The AI apocalypse is already here

I’m not alone in seeing how the internet has been degenerating over the years. The first poison was capitalism: once money became the focus of content, a content that was rewarded for volume rather than quality, the flood of noise started to rise. Then it was the “algorithm”, initially a good idea to manage the flow of information that was quickly corrupted to game the rules. SEO became a career where people engineered that flow to their benefit. And Google smiled on it all, because they could profit as well.

The latest evil is AI, which is nothing but a tool to generate profitable noise with which to flood the internet, an internet that is already choking on garbage. Now AI is beginning to eat itself.

Generative AI models are trained by using massive amounts of text scraped from the internet, meaning that the consumer adoption of generative AI has brought a degree of radioactivity to its own dataset. As more internet content is created, either partially or entirely through generative AI, the models themselves will find themselves increasingly inbred, training themselves on content written by their own models which are, on some level, permanently locked in 2023, before the advent of a tool that is specifically intended to replace content created by human beings.

This is a phenomenon that Jathan Sadowski calls “Habsburg AI,” where “a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.” In reality, a Habsburg AI will be one that is increasingly more generic and empty, normalized into a slop of anodyne business-speak as its models are trained on increasingly-identical content.

After all, the whole point of AI is to create slop that will be consumed because it looks sorta like the slop that people already consumed. So make more of it! We’re in competition with the machines that are making slop, so we can outcompete them by just making more of it. It’s what biology would look like if there were no natural selection, and if energetic costs were nearly zero — we’d be swimming in a soup of goo. As Amazon has discovered.

Amazon’s Kindle eBook platform has been flooded with AI-generated content that briefly dominated bestseller lists, forcing Amazon to limit authors to publishing three books a day. This hasn’t stopped spammers from publishing awkward rewrites and summaries of other people’s books, and because Amazon’s policies don’t outright ban AI-generated content, ChatGPT has become an inoperable cancer on the body of the publishing industry.

That’s a joke. Limiting authors to three books a day? How about limiting it to one book a month, which is more in line with the human capacity to write? You know that anyone churning out multiple books per day is not investing any thought into them, or doing any real research, or even aspiring to quality. Amazon doesn’t care, they exist only to skim off a few pennies of profit off each submission, so sure, they’ll take every bit of hackwork you can throw at them. Take a look at the Kindle search page sometime — it’s nothing but every publisher’s slush pile amplified ten thousand fold.

The Wall Street Journal reported last year that magazines are now inundated with AI-generated pitches for articles, and renowned sci-fi publisher Clarkesworld was forced to close submissions after receiving an overwhelming amount of AI-generated stories. Help A Reporter Out used to be a way for journalists to find potential sources and quotes, except requests are now met with a deluge of AI-generated spam.

These stories are, of course, all manifestations of a singular problem: that generative artificial intelligence is poison for an internet dependent on algorithms.

The only algorithm I want anymore is “Did PZ Myers subscribe to this creator? Then show the latest from them.” I don’t want “X is vaguely similar to Z that PZ Myers subscribed to” and I sure as hell don’t want “Y paid money to be fed to everyone who liked Z”, but that is what we do get.

One hope is that all the AI-based companies will eventually start cannibalizing each other. That may have already begun: two AI image companies, Midjourney and Stability AI, are fighting because Stability skulked into the Midjourney database to snatch up as much of their data as they could.

Here’s a prompt for you: two puking dogs eating each other’s sick and vomiting it back up again, over and over.

Yet another example of our disappointing winter

You may have heard of the Upper Midwestern tradition in some towns* of rolling an old car out onto the surface of a frozen lake, and then taking bets on the date that it breaks through the ice in the spring. If nothing else, you might have encountered the practice in the pages of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods**.

Sadly, we have had such a tepidly warm winter that the practice was discontinued this year. No klunkers this pathetic winter! I don’t know if there’s even been much ice fishing this year — Lake Minnewaska, which usually has a thriving metropolis on its surface every winter, has been strangely barren. Maybe the fish have been enjoying the reprieve?

*Not every town can do this. The lakes in the immediate neighborhood of Morris are rather shallow — we live in the prairie pothole region, where mostly what we’ve got are shallow wetlands. If we did this, the lakes would be dotted with car roofs rising above the water.

**If you’ve read the book, you’d know it’s for the best, since we also don’t have murdered girls in the trunks of the klunkers.

