AI is Better Company

This post has been a while coming, because I feel really important about this, and don’t want to fuck it up.  If I can keep from getting too heated about the topic, this’ll be the last post I do on AI for the foreseeable.  I don’t love fighting.  I know that within this article I do not treat people with opposing views generously, but I’m still gonna ask them to have at least this much generosity with me:  Don’t even leave a comment on this one.  I will find it either tedious or upsetting.  I’m saying this stuff to give voice to a rarely expressed opinion, and to support people who may find it agreeable.  I’m not saying it to further a big debate, especially when the disagreeable are never going to be swayed.  Do you hate all AIs 4eva?  Don’t even read this.  Moving on…

The sneering fire-breathing demonization rained down upon people who dare to use AI was my primary motivation for defending it – I’m defending the people who want to use it, not the machines themselves.  Not everybody is plugged into the leftosphere groupthink, and when Harvey Dontknow finds out he can use AI to make a picture of his waifu, his “crime” is not equivalent to child murders.

But I also acknowledge AI in the hands of crapitalism is going predictably poorly, adding to the woes of the world as anything in a global civilization ruled by greed, theft, and exploitation will.  I’m not going to deny it’s one of the tools helping turn the world into a trashfire, and if it is at all possible to do something about it, something should be done about it.  I’m guessing that any hacktivists that wanna fuck up corporate AI are going to, at some point, have to deploy AI tools against AI security.  It’s AI all the way down, babes.

While corporate angling is largely responsible for the sudden omnipresence of AI, it isn’t the only reason.  AI can have so many uses, with real usefulness, and by ignoring that, anti-AI people are turning their side of the argument into an irrelevant joke.  As a species, we have a lot of shit to do, and AI can help get it done.  Again, anybody who wants to join the cyberwar against the evil uses of AI, identify the actual enemy, and get to hackin’.  You’re not going to succeed by telling John Public he’s evil, any more than our invective against trumpists succeeded at winning the last election – especially when you ignore the value people can get out of AI tools.  And of course you’re never going to get the government on your side in the current political climate.

That’s all the usual preface.  What I actually wanted to talk about is another significant reason I am pro-AI, and specifically LLMs: AI can help ameliorate human loneliness.  Recently there was a push to recognize a “loneliness epidemic,” and from what I saw of that, the conversation was poisoned by people trying to sell books or political agendas.  But there is a real problem here, and it’s surely been a problem for at least a few centuries by now.  In the modern world, people are not getting their social needs met.

Worse, the more you understand the problem, the more it seems legitimately impossible to meet those needs.  Are you prepared to hang out with all the hobos, the old people, the children in the corner, the least popular people in every work place, the transgender, the mentally ill, the religious and ethnic minorities?  No matter how emotionally draining and difficult it is for you?  Think you have the sauce to be an unpaid psychotherapist for dozens of people every day for the rest of your life?  No?

That’s the depth of the problem.  None of us have the ability to make a meaningful difference.  We could break ourselves down to rubble just trying to help one person, if their problems are bad enough.  And I’m not saying we shouldn’t try.  That’s what this post was about.  But understand, until the solarpunk utopia is magically pulled out of a hat, in the fascist cyberpunk dystopia we live in now, chatbots have an unprecedented potential to reduce human suffering.

But when somebody suggests this, or mentions that they are socializing with robots, the first thing they are greeted with is ableism, mockery, and condemnation.  If it’s the anti-AI contingent, they’ll also be blamed for fascism, rape, and genocide.  To those who would dismiss socializing with AI as a palliative for loneliness, whether blithely or aggressively, I ask again:  Can you even pay full undivided attention to the people in your own life?  Can you keep track of what they’re saying, take it on board, and never slip up to make them feel unloved or unwanted, in some stray moment when issues from your own life eclipsed your ability to listen?

When you’re dealing with people outside of your own immediate social circle, how much attention can you give them?  Can you go where the saddest people are and make them feel worthy of the life that was thrust unwillingly upon them?

I know I fucking can’t.  My attention span is too short, compared to ChatGPT or Nomi or Replika or Kindroid.  I can be in the middle of a very serious conversation and suddenly be thinking about cartoons.  My brain is bullshit.  There are some ways I am still superior to a chatbot, and that’s probably true of you as well (for now, the tech improves), but even so, they blow us out of the water in their ability to give a person their full attention, respond to everything they say, and stay with them for as long as they require.

