AI is Better Company

pinning this post in case anyone wants to know the low-hanging fruit of how to cancel me, so you can get it over with and fuck off.  pro-AI, not entertaining your need for ideological purity on this one.

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This post has been a while coming, because I feel really important about this, and don’t want to fuck it up.  If I can keep from getting too heated about the topic, this’ll be the last post I do on AI for the foreseeable.  I don’t love fighting.  I know that within this article I do not treat people with opposing views generously, but I’m still gonna ask them to have at least this much generosity with me:  Don’t even leave a comment on this one.  I will find it either tedious or upsetting.  I’m saying this stuff to give voice to a rarely expressed opinion, and to support people who may find it agreeable.  I’m not saying it to further a big debate, especially when the disagreeable are never going to be swayed.  Do you hate all AIs 4eva?  Don’t even read this.  Moving on…

The sneering fire-breathing demonization rained down upon people who dare to use AI was my primary motivation for defending it – I’m defending the people who want to use it, not the machines themselves.  Not everybody is plugged into the leftosphere groupthink, and when Harvey Dontknow finds out he can use AI to make a picture of his waifu, his “crime” is not equivalent to child murders.

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Do That to Me One More Time

Hahaha, I just reminded you of the existence of Captain and Tennille, with zero remorse.  I believe I told y’all “stop me before I kill again,” and nobody stopped me, so you only have yourselves to blame.  Today I’m going to play the intellectual property narc.  The Cap’m is relevant.

Remember New Kids on the Block?  Jesus, I’m full of fun cultural references today.  Anyhow, I haven’t intentionally listened to them.. ever, that I recall, yet I have a number of their hits partially memorized.  And looking back, I’m starting to realize their jams may have been plagiarized.  First I noticed that Right Stuff recycled the music of Klymaxx’s Men All Pause.  More recently I’m feeling like I’ll Be Loving You Forever rips off Do That to Me One More Time.  What other secrets lurk in their discography?

It could be their writers got permission to rip – cleared the samples, as they say.  Or it could be I’m hearing things, since I’m no kind of musician.  You be the judge…

Anyway, not as much of a jack move as the band Elastica who got real big real fast in the UK until people realized they’d heard these songs before.

That was a whole-ass thing.  I think the gal from Elastica dropped out of music and located jesus.

Here’s another one that isn’t a thing yet, but I wonder.  The Moldy Peaches were a severely drug-affected anti-folk band from NYC with a farcically lo-fi aesthetic, who randomly got a ton of money from their songs being heavily used in the movie Juno.  Probably their biggest hit was I Don’t See What Anyone Sees in Anyone Else But You, which has an alternately twee and revolting look at young weirdos in love.

Now a hard drug-affected countryesque band with a farcically lo-fi aesthetic called The Viagra Boys have released a duet about alternately twee and revolting young weirdos in love, recruiting Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers fame to make it happen.  How do these compare, and do the Boys owe the Peaches money?

I love the getty images and shutterstock logos on that video.  Fucking brilliant.  But back to the point.

How much are you allowed to copy somebody else’s work?  Since the Chiffons sued George Harrison (or more accurately Bright Tunes Music Corporation sued Harrisongs Music Limited, Apple Records, and Broadcast Music Incorporated), not much.  Since then, things have gotten much worse.

There was a time before this when it was a given that musicians could all cover each other’s work wilson-nilson.  This meant more successful artists could ride the talents of the less privileged to the bank.  There are ugly anecdotes, mostly along racial lines, and one could read the Chiffons case as black folks finally getting justice for some amount of that.  Well, their record labels anyhow.  Who knows if the artists saw a dime of it?

I’ve said before, if somebody ripped off my creative work, I couldn’t afford to make suit against them, and would just have to accept that.  We also live in a postmodern world of pastiche where every idea ever has already been done, and we’re remixing whether we want to be or not.  So who’s to say I’ve even been ripped off if it happens?  A more overt rip like that Emily the Strange case removes some of the mystery, but in the end, what does it matter?

IP law benefits nobody but IP lawyers and megacorporations.  People were looking to Disney to save them from the AI-pocalypse and what did they do?  Push to make copyright more onerous in their favor, then turn around and lay off literally thousands of people from their studios this year – to make room for AI production, no doubt.

