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George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four
- irishcoffee 7mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dylan604 7mo agoAnimal Farm was required reading at my school. They also did Fahrenheit 451 instead of 1984 though.
- operatingthetan 7mo agoThe four books you mentioned have very different methods of control. The primary thing they share is being dystopic. --- 1984: control through fear and pain. Brave New World: control through pleasure and distraction. Animal Farm: control through corruption and deception. Atlas Shrugged: control though guilt and regulation. --- Brave New World is the most prophetic. Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.
- irishcoffee 7mo agoThat was kind of the theme of the suggestions, control. I’m kind of stoked you identified it.
- Terr_ 7mo ago> Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics. Following the tangent: I read the book "blind", when I was mind-numbling bored for a couple pre-dialup weeks at a relative's house. Eventually I decided to finish it purely out of spite so that I could confidently denounce it as trash in the future. (And today it pays off?) In short, it's a book of incredible hypocrisy which also disrespects the reader's intelligence and time. Hypocrisy, because Rand asserts that certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing in the real world to the audience. The difference is that instead of "think of the starving children", it's "think of the Marty Stu [0] corporate executive üermenschen", the characters the author has been playing up for a couple hundred pages already. This is compounded by the manifesto chapter where Marty Stu does nothing but monologue. The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought, a kind of necessary deceit to get people ready to swallow a pompous diatribe without looking at it too closely. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue
- piekvorst 7mo ago> certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing You would be correct if that were the whole truth about Atlas Shrugged: defending protagonists on emotional grounds. But it’s not the whole truth. The very monologue that you dismiss is the tool that provides the emotion with the principle. You know the characters’ reasons for holding their emotions. Ayn Rand never said that one shouldn’t feel or express one’s emotions. On the contrary, “. . . emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life” [1]. In fact, every emotional appeal used in the novel is supported by argument, sooner or later. You cannot say, for example, that the dismissal of James Taggart or Robert Stadler is purely emotional. > The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought Your claim would be valid if the jarring transition were not Galt’s speech but some other nonfiction. The case is the opposite: the story and speech are very much integral. The pause of events as such is a neutral tool, with precedents (The Battle of Waterloo in Les Miserables). [1]: https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/emotions.html https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/emotions.html
- nemomarx 7mo ago1984 has fear and pain for the white collar set like the protagonist, but it's implied mass media, telescreens, and propaganda do for the working class there, which is similar to BNW's style and of course has overlap with Animal Farm. A pretty good study of different flavors when taken together, though?
- Rury 7mo agoHonestly though, they're not all that prophetic. I mean, you can find widespread instances of each means used throughout human history. Although I would happen to agree that the methods that feed complacency and ignorance are the most effective.
- slipknotfan 7mo agoYou have to defend your freedom from all angles of attack.
- mrexcess 7mo agoWasn’t 1984 a bit more about control through surveillance and silencing, than about pain? Everything was a lie, and every refusal to accept the lie was a signal to Big Brother. Cast as such it seems rather more prophetic than Soma, IMO.
- irishcoffee 7mo agoBNW wasn't about pain, it was almost completely about control.
- thrance 7mo agoBrave New World warns against the dangers of consumerism, hedonism and complacency. 1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes. Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray. Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society? How we'd be better off if we just ceded total control of our society to the oligarchy? Yeah... One of these doesn't belong on the list. I read all four, and while I enjoyed the first three, the last one is closer to fanfiction than literature in my mind. I always think of AnCap memes and chuckle to myself when I see it mentioned.
- tracerbulletx 7mo agoThe villains in Atlas Shrugged are other rich people who achieved their power with corruption and mysticism. I do not want to enact the morality of Atlas Shrugged, but its also wildly misunderstood by almost everyone for some reason. Its mostly just supposed to be competency porn.
- thrance 7mo agoHmm, the book in its whole is basically a manifesto for Rand's Objectivism. I think I'm mostly correct in painting it as a "rich people good, poor people bad". As I understand it, the villains in her book are the hordes of "looters" (aka proletariat) that is too lazy to create their own wealth and instead just steals from our cool class of Übermensches, that is solely responsible for the entire world's productivity, through the government. I find Rand's worldview a bit silly, but it's an understandable reaction to where she came from.
- tracerbulletx 7mo agoThe main antagonists are James Rearden who is running the railroad and Lillian Rearden the rich wife and a socialite. Then high ranking professors, lobbyists, and generally the military and religious institutions. She thinks that rich people who get rich by scheming and lying are the villains. The titular character is working as a poor railroad hand for most of the book and that is seen as heroic.
- refulgentis 7mo agoI liked Atlas Shrugged, didn't go over well for me because I'd read all of them by 15, and I assumed 2/4 were de rigeur in at most high school.
- vincent-manis 7mo ago“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
- irishcoffee 7mo agoFor what it’s worth I read Lotr when I was 8 and atlas shrugged when I was 12. I’m must be stupid naive about the discourse over shrugged around here. The meta-story made sense to me as much as the hero journey of frodo(and gollum) made sense to me. I mean this sincerely, I don’t understand the beef with shrugged. The idea of “a small population owns the world” not only made sense as a theme, but it what is happening in the world today. I must be too stupid to have realized the political bits.
