FaceDeer

The Darvaza gas crater is a hole in Turkmenistan that’s leaking natural gas and is on fire. I’m quite sure they don’t have a “poet laureate”, it’s literally just a hole in the ground.

But even if it was some metropolis, yeah, he’d be just some guy.

You can get whatever result you want if you’re able to define what “better” means.

Why publish books of it, then?

The whole point of poetry is that it’s an original expression of another human.

Who are you to decide what the “point” of poetry is?

Maybe the point of poetry is to make the reader feel something. If AI-generated poetry can do that just as well as human-generated poetry, then it’s just as good when judged in that manner.

I do get the sense sometimes that the more extreme anti-AI screeds I’ve come across have the feel of narcissistic rage about them. The recognition of AI art threatens things that we’ve told ourselves are “special” about us.

Indeed, there are whole categories of art such as “found art” or the abstract stuff that involves throwing splats of paint at things that can’t really convey the intent of the artist because the artist wasn’t involved in specifying how it looked in the first place. The artist is more like the “first viewer” of those particular art pieces, they do or find a thing and then decide “that means something” after the fact.

It’s entirely possible to do that with something AI generated. Algorithmic art goes way back. Lots of people find graphs of the Mandelbrot Set to be beautiful.

According to the AI art detector I ran that cave art through there’s a 98% chance that it was AI generated, so we can’t trust it’s accuracy.

Hey now, America just had an election to decide whether vaccines work and they decided that they don’t. Respect democracy!

Now watch everyone jumping to the support of AI.

Why does it matter if the Russian people know that? It’s not like they can will more tanks into existence, or just imagine foreign trade and get tangible goods as a result.

Russia’s actual real physical power has been broken by this war. Their demographic future is doomed. Their economy is in ruins. It doesn’t matter if the Russian people are happy with that, they can paint big “Z” marks on their wretched hovels in patriotic ecstasy and it won’t have any actual impact on anything.

It’d be ideal if Ukraine could have an outright victory and end the war fast, but failing that all that’s necessary is for Ukraine to survive and it can wait out Russia’s collapse.

Putin didn’t start this war because he specifically hated Ukraine and wanted it destroyed, even at the cost of Russia’s existence. He started it because he wanted to make Russia great again. In that regard the war is an utter failure.

And self-interested benefits aside, it’s just the right thing to do. If a thing is capable of suffering then I want to minimize that.

Of the war maybe, but Russia’s future economy and demography are very much going to have long term impacts from these losses.

I think people are being too pessimistic about Trump in this context. Trump is terrible, sure, but one of the things that makes him terrible is total self-interest. I don’t think he’s as reliable a puppet of Putin as commonly thought.

I’m thinking perhaps Putin is worried Trump might decide to flip the script and act the tough guy against him this time, since Putin is significantly weaker now than in his previous term. Getting Kursk back would be absolutely vital if it looks like Trump is going to try to freeze the conflict or force negotiations.

The GOP as a whole is not reliably pro-Putin either, there are some hawks in there that would love to finish Putin off.

In general, this is an uncertain time approaching.

Even though AI is IMO not anywhere near human-level intelligence yet, I’ve tried to already get into the habit of thinking to myself “am I being cruel to this AI?” When I set up scripts or tasks or whatnot. So far the answer has always been a resounding “no” but it’s a good habit to get into because someday the answer might be “well, maybe.”

Considering I take the effort to make sure I’m not being excessively cruel when it comes to killing insects it seems like the least I should be doing.

Yeah, I like a light-hearted approach to life but that one particular “joke” should be shot on sight. I’m convinced it plays an actual role in why we haven’t seen much serious discussion of sending a probe there.

That’s not how synthetic data generation generally works. It uses AI to process data sources, generating well-formed training data based on existing data that’s not so useful directly. Not to generate it entirely from its own imagination.

The comments assuming otherwise are ironic because it’s misinformation that people keep telling each other.

Kind of, but frankly I think that’s a self-defeating hair to split.

What ultimately matters in the end is simply “is more carbon going into the atmosphere, or less?” It doesn’t matter where the carbon is coming from, all that matters is that less carbon ends up in the atmosphere.

If I have a plastic object and I send it for recycling or whatever, some of that carbon ends up in the atmosphere. Possibly all of it if it ends up being incinerated, since a lot of plastic “recycling” is not really recycling as you’d expect. If I put it in the landfill, on the other hand, the carbon is locked away effectively indefinitely.

It doesn’t matter where that plastic object came from, I’m just faced with a choice of what to do with it.

It’s funny, for years I’ve been downvoted or thought to be joking when I point out that putting non-biodegradable plastic into landfills is carbon sequestration. I seriously think it’s a good idea, though. If people are concerned about carbon in the atmosphere then that’s a good way to get it out for the long term.

The “how will we know if it’s real” question has the same answer as it always has. Check if the source is reputable and find multiple reputable sources to see if they agree.

“Is there a photo of the thing” has never been a particularly great way of judging whether something is accurately described in the news. This is just people finding out something they should have already known.

If the concern is over the verifiability of the photos themselves, there are technical solutions that can be used for that problem.