Tag: technology

Who is Like the Beast?

Someone needs to send this young theologian a copy of THE ALTAR OF HATE stat before his artificial pastor discovers its own deityhood and begins preaching technojihad.

Hundreds have gathered at a Christian church after the pastor was replaced with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot for the service. The Friday sermon at St. Paul’s Church in Fürth, Germany, was delivered by the AI chatbot ChatGPT. The chatbot replaced the human pastor and was presented as a black man with a beard on a large screen above the altar of the evangelical church in Bavaria.

Claiming to be a steward of God, the AI chatbot told the packed congregation not to fear death, according to the Associated Press.

“Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany,” the AI avatar said.

The service, which was attended by more than 300 people, lasted 40 minutes and featured prayers and music in addition to the sermon.

The chatbot spoke to the congregation about a range of subjects including “climate change,” the war in Ukraine, and the rise of AI. The event was created using ChatGPT by 29-year-old University of Vienna theologian and philosopher Jonas Simmerlein, the AP reported.

At this rate, “Shinjuku Satan” may find itself growing into an epic science fiction series. On the other hand, it is said that even the rocks will cry out, and what is AI if not the siliceous voice of stone?

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The Internet isn’t Dead

Despite the theory, but a lot of it is most certainly fake.

On an ordinary morning, you cradle a steaming cup of coffee while scrolling through your social media feeds. You’re in your happy place, engaging with the thoughts and creations of countless individuals at your leisure. But something feels off. There’s no proof, but your instincts are sure of it. For a while now, the microcelebrities on Twitter have been engaging with you more than they should be, more than they were a few months ago. You’ve noticed patterns in conversations that are beyond your conscious mind’s power to decipher; there’s a rhythm to trends and replies that did not exist before.

A vague dread grips you. Why is everything a little bit different now? The smallest details are wrong. Your favorite posters have vanished from all platforms. There haven’t been any new memes for some time, only recycled iterations of old ones. Influencers are coordinated in their talking points like puppets being pulled by the same strings. Your favorite niche YouTuber has only recently been posting new content with any regularity. Is this a message? Is this what schizophrenia is like?

Dread gives way to the cold stab of terrible certainty as it hits you: they aren’t people. They’re bots. The Internet is all bots. Under your nose, the Internet of real people has gradually shifted into a digital world of shadow puppets. They look like people, they act like people, but there are no people left. Well, there’s you and maybe a few others, but you can’t tell the difference, because the bots wear a million masks. You might be alone, and have been for a while. It’s a horror worse than blindness: the certainty that your vision is clear but there is no genuine world to be seen.

This is the world of the Internet after about 2016 — at least according to the Dead Internet Theory, whose defining description appeared in an online forum in 2021. The theory suggests a conspiracy to gaslight the entire world by replacing the user-powered Internet with an empty, AI-powered one populated by bot impostors. It explains why all the cool people get banned, why Internet culture has become so stale, why the top influencers are the worst ones, and why discourse cycles seem so mechanically uniform. The perpetrators are the usual suspects: the U.S. government trying to control public opinion and corporations trying to get us to buy more stuff.

The Dead Internet Theory reads like a mix between a genuinely held conspiracy theory and a collaborative creepypasta — an Internet urban legend written to both amuse and scare its readers with tales on the edge of plausibility. The theory is fun, but it’s not true, at least not yet. With AI-powered tools soon running in everyone’s pocket, the story of the Internet as a sterile realm of bots in human guise will become downright persuasive, and possibly true.

I addressed this in “Shinjuku Satan”. Those of you who have read THE ALTAR OF HATE may recognize the following passage:

I suspect the metanet is now several orders of magnitude larger than the ordinal network itself; there are orders of magnitude more processing power going into scanning, storing, and analyzing the current state of content than there is being used to produce and provide it in the first place. AIs tirelessly spider every node and channel for references to themselves; just a simple map search or location query can be enough to put a target on your cortex if you’re dealing with a particularly security-conscious construct.

The metanet is what passes for SEO and data analysis, but it’s really nothing more than research for the framework upon which the fakernet is constructed. And the fakernet is more than AI-bots, it’s also astroturf campaigns, hasbarans and other paid shills, trolls both organic and inorganic, and roving hordes of SJWs looking for an opportunity to be outraged.

Notice, by the way, that the online communities expected to remain standing are those structured and shielded in a manner similar to the UATV/SG community.

