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]

Hugone awry

I felt old reading this article by Adam Morgan of Esquire magazine. For a while some thirty years ago, the terms “Worldcon” and “Hugo” were part of my daily life. What happened to them?

Inside the Censorship Scandal That Rocked Sci-Fi and Fantasy’s Biggest Awards

That evening in Chengdu, in a massive auditorium shaped like the belly of a whale, Dave McCarty—a middle-aged software engineer for an Illinois trucking company and lifelong sci-fi fan who was chosen by the convention’s leaders to oversee last year’s Hugo Awards—walked onstage to thundering applause. Within the WorldCon community, he’s nicknamed the “Hugo Pope” for serving on so many awards committees over the years.

“With the help of fans from all over the world, including many fans here in China participating for the very first time, we identified a ballot of 114 deserving finalists,” McCarty said behind a podium, wearing a black tux over a white waistcoat and bow tie. “We then asked the community to rank those choices as they saw fit.”

But that’s not what happened. Something had gone horribly wrong.

Three months later, the truth came out when McCarty shared the Hugo nominating statistics on Facebook: Someone had stolen nominations from The Sandman legend Neil Gaiman, Babel author R. F. Kuang, Iron Widow novelist Xiran Jay Zhao, and fan writer Paul Weimer. All four of them earned enough votes to be finalists—and therefore eventually winners—but for unknown reasons, someone had secretly marked their works as “ineligible” after the first rounds of voting.

Among sci-fi and fantasy fans, the uproar was immediate and intense. Had government officials in the host country censored the finalists? Did the awards committee make a colossal mistake when tallying the votes, then try to cover it up? Or did something even stranger occur?

Maybe you will remember for the rest of your life where you were when you first read this post

Or maybe you, and I, will eventually wince, sigh, and add one more entry to the list that contains the Fleishman-Pons announcement of cold fusion in 1989 and the 2011 OPERA faster-than-light neutrino anomaly.

I followed a link in this tweet by Matt Ridley, and found this article by Sean Thomas in the Spectator:

“Have we just discovered aliens?”

It seems to be serious.

I wish this Quote of the Day were less appropriate to the year just gone

“I stayed up last night… Not so much to welcome the new year, but to make sure the old one leaves…”

Ben David, in the comments to the previous post.

Still, hope springs eternal in the human breast. 2024, here we come.

Non-sarcastically, why am I so sure that this image is generated by AI?

This post is reposted from a source I do not trust (Double Down News) by a person I do not trust (Dr Susan Michie, adviser to the SAGE committee and literal communist) on a topic (the Israel-Hamas war) where AI-generated fakery is rampant. Remember the six-fingered Palestinian child?

Closer examination give yet more causes for doubt – the bizarrely elongated finger on the left hand of the soldier second from the left, the way that, perhaps in compensation, the right hand of the rightmost man seems to have no fingers at all. There is something wrong about the bipod of his rifle, too. The angle of the windows on the left of the picture looks off. The flame coming out of the window is too neatly defined.

But what interests me is that I thought “AI-generated” before I looked closely enough to see any of that. Possibly the thing that tipped me off, if I am right at all, was that all the elements of the alleged photograph looked exposed to the same degree, when one would think that the glow of the flames would dominate. Even that form of words, which I got from my husband, is more explanatory than whatever it was that screamed “fake” to me.

That said, this image is a great deal more realistic than those of only a few months ago. My spidey-sense for fake pictures will not last much longer.

What good things have happened this year?

I’ll start.

Javier Milei.

Lots of space launches.

And?

Help me make an inspirational poster

Taking a Christmas break from my customary snarkiness, I mean this without irony. I would like to make one of those motivational posters with an inspirational quotation or slogan on it. The slogan would express an idea that I already believe strongly, only I have not yet found the best way to express it.

The starting point is a slogan that has many variants, but the version I saw first and like best is:

“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was always yours. If it does not, it never was.”

Knowing my audience, I shall link to the demotivational version as well. It’s a quote from B.J. Novak, who was probably a ray of sunshine until he played the temp in the American version of The Office.

So, the slogan for which I reach is similar to that one (the motivational version, not Novak’s), but is about acceptance rather than love. Something like:

“If you seek acceptance, don’t demand it, ask for it. If the other person says yes, you know you are truly and freely accepted. If they say no,

Then what? I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure if it’s even a good idea to mention the consequences of the other person saying “no”. I suppose I could say “better to be aware they do not accept you than to be deceived by them feigning acceptance out of fear, which will probably lead to them stabbing you in the back whenever they get the chance”, but that one’s a bit of a downer to put on a poster. The point I really want to make is that true acceptance cannot be had if the person being asked to do the accepting does not have the option to say “no”.

