We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

It lets us pretend that it is us talking

Samizdata no longer needs me. Soon it will no longer need you. I took the text from the sidebar:

The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property.

and copied it into Talk To Transformer.

The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Most of them are rich white males who are probably atheists, but many are probably questioning the existence of a god as they revel in their limitless wealth. They believe that anyone who is unprotesting of their cause is a threat to their cause and a threat to their own existence. They don’t care if you are a child and a physician or an Arab and a journalist. You must conform and accept their conspiracies. This is the true face of

Comments are, as ever, welcome. Even from humans.

21 comments to It lets us pretend that it is us talking

  • Simon Jester

    Guess what I put in to get this out:

    Or are you? How about you go fuck yourself

    Fuck you. Fuck, fuck you.

    We are the motherfuckers that came out,

    The mothers that clapped as you walked into the club.

    And it’s with great pleasure that we say goodbye

    To our own son, who lived out the wildest dreams

    Of our own ignorant children, our own sons and daughters.

    Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

    There is a stick of incense burning on the altar,

    Burning to ease your final agony,

    A shawl around your neck and a small rose on your pillow,

  • Zerren Yeoville

    It seems like the book-writing kaleidoscopes that Julia operated in ‘1984’ are now with us.

    I took a nonsense fragment (‘Mischievous Gus wrote something disobliging about a hen, unaware that every single caption…’) from ‘Hooting Yard’, the website of the late nonsensical-wordmonger Frank Key, and fed it into the Transformer.

    Behold:

    Mischievous Gus wrote something disobliging about a hen, unaware that every single caption links him to a dead scientist.

    Consequences

    After failing to fulfill the “Jack Hatches the Egg” task, Evil Gus gets locked up in jail. The criminal overlord Vigo, who Gus brought into the jailhouse, steals all of his property. As Evil Gus faces his death sentence, he gives his final speech to the others, saying that he “told you it would work.” Afterwards, he is picked up by jailers and executed by being thrown into the Vultures’ camp.

    Gallery

    The Disney Wiki has a collection of images and media related to Vigo the Carpathian. has a collection of images and media…’

  • bobby b

    I love Artificial Inanity. So much better than the real Inanity.

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker) Gray

    It seems like they’re onto us! Head for the hills!

  • GregWA

    Ultimately it is code. Written by humans. Culpable humans. Hold them to account. Maybe I’m ignorant regarding how code is created, maybe some of it is code writing code, but I’d focus on the human origins. And go after them in a serious way, one that threatens their livelihood, their platform. Let’s not stand by, blogging, while they encircle us.

  • Caligari

    That is not so impressiv as a good, oldfashin chatbot.

    If you write the “false” Texts, he reproduce something or fake something.

  • Stonyground

    Actually, that opening sentence was being satirical. So all we have here really is the programme’s instability to pick up on that and therefore it is taking the words at face value.

    Then again, all the comments up to now could be being satirical and it is me who is failing to pick up on that and now I’m really confused.

  • I was kind of impressed by

    They believe that anyone who is unprotesting of their cause is a threat to their cause

    With just a little more cleverness in the following clause, the machine could have produced a sentence whose boolean value would have been really hard to pin down. I commend the “unprotesting of” construct to any politico facing a tricky interview. 🙂

    They don’t care if you are a child and a physician

    That might have failed the Turing test in the old days, but thanks to political correctness we are more broadminded now. 🙂

  • Aetius

    We did nonsense better in the old days without computers, for example, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.

  • Pat

    How many people are children and physicians?
    The must be some who are Arab and journalists, but not many.
    So it’s only a minuscule minority that we are alleged not to care about.
    We care about children if they aren’t physicians.
    We care about physicians if they aren’t children
    Etc.
    This is so obviously Dagenham!

  • Mr Ed

    I finally figured what this is about: Here is what i put in, in bold and the continuation in plain:

    Matt Hancock knows what he is doing, and Michael Gove can be trusted to do the right thing. Dominic Raab has gravitas and confidence, and also knows what he is doing.
    Theresa May does not yet possess either. In other words, the choice is not between a hard Brexit and more Europe, but between more Europe and more Britain.

    So let us examine some possible alternatives.

    Let us follow the same line of thought as the Daily Mail – don’t let anyone find out what you’re planning, and have it done secretly and outside the democratic process. To claim otherwise is to let Brexit set you loose on the road to oligarchy. Don’t let London play with Eurosceptic policy; let it watch and then govern

  • Clovis Sangrail

    I worry about what this was trained on (I used the Samizdata text):

    This has a clear American and European model, which is, of course, being foisted upon the world by a US-European group whose goal is to dominate, impoverish and control. I don’t recall their having any plans to eradicate “the egotistical parasitic riff-raff.” The US, its Western European allies, and its Gulf State partners as well as their Israeli military allies (which are probably the most brutal and powerful on earth right now, seeing as how they’re flying their horrifying 15-ton “mule” bombing fleets) are pursuing a remarkably similar strategy

  • Snorri Godhi

    I experimented with the first 2 sentences from Njal’s Saga, and the first sentences from The Origin of Species and The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

    Njal’s Saga was turned into (the beginning of) a fairytale.
    The Origin of Species did not come out too badly.
    LoSD was turned into garbled nonsense.

  • Mr Ed

    I shall taunt this pernicious bot with a choice discourse from the Sage of Kettering, it clearly needs retraining.