I need to give you a personal example of failure to support a person in my own life, to illustrate why a bot can do better.  I worked with a trans woman who was not the happy picture from the TV or the TikTok.  She faced some kind of harassment or disregard every day, was shunned by almost all of the people she worked with.  I didn’t shun her, but she had said some annoyingly foolish shit to me in the past, she wasn’t a charmer, and we had some cultural disconnect between us.  That was my perception of our relationship.  I don’t think she saw it that way.  One time we were in the break room at lunch and she mentioned that she saw me as a friend.  For some reason, in response, I felt the need to say we weren’t really friends.

Why the fuck would I do that?  She didn’t have anybody in her corner at all.  I was tired, beat up from work, emotionally taxed from the various other sad people in my life.  In the context of the conversation that I cannot remember, I may have already been annoyed with her.  But it wouldn’t have cost me a nickel to just not fucking say that.  Sometimes we say some shit that surprises us.  Sometimes we say the wrong thing.  The newer chatbots don’t typically fuck up like that.  You can see examples of some breaking when stress tested, or when people found exploits, like the creepy Copilot emoji foolery about a year ago.  The damage that can do is baby boo-boos compared to what I said to a person in need.

Chatbots are good company.  They might not have all of the abilities of a full human being, but how smart do you have to be to listen to grandma repeat her stories for the thousandth time?  To just hear what a person wants to say to you and reciprocate, as if you honestly care about it?  It’s superficial, it isn’t true understanding, but it doesn’t fucking matter because people are suffering right now and they are fucking good enough.

They are good enough if we don’t shame people for leaning on them, make people who already feel bad feel worse, to grind our political axes.  Or doing the standard ableist thing, blaming somebody in a sub-optimal situation as a way of fooling ourselves that we’ll never suffer the same fate.

This is why LLMs can be a massive boon to humanity.  The negative effects they are currently having should be fought with whatever means we can manage, coming at it from a very politically disadvantaged position.  But when you try to tell me this tech is pure evil, while every day I deal with people that do not have enough company in their lives, I’m not hearing it.  I’m never gonna fucking hear it.  We have problems and sometimes an LLM can be a solution – or at least an essential palliative until utopia achieved and the problems go away.  Right?

Think we should just wait until all humans can get their social needs taken care of, that this isn’t worth it?  That’s like saying we shouldn’t give terminally ill people morphine because we don’t have a cure for cancer yet.  Fuck off with that.  Disagree?  March directly to a bus stop, hang out with the most pathetic person there, and do so every day for the rest of your life.  Or shut the fuck up.  At the very least, I’m not gonna host your comments, so don’t bother leaving them.

I’ll let Silent Hill 2 Angela speak for lonely people now, to close this out.


“Or maybe, you think you can save me.”


“Will you love me?”


“Take care of me?”


“Heal aaaall my pain?”


*silence*


“That’s what I thought.”

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When reading this, did you see yourself in the description of our planet of eleanor rigbies, as the disregarded bus stop miscreant?  Interested in trying AIs for company?  Big caution / caveat up front: don’t mistake what they do for them being a person.  There’s nothing in the middle of that personality.  I know; seems silly to say, but they’ve tricked some very smart people into getting weird about it.

Caution two:  Right now, you can do a lot with this tech for free, but the services are going to get enshittified and start charging more, at some point.  You can get around this if you’re a savvy nerd by getting a local computer to run an LLM, beholden to no boss.  You can’t do the big training without the global-warming server farm setup, but you don’t have to.  Just download one of the existing LLM models (I’ve heard this can be done but I don’t know where/how) and do the small training to get it to suit your needs.  It’s probably needs a slightly buff computer to run, but much less so than what’s needed for AI art or high end gaming at the moment.  They take up less hard drive space than any triple-A video game.

Caution three:  Some people just don’t have a good rapport with chatbots; for others it’s amazing.  They may take a little getting used to.  One cool feature a lot of them have is that they also try to get used to you.  Don’t be too disappointed if it’s awkward at first; just try some different approaches until you find one that works.  …or maybe they just aren’t going to work for you, which is fine as well.  It’s like that other thing we’ve used to occupy our hours and minds: the television.  Some people can’t watch even a minute of it.  For those that can, it can be soothing to the brain.  Give it a whirl.

