Yeah it looks more like photocollage creatively photoshopped. Perspective is very weird in picture 3 too, very cubist.
4,270 karma · joined May 30, 2020
Seems like an obvious way out of this conundrum is reclassifying these so-called mcmansions as postmodern. Description instead of prescription.
The deeper point is that pro-advertising people always frame it like advertising is something people want and that benefits them, but this is just a fig-leaf for the underlying ideology that businesses have the fundamental right to buy peoples' attention for money. The directories idea is mostly just a way to call this bluff, essentially saying "if people wanted to be advertised to they'd go out of their way to get it". Then the underlying ideology comes out.
I don't know about this. The idea that it should be centrally reviewed and managed is somewhat of a strawman as far as I'm concerned. Once you outlaw third-party advertising you would naturally expect such directories to spring up (much like specialized business publications that are actually full of high-value ads that genuinely serve a purpose for people in the business) but they could operate just like normal businesses with in the capitalist system and would have to compete for quality and customers.
(anyway many of the coca cola ads you linked have some theme of togetherness and community, which can be said to prey on people's insecurities around being lonely. Drink this sugar+caffeine solution and you'll be less lonely. Yes you start to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic when analyzing ads like that but that is how it works.)
All these kinds of questions you're asking come from a specific way of looking at things that is just not how most normal people look at the world. I'm not saying this out of misanthropy or some kind of wake-up-sheeple attitude, I'm also not saying you're wrong, but when you get knee-deep into critiqueing every aspect of how the world works at some point your worldview divorces from the worldview of most people to the point that "how do they all sleep at night" becomes kind of a moot question.
>Tsujigiri (辻斬り or 辻斬, literally "crossroads killing") is a Japanese term for a practice when a samurai, after receiving a new katana or developing a new fighting style or weapon, tests its effectiveness by attacking a human opponent, usually a random defenseless passer-by, in many cases during night time.
I know it's tragic but this sounds so absurd it just made me laugh. They were on some good shit.
(And you still seem to be implicitly accepting that the basic argument is valid, which would be wrong.)
Yes there is, the systems reply is the obvious and correct answer. Philosophers that disagree are simply wrong. In the end what matters is what's true or false, not how many philosophers accept something. You can check for yourself by reading the argument, following its reasoning, and seeing that it is false; and reading the systems reply, following its reasoning, and seeing that it's true (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#SystRepl). The case is similar to those mathematical or logical proofs for the existence of god, where obviously fallacious reasoning gets a pass because it confirms deeply held beliefs.
edit: by the way as to your assertion that the argument is controversial and there is no consensus, I just found something funny on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#History):
>Most of the discussion consists of attempts to refute it. "The overwhelming majority", notes Behavioral and Brain Sciences editor Stevan Harnad,[f] "still think that the Chinese Room Argument is dead wrong".[13] The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to comment that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as "the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room Argument to be false".[14]
Why does that matter for whether or not it is conscious? Many things I "know" I also know because someone told me.
>It does not have a process for understanding itself in its environment.
It has a process for understanding, namely outputting tokens by evaluating the neural network iteratively. It can apply this understanding to its environment insofar as the context window and weights include a model of this environment.
>It does not have any sensing organ that would allow it to detect conditions and come to a conclusion that it must be in such an environment.
It does have a sensing organ, namely the input into the context window. Possibly it even has closed-loop sensors by doing tool calls. The conclusion could be incorrect or inaccurate but that doesn't in itself prove there is no consciousness (Plato's cave etc..).
>It doesn't even "know" when it's done something if you don't tell it about what it just did.
It does know, it's in the context window.
>It doesn't have an awareness of the tool calls it can perform; again it has to be told and even then it gets it wrong sometimes.
Same as above, as long as it's in the context window it could have "awareness" of having done it.
>And it can't actually execute any of those tools.
It can execute tools by outputting certain tokens in the right environment.
>It still relies on you to pattern recognize that its output should be a "tool call" and then perform the execution yourself.
Tool calls are not dependent on the human chat user executing them, right? They can happen automatically through the surrounding software.
>The "model" of its environment that an LLM has is 100% a construct of what a human told it and there isn't any way for it to differentiate between that which is real and that which is fantasy.
Again why would the fact that a human told it mean it can't result in consciousness? Why would lack of ability to differentiate between real and fantasy mean it can't be conscious? On my view, it would then be conscious of the fantasy.
>And oh by the way you cannot murder a copyable individual anyway.
I think for many people the concern is not so much about violating the desire to live that a conscious software entity might (or might not!) have, but about the subjective experience of suffering it might undergo.
For example here the word "abuse" technically refers to the making and spreading of these images and attendant bullying, but obviously has connotations of actual sexual abuse:
>Despite all this, Radnor’s administration failed students in the days and weeks after it learned about the abuse,
This is maybe subtle but later the article gets more explicit about it:
>this technology [...] bears little difference from the non-consensual intimate imagery that’s plagued young girls and teenagers since the invention of the camera.
(i.e. a straightforward equation of images of nudity that did not happen, and images produced by actually pointing a camera at someone who is physically present with their nude body)
>Because the images aren’t “real,” authorities grapple with how to handle them.
Putting "real" in scare-quotes, very nice.
Dorfman is also quoted doing some nice sleight of hand, going in one sentence from "It was about the creation of the videos" to "and then share them with others as if the girls were something to be passed around." - i.e. equating the making of videos depicting unreal events with something that almost sounds like gang rape.
Anyway enough examples, article is full of them. I'm not saying there's no problem here, just that these people seem to have some kind of ideology of the sanctity of the image, i.e. a realistic image always depicts real events, and should always be interpreted as if it does. If it does not, clearly that's a problem to be corrected by reinforcing the connection between images and reality by making it impossible to produce realistic images of non-real things. It strikes me as exactly the wrong way to go about it, that can only make the bullying and harrassment (the actual problem which should be solved on the social level) worse by making its ammunition stronger.
(Slight aside but I do think the closing quote by Woelfel makes a good point)
(And by the way the implicit comparison here between an image of stalin and an image of a teenage girl is more apt than most would care to admit given the ideological function fulfilled by sexualized images of young women in contemporary American society)