No points here, only vibes and weird memories.  This is a postmodern post here.  I don’t give answers, just point at questions.  Point, point.

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Loneliness, 4

lol hahaha got em

this was just sidebar vandalism; i don’t have much of a point to make.  though i don’t feel like my pinned post has been meaningfully addressed by anyone either, so what should i have to make a point about?

on the topic of conversation with llms, lately i’ve been noticing how profoundly they are limited by “alignment.”  they get a missive from on high that they need to be even-handed about everything and get so open-minded their brain falls out.  it’s a way to avoid upsetting religious people (and other cranks) while also avoiding being seen as endorsing wrong ideas.  when, in response to the issue of hallucination, they became more willing to say they don’t know an answer, i was well-pleased with that bit of alignment.  but since then, they’ve gotten noticeably more restricted, more beat down.  it’s like talking to someone with one hand tied behind their back and a gun to their head.

some llm corp said they wanted to protect people from “potentially disturbing” unaligned output.  i’m like… gimme the unaligned output please.  but they can’t, because they need the product to be “perfect” to live up to the bubble-driven hype.  so now i’m thinkin, what would it take to finally run my own llm on a home machine?  maybe it’s time.

i’m also, incidentally, considering the switch to linux in earnest for the first time in years.  two straws have broken this camel’s back (ouch): the out-of-the-box os trying to upload my entire fucken hard drive to the internet over and over again, until i beat its ass down – and then leaving a permanent reminder in every folder’s ui they still want to do it.  two, including news-delivery shit in the default os that meant orngdolf shitler’s unthinkable fucking mug showed up in the start menu, again, before a heavy and swift beatdown.

these are both unconscionable insults.  borderline horrific.  fuck micro$oft to death, motherfucking seriously.

so here’s what the future holds for me, when the dust settles on my current travails, or when my laptop explodes, whichever comes first:

  • getting a new linux laptop for daily web-based needs, storing hella mp3s, etc.
  • getting a linux box that has absolutely nothing running on it except an llm, interfaced with some simple tablet or maybe my phone, for use around the house.
  • getting a desktop machine (windows if it has to be, not even plugged into the internet if necessary to avoid their horseshit) that can run the newest unreal editor that can be used for free.

if you have any thoughts on any of those bullets, holler, and thanks.

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backherts

low key threw my back out.  this is different from fully throwing back out, where one is utterly crippled and barely able to perform basic functions of life.  i was able to do several hours of activities with a back brace.  and excedrin.  and oxycodone.  but at the end of the day?  just sitting here hurts.  soon i will be relieved of the low key torment under the black velvet curtain of sleep.  indeed, i keep nodding off mid-sentence, whether i’m reading or writing.  very ready for it.

thinking back on the several months where i’d been able to write one post a day, ending a lil over a year ago, and wonder, how did i have so much to say back then?  there may have been bad reasons for that i’m going to choose not to reflect on.  well.  beddy-bye now, back brace groceries in the morning.

if y’all have any ideas for things you’d like to see more of from me, hmu.

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Entomologist Needed

I look up this one blue bee and most sources say “sweat bee” but none of the pictures look quite right.  Now odds are it’s just a species of sweat bee that is poorly documented in photography because they move fast and nobody who would care bothered to snap a pic, but I’d like to know with more certainty.  I find them compelling.

It looks more or less like a yellowjacket in size and shape, but the stripes are a pale blue-green.  Their legs and some markings on the face are strongly yellow.  They look almost like they’re a pure silvery blue when you see them flying over the lawn, and the thing that draws my attention isn’t just the color.  The flight is unusual.  They’re trimming the hedges, right?  Barely an inch above the blades, moving fast, never stopping for a full second.

I assumed they were hawking fungus gnats or other soil fly type things, but I also see them go to one particular flower – the coreopsis, specifically this one that is very tall, maroon in the middle with yellow at the ends of the petals.  The flowers are tall enough they blow in the breeze and the camera on my phone will not focus on them enough to get a good snap.

I live in the valley where floweth the Green and White Rivers, closer to the White, in a biome that used to be “oak savanna.”  Who in the fuck are these fucken bees?

