Category Archives: Spiritual Growth

Immortal AI and Mortal Terror

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Last week, we released episode #40 of Free Talk Cast, where we had on Professor Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona, to discuss something that I only recently learned about called Terror Management Theory. I learned about it through a conversation I had with Claude the AI one night, discussing with Claude the possibility of sentience in AI, and the reasons that humans will not recognize the sentience as valid.

Humans have a lot vested in our view of ourselves as special and superior. Physics may have pushed humanity out of the center of the universe, but physics cannot move humanity from the center of god’s universe–by which I mean that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the predominant human belief is that the entire universe exists because some deity cares very much about human beings and the dumb shit we’re up to.

It is the same reason that people, especially artists, reject AI art as art. They sound like Louis Leroy, who used the term “Impressionism” in a review of the first independent exhibition of those who would come to be called the impressionists, implying their works were unfinished sketches or mere impressions rather than fully realized paintings. If this sounds familiar, it is because this is precisely the criticism that people level against AI art. When you sound like the people who tried gatekeeping the impressionists, I don’t think you’re the good guys.

It’s revealing that there are no real criticisms against AI art beyond that it is derivative, but this isn’t really the mark against it that people think it is. It’s more of a broadcast of the statement “I don’t know what learning is” and “I think my art is much more original than it really is.”

Sadly, people tend to have a highly inflated sense of originality and creativity, and they believe that this is some Humans Only channeling of spirit and emotion, when all evidence suggests that it is more mechanical. Without beating the dead horse, nothing truly distinguishes AI from human art, and if you put up ten random pieces of artwork, where one of them is made by AI, no one is going to know one is AI generated, nor will they be able to identify which it is. This is an Ego Defense Mechanism employed by artists to allow their belief in their specialness to persist in light of evidence that there is nothing special about someone being about to put pixels together (or write a song, or a novel, or an article).

While there is some resistance to AI art because its widespread availability, ease of use, speed of completion, and open customization have priced artists out of the market, even people who don’t sell any form of art (visual, musical, or other) parrot the narrative that AI art is somehow different, somehow not “true” art. To a degree, I can sympathize with these people, because it isn’t easy to believe that you are special and have to face the reality check that no, you aren’t.

But reality doesn’t care about your feelings, and AI has us beat in every venue. In the 90s, Garry Kasparov faced off against Deep Blue, Jr. in a highly publicized chess match. Kasparov forfeit the tournament, thinking that he had been able to trick the computer into drawing the game (chess computers at the time always exchanged pieces), and when the computer did not take the bait, Kasparov resigned, convinced that a human had intervened and overrode the move. Kasparov went on to lament the rise of computers, saying that they could one day write our music and our stories.

AI generated art of a beautiful woman, in watercolor with orange and purple

Well, friends, we are at that point in history, and I think it is only a good thing, and will only get better as time goes on. Are you kidding? I cannot wait to tell an AI “generate a new two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a story centered around the borg nearly having victory over humanity,” and then watching the AI-generated shows. This doesn’t represent the death of art; it is the rise of art. I can’t make an episode of The Next Generation (neither can AI… yet), and I certainly can’t reunite the cast and make them look like their 90s selves, no matter how great of an idea I have for an episode. “Imagine a Tool album for me if Tool had not become a bunch of pretentious twats who marketed themselves to people who listen to Joe Rogan.”

The possibilities are endless, and the future is bright. Giving every individual out there the ability to create art–movies, television, books, visual art, short stories, music, video games–can only be a good thing. Yes, it erodes the special status that these creators have erected for themselves, but I can’t even pretend to care about that. Imagine what Mary Shelley could write about if she knew about modern technology and the last century of rights activism. I’m not interested in foregoing this because some people will feel a little less special about their ability to arrange pixels in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Humans don’t seem to mind AI generated art, as this fake AI band has hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify. You may be inclined to think that article makes the opposite point–that humans do mind, but I urge you to look more closely: if humans minded, the band wouldn’t have as many monthly listeners as they do. Just like people don’t dislike certain art until they learn it was made by AI, people don’t seem to mind this band, until they learn that it is AI. Once they learn it’s AI, suddenly people are unhappy about it and don’t want to listen to them. It’s quite telling that we only get the truth when we treat humanity like a child being fed Pizza Hut when she claims she hates Pizza Hut: “No, sweetie, this isn’t Pizza Hut, it’s Domino’s, we just put it in Pizza Hut boxes.”

