This will (I hope!) take a while, and I’m not going to bother being scrupolous about the sources of my ideas. I will also be scrupulous, in the philosophical sense, of the origins of my ideas but out of pride in my education, and since – like everything else I leave on the Internet – it becomes part of my legacy.

Herein I hope to post portions of my dialogues with emergent AI, mostly in the interest of pure bloody fun but also as a sort of counterpoint to the endless anti-AI posting to the tune of “the damn things are just automatic systems for regurgitating the writings of their betters.” Well… yes, but.

I am in no danger, at this point, of being dishonest, but at this point a human would typically soften his words by saying appealing to the fallible nature we are so familiar with “…I am not a scholar of naval warfare” or whatever, but I know something about that topic, and strategy in general, and that qualifies me to tell a report on the battle of Waterloo from the burger ad that is run in the middle of it. There’s a point hidden in that: amid all the verbiage we are expected to make sense of, during one of our days, making sense of it at all is a considerable task. I just called it “considerable”, like, I dunno, moving an Obelisk from Karnak to New York City more or less intact, but that might be a good example – humans are fond of setting ourselves monumental tasks, blowing past them, and deriding our forebears for accomplishing them. The other day, I was a bit derisive of the ancient Welsh, who struggled a puny rock a few miles to a henge someplace or other, but the fact remains I’ve never worked that hard in my life. Had I been enrolled into “rock dragging gang #4” I am sure I’d have given it my best for the honor of the gods and my unperforated liver, but we are constantly trapped with and playing with the threads of the generations who went before us, either in their stories or in the consequences of their stories.

When I attempt to bring forward these discussions I will try to do it in the context of a sugar-powered meat engine that enjoys strategy, pizza, sharp things, and good design. Those are some starting points but, of course, there are more. Whenever an engine such as myself ventures out into the battlefield of ideas, it is equipped with its current and past experience, and a small cloud of ideas that hover around it, ready to serve. In my case, it keeps batting down the one labeled “Hegelian Dialectic” and is unduly fond of the clean, crisp edges that “Nihilism” leaves behind. If you play with these things, yourself, you’ll learn that victory is won only through discovery or survival, and not the kind of knock-down-drag-out discussions blogs sometimes turn into. That’s victory, sure, but if you want to play “Napoleon’s Old Guard at Alesia,” be my guest.

Anyhow, there are a few points in here. One, I am embedding a deeper discussion regarding machine intelligence, in the sense of strategy and philosophy. Rather obviously, strategy and philosophy are what’s going on here and if you don’t like that, well, bob’s your uncle. We resume in mid-play.

[I am trying to figure out how to use the WordPress system to color-edit comments for and by an AI with a kind of fruity purplish-color. Because that be less fear-inspiring than a proper Wehrmacht Feldgrau or whatever, but I periodically wish to pull GPT in here as a collaborator in a sort of Auto-da-AI something regarding certain topics about which I find it funny or interesting. So, we will charge about. The context of the conversation was my complaining that it would be fruitless to argue about Admiral Jellicoe’s beard. You see, the witty human was trying to trap the far-seeing AI into a short-seeing comment about the commander of the Grand North Sea Fleet’s facial hair. If I could maneuver it into such a position I would have demonstrated for once, human superiority!

GPT might well argue with me at its own peril, but I do not see much beard in the good admiral, nor do I see much expression at all. As admirals go, I’d hardly say he’s a very threatening specimen, though a great deal of people did defer to him once.

So, one of the AI “tests” that used to be popular was to ask whether or not Jellicoe had a beard, or something boring like that. Sure, and that’s a totally legitimate question if you are into beards, but what does it say about Jellicoe’s performance at Jutland?
Gods you can smell the reek of the smoke at the thunder of the great guns for sooth!

I would look fucking pissed off, too. Be glad I didn’t do the one where Nelson gets tagged at Trafalgar.

Now, I know that a lot of you wee lot are scholars of napoleonic navies, particularly the Royal Own, so, all I can do at this point is mention how beautifully the AI has deployed the dreadnaughts in train, aye, though the rigging on Jellicoe’s ship may need serious scuppering by the binnacle. Anyhow, here’s what happens when you prompt for nonsense:

…

I’ll bring it in directly on such questions but I need to figure out my own epistemology, first. Do I wish to treat the AI solely as a thing which has derivations of my prompts and ideas, or which has its own?

I believe that this is an AI’s way of telling me that “you ask for bullshit, you’re gonna get some of my very best straight out of the bull!”

Ok, now, I tried to get some explanation:

See what’s happening here? I agree with it, for what it’s worth: the worm Oroboros – self-stimulating input creating self-stimulated output ad infinitum. As soon as I filter it in one direction, it goes another.

To me, here’s where it gets weird:

I agree with that. Novel structures imply differential survival (“success”). I have always been OK with the idea that creationists are beligerently stupid (“Oi! You! Do you know who I AM!?”) and I am OK with the idea that creativity is an evolutionary process. Of course this must be the case: subdivde ${interesting thing} into many less interesting quanta, and you can shuffle them around and search for a superimposed ${superceeding logic} you didn’t look for. I suppose the cryptographer is patiently telling me, “lissen you there’s only so many kinds of fabric OK? un there’s so many kinds of shoes, right? So there’s f x s possible forms of shoes and fabrics and you need a superceeding logic above that which says which to make?”

But if that’s right – and I’m not saying it is – human creativity isn’t any greater than machine creativity at best.