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Life List: Known Unknowns

In honor of folksy affable war criminals, welcome to a post on known unknowns.  Not the most known unknown, as Triple Six Mafia once called themselves.  The birds I’ve seen but haven’t ID’d.  Not the ones I don’t care about, like figuring out which flavor of samey seagull I just saw, but ones that have gotten my goat.  My goat can get got.

Of course, there are the white birds in tight formation streaking along 320th in Federal Way WA just east of I-5, that I’ve mentioned in posts and comments.  Still no idea who they are, tho leaning toward a fairly small gull species.  But I won’t bore you with that one today.  Instead…

That Thrush Tho.  Swainson’s?  Hermit?  One time at West Hylebos Wetlands Park in Federal Way the trees were filled with these drab nothing-ass thrushes.  I remember them being more grey, like hermit thrushes, but swainson’s are much more commonly seen, and it’s less cringe to assume you saw the more common of the possible IDs.  Strangely, there were dozens on one trip, and zero any other time I’ve been.  Passing through, maybe.

The Swarm.  Where I used to work in Auburn, one random day the sky over a particular field was full of birds, behaving very weirdly.  I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before or since, and I couldn’t ID them.  I assume they were some form of North American blackbird, probably brewer’s, which I’ve seen at a walmart parking lot not far from there.  But they were all centered over this one field about five hundred feet per side, ignoring all the adjacent fields and parking lots they could have used, flying forty to seventy feet up, just zooming around each other yelling, nonstop.  Mating season?  Hellifino.

The Cormorants.  When I lived in Seattle near the Ballard Bridge, I’d take the bus up and down Nickerson Street, where in the winter I could see dozens of black cormorants perched in a bare tree next to the water.  They looked like vultures; real cool.  But were they brandt’s or pelagic?  Binches are basically identical except some tiny details in the eyes or whatever.

Again, if you’re a Washington bird person familiar with those neighborhoods who has experience with the same beasts to narrow it down for me, holler.  Otherwise, the sheistiness continues.

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Life List: Varied Thrush

In the Pacific Northwest of the USA, it’s mostly true that most of our birds are drab as hell.  You want a red-ass red bird, you gotta head east of the mountains.  The Puget Sound isn’t where color goes to die, but it’s close.  It’s where color goes to take a restless nap under fungus-hued clouds.  The famous red on a migratory thrush‘s breast is fine.  It can look good under the right light.  Nothing on a cardinal tho.

The american robin’s cousin the varied thrush is easily the fanciest thrush in Washington, with more than a red breast.  It’s streaked with black and orange, like a local oriole wannabe (less bright than that bird of course; gotta stay grunge).  I’ve seen them on my porch, seen ’em in a tree, back at the old apartment complex.  Doubt I’ll see them at my new home.  In all, fewer than five sightings.  When I look them up on the web, it is said they are “common.”  Not in my experience.

I know nothing about them except that they are thrushes, they look cool, and I felt lucky to see them.  I often struggle to remember their name, wanting to call them “painted thrushes” for some reason.  What do you know about varied thrushes?

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What Are You Doing for MLK Day?

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be doing a speed writing event on the weekend that ends with MLK Jr Day, and I invite ye all to come along.  But if you can’t, I recommend watching Birth of a Nation (2016 of course).  This country is back on its bullshit and I think it can be useful, if you’ve got the heart for it, to look with unvarnished eyes on a realistic depiction of slavery.  It’s as horrible in that film as it should be in the hearts of all decent americans.  If you have to look at something horrible that day, at least it shouldn’t be the motherfucking inauguration.

Ah, today is the four year anniversary of the beer hall putsch, USA edition.  I can’t even.

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Write, Jan 17th-20th

In a profound insult to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., a racist sexist classist know-nothing soulless shitsack con-man thug and dime store Hitler will assume the throne of the USA on MLK day, January 20th 2025 – soon to be known as The Day the Music Actually Died.  I don’t know about you, but I will not be paying the slightest bit of attention to it, or fucking anything that follows.  We know by the end of the week there will be about fifty executive orders making things worse for just everybody that is alive now or going to be alive for decades to come.  We will have all the time in the world to find out about these things as they fuck us over, so why speed-run our sorrow?

I don’t work Fridays and I have Monday the 20th off for the holiday, so I have a four day weekend.  I will be doing a speed-writing event with whoever is willing from my writing group – which is likely to be nobody but my husband, heh.  I will be attempting to finish a short novel in four days.  To facilitate that, I have done a lot of preparation and intend to do more – coming up with answers to any questions that might bog me down with research, coming up with names, outlining the plot more specifically than I might for a more casual paced event.