The face has gotten smoother, but it’s the same rot underneath

The Dixiecrat governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, said this in 1962, back when I was an innocent 5 year old who thought all people were good and kind.

There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide.

I first learned about this yesterday, in this video about segregation in sports. It would be so nice to roll back in time to my blissful ignorance as a child.

I had no idea we white people were so frail. Of course, he was laboring under the fallacious belief that miscegenation was evil and that the one-drop rule was valid. There’s a curious racist game they play, where the children of a white person and a black person are 100% black, rather than 50% white, and under those counterfactual rules, white people will rapidly go extinct if mixed race marriages are permitted. It’s a weird mindset that calls having children “genocide”.

But this was in 1962! Surely we have grown past this nonsense here in the 21st century. No, we haven’t. This belief is the major guiding principle of the Republican party. Nowadays they tend to avoid the blatant stuff; instead, they whisper about the “great replacement theory”, which is built on the same fundamental ignorance about biology and meiosis and inherited traits, and is therefore fallacious and doesn’t deserve the dignity of being called a “theory”.

Or they draft some brain-washed Christian hick to use her fundie baby voice to whitewash their hatred of immigrants with Jesus and patriotism. It’s all the same thing. America hasn’t changed its core since the civil rights movement made a valiant effort to call these people to account — this is still a deeply racist country.

The infection has been festering for decades, and is ready to erupt again under the banner of Donald Trump. In the name of decency and basic human dignity, we have to sweep every vestige of the Republican party out of power.

It’s officially the first day of spring break!

And that means I have to go into work — a bit later than usual, but that’s my only benefit. I have to go in and feed the animals, autoclave a bunch of fly bottles, and also, because we had a safety audit last week, I have to rearrange some boxes cluttering up the place to provide better access to the fire extinguisher and first aid kit. Today’s the day for doing mundane stuff that I put off because my teaching obligations come first.

The rest of this “vacation” week I plan to use getting one step ahead of lecture prep. It’s not so much a vacation as it is a temporary reprieve.

The photo is not an accurate representation of what spring break looks like in Minnesota. We have no snow, but we do have brisk temperatures and wind. I’ll leave my bikini at home when I walk over to the lab.

The era of beautiful airplanes

When I was a young kiddo, up through high school, I had two passions: biology and airplanes. You can guess which one won out, but I still sometimes dream of flying. In those days, I’d bicycle out to one of the local airports — Boeing towns had no shortage of them — and just hang out at the chain link fence by the end of the runway, or bike around the hangars. It was a treat to take a long bike trip to the Museum of Flight, which at the time was a big hangar where people were reconstructing a biplane, but has since expanded into a magnificent complex with all kinds of planes.

I am suddenly reminiscing about this because YouTube randomly served up a video about one of my favorite old-timey airplanes, the P-26 Peashooter.

That great big radial engine, that lovely post-war color scheme, and it’s wearing pants! Before retractable landing gear became a must-have for any high performance plane, they were outfitted with aerodynamic coverings, which I find irresistibly charming. Planes from the 1930s hit a sweet spot for me, so this random video in which nothing really happens was something I had to watch. It’s an odd trigger that reminds me of being 15 years old again.

So why did I give up my fascination with planes? One factor was that I only learned in high school that I was extremely near-sighted, and needed glasses — that felt like discovering that I was broken, and nature was telling me that certain pathways were closed to me. I was also getting deeper and deeper into that scholarly stuff, reading constantly, which probably contributed to my optical failures. I still sometimes think it would be awesome to take flying lessons, except a) no time, b) no money, and c) age has taught me that there are many things that look easy, but actually require a great deal of skill and discipline to do well. Flying is one of those things that is unforgiving of dilettantes.

But still, those aircraft from the Amelia Earhart era give me a little tingle.

You couldn’t pay me to ride in a Tesla

Let alone buy one. They’re over-engineered and clumsily designed, as we can see in the example of this stupid, poinless death.

Angela Chao, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s billionaire sister-in-law, spent her last minutes alive frantically calling her friends for help as her Tesla slowly sank in a pond on a remote Texas ranch, according to a report.

Chao, the billionaire former CEO of dry bulk shipping giant Foremost Group, tragically died at the age of 50 on Feb. 10 after accidentally backing her car into the pond while making a three-point turn.

When the car lost power, she couldn’t get out while the car filled with water.

