A weapon to surpass Metal Gear

Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@xeiaso.net>

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+---
+title: A weapon to surpass Metal Gear
+date: 2023-03-10
+tags:
+ - philosophy
+ - metalGear
+ - futurism
+ - sciFi
+ - ChatGPT
+---
+
+Every so often, I like to look at some of the more weird conspiracy
+theories and then try to debunk them. I consider it a media literacy
+exercise, but there has been one theory that I've come across that is
+impressively hard to debunk: the "Dead Internet" theory. I think that
+the best conspiracy theories are the ones that are hardest to debunk,
+and this one is increasingly getting more difficult to debunk.
+
+The core idea is that the Internet itself is actually dead, no human
+authorship of any content exists. Any actual human content that is
+created is isolated into its own little
+[heavenbanned](https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561)
+bubble. Mainstream platforms, news outlets, social media sites,
+Internet forums, chatrooms, everything filled with bot generated
+content to the point that it's impossible to find another human. The
+same arguments cycle back and forth throughout the forums with new
+dramatis personae every iteration.
+
+To be clear, this theory has literally written is absolute nonsense
+and probably not worth taking too seriously. A lot of this theory was
+originally designed to come up with reasons why people in forums will
+just randomly vanish forever, never to be seen or heard from again.
+That friend that you played Team Fortress 2 with for years? Ten
+years offline on Steam. No goodbyes. No warning they'd leave. They
+just vanish.
+
+As someone who has experienced this type of vanishing a lot, I
+get where the conspiracy theory comes from. I think it's quite a
+stretch to assert that it's the result of chatbots, or something. But
+over all this is a very interesting thing to try to dissect and argue
+against. As AI models get more complicated and their output gets more
+and more convincing, it's getting difficult to impossible to actually
+argue against this theory.
+
+This is something that is entirely possible to create with the modern
+technology we have.
+
+<xeblog-hero ai="Anything" file="raiden-automata" prompt="1girl, cyborg, outdoors, landscape, forest, yellow eyes, blindfold, bodysuit, hoodie, white hoodie, boots, skirt, gloves, neutral expression, city ruins"></xeblog-hero>
+
+I hope that this is actually a false assertion, but it's getting
+difficult to make the case that it is. This has really given me a lot
+of pause and started to make me wonder what this technology is
+actually going to be end up used for.
+
+As a writer, there's two ways that you can analyze futurism and
+science fiction. The common model is to compare it to the car. If you
+are to talk about the idea of the car, the possibilities it allows
+for, and what it enables people to do, that is futurism. Futurism is
+mainly talking about the ideas and thoughts about what technology
+could give us. For comparison, if you were to analyze it as science
+fiction, you would probably start with the idea of traffic jams.
+Futurism would enable people to live and work in different
+geographical places, this is something that has not commonly been done
+for the vast majority of history for the vast majority of population.
+People generally lived where they worked, because travel was
+difficult, expensive, and annoying. But, if everyone has to do that,
+then there will likely be times where the roads are filled with cars
+for people trying to get to somewhere else so they can do their job.
+This creates a traffic jam. This is the science fiction of the car.
+
+I would like to wager that AI technologies like ChatGPT, Stable
+Diffusion, LLaMA, Whisper, and more are looked at in the eyes of
+futurism. To contrast, I believe the "dead internet" theory is the
+science fiction. If we have the ability to create all of this stuff
+automatically by machine, then what will be left for humans to enjoy?
+
+## Metrics and Ratios
+
+At some level though, I recognize that for about eighty percent of
+the articles that people actually read, an AI generated article is
+probably sufficient. Consider the fact that most of articles that
+people read are very basic high level things:
+
+- X died
+- X person said Y
+- Event happened at place
+- "No Way To Prevent This," Says Only Nation Where This Regularly
+  Happens
+
+Statistically, most people won't even read past the title anyways.
+This is why titles get clickbated. Because people want you to read
+the fucking article, and nobody reads past the title. Consider the
+fact that when Elon Musk, one of the biggest accounts on Twitter,
+tweeted a link to someone's webpage, there was a less than one percent
+click through rate. When you don't click on a link on Twitter, all you
+see is the title and any extra preview data that Twitter scraped.
+
+If that has a less than one percent click through rate, then why
+should companies bother to pay humans to write articles that aren't
+going to be read?
+
+Turns out, capitalism has noticed this.
+[Buzzfeed](https://buzzfeed.com) is reportedly [using AI models to
+generate its listicles and other filler
+content](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2023/01/26/buzzfeed-to-use-chatgpts-ai-for-content-creation-stock-up-200/?sh=70b2faf67eae).