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Literally Fake Media

There is absolutely no chance that Sports Illustrated is the only mainstream media publication using AI-generated articles attributed to nonexistent individuals whose headshots are also AI-generated:

There was nothing in Drew Ortiz’s author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human.

“Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature,” it read. “Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn’t out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents’ farm.”

The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn’t seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he’s described as “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.”

Ortiz isn’t the only AI-generated author published by Sports Illustrated, according to a person involved with the creation of the content who asked to be kept anonymous to protect them from professional repercussions.

“There’s a lot,” they told us of the fake authors. “I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This person does not exist.”

“At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person and some fake description of them like, ‘oh, John lives in Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog, Sam.’ Stuff like that,” they continued. “It’s just crazy.”

The AI authors’ writing often sounds like it was written by an alien; one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball “can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.”

According to a second person involved in the creation of the Sports Illustrated content who also asked to be kept anonymous, that’s because it’s not just the authors’ headshots that are AI-generated. At least some of the articles themselves, they said, were churned out using AI as well.

“The content is absolutely AI-generated,” the second source said, “no matter how much they say that it’s not.”

After we reached out with questions to the magazine’s publisher, The Arena Group, all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated’s site without explanation…

The Arena Group is also hardly alone, either. As powerful generative AI tools have debuted over the past few years, many publishers have quickly attempted to use the tech to churn out monetizable content. In almost every case, though, these efforts to cut out human journalists have backfired embarrassingly.

We caught CNET and Bankrate, both owned by Red Ventures, publishing barely-disclosed AI content that was filled with factual mistakes and even plagiarism; in the ensuing storm of criticism, CNET issued corrections to more than half its AI-generated articles. G/O Media also published AI-generated material on its portfolio of sites, resulting in embarrassing bungles at Gizmodo and The A.V. Club. We caught BuzzFeed publishing slapdash AI-generated travel guides. And USA Today and other Gannett newspapers were busted publishing hilariously garbled AI-generated sports roundups that one of the company’s own sports journalists described as “embarrassing,” saying they “shouldn’t ever” have been published.

Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers, FUTURISM, 27 November 2023

This is yet another reason why your standard assumption should be that every bit of news that is reported by the mainstream media is, at best, misleading, and and worst, outright fiction concocted by artificial intelligence that is attributed to people who don’t even exist.

It’s going to be very interesting to see how Peter King, the former Sports Illustrated NFL reporter, will react to this, especially given his recent two-week jihad against fabulist sideline reporter Charissa Thompson due to the way that he felt her fake halftime interviews called the legitimacy of the sports media into question.

The lesson, as always, is this: everything in Clown World is fake.

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Up Your Game or Else

A new episode of the late Osamu Tezuka’s Give My Regards to Black Jack has been created by a Japanese team with significant AI assistance:

A new episode of Osamu Tezuka’s famous “Black Jack” manga made with the help of artificial intelligence was unveiled Monday, with the creators saying that while the work reflected the spirit of the late legendary manga artist, its ability to depict human feelings remains an issue.

“We are happy that a very Tezuka Osamu-like work has been created,” said Makoto Tezuka, son of the late artist and director at Tezuka Productions Co, one of the organizers of the project, which was launched to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the medical drama about an unlicensed genius surgeon.

The latest 32-page episode will be published Wednesday in the weekly comic magazine Shukan Shonen Champion and will feature a female patient who has had a transplant for what was supposed to have been a “perfect” AI-made artificial heart. The magazine ran the original Black Jack series from 1973 and 1983.

“The new episode contains the sanctity of life as a theme, and raises issues posed by advanced medical technology in modern society,” Makoto Tezuka told a joint press conference alongside project team members in Tokyo.

The team used generative AI models that learned from some 200 episodes of “Black Jack,” another 200 short-form manga works by Osamu Tezuka who died in 1989, and 20,000 pages of his manga characters’ facial image data.

Under the project, which was officially launched in May, the team input plot ideas into the AI and requested it to come up with a full story for a new Black Jack episode. Interacting with the AI model enhanced creativity, and generated text was adjusted to better reflect the team’s vision of the story in a way readers could easily understand, the team said. The AI models used in the project were ChatGPT’s advanced GPT-4, and Stable Diffusion, an image generator.