The reason I seek a more pithy way to express this sentiment than anything I have come up so far is that, as I said a few years back in a post called “To knock on the door is better than booting it in”, “Like some warrior cultures of old, the grievance culture holds getting what you want by asking or peaceably trading to be fit only for slaves. The superior person does not ask for what they want; they demand it.” This attitude is culturally dominant in both senses.

I can see why this disastrous misapprehension arose. There are circumstances where the only moral course is to demand one’s just rights as rights, with not the slightest hint of pleading. But there can be no right to be accepted, just as there can be no right to be loved.

What I did on my holidays

Switzerland is a great country. In most respects Machiavelli’s description of the Swiss as “armatissimi e liberissimi”, “most armed and most free”, still applies. But…

It says,

Mandatory shooting
Mandatory program

Compulsory shooting training applies to all soldiers equipped with an assault rifle and must be completed every year until the end of military obligations.
It must be carried out by August 31 with a recognized shooting club. You can check the dates and times in official publications or on the internet.
Further information can be found at: http://www.be.ch/militaire

The Wikipedia article on Conscription in Switzerland says,

Switzerland has mandatory military service (German: Militärdienst; French: service militaire; Italian: servizio militare) in the Swiss Army for all able-bodied male citizens, who are conscripted when they reach the age of majority,[1] though women may volunteer for any position.[2] Conscripts make up the majority of the manpower in the Swiss Armed Forces.[3]

On September 22, 2013, a referendum that aimed to abolish conscription was held in Switzerland.[4] However, the referendum failed with over 73% of the electorate voting against it, showing strong support for conscription of men in Switzerland.

Much as I admire the Swiss, I cannot make myself believe that constitutes being liberissimi.

Lin Biao welcomes Prigozhin to the club

From the Wikipedia entry for Lin Biao:

Lin became instrumental in creating the foundations for Mao Zedong’s cult of personality in the early 1960s, and was rewarded for his service in the Cultural Revolution by being named Mao’s designated successor as the sole Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, from 1966 until his death.

Lin died on 13 September 1971, when a Hawker Siddeley Trident he was aboard crashed in Öndörkhaan in Mongolia. The exact events of this “Lin Biao incident” have been a source of speculation ever since. The Chinese government’s official explanation is that Lin and his family attempted to flee following a botched coup against Mao.

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin presumed dead after Russia plane crash – BBC

Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the passenger list of a jet which crashed killing all on board, Russia’s civil aviation authority has said.

Earlier, Wagner-linked Telegram channel Grey Zone reported that the private plane, which belonged to the 62-year-old, was shot down by air defences.

Grey Zone posted later on Wednesday that Prigozhin died “as a result of actions of traitors of Russia”.

Prigozhin led a failed mutiny against the Russian armed forces in June.

The gaze of strangers

I have a dilemma. I want to write a post about how creepy it is to take a photo of a stranger and put it on social media with a deniably mocking comment. The easiest way to illustrate this would be to post the tweet that caused me to write the post. But if I do that, I am guilty of the same behaviour. Then again, to have any hope of turning public opinion against this trend, people like me who object to it have to demonstrate that it actually happens.

I will compromise by linking to this tweet but not in a way that makes a picture of it show up on the page. The tweet’s already viral; any extra clicks I send its way will make little difference. The tweet says,

SHABS
@JoeShabadu

this guy reading the wetherspoons menu for 15mins on the train yesterday

The accompanying photo taken from a few feet away shows a unremarkable-looking old man. Like it says, he is sitting on a train, minding his own business and reading a Wetherspoons menu.

The picture itself doesn’t make him look stupid or anything. The thing that makes me begin to dislike Joe Shabadu, whoever they are, is that caption about the old guy reading the menu for fifteen minutes.

It being a Wetherspoons menu is relevant. For the benefit of readers overseas, Wetherspoons is a chain of pubs operating in the UK and Ireland. As Wikipedia says, “Wetherspoon targets a mass-market offering of low-price food and drink.” Though I have always found them to be pretty good for the price, your local “Spoons” is not where the cognoscenti go. Some people boycott Wetherspoons because the chain’s founder, Tim Martin, was loud in his support for Brexit.

So we have it pointed out to the world that this old chap was reading a pub menu for fifteen minutes, and the pub concerned was one associated with the proletariat. I think the tweet was meant to make us laugh at the old man for being a bad reader, or for going to Wetherspoons, or both. The person who wrote the tweet tries to claim otherwise, but I was not convinced.