+CNET [also recently had a spat with AI generated
+articles](https://gizmodo.com/cnet-chatgpt-ai-articles-publish-for-months-1849976921),
+albeit one that ended poorly.
+
+## Arsène
+
+What could such a dead internet look like? I decided to do a little
+experiment and find out. I call the results
+[Arsène](https://arsene.fly.dev/). It is a little app with Deno and
+Fresh that creates a new article about every 12 hours about the
+current phase of the moon, astrological sign, and three tarot cards to
+describe the past, present, and future. It feeds all of this into
+ChatGPT and I have done very little prompt engineering to try and
+hide the fact that it is AI generated.
+
+My fear is that all major/popular websites will end up looking like
+this. Pleasing design, modern user experience, but absolutely nothing
+worth witnessing.
+
+<xeblog-conv standalone name="Cadey"
+mood="coffee">[Fresh](https://fresh.deno.dev/) and
+[Tailwind](https://tailwindcss.com/) actually really does make for a
+nice combination for making decent looking websites at a very low
+amount of effort spent in the design phase. I'm likely going to use it
+a lot in the future for my more experimental projects or things that I
+don't expect to scale.</xeblog-conv>
+
+If there's going to be all of this automatically generated content,
+how are we going to sort through it all? Who is going to take the
+time to curate things? How will information search change in the wake
+of this technology?
+
+## Context
+
+Metal Gear is a series of games made by producer Hideo Kojima. The
+series has always covered complicated topics such as war, political
+philosophy, existentialism, free will, understanding how ideology
+spreads, and in general is seen as the precursor to understanding a
+lot of how the US has developed. And you get to play as super-solders
+trying to piece together everything as it all burns.
+
+This series is well worth playing, or at the very least watching the
+cutscenes on YouTube. One of the most important things that it covers
+is the idea of free will, and censorship on the internet. At some
+level, its thesis is that America is diseased. Rotten to the core. We
+drown ourselves in information, and there is no good way to sort it,
+analyze it, or know what's worth preserving and what's worth
+discarding.
+
+In Metal Gear Solid 2, there is a faction known as "The Patriots".
+They are a group of artificial intelligence models that has slowly
+built up and gained sapience in the White House. By the events of
+Metal Gear Solid 2, the patriots control the entire country. The
+president is the puppet of the patriots. Information is censored
+through the patriots. Broadcast TV, internet forums, email, chatrooms,
+all of it censored by the patriots. Oh, and they control the nuclear
+launch codes.
+
+There is one cut seen at the end of the game where the patriots spell
+out their core thesis and their rationale for why they are doing what
+they are doing. I'm going to be quoting parts of it as I continue
+this article, but you should really watch the entire thing to help you
+understand where I'm coming from here:
+
+<iframe width="725" height="408"
+src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eKl6WjfDqYA" title="YouTube video
+player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay;
+clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture;
+web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
+
+Even without the help of artificial intelligence models, we create so
+much information that there is no way that anyone is going to be able
+to sort through it. In ten seconds, something ridiculous like eighty
+five hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Untold terabytes of data
+are minted at Twitter. Millions of blogs post billions of articles
+every day. There is so much information, and so much noise, that even
+the one company that was designed to sort through the internet is
+having difficulty sorting through the internet.
+
+And now, it is even easier to continue that 24/7 spew of trivia and
+celebrity bullshit with things like large language models. As an
+example, let's think about that art project that I linked to earlier.
+Here is the verbatim prompt that it uses in order to generate
+articles:
+
+```js
+const prompt = `Ethereum is worth ${ethUSD} US dollars.
+The current lunar phase is ${lunarPhase}.
+The current astrological sign is ${astrologicalSign()}.
+The current date is ${(new Date()).toDateString()}.
+
+Past events: ${tarotReading[0].fortune_telling[0]}
+Current events: ${tarotReading[1].fortune_telling[0]}
+Prediction: ${tarotReading[2].fortune_telling[0]}
+
+Write a lengthy analysis article that speculates why the prediction will come to pass and what it will do to the price of Ethereum. Lead your analysis with a line containing an original title followed by two new lines.`;
+```
+
+Consider this: that project was made in literally two days as an
+exploration of how this technology could lead to a "dead internet". I
+made this because of a quote that my mentor gave me:
+
+> Come on now, put your fears on the canvas and then you can see how
+> bad they really are. It's easy to get caught up in the imagined
+> fears of hypotheticals, but looking your fear right at the face lets
+> you see if it's truly something to be afraid of.
+
+So I did that. Just imagine, I did this in two days as a joke. If some
+idiot like me can spin out something like this in two days that gets
+decent enough results, just imagine how this technology could be used
+by someone actually malicious. Are we going to be able to trust things
+that we read on the internet anymore? Are we going to be able to trust
+video? Audio? Text? Images?
