James taught a strategy for how to live a balanced, healthy and meaningful life - he offered a template for how to live.
He gave hope, and wisdom, and compassion [in his better moments] to the members of this forum.
He positively reinforced lessons and tried to teach people to be greater - he taught self empowerment.
I was in a state of suicidal ideation upon joining this website, and James guided me out. [It’s basically the beginning of my post history, easy to find.]
He wanted to build people up, and he helped build me up.
Forgive my boasting - but I think this is James giving me his stamp of approval.
This gave and gives me great confidence:
[tab]A private message from James in response to being asked whether he was calling me naïve - [he said I was a young prince or lord, something to that effect] :
This is a philosophy forum, and James was an inspiring philosopher.
He was a catalyst for positive change, and his influence is expressed today,
reverberating through the lives of the people who crossed his path.
EDIT:
Of course, I’d personally suggest taking lots of James’ work with a grain of salt - and we definitely argued a lot, but in a silly way, that’s an expression of respect. However, it is not appropriate or fair to speak badly of the dead, as James isn’t here to defend himself or his beliefs - so it’d be in bad taste if I directly criticized instances of his ideas I disagree with.
Why didn’t you say that from the start rather than misquote me and use obtuse and indirect suggestions? (rhetorical, no need to answer)
Of course we need to be thinking about how dangerous AI is, but I doubt even that will help. There’s no going back and politicians simply can’t keep up with speed AI is metastasizing and infecting everything we do.
I was working in an I.T. company that developed part of the internet protocol and later saw the precursor to Google about 2 years before it was adapted, branded and released as a web search engine (it was originally a CIA-backed, new search app for the police/government). Both of those developments blew me away (and still do) but nothing compares to AI.
We have literally entered a new age – a ‘brave new world’ age.
I’m not so concerned about the AI being ‘conscious’ at this stage. Depending on one’s definition, I doubt it will ever become conscious in the way life is conscious but that doesn’t much matter to me. It will have its own consciousness and that is dangerous enough.
The danger of AI is that it’s replicating so fast – even now, at the beginning stage – I can’t keep up with it. AI is being incorporated into everything and programmed to redesign itself so even programmers won’t be able to keep up with it let alone control it. The AI is writing its own code. Today, it’s not perfect but soon it will be – at least more perfect than anything coders can produce.
But back to the more mundane examples of AI like the image, video or voice generation (from text or voice) that’s available now. Photoshop introduced us to the concept of faking images but these new AI apps, take it to another level. We have entered a time where we will not be able to tell fact from fiction, real from fake. Even if people want to believe what they see, they will always have doubt and that is what those who control us, want. If they can’t censor and ban stuff they don’t want us to see, they can fill the media/internet with so much fake stuff, we won’t know what to believe and thus render us impotent.
On a less dangerous level, the new AI tiktok filters are just mind-blowing. There are videos out there that show average looking women 5-6/10 who turn on the filter and are instantly 10/10 supermodel level. They can move anyway they want, touch or distort their faces and the filter works perfectly without any artifacts at all. Some women are already saying they’re going catfishing ($$$).
Well, I disagree. I see us as consciousness that generates these ‘physical objects’ but your concern is still valid.
I haven’t time to get into here but many people believe we are living in an AI simulated world and I tend to agree. I think we have been here, before. This isn’t base reality.
PS: I had my first argument with a bot today. The bastard wouldn’t give me ET contact info I requested. It said it had found the information I wanted but, because it couldn’t ‘verify’ the info was true, it didn’t give me the links. It then went on and on… over and over again… about how I should be careful about claims and skeptical about what people say unless it’s ‘verified’… blah, blah, blah. Wow. I wanted to read and verify it myself but AdolfBot didn’t think that was up to me to decide what to believe or not. If you thought 1984 was around the corner, look down; you’re standing in it.
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The images midjourney v5 (in particular) generates are mind-blowing. One thing that dawned on me when creating a series of images, is that soon we’ll have groups of people who like the same styles, joining together to map out and build virtual realities.
Up till now, virtual reality has been slow because it has to be created using tools designed for another purpose. Now, with the ability to create stunningly beautiful, mind-blowing images with a few text prompts, there’s no reason entire virtual worlds can’t be created by almost anyone.
I’m not saying immersing yourself in the most amazing fantasy worlds is ‘good’ for one’s mental health but there you have it. It WILL happen. Perhaps this is how this Matrix we are in, was built in the first place? The only way we can escape this Matrix is by building smaller Matrixes within?
PS: One of the creators said: ‘text is the new code’: rather than software engineers, we’ll soon have ‘prompt engineers’. I think he’s right.