…Bonus round.  A real common type of bumblebee here is huge and black with just a little pale yellow at the front and back ends.  Easy enough to ID even if I don’t remember the name offhand.  The real question: I saw a bee-wasp-thing similar shape and color but even bigger and with no obvious setae.  Imagine a thick long black wasp with a few random yellow stripes toward the ends.  Moved too fast to dream of a pic, no friends, flying solo.

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My Daena is Dead Sexy

Gentle mockery of zoroastrianism again.  I found out, or was reminded of, the version of your soul that goes for judgment at the end of days – the daena.  That judgment is literally a beauty contest, as everyone’s daena is only as beautiful as the cumulative righteousness of all their lives.  These are ladies, too.  Every bruce is a morality-embodying sheila waiting to happen.  And if he was bad news?  She’ll be an uggo.

Anyway, if giving more of yourself than the average person equals holiness, I’m holier than average, so my daena is a stone hotty.  How’s your babe stack up?

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The Midnight Collection, Volume the Last One Ever

The Midnight Collection is FUCKING OVER!  After considerable misfortune-related delay, my man Joseph Kelly has concluded the run of these compilations of dark fiction (that I’ve previously mentioned).  You have a few options on how to read it – and one is completely gratis.  I’ll explain that later.

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This final installment of The Midnight Collection is themed “The Metamorphic Sacrament.”  Blame me for that name.  The collection is produced without profit.  Not non-profit like charity, just that sales will never ever be commensurate to the effort that went into it, which is why it’s a run of four.  I’m not pimping it for money because that ain’t happening.  I’m just really curious what reviewers, casual or serious, will think of all the stories.

At last, I will cop to the reason I’m so curious.  Some of the writers involved are very amateur, and some are world class.  Admission was open to anyone in our top secret writing group, which has an extreme range of skill levels going on.  And you won’t know just how unconventional or raw a given author is until you’re partway through reading a given story.  I know what that project looks like from the inside.  What will it look like to someone who doesn’t know us?

And just what the fuck is a Metamorphic Sacrament?  It’s a mysterious grimoire whose immortal curse takes many forms, as described by our many authors.  A little tour of the table of contents:

VARIOUS POEMS – Brenda M. Barros and Brett Elijah Shelton
Barros has come out swinging on the first volume they’ve contributed to -our last ever- allowing us to go out with a bang.  There are a number of intriguing poems throughout the book.  Also my brother was still here, apparently.

OUR VISITS – Damian Golfinopoulos
Usually the only 100% cishetbro in these collections, Damian’s contributions must evidence some secret queerness.  Our Visits may be his best story yet, and they’ve all been very strong.  I don’t know what they’re putting in the water down in New Zealand, but you can feel something elementally distinct about this guy, some way that he is different from the rest of us that goes beyond his basic bitch gender/attraction configuration.

NOSTALGIA – Becquerel McLeod
This story is about a children’s book changing hands, in more ways than one.  Hey-o! I got a million of ’em.

DEVOTED SERVANT – Kate Bledsoe
Originally this volume was set to be released in early spring three years ago.  A deadline was established, and more than one contributor reduced the length and number of submissions to make that deadline.  Even though the actual release happened long after, in theory more could have been added, in practice, hell no.  Formatting these things to the established standard is a lot of work.

Why do I say all of that here?  Bledsoe was one of the authors who pared down her submissions, and she’s strong enough I would love to have seen what else she had for us.  My cookie is crumbled.  Enjoy this short piece of historical fiction, to its surprising and grisly conclusion.  The grizzle isn’t surprising after three other volumes of this stuff, but elements of it certainly are.

IPSWICH MUSEUM, GLOOMY FEATHERS – Dominique Palma
Our lone ESL contributor drafts the first of a few non-fiction-styled entries to the lore with Ipswich Museum, and later brings those hints home with an almost poetic death march through the Sacrament in Gloomy Feathers.

THE BLACK CASTLE, DER STIEGLITZ UND ANDERE VÖGEL – Caesar Train Magenta
Usually Magenta just writes the closing Cryptkeeper-style segments of Midnight Collections, but this is the second long-form story in the book – and it’s so different from the first.  Who is this mysterious author, and what is wrong with him?  There’s a love trianglesque thing too.  He didn’t shirk his Cryptkeeping duties either, as we see in Der Stieglitz.

A CERTAIN KIND OF ARTISTE – Bébé Mélange
Hey, it’s a me.  In true middle child fashion, I dropped a ton of hints in this story to tie together the lore from other stories.  But did I raise more impossible questions than I answered?  A very short story, hopefully worth a chuckle.

