TechTakes

This is gonna be a little off the rails but bear with me:

I recently watched a youtube video that talked about how the contemporary jazz musician Laufey* and her audience run the risk of erasing the history and culture of jazz because they don’t take the time to engage with it. Instead, they are content with replacing it with an idealised parody/pastiche of that culture. Like how people wear mexican costumes and drink on cinco de mayo, or irish costumes on st pats day, or german costumes for oktoberfest, or 1920’s rich white people costumes for a gatsby party etc.

I’ve also been thinking about how the immortality fetish faction of treacles want to do brain uploading so they can live in a simulation forever. I think anyone would agree that such an existence is essentially the same as plopping on a VR headset and watching AI-generated content.

Putting these two ideas together, I’ve essentially reformulated what we already know about treacles et al, which is that they don’t want to acknowledge actual reality. Their model of the world is a pastiche of lazy stereotypes and reinforced by cherry picked statistics. They want to live in a space that confirms all their biases, basically an echo chamber in the cloud.

So yeah, when confronted with an observation about how generative AI produces biased results, we see an expression of the above. The AI produced parody is the reality they want to live in, so there’s no issue.

*I love Laufey. She’s great. You should give her a listen.