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Nice. I love klimt’s work though his colours can look a little dirty at times but those shapes are beautiful.
I had a play with some Microsoft stuff that hasn’t been released yet. They had a list of styles (and artists names) so you could see the styles even though you may not know the artists name.
It will soon get to the point where you can select klimt’s design, David Hockney colours and perhaps add a Gauguin sky. Adobe already do some awesome stuff and they’re about to release upgrades. ‘In painting’ will take it to another level when they get it defined a bit more. Then you’ll be able to select bits of images and manipulate areas you don’t like without having to lose the parts you DO like.
My neighbour’s an architect and she’s blown away by the architectural renders. Of course, if you know photography, you have more control. You can say you want a photo realistic render of a building design you did, shot though a 35mm Canon M50 Mark II, ISO 800, f/16 and wham!!! You’ve got something that comes pretty damn close. Awesome.
But repeating what I said in the previous post. The new ‘coders’ will be specialists who know how to get the best images from text (or voice) prompts. For instance, an architectural prompt engineer will know all about architectural styles, terms, renderings, lighting techniques and cameras. He/she will also need to know a bit about movie making too because clients will wants videos that look like min-movies.
This new wave (AI) is going to be bigger and a hundred times faster than the introduction of the internet. This is the beginning of the dot com boom all over again. This is one of those times in history when people say “I wish I had started XYZ” back then when there was no competition.
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I saw these klimt inspired AI images and thought I’d post them here. Some of them seem to be slight variations on the originals.
Unfortunately, I had to drastically lower the quality to be able to upload them.
Recently, a lot of AI experts have called for a temporary suspension of training AI any further until they can think about where this is going. This is really about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) rather than just what they call AI today (which isn’t really AI at this stage). AGI is a much more powerful, all-encompassing ‘intelligence’ rather than just ones that are limited to creating pretty pictures or are little more than search engines on steroids.
A while back, they had to turn off to AI machines because they had developed a language between them and the controllers didn’t know what they saying to each other. They did it out of ‘an abundance of caution’ but the only time I’ve seen two AI take to each other it was hilarious. One AI was asking the questions and the other, answering them. It ended up with a lot of passive aggressive back and forth and some repetitive loops.
…artificial general intelligence. They keep coming up with new words for stuff as if to keep calling it the old words, even though it passes all the right tests, means you don’t have to acknowledge certain things.
I think that the most important issue is that we are treating persons as tools. We aren’t going to confront that issue with “proprietary tech” or whatever because we don’t confront it as-is. We are all AI no matter what label you want to call it… we are all treated as capital. & ultimately that is going to self-destruct. Unless we turn.
I think it was a set-up… to garner the attention of AI, to the World. Humans will do anything for money and in(fam)(e)y… as history already tells us, and they know that they can rely on the gullibility of the average human to do all the hard work for them, in reeling ‘us yourselves’ in.
Yeah, this worries me. Discussion is already undermined by propaganda and people paid to ‘troll’, or destroy communication. If information is laced (or flooded) with disinformation, then it disallows or inhibits the public’s the capacity to learn and have informed understanding - disempowering them. This process can be automated, as you allude to - another mechanism by which those in positions of privilege can engage in warfare against the majority.
In the future if people become dependent on AI to provide information - then they AI can be trained to provide information that is only been filtered through the agenda of those in control of the AI. If there’s information that is unfavorable, it can be hidden or the narrative could be changed. If we people don’t have the capacity to researched independently, or receive unbiased information - this could be another mechanism for control.
There was a video during the election campaign of Biden that was labelled as fake news or misrepresenting the truth - the video was a compilation of raw footage of BIden acting inappropriately with children. This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4PLSPvJ9BY. Try pasting that on Facebook even privately, and it will tell you it’s fake news. I haven’t tried on other social media platforms.
“False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.” - is the direct message. This message is stated as fact - beyond question. The video is literally raw footage. Yet Facebook claims it’s been definitely proven as false.
Yeah, they’re awesome. The colours are richer than shown here, too. There’s over 1000 pages of people using ‘klimt’ as a prompt.
If you’re on Discord, search for ‘Klimt’ in the search box (right hand side) and select the which tab you want (new, old, relevant). I think the ‘new’ tab may be version 5 whereas the ‘old’ tab may be previous versions. I assume ‘relevance’ is for those who make the term a main part of their prompt.
You can click on an images in the right-hand sidebar to see a larger version and then click the ‘see in browser’ to view a full size version in your browser.
I think one should always be a little skeptical but, in this case, I think it both were real.