+
+> **Colonel**: Raiden, you seem to think that our plan is one of
+> censorship.<br />
+> **Raiden**: Are you telling me it's not!?<br />
+> **Rose**: You're being silly! What we propose to do is not to
+> control content, but to create context.<br />
+> **Raiden**: Create context?<br />
+> [...]<br />
+> **Colonel**: Absolutely. Who else could wade through the sea of
+> garbage you people produce, retrieve valuable truths and even
+> interpret their meaning for later generations?<br />
+> **Rose**: That's what it means to create context.<br />
+> **Raiden**: I'll decide for myself what to believe and what to pass
+> on!<br />
+> **Colonel**: But is that even your own idea?<br />
+> **Rose**: Or something Snake told you?<br />
+
+<xeblog-conv standalone name="Cadey" mood="coffee">As I was writing
+all of this, Discord quite literally announced that they are making a
+new client feature with the ChatGPT API that allows them to
+automatically [create context for your
+conversations](https://www.engadget.com/with-the-help-of-openai-discord-is-finally-adding-conversation-summaries-160030905.html?guccounter=1).
+I literally can't make this up. The parallels and analogies are
+literally writing themselves at this point.</xeblog-conv>
+
+Who will be our patriots? This has been a question that's been
+rattling around throughout my skull for the last two weeks or more.
+
+If you take a serious look at the Metal Gear series, you probably
+would find it _dripping_ with allegory and other moments like this.
+The thing that comes to mind the most is the one of the most
+symbolically critical cutscenes from [Metal Gear Rising:
+Revengance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear_Rising:_Revengeance)
+where Raiden is talking with the one of the bosses/enemy terrorists
+named Monsoon.
+
+This game is also notable because it came out in that small sliver of
+time between modern gaming being a thing and the common definition of
+memes as what we know them as today didn't exist yet. In an
+anthropological sense, you can think about a meme as a viral idea, and
+that sense is being referred to below.
+
+When Raiden is talking with Monsoon about war, violence, and justice,
+their conversation drifts to anthropology:
+
+> **Monsoon**: Yes, you aren't the only one to grow up on the killing
+> fields. War is a cruel parent, but an effective teacher. Its final
+> lesson is carved deep in my psyche: That this world, and all its
+> people, are diseased. Free will is a myth. Religion is a joke. We
+> are all pawns, controlled by something greater: Memes. The DNA of
+> the soul. They shape our will. They are the culture -- they are
+> everything we pass on. Expose someone to anger long enough, they
+> will learn to hate. They become a carrier. Envy, greed, despair...
+> All memes. All passed along.
+
+When all these memes (both senses) build up and overwhelm us all, what
+happens? Where do people find actual truth when everything worth
+interacting with is drowned out.
+
+Later in the game when Raiden fights the final boss, a _United States
+Senator_ (this game is about as subtle as a nuclear bomb, it's great),
+they talk about the fallout of The Patriots being destroyed in the
+wake of the FOXALIVE virus (and the resumption of the uninterrupted
+flood of garbage onto the internet).
+
+<iframe width="725" height="408"
+src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IMpuUUV2HeE" title="Senator
+Armstrong&#39;s Political Speech" frameborder="0"
+allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media;
+gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
+
+> **Senator Armstrong**: All right, the truth then. You're right about
+> one thing... I do need capital. And votes. Wanna know why?.. I have
+> a dream.<br />
+> **Raiden**: What...?<br />
+> **Senator Armstrong**: That one day every person in this nation will
+> control their OWN destiny. A land of the TRULY free, dammit!
+> [Armstrong resumes fighting Raiden.] A nation of ACTION, not words,
+> ruled by STRENGTH, not committee! [Armstrong grapples Raiden,
+> rendering the cyborg mostly helpless.] Where the law changes to suit
+> the individual, not the other way around. Where power and justice
+> are back where they belong: in the hands of the people! [Armstrong
+> and Raiden headbutt each other, but neither is harmed.] Where every
+> man is free to think -- to act -- for himself! [Armstrong beats
+> Raiden to punctuate every statement.] Fuck all these limp-dick
+> lawyer and chicken-shit bureaucrats. Fuck this 24/7 Internet spew of
+> trivia and celebrity bullshit. Fuck "American pride." Fuck the
+> media! Fuck all of it! America is diseased. Rotten to the core.
+> There's no saving it -- we need to pull it out by the roots. Wipe
+> the slate clean. BURN IT DOWN! And from the ashes a new America will
+> be born. Evolved, but untamed! The weak will be purged and the
+> strongest will thrive -- free to live as they see fit, they'll make
+> America great again!
