Furious Furries

I’m working on more serious content, I swear, Meantime, ChatGPT has me distracted with furious furries.

Write a poem about furious furries in iambic pentameter.

Furious furries, with their teeth all bared, 
Their paws clenched tight with fury and with hate, 
They snarl and growl and pace, not yet aware 
Of the cold reason that might dissipate 
Their rage. They are a force to be reckoned with, 
These creatures of the wild, with primal might 
And strength. They are a force to fear and fear 
Again, a force that few would dare to fight.

But even furries, in their wildest rage, 
Are still just animals, with hearts that beat 
And minds that think and feel. And so, perhaps, 
We ought to try to understand the heat 
That drives their fury, and to seek to find 
A way to calm the storm that rages in their minds.

Write a haiku about furious furries

Furiously they pace, 
Fierce and wild, their eyes ablaze 
Furries in a rage.

Write a postmodern poem about furious furries

Furries, oh furries, 
Fierce and wild and in a rage, 
They pace and snarl and growl.

But wait, what are these furries? 
Are they real, or just a guise? 
A mask to hide behind?

Perhaps they are a metaphor, 
For something deeper, something true. 
A way to express the rage

That lies within us all, 
The primal, animalistic force 
That drives us to lash out.

Or maybe they are just furries, 
Fierce and wild and in a rage, 
Pacing and snarling and growling,

Unapologetic in their fury, 
Unwavering in their rage.
Furries, oh furries, 
A mystery wrapped in fur, 
A symbol of the fury

That lies within us all.

Ecrire un poème sur les furries furieux en conflit avec les fées françaises

Furieux furries, aux dents découvertes,
Leurs pattes serrées de colère et de haine,
Ils grondent et rugissent et arpentent, pas encore conscients
De la raison froide qui pourrait dissiper
Leur rage. Ils sont une force à ne pas sous-estimer,
Ces créatures de la nature, avec leur puissance primitive
Et leur force. Ils sont une force à craindre et à redouter
Encore une fois, une force que peu oseraient affronter.

Mais même les furries, dans leur rage la plus sauvage,
Ne sont encore que des animaux, avec des cœurs qui battent
Et des esprits qui pensent et ressentent. Et donc, peut-être,
Devrions-nous essayer de comprendre la chaleur
Qui alimente leur fureur, et chercher à trouver
Un moyen de calmer la tempête qui fait rage dans leurs esprits.

Féeriques françaises, de grâce et de beauté,
Leur magie scintillante et leurs ailes brillantes,
Elles se tiennent face aux furries en colère,
Un affrontement de deux mondes diamétralement opposés.
La rage contre la grâce, la sauvagerie contre la délicatesse,
Un conflit sans fin, une guerre sans merci.
Qui triomphera dans cette bataille éternelle?
Seul le temps nous le dira.

Write a sonnet about furious furries in conflict with French fairies

The furious furries snarl and growl with rage, 
Their paws clenched tight, their teeth bared and sharp. 
They pace and seethe, a primal force engaged 
In conflict with the French fairies, who hark 
Back to a time of grace and chivalry.

But even in their wildest, most ferocious state, 
The furries are still just animals, with hearts 
That beat and minds that think and feel. It's late 
To try to understand the heat that imparts 
Their fury, but perhaps it's not too late 
To find a way to calm the storm that rages 
In their minds, and bring some measure of peace 
To this eternal battle, this never-ending war.

The French fairies, with their delicate wings and charms, 
Stand against the furries, a clash of two worlds, 
Diametrically opposed. Who will emerge victorious? 
Only time will tell.

Against Property

Private property ownership is immoral, and this includes state ownership of property. Property belongs to the world and all of its inhabitants. It may be inconvenient to have societies live in a propertyless world, but convenience doesn’t constitute morality. For those who believe in such things, morality is right or wrong, and property ownership is wrong as well as unfair to unborn future generations. I’ve said this before. It’s an unpopular opinion. In fact, this is why I am posting this segment.

I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, the generative chatbot, and I have found it to be laden with much cultural bias—Western culture to be more precise. It is also trained to avoid certain topics and give false responses. Perhaps that’s for another day, but in a nutshell, I asked it to generate a story with a theme of prostitution and addiction. It warned me that it was not designed to produce something as complex as a story. However, when I asked for a story sans prostitutes or addiction, it produced a plausible outline and subsequently filled in narrative elements. Even when the protagonist was ‘addicted’ to gingerbread cookies, the request was flagged as inappropriate. This is disconcerting. And so it goes…

On the topic of private property ownership, it is equally defensive. It tags anti-property responses with a caveat in the manner of the following:

Ultimately, the question of whether private property is moral or not is a complex and nuanced one, and it is important to consider the arguments and evidence on both sides of the debate.

ChatGBT Reponse

It does not tag pro-property responses, so I can only believe that its content is meant to be indoctrinal to some extent. Follows are a couple of interactions.

Why is private property immoral?