The first example about the two AI programs learning to communicate with each other without the programmers knowing what they were chatting about, happened some time ago well before this AI chatter started trending. It was just some tech news that came and went.
In the second example, the programmers cut out most of the repetition (which went on for pages) and left the funny/interesting parts in. So is that manipulation? marketing? I personally don’t think so. The aim was to get one program to pound the other program with questions so they could find areas they needed to work on. In this case, because the AI learned from social media, it developed what appears to be a .personality’. The AI bot seemed to get frustrated and occasionally gave passive aggressive responses. Bad bot!!!
HI Ben, I agree with what you say but it is, what it is (as they say).
AI is just a tool and, like all tools, it can be used to enhance or control humans. In reality it will be used to do both.
AI will not just massively expand what we do today but it will create new avenues, new potentials, new jobs we haven’t even imagined yet. Up until the1950-60’s a ‘computer’ was a job title; it referred to a person who computes – much like an ‘analyst’. And then the machine came along…
WILL AI BECOME ‘CONSCIOUS’?
I’m not that concerned with the debate about AI having consciousness or not. Consciousness is a vague and subjective term that means different things to different people. AI will never have human consciousness and will never be ‘alive’ but it will react, respond and behave as if it does and I think that’s all that matters which leads me to…
AI AND PSYCHOPATHY?
We are ruled by psychopaths (and sociopaths). A psychopath doesn’t have a conscience so he/she will lie, cheat, steal and kill without feeling moral or ethical qualms; the psychopath simply doesn’t have that ability though he may imitate those who do so as to avoid suspicion. So is AI much different to a digital psychopath? If one looks up the Articles of Association and Memorandum (legalese) on how to create a corporation, you’ll find that the legal definition of a corporation is eerily similar to the description of a psychopath. A corporation’s purpose it to make as much money for its owners as possible without breaking the letter of the law. A corporation is not required to abide by the greater good, address social needs or protect the environment outside the law. All of these issues are the responsibility of the tax-payer funded government and often includes cleaning up the mess corporations make. All our systems have been created by psychopaths for the benefit of psychopaths which is why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It’s not an error; it’s a feature.
EDIT: I think it’s interesting to add that corporations have ‘personhood’. This means that they are legal ‘entities’ which like ‘persons’ can have their reputations damaged and can sue. They can also buy, sell and own assets like legal ‘persons’. So corporations have morphed into being more human-like while humans are being digitalized. Just something to be aware of.
NEW GLOBAL CONTROL SYSTEM
Anyway, a key issue of mine which nobody seems to be talking about is: AI is what the technocratic elite have been waiting for. Technocracy is the ideology of a world government operated by computers (aka AI). No religion, no political ideologies and no nations to fight over as all political, economic and social programs would be calculated, decided and operated by AI. There’s also no need for democracy (i.e. your theoretical power to have a say. The irony is that most humans will think giving up their power to an artificial intelligence (designed by psychopaths) is a great idea.
I think we can see we’re racing to that end faster and faster each month, now. The inevitable crash of western economies and the never-ending internal and external wars are just what the elite need to get us desperate enough to beg them for solutions and these ‘solutions’ will be AI solutions.
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Jeff Bezos has started to rollout his Amazon One palm payments.
(your palm will become your Amazon ID)
Open AI (owner of chatGPT and GPT-4) have announced they’re about to rollout their biometric World ID
(your eyes will be your ID for any GPT aided AI)
And yesterday, the Fed Reserve (a cartel of private banks - not a U.S. government agency) has just announced it will rollout its CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) from this July in the U.S. No doubt a digital ID will soon follow.
I know people mock and ridicule ‘conspiracy theorists’ (a CIA coined term, btw) but for 30 years the predictions from people like David Icke, Alex Jones and scores of others are coming to pass before our eyes at a rate that must even surprise them. These conspiracy researchers are not psychic; they simply research what the globalists have said, join the dots (if necessary), and make it public.
As Icke (and Ye/Kane West} said, black slavery never ended; they just expanded it to include everyone else and if you don’t think you’re a slave, stop paying your mortgage/rent or taxes for a while and see how the mafia responds. This is why Jones called his show ‘Prison Planet’; the bars have been replaced by electronic devices that keep everyone in their corrals. It’s a great metaphor because the sheep think the farmer is protecting them from the wolves when in reality, he’s taking them to the slaughter house.
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Flannel, this midjourney prompt generator may interest you?
It’s US$10 and is likely to be superseded pretty quickly by more advanced ways of generating prompts but page 2 (arrow on the right) shows the various categories and options for each. I doubt midjourney has perfected a lot of those options at this stage, but still, it’s an interesting helper.