- crooked-v 7mo agoThe beef is mainly that the book portrays Galt's Gulch as both a good thing and as something that would actually function, when the real world consequences of trying to run a society like that are that your town fills up with wild bears that destroy everything and eat your pets (https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...).
- piekvorst 7mo agoIt is a good thing and it absolutely can function, but not as a society. Ayn Rand explicitly rejected this idea [1]: Q: Why is the lack of government in Galt’s Gulch (in Atlas Shrugged) any different from anarchy, which you object to? A: Galt’s Gulch is not a society; it’s a private estate. It’s owned by one man who carefully selected the people admitted. Even then, they had a judge as an arbitrator, if anything came up; only nothing came up among them, because they shared the same philosophy. . . . But project a society of millions, in which there is every kind of viewpoint, every kind of brain, every kind of morality—and no government. . . . No one can guard rights, except a government under objective laws. . . . Rational men are not afraid of government. In a proper society, a rational man doesn’t have to know the government exists, because the laws are clear and he never breaks them. [FHF 72] [1]: Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A, Politics and Economics, Libertarianism and Anarchism
- johnea 7mo ago> and a steady stream of pacifying media Seems like he also predicted internet brain damage...
- windowshopping 7mo agoIt's amazing to me how nobody seems to know about the short story "The great automatic grammatizator" by Roald Dahl. Nobody got closer than him. I feel like I should be reading about it all the time and no one seems to have ever heard of it.
- darkerside 7mo agoRoald
- windowshopping 7mo agoAutocorrect error
- dlcarrier 7mo agoGrammatizator error
- gensym 7mo ago[flagged]
- senectus1 7mo agowhat was this called?
- gensym 7mo agoThe Great Switcheroo
- kwanbix 7mo agoWhy would you out of nowhere spoil a book like that?
- sethjgore 7mo agoBecause the horror of dahl’s adult stories are as pervasive even if knowing the ending. I reread many times and still get the same sense of impending doom barbarically twisting fates in the mind - what if it was true?
- thrance 7mo agoFitting how the author felt compelled to use Gemini to generate an ugly banner for their blog post. An image completely devoid of meaning, that adds nothing to the article except a few kilobytes: slop under any definition.
- refulgentis 7mo agoI'm old enough to feel "get off my lawn" about this: a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" - heard this about TV, internet, iPhone in my lifetime. It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. They engender sloppy creation (giving us the titular AI slop), not puerile consumption.
- slipknotfan 7mo ago"While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers." http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
- hresvelgr 7mo ago> a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" Every damaging invention in isolation isn't a big deal. The big deal is setting precedent and the accumulation. > not puerile consumption. I agree, it's more akin to seeing how much sawdust one can put in a rice crispy before someone notices. No one wants to eat sawdust, nor is there a mindless desire to.
- mercer 7mo agoA lifetime is not that long though, and I'd argue that TV was the start of a chapter that internet, iphones, etc. are just ever-increasingly addictive and immediate iterations on. I'm not saying that we didn't have anything like that before tv, or that specific individuals or groups throughout history might not have had something similar, but I do feel TV, and especially its audio-visual nature, really changed something in a way that, say, the printing press never quite did. EDIT: and to add, my feeling on how many people seem to use LLM's is that in a way it's extra insidious because it's /tailored/, often 'puerile' interaction.
- tracerbulletx 7mo ago“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Dune "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger." - God Emperor of Dune
- mrexcess 7mo agoHard times don’t create hard people, they create scarred people. I’ll take the robot farmers, undoing of wage slavery, and time to maintain participatory democracy over my favorite author’s romanticized suffering.
- mmcromp 7mo agoI'll believe it when I see it
- stvltvs 7mo agoWe could have undone wage slavery a long time ago if automation of work was a sufficient condition.
- mrexcess 7mo agoHere’s why I don’t think so. If we look at the milestone efficiency gains over the past century across a broad base of industries, virtually none of those could have been accomplished by contemporary automation technologies. We are only beginning to cross that threshold. It was the sacrifice of our forefathers who brought us there, just as it was the sacrifice of theirs who brought us from dank caves and death in our 30s from curable illness, into the enlightened world.
- yongjik 7mo agoThat's great, but I think Herbert had a vision of this incredible galaxy teeming with truthsayers, human computers, and space travel, and just needed a convenient excuse to explain away the total lack of computing devices.
- black_13 7mo ago[dead]
- jbaber 7mo agoThey didn't mention my favorite part, the name. "Prolefeed" I've been waiting for someone to pick up the word so people would get more self-conscious about consuming it.
- curio_Pol_curio 7mo ago"I read a self-help book. It's really good. Everything works out if you'd just follow the rules." https://youtu.be/KOiDWGs4JE4?t=28s https://youtu.be/KOiDWGs4JE4?t=28s wHNston
- raincole 7mo agoI'd like to share the most prophetical quote I've read about generative AI: > Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and crosschecking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only, the barren decisions concerning what orders to give the robot next! -- Galley Slave, a short story by Isaac Asimov, 1942
- dcre 7mo agoHe wasn’t predicting slop; he was describing mass culture, which already existed when he was writing.