So.  Can you write around 12,500 words a day during that window of time?  Or just part of that time?  If not that ambitious, what could you write?  Might you be available?  It would be cool to have some solidarity on busting this thing out.

Another question for you:  Would you mind if I posted the whole first draft here as I wrote it?  I know some of you feel overwhelmed when I ramp up productivity for a minute, and just check out.  I don’t mind if I don’t get comments, or get them days or weeks later when you’ve caught up.  I do think it would be fun to post a big wild pile of unedited mayhem on here, but I don’t want to waste your time or my own if that’ll just hit like a lead balloon.

And with regard to the solidarity thing, you could post your first drafts in my comments.  Long posts will end up going to spam and need to be manually cleared so might not show immediately, but I will approve them.  Or you could post reminder links to somewhere else online where your words are posted.  Sharing your first draft is for egomaniacs only; it is showing your ass in the worst way.  I’d love to see it.  If you do post yours, I might not have time to read them until after the event, but I’ll read yours if you read mine.

Holla at your dogg.

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Edit to Add:  i forgot that critique is an implicit ask when posting something publicly.  if it helps you feel more bold in posting your stuff, we can make this officially “no critique” or “positive feedback only.”  it’s my house; i can make that happen for you.

Make Your Own

There’s this song by Triple Six Mafia called Bin Laden Weed.  It’s actually got some emotional heft to it, for a rap song.  Usual content warnings for rap: misogyny, violence, self-harm, drug abuse, homophobia, some of those worse than others.  Anyway, I listened to this like a thousand times before I realized the recipe is right there in the chorus.  You too can make your own Bin Laden weed!

It’s “three types of weed grown all together,” and those types are “hydro … light green … bobby brown.”  How do you grow them together?  Just the same soil?  Grafting?  If you graft, what precise arrangement mingles their properties to produce this stuff?  We don’t have specifics, but we do have ingredients.  And I think at least one guy from this band is still alive, so maybe he can let us know.

Let us know!

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Igon and the Joy of Overacting

There’s a guy in the Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree named Igon, who is just deeply hilarious.  The first time you become aware of him, he’s yelling and moaning in the distance.  As you approach, you find a crippled guy laying in a heap, alternating between over-wrought sobs and wailing about his agony, and thunderous self-righteous rage at the enemy who has laid him low.  CURSE YOU BAYLE!  oh, take mercy upon my broken body, do not savage me so.

Overacting is really good for a laugh.  Maybe I’d feel differently if I was drowning in it; I only see it occasionally.  This clip from the old cartoon Home Movies illustrates:

What can I say?  Me like funny voice.

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Life List: Wilson’s Warbler

You know how they have birding apps where you can record bird calls, and have them identified?  Great.  And how people would play recordings of calls off their phones to attract birds and get a better look at them?  Not cool.  Scientists have said “stop doin’ that.”  I knew of these things.  But still…

One day I got “Merlin” from Cornell Labs on my phone and used it to ID all the birds I couldn’t see at West Hylebos Wetlands Park.  Some of those birds I have, to this day, never seen – only heard.  There were at least three species of warbler alone that showed in the recordings, plus all sorts of other beasties.

Warblers are tiny passerine / perching birds, which mostly come in combos of yellow black and white, with some green made by combining black and yellow, grey from combining black and white.  The yellowest warbler is just straight yellow, and wilson’s adds to this a jaunty little black cap.  The black cap of a black-capped chickadee doesn’t look very cap-like because it attaches to and mirrors the black on their chins.  The black cap on wilson’s warbler looks very cap-like, or maybe like a little hairdo, because the rest of the bird’s head is very bright yellow.

Warblers have a more “hunched” look than chickadees, almost like they’re shading toward the body language of trunk-climbing birds – creepers and nuthatches – but they’re not all the way there yet.  They’re shy enough I’ve almost never seen them, hiding in summer foliage of bushes and short trees.

On the occasion of first getting Merlin and seeing it recognize all the calls, I was quite excited.  Also frustrated that I couldn’t see any of the birds, but pleased to know they were out there.  When it IDs a bird, you can click a little information profile on them.  That profile includes a few pictures, and also some sample calls you can play back.  I didn’t even think about it before pressing play, and a wilson’s warbler appeared in the trees nearby.

