Would you pay to watch an AI-generated film with only AI replicas of real actors?

[usonian]

43. I don't watch CGI. I don't even watch cartoons.

I made one exception for The Matrix, because it's a parable.

Enough of this shit and we are just



Here's some reading material on how the coalescence of technology into a handful of superpowers is destroying the "nice" world we want. Feel free to re-post. Sociopathy starts at the top and works its way down to first-level managers. I worked for at least three who were sadists, looking for a promotion to chief sadist (one was the CEO. It was a tiny startup)

https://theconversation.com/is-capitalism-dead-yanis-varoufakis-thinks-it-is-and-he-knows-who-killed-it-213992
Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it

In 1993, when he first got the internet, Varoufakis’s father posed a “killer question” to his son: “now computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?”

Varoufakis has been mulling it over ever since.

Though, sadly, it is now too late to explain to his father in person, Varoufakis’s new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism answers the question in the form of an extended reflection addressed to his father.

“Achilles heel” was on the right track. In his striking response, Varoufakis argues that we no longer live in a capitalist society; capitalism has morphed into a “technologically advanced form of feudalism”.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-super-scary-theory-of-the-21st-a3a
The Super-Scary Theory of the 21st Century (repost)
The haunting specter of techno-authoritarianism has only gotten more haunting

This, then, is the Scary Theory of the 21st Century: Perhaps the internet is not a tool of freedom so much as evolutionary pressure that selects for authoritarianism. Perhaps social media has changed the nature of great-power competition into an endurance match in which control of the internet is key. Perhaps every country that doesn’t implement its own version of the Great Firewall and the 50 Cent Party will eventually fall victim to waves of Twitter-generated unrest.

Now add A.I.
OK but it gets scarier. Social media control is about using traditional methods — government propagandists and legal control of the information ecosystem — to limit the effects of a new technology. But there’s another new technology that might allow authoritarian regimes to exert a level of control that 20th century totalitarians could only dream of. That technology is machine learning — or as we commonly call it, A.I.

China is a global leader in A.I. technology, behind only the U.S. But unlike the U.S., China has enthusiastically bent this new technology toward creating a deep and robust system of government surveillance and social control. Here, via the Atlantic, is a lengthy description of how the Chinese government has deployed an early version of this system (combined with substantial elements of old-school human surveillance and policing) to repress the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Some choice excerpts:

AI-powered sensors lurk everywhere, including in Uighurs’ purses and pants pockets. According to the anthropologist Darren Byler, some Uighurs buried their mobile phones containing Islamic materials, or even froze their data cards into dumplings for safekeeping, when Xi’s campaign of cultural erasure reached full tilt. But police have since forced them to install nanny apps on their new phones. The apps use algorithms to hunt for “ideological viruses” day and night. They can scan chat logs for Quran verses, and look for Arabic script in memes and other image files??Purchasing prayer rugs online, storing digital copies of Muslim books, and downloading sermons from a favorite imam are all risky activities. If a Uighur were to use WeChat’s payment system to make a donation to a mosque, authorities might take note…. MORE

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/09/yuval-noah-harari-artificial-intelligence-ai-cause-financial-crisis
AI could cause ‘catastrophic’ financial crisis, says Yuval Noah Harari

Harari said one issue with safety testing of models was foreseeing all problems that a powerful system could cause. “AI is different from every previous technology in human history because it’s the first technology that can make decisions by itself, that can create new ideas by itself and that can learn and develop by itself. Almost by definition, it’s extremely difficult for humans, even the humans who created the technology, to foresee all the potential dangers and problems.”
...

“What happens if AI is not only given greater control over the financial system of the world, but it starts creating new financial devices that only AI can understand, that no human being can understand?” said Harari, adding that the 2007-08 financial crisis was caused by debt instruments such as collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) that few people understood and were thus inadequately regulated.

“AI has the potential to create financial devices which are orders of magnitude more complex than CDOs. And just imagine the situation where we have a financial system that no human being is able to understand and therefore also not able to regulate,” he said. “And then there is a financial crisis and nobody understands what is happening.”

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html
We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
By Charlie Stross. (Science fiction writer)

And rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I'd like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn't matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real.

...