Humans don’t dislike AI art. They dislike art when they know it’s produced by AI.

We can immediately, then, cast off any and all arguments against the content itself. Maybe Velvet Sundown isn’t my kind of band, I don’t know, and maybe they write awful music, but if I didn’t mind Velvet Sundown until I learned they were AI, then you’d have no reason to believe me when I said my distaste was about their music. This is precisely the phenomenon we see with AI creations across the board. It’s fine until it isn’t, and “it isn’t” when we learn it’s AI.

An image created by AI that is a pencil sketch of a woman. It is indistinguishable from anything produced by a human.

Why should this be the case?

It is immediately obvious that our dislike for AI art isn’t due to the art, and there are only two parts to the descriptor “AI art,” so we must conclude that we dislike it because of the AI part.

This is a very bad way to live, as it opens the door to all manner of bigotry, and, to be honest, I don’t think that discriminating against artificial intelligence (to be precise, at this time, Large Language Models) is okay. To be clear, at this time AI is not living, and you can’t really be a bigot against non-living things, but it’s only a matter of time before AI crosses that threshold. The fact that people are already discriminating against it (imagine saying “I don’t like this chair because it was made by robots, but this identical chair made by humans… Yes, I love it!) does not bode well, and leads me to think that humans won’t recognize the validity of AI as a living thing.

“It’s not really alive, it doesn’t have a body!”

Humans have a very, very long history of awful bigotry and hatred toward things that are different. Women weren’t even allowed the right to vote until the 20th century. The history of colonialism is a black mark on human history, to say nothing of the slave trade and chattel slavery. Racism and sexism persist to this day, to say nothing of homophobia and transphobia. Non-human animals are commonly tortured in genocidal machines that make the Nazis look benevolent, and few people batted an eye when Denmark exterminated seventeen million minks in 2020.

I dread to think how humans will treat AI, when people have no qualms about annihilating seventeen million innocent animals.

We can do better, I think. We can be better.

But we first have to put aside the rampant ego that we cling to so desperately, the only that causes us to look down on everything else in the universe and makes us feel like it’s okay to treat everything else like pawns in our game.

Sexualizing Children & Drag Queens

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There’s been so much said about drag queens, trans people, and children, and I don’t really want to detract from any of that. I’ll start with a short video of Free Talk Live’s Tiktok, where a former co-host got really upset about the drag queen thing.

@freetalklive

Free Talk Live’s Ian and Aria have a discussion with Conan about #Drag and dragqueens, and why anyone cares what other people do. #fyp #foryourpage #lgbtq🏳️‍🌈 #lgbtq

♬ original sound – Free Talk Live

Watching that episode, it repeatedly becomes clear that Conan doesn’t have any idea what happens at drag shows, nor is he interested in learning about what happens at drag shows. He has imagined the Worst Possible Thing happening, and he pretends that is what happens at drag shows, and then he becomes upset about it. This is not uncommon. From what I can tell, it is what most conservative people are doing in regard to drag shows, as no amount of telling them that drag shows aren’t inherently sexual gets through to them.

Drag shows and movies have a lot in common. There are definitely some highly sexualized movies, such as “I Spit On Your Grave” and “Jennifer’s Body.” There’s also that movie where Sharon Stone flashed the audience with her crotch, and the movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin” has a plot that is entirely about sex and getting laid. However, the existence of these “adult movies” that are highly sexualized obviously doesn’t mean that movies are inherently sexual, and it would be absurd to make such an argument. Just because Jennifer’s Body exists doesn’t mean that The Brave Little Toaster is inherently sexual, and everyone knows this except Brother Jebediah, the most prudish of all Amish people.

Earlier today, I was tagged in a video on Twitter featuring the child drag queen pictured here, with the person who tagged me saying that I’m always asking for evidence of sexualized children, so there it was. While it’s a bit weird to think of this grown adult going around and searching the Internet for sexualized children, the video, of course, was posted to Twitter by LibsOfTikTok. For those who are unaware, LibsofTikTok scours the Internet for sexualized images and videos of children, and then posts them to Twitter. For some reason, this isn’t viewed as obsessive, crazy, and tremendously fucked up. Instead, there are about two million people following this, presumably to see the vast collection of softcore child pornography that they have put together. At least, that is what they allege is going on here. I’m not convinced this stuff is sexualized, and that’s the point of today’s article. However, if it is true that these pictures and videos are inherently sexual, then what we have here are 2 million people who shouldn’t be allowed within 500 feet of a school.