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    Clovis Sangrail and Mr Ed, I assume it works from a corpus of the text of newspaper articles and suchlike, and so will reproduce the general tone of what it hears. Given how strongly the US media leans Democrat, perhaps it is not surprising that it seems to be a wokebot. I typed in a few things that were intended to be no more than interesting first lines for stories and found that the machine sometimes follows not-very-political first lines with political content. For instance (my words in bold):

    Did you never think to ask yourself why we acted as we did? I’m speaking, of course, of our behaviour in the summer of 2001. Remember the peace accords? We stood at the negotiating table with America. I was prime minister at the time and he, together with George Bush, was their representative. We met each other to find out how they were going to handle the threat of the extra-territorial application of the Afghanistan treaty in India. We knew it was not going to be easy. There was a long history of friction between India and Afghanistan. It went back to the mid-1960s. We knew that in 1992 Afghanistan had attacked India with Pakistani help, and the agreement to take joint responsibility had been a very good deal. But all

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    By the way, it also speaks foreign languages, but worse than it speaks English. Short French phrases will be followed by text in English but mentioning French themes. Longer French phrases will be followed by something that is recognisably French but very incoherent. De Tocqueville’s description of Napoleon, “He was as great as a man can be without morality”, gave forth the following:

    Il Ă©tait aussi grand qu’un homme puisse l’ĂȘtre sans la vertu. La sociĂ©tĂ© fait loin Ă  des ressources bonne comme comme environnement et de fondation. Les catĂ©gories de moins unis de traditiones, s’il n’Ă©tait pas quoi en vue de compliquer, ne fait point effrayant. La sociĂ©tĂ© comme un chĂšre de coeur, Ă©tait maintenant admis de l’Ă©ventu vidĂ©o. Egalement le cadre de valeur qui peut mettre un cadre de valeur et au grand cadre

    This of course means (courtesy of another robot):

    It was as great as a man could be without virtue. The company does away with good resources like environment and foundation. The less united categories of tradition, if it was not what in order to complicate, is not frightening. The company as a dear heart, was now admitted to the eventual video. Also the framework of value which can put a framework of value and the large framework

    One of my linguistically-talented children verified that it also… well not exactly speaks Japanese, but can process Japanese as Japanese.

  • Mr Ed

    Most governments, whether they know the writer or not, tend to follow the assumption of the late Mr. Jeremy Bentham. They regard humans as soulless machines, not beings with free will and moral agency, and they regard the idea of rights against the State as ‘nonsense’ and natural justice itself, which is to say limiting state power, as ‘nonsense on stilts’.

    Mr. Bentham, who in 1824 would have been 105 years old, might well have responded in these terms:

    If the state is an evil it must be abolished, and its inefficiency pointed out and thwarted, or it will poison the blood of men, and bring all mankind to destruction, both politically and individually.

    German “Historicism” (whether of the “right”, Hegel, or the “left” Karl Marx) and American “Pragmatism” (Charles Pierce, William James, John Dewey
.) are very different philosophies (very different indeed) – but they have some things in common which lead to some similar results. They both deny objective and universal truth – the Ralph Cudworth or Thomas Reid thinking of “We hold these truths to be self evident
.” of the American Declaration of Independence and the philosophy of the Bill of Rights. Â Which is better in its own way? As Max Weber has argued in his famous book Humanism,” he attributes those cultures that

    The British Whig tradition, and the Tory tradition also (Dr Johnson and all that), starts from the principle of moral personhood – the ability of human beings, with effort, to tell moral right from wrong and, again with effort, to choose to overcome our evil passions and do what it is morally right. To choose do other than we do. And it goes without saying that this is extremely difficult. To achieve moral personhood we need most of our potentialities to be in play and we require great self control (which is why there is great difficulty in keeping our appetites in check, although we may be able to make those appetites so more conscious that they no longer dominate our actions). We cannot live with the problem of having evil passions

  • Runcie Balspune

    It does a reasonable Coleridge:

    In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
    A stately pleasure-dome decree:
    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea. Life’s sweet delights
    Seemed beckoning through a thousand miles of night,
    When by chance upon the sand a rude figure
    On camel’s back, with pile of arrows in its hand,
    Suddenly appeared. As it approached, he uttered a loud cry,
    And by the light of his torch told his plight.
    Far away over the sea, far from the rim of the world,
    The flag of doomed Greece had wavered,
    And long her strength had failed. He was a stranger there

  • The Tea Must Flow

    In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. His name was Baggins and he was made of straw. One day, as he was walking along, he was picked up by the DĂșnedain. He was brought before the Council of Elrond, and the oracular giantess told them his story. There was a cat in Mirkwood Forest who was fond of Baggins and would catch anything that moved. At first the cats of Mirkwood did not take to the Hobbit, but when he told them of his adventures, they agreed to give him their best cat, Melkor. The people of Mirkwood did not enjoy this, of course, but Melkor proved to be more than a friend to the Hobbit

    …Almost, machine. Almost.

  • Zerren Yeoville

    Following earlier comments about it being a ‘wokebot’ I decided to tease the Transformer again by offering it ‘Nigel Farage is the greatest liberation hero of the modern era’ and to my considerable surprise it didn’t actually explode:

    Nigel Farage is the greatest liberation hero of the modern era. His is a modern, forward-looking, liberal, inclusive, ‘free’, anti-elitist nationalism, in the tradition of the 21st century incarnation of nations under a state, if not of socialism. He is moving into the void that the contemporary left and its historical beneficiary, the conservative right, have opened up for him. In doing so he is destroying, at last, all of the constructed and constructed-upon pillars of privilege that run the country.

    The referendum outcome was as unforeseeable as it was terrifying. The narrative of ‘Remain’ is as tattered and pale as an old fly-speck hat. The idealised, oh-so…”

  • Paul Marks

    I am not an atheist – and I am certainly not rich. I am poor – and I have always been poor.

    I am “white” and male – but unless one is a Hollywood Marxist (the sort of modern Marxist who would baffle Karl Marx) there is nothing bad in being white and male.