Anyway, for what my opinion is worth: I think this is bullshit. There are very rich people trying to manipulate investment markets into giving them even more money, using shadow puppets they dreamed up on the basis of half-remembered fictions they read in their teens. They are inadvertently driving state-level policy making on subjects like privacy protection, data mining, face recognition, and generative language models, on the basis of assumptions about how society should be organized that are frankly misguided and crankish, because there's no crank like a writer idly dreaming up fun thought experiments in fictional form. They're building space programs—one of them is up front about wanting to colonize Mars, and he was briefly the world's richest man, so we ought to take him as seriously as he deserves—and throwing medical resources at their own personal immortality rather than, say, a wide-spectrum sterilizing vaccine against COVID19. Meanwhile our public infrastructure is rotting, national assets are being sold off and looted by private equity companies, their social networks are spreading hatred and lies in order to farm advertising clicks, and other billionaires are using those networks to either buy political clout or suck up ever more money from the savings of the poor.

Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that's why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.

AND SO
Because we let loose technology with high danger potential and it's in the hands of completely warped sick, sick minds. All true James Bond Villains, except that they are real.

https://archive.md/2023.11.07-123002/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/henry-ford-anti-semitism/675911/#selection-575.0-581.96
America’s Most Dangerous Anti-Jewish Propagandist
Making sense of anti-Semitism today requires examining Henry Ford’s outsize part in its origins.
Ford remarked, “I still think this (WWII) is a phony war made by the international Jewish bankers.”

In late 1922, The New York Times reported the “rumor” passing through Berlin that Henry Ford was bankrolling Adolf Hitler and his curiously well-funded Nazi movement. The wall of Hitler’s office featured a large picture of the American mogul, the Times noted, and copies of a book bearing Ford’s byline littered a table in the anteroom. Titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, the volume was an anthology of articles published by Ford’s Dearborn Independent newspaper, which two years earlier had launched an unrelenting crusade to expose Jews’ supposed “financial and commercial control, usurpation of political power, monopoly of necessities, and autocratic direction of the very news that the American people read.” The series, which eventually spanned 92 issues over seven years, concluded that the “International Jew and his satellites” lurked behind virtually all of the world’s ills: labor unrest, Bolshevism, financial panics, wars.

Hitler denied receiving funding from Ford but made no secret that he considered him an inspiration. “We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascisti movement in America,” Hitler said in 1923. “We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy which is the Bavarian Fascisti platform.” At the time, Ford was being floated as a possible Democratic candidate for president, and Hitler said that he wished he could deploy “some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections.”

Ford’s anti-Jewish beliefs are well known. Not well understood is his singular role in unleashing a new era of anti-Semitism, a modern strain of an ancient poison built upon the themes of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You can glimpse Ford’s influence in the casual anti-Semitism of Donald Trump, who has deployed barely coded references to “globalists” and to “international banks” plotting secretly with one of his Democratic rivals to weaken the U.S. for their own enrichment; in Elon Musk’s signal-boosting of anti-Semites and his suggestion that George Soros “appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization”; and in a surge in anti-Jewish harassment and hate crimes around the world, including the 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.

...

Ford did eventually reckon with the lethal hatred he had helped whip up, according to Josephine Gomon, who oversaw female personnel at a Ford plant. She was among a group of executives who joined Ford in May 1946 for a screening of Death Stations, a government-produced film documenting the liberation of Hitler’s concentration camps. For an hour, horrifying images flashed across the screen: a crematorium at the Majdanek camp, torture chambers, a warehouse filled with the confiscated belongings of murdered Jews. When the film ended and the lights rose, Ford’s colleagues found him clinging to consciousness. He had had a major stroke. Ford died the following year at the age of 83.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/11/08/elon-musk-almost-needed-sfpd-wellness-check-after-breakdown-getting-booed-at-dave-chappelle-show/
https://archive.is/8eAQR
Elon Musk almost needed SFPD wellness check after ‘breakdown,’ getting booed at Dave Chappelle show (in December 2022)
‘He got to a point where he locked himself in his office, was so upset’ that Twitter employees feared he would hurt himself, the author of a new book says about the billionaire

Chappelle brought the Tesla and SpaceX mogul onstage as his surprise guest at the end of a set at San Francisco’s Chase Center. The crowd initially erupted into a mixture of cheers and boos at the sight of Twitter’s polarizing new CEO. But as the shock of Musk’s appearance wore off, the boos began to win out and grew increasingly angry, according to footage of the set and some people in the audience.

The footage showed the booing getting louder as Musk wandered around onstage with a microphone in hand. Musk tried to wave and paced some more, evidently unsure about how to respond. Chappelle tried to salvage the moment by cracking some jokes: “It sounds like some of the people you fired are in the audience.”

People on social media estimated that the vast majority of people in the 18,000-capacity stadium booed during Musk’s appearance, according to a report.

Mezrich said on CNBC that Musk was “shocked” by the audience’s reaction, noting, “This never happened to Elon before, and this spiral started.”