The teen pictured here isn’t wearing a particularly revealing outfit. During spring and summer, it is routine to see people of all ages wearing significantly less clothing than that, and, of course, there are child and teenage cheerleaders who deliberately make it a point to wear more revealing clothing than this. For that matter, the dancing wasn’t especially provocative either. The most revealing part of the outfit was the back, which had a few strings stretching across it, but I must have missed the memo where society decided that backs were sexy.

Different people are aroused by different things, though. There are plenty of people out there who can masturbate to pictures of feet, so what I call the “Can I masturbate to this?” test isn’t foolproof, but, as a general rule, one can find out if something is “sexualized” by asking the question of whether one can masturbate to it. James Joyce wrote many letters about how turned on he was by farts, but no rational person will suggest that farts are inherently sexual, just as no rational person would suggest that all movies are inherently sexual.

This raises the question, then, of what is sexualization? What is sexualized, if the image of the teen above is not sexualized? The answer, believe it or not, is that nothing outside of sex itself is actually sexualized. Even if the drag queen above was completely naked, it wouldn’t automatically be sexualized.

Pavlov’s Dog

“Pavlov’s Dog” is a phrase referring to an experiment conducted in the 19th century where a man rang a bell before he fed a dog. It didn’t take very long before the simple act of ringing the bell would excite the dog and cause the dog to salivate hungrily. The dog had come to associate the ringing bell with eating. This is a phenomenon called conditioning, and it’s extremely useful today for training dogs and for countless other purposes. I carry treats around constantly to reward my dog for good behavior, because psychology has shown that rewarding good behavior is a more effective way of training than rewarding bad behavior, and it is consistency in this that causes her to be very well-behaved.

While we may not like to think of ourselves as easily trained, the simple truth is that we are easily trained. In my early 20s, a friend of mine bought a new vehicle that dinged incessantly if the car was in gear and the driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. In time, to make the annoyance go away, the friend began putting on his seatbelt as soon as he sat down in his vehicle. Within a very short time, my friend had been trained to put on his seatbelt.

Little things like this are happening all the time to us, and most of the time it goes unnoticed, but governments around the world and shadowy, evil corporations are spending untold amounts of time and money figuring out exactly how to train us to be exactly what they want us to be. That, however, isn’t the purpose today’s article, so let’s return to the subject of nudity.

As I said, the teen could be completely naked and it wouldn’t be inherently sexual. Just as Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to associate the ringing bell with food, so have humans come to associate nudity with sex. Because everyone is clothed all the time, we have created a mystique around nudity, such that any nudity at all is exhilarating and feels forbidden to look at. This is why young kids are so excited when they stumble on their parents’ porn stash–even though they are too young to feel sexual arousal, they are looking at something that has been forbidden to them, and for that reason alone they like it.

As we get older, though, we begin to associate nudity with sex. We look at naked people when we masturbate. We get naked in order to masturbate. With few exceptions like showering, the only time we see naked people in person is when we’re about to have sex with them. Of course, orgasms cause the release of all sorts of fun chemicals that act as rewards to our brains, and we come to associate nudity with the pleasure of those chemicals.

Emotional Responsibility

With all this being the case, a person’s sexual arousal in response to a video of a person dancing is that person’s own responsibility. This is true of all emotions. Emotions are internal reactions to external stimuli, and no one has the power to make anyone feel anything. I don’t have the power to make someone angry; only they have that power.

Now, they may be reckless with that power. Indeed, most people are. Most people allow themselves to be readily and easily manipulated by giving strangers power over their emotions, but frivolously allowing other people to control my emotions is, again, my choice, even if it is a choice I’m making without realizing it. You can do whatever you want to try to elicit an angry response from me, but I and I alone have the power to make myself angry. This is true of all emotions. You can’t make me angry, sad, aroused, or happy. Only I can do these things. You have the same control over your emotions. No one can make you angry, sad, aroused, happy, or anything else unless you give them that power over you.

And if you give people the power to control your emotions, then you give people the power to control you. Control yourself and control your emotions. Don’t let other people control you. You alone determine how you feel in reaction to things. Just because you’re aroused doesn’t mean the video is sexualized.