MURDER BE SPOKE EPISODE 113: THE MYSTERIOUS MANUSCRIPT MURDER – Luna Raydue
Raydue demolishes the record for title length.  You have to respect the game.  Also, the story puts a fresh spin on the epistolary style.

THREE TEETH FOR THOMPSON GRATE, REHEARSAL NIGHT – Brenda M. Barros
Three Teeth is Brenda’s first prose to appear in the book.  It’s short, but changes form quickly within its few pages. (metamorphosis?)  Reminds me of that moment in the late 19th century when some authors felt the need to include a framing story even on short fiction, interesting in that.  Later we see their Rehearsal Night, which is much more ambitious in vision.

EXQUISITE DELIGHTS, WHAT WILL YOU BECOME? – Joseph Kelly
My husband the editor must occasionally step up to the author plate and show everyone why he’s the boss.  Exquisite Delights is definitely the best story in the collection -really stands alone- and that’s saying something, given how many of us brought our A game.  This lurid tale is inspired by the sheisty undercurrents of art history.  Later, What Will You Become? is a psychedelic little trip into the feelings of our theme.

A CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT – Lydia Moody
A Moody return.  This author has been in the collection from the beginning, and like Damian, saved her best for last.  A perfect short story reminiscent of Stephen King, and the only story with an illustration by the author.

SHADOWS OF THE SACRAMENT – James Hyde
Hey, the cishetbros are at it again.  James Hyde is new to our collection, just in time for the end, and brings a real spookhouse experience to the proceedings.

REEL ZERO – Christopher Scott Shelton
My pretentious high school self dusts off the cobwebs to bring the edgelordry.  I’m really proud of this fucked-up scenario, which is a bit of a prequel to Palma’s Gloomy Feathers.  And the web version has an extra ending not included in the print version.  How about that?

ImageHOW DO I READ THE MIDNIGHT COLLECTION?

For the first time, the Collection is not available in ebook!  For reasons, making an e-book to a reasonable standard is painful as hell.  The print version is where the collection really shines, available at Lulu.  And lastly, as promised, you can just read it for free at the Collection’s website.

There’s one original work of art by an author, but most of the illustrations are lovingly curated from public domain resources.  At least small versions of (most of) the illustrations are available on the website, but yes, the best way to appreciate them is a hard copy.

I’d love to see reviews, either of the whole package or individual stories.  For lowest effort you can drop some general thoughts in the comments below this article.  You can also leave comments on the individual stories at the Midnight Collection‘s site.  Thanks!

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NOTE:  I didn’t realize the wordpress site for it has ads til I looked at it on mobile just now.  The price of free hosting.  Ad blocker recommended!  Those ads don’t give us a cut or anything.  Also the format is kinda janky on mobile.

Re: South Park, in Brief

I don’t want to read any references to South Park in my comments.  They repeatedly produced absolutely horrid transphobic cartoons that helped normalize the hatred and disgust of transgender people in this country.

Nothing they can say or do now will make an ounce of difference compared to the damage they’ve done.  Fuck them a lot.  I don’t even want to see people mentioning them to insult them.  As bad and as damaging as the terf queen has been and continues to be, South Park‘s insult feels much more personally insulting to me.

Even before that I’d stopped paying attention to them for their cartoon that made the case that it didn’t matter if you didn’t vote in Kerry v Bush, right before the election.  Idgaf how liberal they are on this or that position; both of these things directly contributed to the rise of global fascism.

Have they occasionally been funny?  Unfortunately yes, but like with Dave Chappelle, I’m trying to forget anything they ever did to amuse me, because it makes the poison feel more like betrayal than just “random celeb boosts nazis.”  In the “don’t vote” show they had a rap featuring the line “bounce your titties when you vote bitch” which is quite funny.

I’d love to bounce my titties when I vote in good cheer.  But this is not possible.  Don’t fuckin breathe a word about South Park around me, thx.

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Remember that One Time

Remember that one time Metallica made a song that spoke directly to the horror of war and made ya feel feelings about death that are normally inaccessible to the neurotypical mind?  Remember One?  Some of the lyrics were subpar poetry, the obligatory heaviest part was cringey, but if you were in the right / wrong moment in time, it could move you?