The windows are made of laminated glass, which sounds like a plus, but they’re so hard they aren’t easily broken. The doors are opened electronically, with a clever little button. There is a manual switch for the front doors, but they’re not obvious and you need to have read the manual to know about them. The manual switches for the back doors are buried in a very nonintuitive place, and further, owners are warned that using them too much can damage the finish.

Apparently, changing gears is done with an LED touch screen. Why? Multiple generations of Americans have been trained on simple levers and buttons that are familiar and reliable. There is a virtue to simplicity and obvious controls.

Manual controls are probably cheaper, too, but not as flashy.

The end of UAPs? Not likely.

The Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) released a report that will finally end all that UFO/UAP nonsense. Just kidding — nothing will end the human capacity for self-delusion. But it’s a start.

AARO found no evidence that any USG investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology. All investigative efforts, at all levels of classification, concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification. Although not the focus of this report, it is worthwhile to note that all official foreign UAP investigatory efforts to date have reached the same general conclusions as USG investigations.

  • Although many UAP reports remain unsolved or unidentified, AARO assesses that if more and better quality data were available, most of these cases also could be identified and resolved as ordinary objects or phenomena. Sensors and visual observations are imperfect; the vast majority of cases lack actionable data or the data available is limited or of poor quality.
  • Resources and staffing for these programs largely have been irregular and sporadic, challenging investigatory efforts and hindering effective knowledge transfer.
  • The vast majority of reports almost certainly are the result of misidentification and a direct consequence of the lack of domain awareness; there is a direct correlation between the amount and quality of available information on a case with the ability to conclusively resolve it.

I thought this was an amusing comment on the quality of the evidence.

Another program brought to AARO’s attention, Kona Blue, was alleged to be a Homeland Security Department effort “to cover up the retrieval and exploitation of ‘nonhuman biologics,’” the report found. In other words, alien bodies.

The origins of those suspicions, investigators found, traced back to some of those earlier Pentagon researchers, backed by Reid, who had strayed into studying UAPs.

When the Defense Intelligence Agency canceled that effort in 2012 “due to lack of merit,” its supporters proposed that Homeland Security fund a new version to investigate paranormal research, including “human consciousness anomalies,” the report found. The program, which they proposed calling Kona Blue, also would reverse-engineer “off-world spacecraft that they hoped to acquire.” The Kona Blue backers assumed that biological evidence of aliens was already in the government’s possession, the report found.

They proposed to study aliens and spacecraft that “they hoped to acquire”. Cool. What are the chances of my getting funding for my NSF proposal to study spiders from Mars that I “hope to aquire”? I’m sure, though, that we’ll be hearing about the unauthorized, unsupported, imaginary Kona Blue project for years to come. The only thing you need to do to captivate the Ancient Aliens crowd is to invent a catchy, enigmatic name.

In related news, you may recall that Avi Loeb claimed to have scraped tiny molten balls from an exploded UFO in the ocean off New Guinea. He launched his expedition years after the fireball was observed, and claimed he had mapped the location from real scientific data, seismographic recordings that caught a little jiggle at the precise time of the supposed crash.

Except it wasn’t. He was chasing a trivial seismic glitch.

In January 2014, a meteor scorched its way through the atmosphere, a brilliant ball of fire over the Pacific Ocean.

Before it plunged into the sea, strange sound waves were picked up by a seismometer in nearby Papua New Guinea.

Could it have been an alien signal? Perhaps a desperate SOS?

Sadly for UFO fans, it was not. The sound waves were actually from a truck, distinctly Earthly in origin, trundling along a nearby road.

‘The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,’ said Dr Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University who led the research.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter. It never does. I’m going to see Loeb’s grinning, gnomish face popping up on web pages for the rest of my life, aren’t I? It’s of no importance that he has zero evidence, his thesis is ridiculous, but he wields that fading authority of Harvard, so every kook in the world will lap up his dribblings.

In my prime!

Today’s my birthday! Guess how old I am.


Old ’67 what a time it was
What a time of innocence, what a time we’ve lost
Raise a glass and have a laugh, have a laugh or two
Here’s to old ’67 and an older me and you

It was very nice of Elton to write that song just for me.

It is also the first day of spring break, so I should probably do something fun, like take a nap.

We’re also having a grand get-together of the gang at FtB, throwing a podcast to celebrate.

Whoa, that’s the worst party theme ever. I think maybe it’s not going to be about me at all. At least, I hope not.