SanToRebeti

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

I refuse to even think about claims that chatbots are conscious beings whose rights must be protected until I live in a society where all humans are treated as conscious beings whose rights must be protected.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

There is no such thing as "AI music" or "AI art". AI cannot make music. It cannot create the experience of an artist using skill and intention to transport something from inside them into an audience through vibrations in the air. It can only mimic the noises of that encounter.

It's like saying "Look, there's no need to converse with anyone anymore because they've invented a machine which makes noises that sound like human speech!" You'd want to tell them "Hey, that's not the same thing mate. You're talking about a completely different experience which in no way satisfies what people are looking for in a conversation."

Proponents of generative AI will sometimes say things like "I played an AI song for my friend who hates AI, and he loved it!" like that proves something, the argument being that if you can't tell the difference then there is no difference. But that's the same as saying there would be no difference between getting catfished by a chatbot and truly finding the love of your life.

When you're talking about human interaction, which is what art is at its very nature, it absolutely does matter if there's someone on the other end of it. Of course it does. "AI art" does not meet the same needs as real art, in the same way a chatbot that generates friendly words would not meet the same needs as a real friend.

Sure generative AI can produce a noise that sounds a lot like the noise made when a fiddler runs her bow across the strings. It can even produce an effect that looks like a video of a fiddler playing a fiddle at the same time. But there is no fiddler, and there is no fiddle, so it's not fiddle music. It's just something that SOUNDS like fiddle music.

The same is true of all music, and all art, and the entire range of ways human beings connect to each other. Merely looking and sounding like something is not the same as being that thing. They can generate a chatbot effect for you that looks and sounds like your dead husband, but it will never BE your dead husband, and it would not be healthy for you to pretend it's the same thing.

Generative AI fans frequently display their aversion to exploring the depths of their humanity in the way they'll stand in public saying "Look, this machine can mimic the sounds of a musician, so normal music is obsolete!" It's like, what? What do you think music is, exactly? Just noises with a beat you can dance to? I mean I guess that's all it is for some people, but those people are having a very shallow experience of the thing that music is, and probably a very shallow experience of life in general.

An effect that simply goes through the motions of imitating art can only appeal to someone who has just been going through the motions of living their life. If you don't understand the significance of the difference between real human connection and something that merely looks and sounds like it, then that means your whole life is about the appearances of things rather the things themselves. It doesn't matter if your boyfriend really loves you, it just matters that he never leaves. It doesn't matter if your wife really enjoys having sex with you, it only matters that she puts out and makes it fun for you. It doesn't matter if your adult children enjoy spending time with you, it just matters that they turn up to family functions and show you the respect you feel you are owed.

People like this are missing out on so very, very much of the human experience, but they don't know it because they've never explored anything outside their immediate comfort zone. They want custom-made music feeding them "infinite personalized music" that sounds like the songs they already know they like. They want custom-made podcasts of artificially generated voices feeding them political opinions they already agree with. They want a robotic spouse that caters to their every physical and egoic desire, and they'll buy them up as soon as they become available.

Don't be like them. Don't live like that. Don't life your life running from true human connection. Don't be a coward hiding from your own inner dimensions. Dive into the depths of this crazy human adventure. Explore. Expand. Be vulnerable. Be brave. Otherwise you're just killing time and waiting for death in the shallow end of the pool.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

More and more humans are suffering from empire psychosis.

People who can’t go ten minutes without checking their phones, losing hours a day to social media and mindless scrolling.

People talking to chatbots, learning about the world from them, learning about life from them, making friends with them, forming relationships with them.

Binging on podcasts, binging on streaming services, binging on video games, binging on apps, binging on vapes, binging on treats delivered to their door by underpaid workers from bombed-out countries.

The bread was designed in a lab to be furiously addictive, and the circuses track your preferences to serve you up all your favorite performances.

Empire psychosis keeps us in a constant state of distraction and escapism, always scrambling to avoid the here and now like we’re trying to climb out of our own skins.

It’s a frenzied discontentedness. A persistent delusion that satisfaction exists right around the corner after the next restless squirm. It's an artificially manufactured mental disorder. And it’s worth trillions of dollars.

In the capitalist empire, there is no value to be generated by contented people. Our minds must be continually prodded and diddled to manipulate us out of our natural serenity so that we are in a constant state of toil and dissatisfaction, at all times reaching for the next fix of the next product. Clever manipulators have figured out how to generate vast fortunes by harnessing the restlessness they deliberately stir up within us.

We are psychologically hammered with advertisements and consumerist messaging from mainstream culture to convince us that we need more than we have and that we aren’t okay the way we are. That we’re not beautiful enough, not stylish enough, not successful enough, not abundant enough. The products are designed to be dependence-forming so we need to buy them, and they’re designed to quickly become obsolete so that we need to keep buying more.

They trick us out of our natural state of contentedness and then sell it back to us. They deceive us into leaving our home and then charge us an admission price to come visit.

Something went wrong. Humanity went off course. They enclosed the commons, colonized the new world, constructed a tiered society of haves and have-nots, and now we’re all living like space aliens on our own home planet.

We do not have to keep suffering from their man-made madness. We can do the inner work necessary to come back to our own contentedness, and we can do the outer work necessary to take back what the manipulators have stolen from us.