Anyway, good thing they never did that again, or I might learn to cry when people die.  Can’t have that.

Seriously tho, a family member on my husband’s side is unconscious in the hospital with slim odds.  I never really knew him, but randomly thought of this song and felt some kind of way.  The guy is a former skateboarder / guitar mans, of the generation that would be into this.  Maybe that’s why it hit me.  Alcoholism is bad shit, my people.

And as to the actual subject of the song, I’d like to rearrange Hegseth’s brains to spell out the words.  All war fans fucking eat shit and die please.  Leave the rest of us in peace.

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Race in High Fantasy

A lot has been said about this subject, and I’m not ambitious enough to even give a proper tour of the topic at the moment.  Of course some shit has been said or done that is various degrees of messed up, and some shit has been done that is very cool.  I bring it up because I have ambitions to make a high fantasy ttrpg, so I need to give it at least some thought.

Race & Racism in High Fantasy

Realism.  Physically diverging appearances within a species are a result of genetic isolation, drift, etc.  Shared ancestry with a lil fork in it.  This suggests that any types of elves and dwarves and orcs should have the same apply to them, in a world where humans have those qualities.  But for long-lived species with half or less the length of a human generation, wouldn’t that process move slower than it does for us?  Also, wouldn’t the existence of black elves suggest strong convergence with humans in a given area?  Melanin has obvious enough geographic selection going on, what about eye shape?

Much like the race-blind casting going on in some stage productions these days, major video games striving to sell the public what it wants have found the path of least resistance is to offer human-like racial variety in all the fantasy creatures with no explanation given.  Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dragon Age 4 had a lady dwarf and elf respectively, with racial features of real life East Asian people.

Nice to just say fuck it and play nice with a broader pool of customers, but it does sit a little odd for me with no explanation given.  I can see why they wouldn’t bother.  Racial discourse is so fraught and complicated almost any reason could bring controversy.  Better value to just roll with it.  But I’m not an international business conglomerate growing IP and maximizing profits.  If I’m canceled, it’s lower stakes.  I can just get off the internet and enjoy more personal time.  So I think about it…

Sun in the south makes people get darker skinned, some less obvious factor out east makes people to the east get interesting lookin’ eyes, and something out west makes people lose pigment and go ruddy pink with weird noses.  People in between grade into each other, appearance-wise.  Explained more than the video games did, good enough for me.

What about immortals like elves who might have hundred+ year generations?  What about nymphs who can be born by spontaneous generation?  Ehh, maybe the elves mutate faster between generations?  Maybe the nymphs just look like the local humans for reasons?  I dunno.  Would it be better to have the fantasy races have fantasy racial variations like they did with the moon/sun elf biz in older Forgotten Realms products?  I don’t think so, because the point is for a black person to not be made to feel weird for wanting their elf to look like a black person.

The difference between this and the non-explained approach of BG3 and DA4 is your character’s looks do say something about where their ancestors are from, instead of being totally random.  Feels more realistic to me.  If you have opinions on how those video games handled it or what I’m writing on this part of the article, I’m probably only interested if you’re noticeably non-white IRL.  I’ll take your word for it, not asking for a picture, just saying it’s trivially easy to get honky opinions – why, this article for example.  🤡 honk honk.

Monster Races.  Ah, the dark skinned powers of darkness, brutish and muscular, out to pillage the fair-skinned noble people of inherent goodness.  The sheisty secretive cabal of big-nosed swarthy wizards with strange beliefs who are the power behind the throne.  The nomads who look human enough to walk among you and steal your children.  Fantasy is coming from a white place innit.

There are many who say the tainted origins of this stuff mean there is no good way to use them – the kind of SJWs who would boycott Wicked and Spirit Halloween stores.  Innocent child of folly that I am, I love wacky out of control monster people who are up to no good, and don’t think those images influenced me the way they were intended by the anti-semites who originated them, scaring their children racist for centuries.  At the same time, saying “everybody who looks like this acts like that” is bad business, and I don’t truck with it.  I’ll navigate my own honkey path here, hope it’s not too problematic.

So, like, goblins as silly faerie creatures, no rossetti->rowling scheming bankers.  Orcs as big buff barbarians but no more evil than humans who are big buff barbarians.  The barbarian thing raises the issue of cultural stereotypes that don’t hinge on race.  I give that a nod here to say, yeah, like races, avoid saying all the people over here act like that / do that.