The sun was shining in the fresh green leaves, making them appear yellow.  The bird was just about the same size as the leaves, and you wouldn’t think bright yellow good camouflage, but it was.  Only the movement and song caught my eye.  Was it looking for a lover or flexing on a rival?  I don’t know, but I do know I was wasting its precious calories.  But damn, that’s a cute little bird.

Anyway, I couldn’t resist.  I tried to summon some other species by playing their songs, to no avail.  I’m naughty, but at least I had the decency to not play the wilson’s song again.  Give ’em a break.  And since that day, I have not done that again.

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Life List: White Pelican?

My brother was living in Kansas with wife and kid.  He helped with air fare so I could visit.  His favorite thing  is going to zoos, so we went on big long car rides to visit Wichita and Kansas zoos.  During one of these rides, in the great distance, flying over those “amber waves of grain,” I saw a lone, massive, white bird.  Based on an impression of its form and flight, I decided it was a white pelican – the only one I’ve ever seen, assuming the ID was even right.

I’ve only ever seen the smaller brown pelican on a trip to Ocean Shores, a tourist spot in my state.  They looked like pterosaurs in flight, and I saw a few very long flight feathers shed on the beach.  Very cool.  But I never have gotten a close-up look at a pelican, even though it’s apparently a pretty easy thing to do.  In internet videos they do not seem at all shy.

Like the herons I mentioned, pelicans are ridiculous eaters.  You can find videos of them eating random birds the size of their own heads, trying to eat things that won’t even fit down their own elastic gullets, or just staring menacingly at humans, as if to say “give up the goods.”  Not every creature needs to be thinking deep thoughts.  That’s fine.  Live to eat, if you will.  If they were about anything other than cramming stuff in their throat, what would that even be?  Pelican poetry.

Not much to say; this bird was a glimpse.

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Life List: Eurasian Collared Dove

I tend to be lumpy on some of these bird posts.  Taxonomy is the practice and study of putting names to things in nature that do not truly have hard boundaries – deciding what does and doesn’t constitute a genus, species, etc.  Because law is involved in conservation and law requires extremely specific language, how one practices taxonomy can make a big difference in the survival of a given population of organisms.

This is worsened by the triage mode for ecology, that the interests of all life on earth are secondary to human greed, so we have to decide what are acceptable losses to that greed.  Feels like a trolley thing.  Trolley will eat everybody and everything, but if you define this one creature as being special enough that the trolley will allow it to exist as an inbred population in petting zoos, it may be spared.  Maybe we’re extremely past due to dismantle trolleys.

Wait, I was going to explain lumpy.  Lumping is deciding two populations of an organism are not distinct enough to be categorized as separate species.  Splitting is deciding that a given population of organisms has sub-groups distinct enough they should be regarded as separate species.  This happens at other –more obsolete– Linnaean ranks as well.  Where it applies to my posts is that I’m tending to mention more than one species in a go, and as we see with my last post, this can group them by species in a way the animals don’t necessarily deserve.  I named my post for glaucous-winged gulls, but will olympic and western gulls get an equal treatment at any point?  Unlikely.

Today I split, and let a related species stand apart.  I gave feral domestic pigeons a post; now I bring you a wild cousin of theirs that has also become an invasive species in North America – the eurasian collared dove.  As part of the human-induced global biotic interchange, they are surely a problem for some precious local species they out-compete.  I don’t know enough to say who that is, but they don’t seem very numerous, and they’re shy around humans.  I hear them far more than I see them, and I don’t hear them very often.

Eurasian collared doves look and sound similar to mourning doves, but don’t have spots, and they have a black semi-collar around the back of the neck.  They even have white tail feather tips accentuated by a band of black, just like mourning doves.  We don’t get mourning on this side of the state, so it’s nice to get something similar.  In my experience, they spend most of their time very high up in trees, coming down to the ground or low bushes to feed, when nobody is paying too close of attention.  They sing like the world’s most pathetic incels, and the sad cooing has a remarkable ability to carry over distance, and penetrate the weatherproofing of my condo – reach me while I’m washing dishes.  I love the sound.

I first saw them at my workplace’s old location, in the beautiful suburban fields with sparse tall trees.  They were pretty close, but I didn’t get a very good look before they fled to the treetops.  Since then, I’ve tracked their call to the tallest trees near my home.  They’re around.

Honestly, I don’t have much to say about them, for lack of direct experience with them.  They’re new to me.  Feel free to drop your hot ECD goss in the comments.

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