+
+To say that this game wears its heart on is sleeve is like trying to
+say that water makes things moist. Senator Armstrong's core thesis is
+that people need to be free to do what they want. However:
+
+> **Colonel**: You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the
+> result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from
+> hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to
+> churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and
+> value systems.<br />
+> **Rose**: Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community,
+> afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds,
+> leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of
+> society at large.<br />
+> **Colonel**: The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh.
+> No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. <br />
+> **Rose**: Not even natural selection can take place here. The world
+> is being engulfed in "truth."<br />
+> **Colonel**: And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang,
+> but a whimper.
+
+Communities that used to have public presences, online forums, wikis,
+all of that reduced to private, secluded, Discord servers. Spam has
+always been a problem that has required a lot of careful research and
+implementation because of how easy it is to do and how hard it is to
+only block the spammers, and not the legitimate users. And now new
+tools allow you to generate kilobytes of spam in tenths of pennies.
+
+The things we experience become the memes we share with others. Expose
+someone to hate long enough, they'll hate too.
+
+> **Colonel**: That's the proof of your incompetence, right there. You
+> lack the qualifications to exercise free will.<br />
+> **Raiden**: That's not true! I have the right--<br />
+> **Rose**: Does something like a "self" exist inside of you?<br />
+> **Colonel**: That which you call "self" serves as nothing more than a
+> mask to cover your own being.<br />
+> **Rose**: In this era of ready-made 'truths', "self" is just something
+> used to preserve those positive emotions that you occasionally
+> feel...<br />
+> **Colonel**: Another possibility is that "self" is a concept you
+> conveniently borrowed under the logic that it would endow you with
+> some sense of strength.
+
+It is very likely that we are living in an age of ready made truths,
+and this will all only get worse as these text transformer models get
+more and more easy to use, run on lower and lower and hardware, and
+become fast enough that they can be used in real time.
+
+## The traffic jam
+
+This is the traffic jam. A traffic jam not made of cars, but ideas.
+Ideas and memes fed to people 24/7. God forbid what happens when
+somebody actually malicious gets their hands on these tools.
+
+We're already rapidly approaching the point where you can't trust
+video and audio recordings of anything anymore. I've seen a new format
+of memes spread around in the last month or two. They use AI text to
+speech generation to show former and current US presidents in
+ridiculous scenarios such as Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama and
+Chris Pratt playing Mario Party together:
+
+<iframe width="725" height="408"
+src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b6WYD0QeF4s" title="The Gamer
+Presidents Play Mario Party (ft. Chris Pratt)" frameborder="0"
+allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media;
+gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
+
+Just imagine what a boon this could be for misinformation. Imagine a
+conspiracy, and with a few clicks of a mouse, create the evidence you
+need to spread it. Create the memes that you need in order to
+discredit your opposition. They'll spread like wildfire.
+
+At this point, the genie is out of the bottle. Pandora's box is
+opened. We're going to have to learn to live with these diseases.
+
+Next year is an election year. I can only imagine what kind of things
+we will end up being inflicted to on the Internet this next election
+cycle.
+
+It's very likely that we're not going to be able to trust breaking
+news about political candidates very soon. It's also very likely that
+a lot of the articles that people read are going to look like those
+articles made by that joke of a website I made. Our world is being
+engulfed in relative truths based on assumptions. The common belief in
+an "objective reality" is crumbling.
+
+One event happens. A million people witness it. A million separate
+headcanons of that become the reality for those million people.
+Some of them may be mutually understood by each other, but they are
+still a million separate interpretation that can all conflict in a
+million different ways. This is the way that that things always have
+been. We just don't like to think about this.
+
+Above all, my biggest fear is that one of the biggest sources of
+liberation in my life is going to no longer be a source of liberation
+for anyone else. This is the technology that can truly kill the
+internet. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
+
+<div>
+<xeblog-conv standalone name="Cadey" mood="coffee">I couldn't figure
+out where to fit this in the article, but I suspect that a lot of the
+reason that so many companies are announcing AI products in recent
+days can boil down to two basic factors:<ul><li>AI-based products are
+a perfect denial-of-service attack on product departments. They look
+cool as hell. They raise a lot of buzz. It only makes sense that
+people would want to raise that buzz and look cool as hell in order to
+get promoted.</li><li>The AI departments of most companies have not
+really published any products. The tech industry as a whole is going
+through economic downturns, and this is making companies look for
+places to cut the fat. I suspect that AI products are being introduced
+because it allows people to remain employed because their department
+is raising a lot of buzz.</li></ul></xeblog-conv>
+</div>
+
+This is truly a weapon to surpass Metal Gear. Now accessible through
+Bing and Google search. Now available for any kid with a dream and a
+credit card.