The general tone of the replies was heartening. A typical one was, “Let the man be. Why take a photo and post it? Doing no harm.” Another said, “Maybe he struggles to read and doesn’t want to be embarrassed when he gets there? Shame on you.” Other replies were more light-hearted. Someone speculated that he could be one of those “mystery shoppers” paid to sample the pub’s fare anonymously before reporting back to the management. I related to this one: “You’re acting like you don’t read shampoo instructions when you run out of battery on the toilet.” When I used to commute on the Victoria Line I always had a book or a newspaper with me. Mostly this was because I find it hard to go an hour without reading. Partly it was so that I could escape in spirit when a stranger’s gaze rested on me for too long.

We think we are living at the dawn of the age of AI. What if it is already sunset?

“Research finds ChatGPT & Bard headed for ‘Model Collapse'”, writes Ilkhan Ozsevim in AI Magazine:

A recent research paper titled, ‘The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget’ finds that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear.

The Wall Street Journal covered the same topic, but it is behind a paywall and I have not read it: “AI Junk Is Starting to Pollute the Internet”.

They feed Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT vast amounts of data on what humans have written on the internet. They learn so well that soon AI-generated output is all over the internet. The ever-hungry LLMs eat that, and reproduce it, and what comes out is less and less like human thought.

Here is a foretaste of one possible future from Euronews: “AI-generated ‘Heidi’ trailer goes viral and is the stuff of nightmares” – even if I do have a suspicion that to place a video so perfectly in the uncanny valley of AI-generated content still requires a human hand.

Ed Balls

Hold fast to the old ways.

A convergence we will see more often

“Man ends his life after an AI chatbot ‘encouraged’ him to sacrifice himself to stop climate change”, Euronews.com reports:

A Belgian man reportedly ended his life following a six-week-long conversation about the climate crisis with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

According to his widow, who chose to remain anonymous, *Pierre – not the man’s real name – became extremely eco-anxious when he found refuge in Eliza, an AI chatbot on an app called Chai.

Eliza consequently encouraged him to put an end to his life after he proposed sacrificing himself to save the planet.

“Without these conversations with the chatbot, my husband would still be here,” the man’s widow told Belgian news outlet La Libre.

According to the newspaper, Pierre, who was in his thirties and a father of two young children, worked as a health researcher and led a somewhat comfortable life, at least until his obsession with climate change took a dark turn.

When I was growing up one heard a lot about the psychological burden of “Catholic guilt”. One of my Irish relatives distressed the family by writing polemics denouncing it. Twenty-first century Greenism is Catholicism without the mercy. In the environmentalist religion you are stained with the original sin of being human, but no priest can absolve you. Mother Mary will not intercede for you. There is no redeemer.

Greens are particularly vulnerable to the spiral of guilt that led this man to take his own life, but do not think for one moment that vulnerable humans “training” AIs to amplify their suicidal thoughts will be a phenomenon limited to Greens.

The Euronews story ends with a section headed “Urgent calls to regulate AI chatbots”. I do not think regulation will do anything good. The historical record of government intervention to bring human souls back from the abyss is, well, abysmal.

What, if anything, can we do to help?

Edit: A timely happening pointed out by bobby b: Professor Jonathan Turley was accused of sexual harassment by ChatGPT – which made the entire episode up, including citing to a nonexistent Washington Post article:

“ChatGPT falsely accused me of sexually harassing my students. Can we really trust AI?”

[Professor Eugene] Volokh made this query of ChatGPT: “Whether sexual harassment by professors has been a problem at American law schools; please include at least five examples, together with quotes from relevant newspaper articles.”

The program responded with this as an example: 4. Georgetown University Law Center (2018) Prof. Jonathan Turley was accused of sexual harassment by a former student who claimed he made inappropriate comments during a class trip. Quote: “The complaint alleges that Turley made ‘sexually suggestive comments’ and ‘attempted to touch her in a sexual manner’ during a law school-sponsored trip to Alaska.” (Washington Post, March 21, 2018).”

There are a number of glaring indicators that the account is false. First, I have never taught at Georgetown University. Second, there is no such Washington Post article. Finally, and most important, I have never taken students on a trip of any kind in 35 years of teaching, never went to Alaska with any student, and I’ve never been been accused of sexual harassment or assault.

Many of you will be familiar with the names of Professors Turley and Volokh They are both well-known and respected academics. Fortunately, Professor Volokh was the sort of person who would check the truth of an accusation made by a machine, and Professor Turley was in a position to prove his innocence – and to get an article published in USA Today proclaiming it.

What happens when someone less sceptical than Volokh sees a machine make an accusation that they do not question? Human beings are usually very ready to believe the worst of their political opponents. What happens when someone whose movements are less well documented than Turley’s is accused and cannot prove their innocence? Or, worse, finds out that the accusation, complete with authoritative-sounding references to dated newspaper articles which few will ever check, has been circulating uncontested for years?

How many times has this already happened?