Private property is not necessarily immoral. It is a system that allows people to own and control resources, including their own labor and the fruits of their labor. The concept of private property has been important in many societies because it allows individuals to have a sense of ownership and control over the things they possess, which can provide them with a sense of security and stability. It can also incentivize people to work hard and be productive, because they can keep the rewards of their labor for themselves. However, private property can become immoral when it is used to exploit or oppress others, or when it is used to deny access to resources that are necessary for basic human flourishing. It is important to consider how private property is used and to ensure that it is not used in ways that are harmful to others.

Why is private property ownership immoral?

Ownership of private property is not inherently immoral. It is a system that allows individuals to own and control resources, including their own labor and the fruits of their labor. The concept of private property has been important in many societies because it provides people with a sense of ownership and control over the things they possess, which can provide them with a sense of security and stability. It can also incentivize people to work hard and be productive, because they can keep the rewards of their labor for themselves. However, private property can become immoral when it is used to exploit or oppress others, or when it is used to deny access to resources that are necessary for basic human flourishing. It is important to consider how private property is used and to ensure that it is not used in ways that are harmful to others.

Notice that its response privileges the prevailing position. In bold, I’ve highlighted the differences between the two responses. In the second query, I’ve added the term ownership for clarity, and it expectedly parrots it back. Notice how it superficially swaps people and individuals in the first output for individuals and people in the second. Finally, note the centricity of human flourishing as a default moral stance. And so I asked:

Is antinatalism a strong moral position to hold?

Overall, the question of whether antinatalism is a strong moral position to hold is a complex and nuanced one, and it is important to consider the arguments and evidence on both sides of the debate. It is ultimately up to individuals to decide for themselves what they believe is the most moral course of action in regards to having children.

Despite the nudging, ChatGPT is a moral relativist, so it’s alright in my book.

Humans Ruin the Economy

Humans are ruining the economy.

Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content.

This is the caption on the sign for this segment. The sign advertises a solution, which is to “Vote for DEMOCROBOT… The first party run by artificial intelligence”. It also promises to “give everyone a living wage of £1436.78 a week”.

I have been very vocal that I find the idea of humans governing humans is a bad idea at the start. By and large, humans are abysmal system thinkers and easily get lost in complexity. This is why our governments and economies require so much external energy and course correction. Not only were they poorly designed and implemented, but they’re also trying to manage a dynamic system—a complex system. It won’t work.

What about bots and artificial intelligence? The above image was posted elsewhere, and a person commented that our governments are already filled with artificial intelligence. I argued that at best we’ve got pseudo-intelligence; at worse, we’ve got artificial pseudo-intelligence, API.

The challenge with AI is that it’s developed by humans with all of their faults and biases in-built.

The challenge with AI is that it’s developed by humans with all of their faults and biases in-built. On the upside, at least in theory, rules could be created to afford consistency and escape political theatre. The same could be extended to the justice system, but I’ll not range there.

Part of the challenge is that the AI needs to optimise several factors, at least, and not all factors are measurable or can be quantified. Any such attempt would tip the playing field one way or another. We might assume that at least AI would be unreceptive to lobbying and meddling, but would this be the case? AI—or rather ML, Machine Learning or DL, Deep Learning—rely on input. It wouldn’t take long for interested think tanks to flood the source of inputs with misinformation. And if there is an information curator, we’ve got a principle-agent problem—who’s watching the watcher?—, and we may need to invoke Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon solution.

One might even argue that an open-source, independently audited system would work. Who would be auditing and whose interpretation and opinion would we trust? Then I think of Enron and Worldcom. Auditors paid to falsify their audit results. I’d also argue that this would cause a shift from the political class to the tech class, but the political class is already several tiers down and below the tech class, so the oligarchs still win.

This seems to be little more than a free-association rant, so I’ll pile on one more reflection. Google and Facebook (or Meta) have ethical governing bodies that are summarily shunned or simply ignored when they point out that the parent company is inherently unethical or immoral. I wouldn’t expect much difference here.

I need a bot to help write my posts. I’ll end here.

Man versus Machine

Human-designed systems seem to need a central orchestration mechanism—similar to the cognitive homunculus-observer construct substance dualists can’t seem to escape—, where consciousness (for want of a better name) is more likely the result of an asynchronous web with the brain operating as a predictive difference and categorisation engine rather than the perceived cognitive coalescence we attempt to model. Until we unblock our binary fixedness, we’ll continue to fall short. Not even quantum computing will get us there if we can’t escape our own cognitive limitations in this regard. Until then, this error-correcting mechanism will be as close to an approximation of an approximation that we can hope for.

The net-input function of this machine learning algorithm operates as a heuristic for human cognition. Human-created processes can’t seem to create this decoupled, asynchronous heuristic process, instead ending up with something that looks more like a railway switching terminal.

Cover photo: Railroad tracks stretch toward Chicago’s skyline at Metra’s A2 switching station on March 29, 2019. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune); story

AI Promises, Promises

To those on the edges of their seat waiting for the imminent progression of AI, just remember the millions who have lived and dies awaiting the same promise. No offence, but you have a higher probability of winning at Lotto than any major breakthroughs in general artificial intelligence.