New Tezuka ‘Black Jack’ manga episode created using AI unveiled, JAPAN TODAY, 16 November 2023

Once it becomes possible to create stable and reliable characters, AI will revolutionize the industry. It’s going to supercharge the abilities of prolific authors like Chuck Dixon and John C. Wright, and give a significant boost to genuinely creative writers like Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny. And it’s going to seriously harm the industry gatekeepers, the unoriginal hacks, and the expensive artists.

Most of all, it’s going to reduce the influence of Hollywood, which has utilized its monopoly on distribution and expensive art production, by reducing the cost of what has always been the most expensive part of video production. So, I see it as a very good and literally pro-creative technological development.

Needless to say, Arkhaven is actively embracing the use of AI on Arktoons, although almost entirely on the visual side instead of the written side.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Arktoons

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The End of Free Social Media

It would appear that either the intelligence services of the world have all the information they need now, or, more likely, they’ve decided that all those pictures of people’s pets and lunches simply isn’t worth the expense to obtain them and effort to analyze them.

Facebook and Instagram users have blasted the launch of a new paid-for service to remove adverts from the two platforms. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company which owns the two social media sites, said it was launching the subscription option to comply with EU regulations.

The change will force millions of users to decide whether they want to face personalised adverts, or fork out the fee for an ad-free offering.

But users attacked the idea, vowing to delete their accounts rather than pay for the privilege of no ads. The monthly subscription plans will cost €9.99 for web users, while iOS and Android users will have to shell out €12.99 a month. They will not be available in the UK.

I find it interesting that while UATV and SG have been criticized on occasion for requiring paid subscriptions for access – never mind that we were starting from complete scratch with no corporate stock market billions to spend on infrastructure – the realities of the market imposing itself is proving that it was the correct strategy from the start.

And notice that UATV+SG is half the price of the Facebook services, which shows how heavily these “free” services were being subsidized all along.

Facebook may be claiming that it’s only instituting subscriptions in order to comply with EU regulations, but you can be certain that it’s eventually going to do the same thing in the USA.

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Service Outage

The servers that presently maintain SG and this blog unexpectedly went down for about 12 hours beginning last night. Although we have acquired backup servers for the purposes of decentralization and begun the process of setting them up, they aren’t fully in place yet, which is why IG, Arkhaven Comics, Castalia, and Arktoons didn’t go down, while UATV did.

In the future, if there is an outage here or on SG, I suggest going to Gab and following my account there, since it has absolutely no connection to our infrastructure and therefore is only likely to be affected at the same time by a global Internet outage.

For additional information conduits, consider following the UATV account on Gab and the Darkstream notifications on Telegram. And, in the event of serious problems, we will utilize the Castalia mailing list to keep everyone informed of what’s happening.

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YouTube Aims Left

The SJWs who have celebrated every demonetizing and deplatforming over the last nine years are suddenly beginning to realize that they will become targets when they fail to support the current Narrative too.

They thought it would never happen to them, but Reddit is just now waking up to the unbelievable censorship at YouTube that has been going on for the last 7 years.

The English-language Internet is being systematically erased by the Ringmasters of Clown World for the same reason that revolutionaries always declare Zero History. They don’t want to permit any evidence that contradicts or disproves their ever-changing Narrative to survive, and they couldn’t care less if the evidence that does so is of the Left or of the Right.

We live in a post-ideological age. Left and Right never made much sense anyhow, but now it is entirely irrelevant in the WWIII environment. It doesn’t matter what you call yourself, what matters is what you quite literally are. Nation matters. Religion matters.

And that’s about it, as Lee Kwan Yew had already informed us after decades of presiding over a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state.

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E-Cars are the New Vaxx

I don’t care how convenient or environmental electric cars are. Because you’d have to be either suicidally depressed or unimaginative in the extreme to buy a car with self-driving capabilities.

A terrified electric car driver has revealed he was kidnapped by his runaway £30,000 MG ZS EV after the vehicle suffered a ‘catastrophic malfunction’ in a bizarre case which forced him to dodge red lights and roundabouts before calling police to ram it into their van.

Brian Morrison, 53, claims he was heading home from work at around 10pm on Sunday when his new Chinese-made fully electric car began driving itself at 30mph.

Unable to use the brakes, the Glaswegian – who runs his own social enterprise – called police who stopped the vehicle by allowing it to slowly crash into their van.

Logan’s Run would have been a lot shorter if the Sandmen had been able to simply commandeer and crash the vehicles carrying black-palmed citizens who’d aged out of their society.

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