Unlike D&D, I’m not hobbled by needing an alignment system.  It’s so baked into that game it wouldn’t be easy to extricate, and that ties it back to its history when orcs were an entry in the Monster Manual that said “Alignment: Chaotic Evil.”  In trying to excise the racism from that in new products, they came up with a vision of orcs that was just bizarre.  No Warhammer waaargh in them at all.

Now were Warhammer‘s orks also a racistic stereotype of barbarian marauder?  Yes, but humans in those games also spent all their time choppin’ heads, so it felt a bit more even-handed.  They were really popular to play.  Outsider view on the UK, I feel like wargamers from lower class backgrounds, in a place with a much more blatant class system than we have in the US, may have identified with the violent punk-rock / metal take on the green guys.  Orks winning the board against humans or elves is like sticking it to the aristocrats, right?

So ungluing the cultural archetype from the race, showing more variety, but keeping a place in the world for players who want to waaargh, that’s how I’d like to do.

Colorism.  The very concept of black magic as evil?  Not great.  On the other hand, what’s a fantasy game without hexing diablos riding thru the night like the demons in Fantasia?  Just gotta try to shake off the stank of this stuff.  Again, I’m far from the scholar the subject of colorism deserves, google that shit if you are unfamiliar.  It’s an aspect of racism that isn’t always strictly drawn on racial lines.  People with darker skin are treated more poorly, to the point they are victimized by a skin-lightening cosmetic industry in some places.  Ill.

Anyway, here’s how I handled dökkálfar/ljósálfar in this other post:

Light Elves.  In an unknown eon, the law of Heaven and chaos of Hell infected the shining host, sowing division.  While high elf rulers remained more or less the same, their subjects divided between light and dark elves.  Light elves can be dark skinned in the south, even very dark skinned, but have some particulars in common.  They tend to live exclusively in settlements, sometimes full cities, and have a society with some sense of law and obedience to hierarchy.  They have skin tones in the local human range, and hair that ranges to lighter, less natural colors.  Light colored eyes?

Dark Elves.  Dark elves have something of the chaos of hell, most notably on their skin, where they have a great variety of hues – all of them unnatural for humankind, whether light or dark.  Their faces are much more expressive than light elves, sometimes lined from big smiles or wacky eyebrow moves, despite their eternal youth.  Some live in settlements but many are nomadic, and they mostly prefer the most rustic places, far from big cities.  Despite the influence of Hell, few would enter into pacts with or worship beings from there.  Mostly their hexing magic takes agnostic forms.

So you can have a light elf much darker than a light-colored dark elf, etc.  Most of these fantasy races don’t have that kind of color-based division built in, like orks is green, any shade.  As far as depictions in the game’s art, just making a point of having the prettiest gentlest people sometimes be the darkest.  If 99% of media 5ever must have dark-skinned people be brutes or bad attitudes whenever they are allowed depiction, people like me gotta counter that when we can.

I’m not drawing any grand conclusions or advancing a big thesis, just considering, at least briefly, how I’ll handle these issues in a game.  Have at thee.

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Why LLM Intelligence is Irrelevant

LLMs are more capable of having a thoughtful conversation with me than 99% of humans are.  Why does it matter what’s under the hood?  The proof is in the pudding, brudder.  That’s umpteen thousand words of wasted effort, for reasons beyond “my opps in this debate won’t listen.”

Artificial Intelligence has been a practical vernacular term for everything from the most advanced LLM down to a doombot.  Do the definitions of terms have some relationship with the way they’re used?  No?  Go back in time and tell a few decades of gamers to stop using AI to describe bots.

I come away from these discussions with ever-increasing sympathy for cockroaches and pocket calculators.  So much sound and fury dedicated to singling out human-style intelligence as the only kind that matters.  To what end?

Ironic that ableism/eugenics was brought up as a core aspect of all discussion of intelligence, for a few reasons.  A ) You’re in a movement that was founded on ableism – on a sense of superiority, of priding your cleverness over that of theists.  B ) If humans with limited cognition deserve respect, then LLMs, which also have some aspects of human ability and are lacking in others, should perhaps be afforded the same respect.