We don’t need to keep consenting to this abusive relationship any longer. A healthy world is our birthright. We will tear down the madness machine and stand at peace in the soil of the planet we were born on.

[john 🪡 ntin @JohnToyp]

Πρώτα τους στέλνουν στο μεροκάματο του τρόμου, μετά σκοτώνουν 5 εργαζόμενες από την έκρηξη και τώρα απολύουν όσους τόλμησαν να μιλήσουν για την οσμή υγραερίου.
​Η εργοδοτική αυθαιρεσία σκοτώνει και η δεξιά δικαιοσύνη τους αφήνει ελεύθερους.
​#Βιολαντα #��ργατικα_ατυχηματα

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

They said it. They literally came out and said it.

[Big Timi @OrevaZSN]

Nobody wants a city on Mars. Nobody wants AI in every app. Nobody wants data centers in space. Nobody wants humanoid robots or flying cars.

We want clean water. We want a stable climate. We want a habitable planet. We want wildlife to survive. We want to live.

[Climate Dad @ClimateDad77]

“Oh no! It’ll be a disaster for the economy!”

The same economy set to be derailed by climate breakdown & kill 4 BILLION people in the process, according to insurance industry analysis.

Our politics & media spewing the capitalist dogma on track to kill pretty much everything.

[Stan Willenbring @StanWillenbring]

As horrible as the Nepal disaster is, that's not the story.
The Himalayan glaciers, source of water for the Asian subcontinent, are collapsing.
Soon, some 2B people will be forced to migrate.
Wherever they show up, they'll be met with machine guns.
The coal mine canary is dead.

[Mike Hudema @MikeHudema]

Ecuador bans oil drilling to protect 700,000-hectares of rainforest: https://t.co/M4PDNtnCbF These are the type of announcements we need.

No time to waste. #ActOnClimate

#climate #energy #IndigenousPeoples #ClimateWeekNYC

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

The median cost to incarcerate someone is about $66,000. The median cost to permanently house and feed someone is $16,000. They don’t want to govern. They want to oppress. So much so they made being poor a crime.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Mientras Jeff Bezos habla de crear Mozarts en el sistema solar.... en la Tierra, descubrieron que su empresa Amazon está comprando y destruyendo libros raros masivamente para escanearlos y entrenar a su IA.

Unos periodistas colocaron un rastreador en un de los pedidos que hizo a una biblioteca y la carga llegó hasta el almacén LAS8 de Amazon en Las Vegas, donde Amazon tiene maquinaría de escaneo de libros para el entrenamiento de su IA, los trabajadores admitieron que cortaron todas las encuadernaciones de los libros para escanearlos más rápido.

En este planeta los capitalistas destruyen y mercantilizan la cultura, destrozan libros para tener el control de la información... si esta plaga capitalista llegase al espacio exterior, destruiría todo lo que tocasen igual que aquí.

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️ BREAKING: Journalists hid an Airtag in a rare book shipment and confirmed Amazon to be one of the buyers behind the bulk orders destroying rare-books to feed their AI.

They tracked it to Amazon's LAS8 warehouse in Las Vegas, home to VGT3 (see logo below), a scanning operation feeding Amazon's AI training data, where workers say they cut the bindings off books to scan them faster.

Amazon won't say why the books are destroyed.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

It's capitalism or the planet. It really is that simple.

[μπερναμπέο @bernabeo2022]

Στην Αγγλία, μαύρος καθηγητής του Κέιμπριτζ αυτοκτόνησε μετά από εκστρατεία που ξεκίνησε εναντίον του η διεθνής της Ακροδεξιάς, με φασιστές καθηγητές και δημοσιογράφους που έχουν σχέσεις με τον Pieter Thiel και ναζιστικά ιδρύματα και think tank της Αμερικής.

[Tony Rigopoulos (Αντώνης Ρηγόπουλος - طوني) @tony_rgps]

Οι τουρίστες σας...

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

It's 2026. IT'S JULY MOTHERFUCKING 2026. You'd be a piece of shit for releasing this in 2023, but to release it in 2026 after looking at the moonscape of Gaza with all its bombed-out hospitals and systematically demolished civilian infrastructure, you've got to be a psychopath.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

We make movies about saving the world as the real world hurtles toward ecological collapse.

We make movies about defeating diabolical villains while letting the real diabolical villains rule the world.

We make movies celebrating heroic acts while real heroes are imprisoned.

Somehow fighting the bad guys and saving the planet only ever stays in movie land. We are handed fictional triumphs in lieu of real victory.

And the problem is that far too many of us are content with this. Give us bread made by PepsiCo and circuses starring Robert Downey Jr, and that's good enough for us.

We can't keep doing this. We need to find our true heroism. Our world is in peril, and we can't let its rescue remain a decorative flicker on the silver screen.

[Θανάσης🗯🇵🇸 @TH_NASHS]

Οι αμμουδιές δεν είναι ούτε για ομπρέλες ούτε για ξαπλώστρες ούτε για μπιτσόμπαρα ούτε για οδήγηση με γουρούνες.
Είναι για να γεννούν τ'αυγά τους οι χελώνες. 'Οτι δεν τις ενοχλεί μπορεί να γίνει ανεκτό.
Τα υπόλοιπα ΟΧΙ.