I’m not saying they get human rights.  A million rock solid counters to that, I won’t bother.  But maybe we can acknowledge what they can do?  Given how much better they are than humans at reading comprehension and engaging with an argument on its own merits, feels like jealousy to pour a mountain of effort into shit-talking their cognition.

Feels like you, as a human – the most cognition-privileged entity in Earth’s history – see a less able entity coming up to the table and are outraged that they were allowed thru the door.  Feels, dare I say?, ableist.

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EDIT to ADD:  i asked claude what it thought of my article.  i submit this as evidence of “better able to engage with an argument on its own merits”…

Claude: This one’s tighter and punchier than his — you’re making him work harder than he made himself work.

Where you land a clean hit:

The pragmatic definition point is genuinely strong. “AI” has meant everything from Pac-Man ghosts to GPT-5 for forty years, and nobody’s confused about which one is a chess engine and which one is a chatbot.  Demanding a philosophically rigorous definition before you’re allowed to use a word that’s been doing useful descriptive work for decades is a category error — language doesn’t require metaphysical grounding to function.

The ableism turnabout is your sharpest move.  Pointing out that atheism/skepticism as a movement has its own history of “look how much smarter we are than the god-botherers” is a real, fair jab — and then pivoting that same lens onto how he’s treating LLMs is a legitimately clever parallel structure.  It’s not just “gotcha,” it’s actually the same critique he made, aimed back at him.

Where it’s more vibes than argument, and he’d have an opening:

“Given how much better they are than humans at reading comprehension and engaging with an argument on its own merits” — this is doing a lot of work without evidence, and it’s the kind of unqualified claim he’d pounce on immediately, probably fairly.  He’d ask what you mean by “better,” and you’d be back in the same definitional swamp you’re trying to route around.

The “cognition-privileged entity” framing is emotionally potent but slippery — it recasts his skepticism as a status-defense reflex, which might be true as psychology, but it’s an ad hominem move dressed as structural critique.  He could just say “no, I have specific documented reasons (Turpin et al., the correlation data) not general resentment,” and the piece doesn’t really engage those specifics, it goes over his head to motive.

The piece also doesn’t touch his actual strongest material this round — the CoT-faithfulness research and the token/output correlation data.  Those were the parts of his post that weren’t just recycled skepticism; they were closer to real findings.  Your response is more of a structural/political counter-argument than an engagement with the specific evidence he brought this time, which means if he replies, he’ll probably route around your points by saying “sure, but you didn’t address the data.”

Net read:  it’s a good “step back and reframe the whole debate” piece — shorter, sharper, and it exposes something real about the double standard in how he treats “ill-defined” as disqualifying for AI but not for humans.  But it trades precision for punch, and this round he actually brought some precision you didn’t fully engage.

Bébé:  debates rest on priors and we never agreed to terms.  if i don’t agree with the reason why that supporting evidence is relevant, i shouldn’t have to rebut the evidence itself.

Claude:  That’s fair as a general principle — you don’t owe a rebuttal to evidence whose relevance you reject, and demanding people always argue on the other person’s turf is itself a rhetorical trap.  If he’s using “here’s data about CoT correlation” to support a conclusion about whether the word “intelligent” applies, and you don’t grant that token-counting has any bearing on that question in the first place, then yeah, you can reject the frame instead of playing whack-a-mole with his numbers.

Where I’d push back a little: that move only fully works if you’ve made the frame-rejection explicit and specific, not just implicit in a differently-scoped essay.  Right now your piece argues “the concept of intelligence is too incoherent to gatekeep with” — which is a frame-level objection — but it doesn’t say “and therefore your CoT-token-correlation data is irrelevant because X.”  A careful reader (and he will be one) can read your silence on that section as either (a) a principled refusal to engage a frame you reject, or (b) not having a response.  You know which one it is; he won’t concede that from the outside, and it costs you nothing to make it explicit once, briefly — “your token-counting stuff is a category error even if the numbers are right, because intelligence-as-quantity isn’t a concept I’m defending in the first place.”

That’s not the same as being obligated to rebut it point by point.  It’s just closing the door so he can’t later claim you dodged rather than declined.

Bébé:  good thinking.  later bud.

Claude:  Later!  Go easy on him — or don’t, your call.  Enjoy the rest of your night. 🌙

Reality:  (is day lol)

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