Alexa in the Garden of Epicurus

Is she supposed to have ringworm??

Honestly, it would probably be more accurate for Alexa to be masquerading as an Epicurean student but actually to be listening to only report back EVERYTHING to its Stoic or Academic manufacturers so the info can be used against the Garden.

The more I learn about AI in all its nefarious energy-hogging consumer-facing forms, the more I loathe it. Use it for big data analysis or other academic applications, but stop shoehorning it into everything. Just one example: Google's AI summaries at the top of ALL my searches are intrusive and far and away useless the large majority of the time. I still use Google, but I'm rapidly being more likely to use other search engines for this exact reason.

Any novelty it did have has worn off for me.

Quote from Don

Honestly, it would probably be more accurate for Alexa to be masquerading as an Epicurean student but actually to be listening to only report back EVERYTHING to its Stoic or Academic manufacturers so the info can be used against the Garden.

......

I just found this interesting article:

If any AI became 'misaligned' then the system would hide it just long enough to cause harm — controlling it is a fallacy

AI "alignment" is a buzzword, not a feasible safety goal.

www.livescience.com

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Given the vast amounts of resources flowing into AI research and development, which is expected to exceed a quarter of a trillion dollars in 2025, why haven't developers been able to solve these problems? My recent peer-reviewed paper in AI & Society shows that AI alignment is a fool's errand: AI safety researchers are attempting the impossible.

And this article:

AI could soon think in ways we don't even understand — evading our efforts to keep it aligned — top AI scientists warn

Researchers at Google and OpenAI, among other companies, have warned that we may not be able to monitor AI's decision-making process for much longer.

www.livescience.com

And lots of other articles on AI at the livescience website.

Quote from Don

Google's AI summaries at the top of ALL my searches are intrusive and far and away useless the large majority of the time. I still use Google, but I'm rapidly being more likely to use other search engines for this exact reason.

I feel you 1,000%.

Even on the Starship Enterprise, I would still fact check the computer.

How can we ever know, unless we are the ones doing the knowing?

As an artist who always struggled with drawing proper proportions, I've done lots of experimentation with AI art (but only with using free programs). It seems lately that I am not able to get as good results as I did in the past, so now I mainly have been doing collaging with Canva.

But just for fun, here is an AI picture from last year (the prompt that I likely used was something like: beautiful ancient Greek woman wearing white and reading scroll in a beautiful garden, but likely was much more detailed than that):

And would name this "Leontion in the Garden".

Quote from Kalosyni

beautiful ancient Greek woman

I've been noticing that AI seems to default to people with Northern European features, even when given direction otherwise. I'm just wondering, what is that Valkyrie doing in Greece?

This is another issue I see with AI: It has beauty standards, subjective beauty standards. Someone is setting those standards, or else, it's being fed data that begs it to arrive at that conclusion.

It was asked to generate a beautiful Greek woman, and it rendered a blonde. It's like ... jeez, AI, tell us your PornHub categories without telling us your PornHub categories.

Eikadistes your post got me wondering and so I found this on a Wikipedia site:

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Ancient Greece

Left: Reconstructed Blond Kouros's Head of the Acropolis, c. 480 BC.
Right: Ganymede, a Trojan youth, rolling a hoop, Attic vase c. 500 BC.

Most people in ancient Greece had dark hair and, as a result of this, the Greeks found blond hair immensely fascinating.^{[citation needed]} In the Homeric epics, Menelaus the king of the Spartans is, together with some other Achaean leaders, portrayed as blond.^[67] Other light-haired characters in the Homeric poems are Peleus, Achilles, Meleager, Agamede, and Rhadamanthys.^[67] The traces of hair color on Greek korai probably reflect the colors the artists saw in natural hair;^[68] these colors include a broad diversity of shades of blond, red and brown.^[68] The minority of statues with blond hair range from strawberry blond up to platinum blond.^[68]

Sappho of Lesbos (c. 630–570 BC) wrote that purple-colored wraps as headdress were good enough, except if the hair was blond: "...for the girl who has hair that is yellower than a torch [it is better to decorate it] with wreaths of flowers in bloom."^[69] Sappho's contemporary Alcman praised golden hair as one of the most desirable qualities of a beautiful woman,^{[citation needed]} describing in various poems "the girl with the yellow hair" and a girl "with the hair like purest gold".^[70]

In the fifth century BC, the sculptor Pheidias may have depicted the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena's hair using gold in his famous statue of Athena Parthenos, which was displayed inside the Parthenon.^[71] The Greeks thought of the Thracians who lived to the north as having reddish-blond hair.^[72] Because many Greek slaves were captured from Thrace, slaves were stereotyped as blond or red-headed.^[72] "Xanthias" (Ξανθίας), meaning "reddish blond", was a common name for slaves in ancient Greece^[72][73] and a slave by this name appears in many of the comedies of Aristophanes.^[73] Historian and Egyptologist Joann Fletcher asserts that the Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great and members of the Macedonian Greek Ptolemaic dynasty of Hellenistic Egypt had blond hair, such as Arsinoe II and Berenice II.^[74] Additionally, the ancient Greek lyric poet Bacchylides wrote of "the blonde daughters of the Lacedaemonians" (Spartans),^[75] while also noting the light hair of athletes at the Nemean Games.^[76]

Greek prostitutes frequently dyed their hair blond using saffron dyes or colored powders.^[77] Blond dye was highly expensive, took great effort to apply, and smelled repugnant,^[77] but none of these factors inhibited Greek prostitutes from dying their hair.^[77] As a result of this and the natural rarity of blond hair in the Mediterranean region, by the fourth century BC, blond hair was inextricably associated with prostitutes.^[77] The comic playwright Menander (c. 342/41–c. 290 BC) protests that "no chaste woman ought to make her hair yellow".^[77] At another point, he deplores blond hair dye as dangerous: "What can we women do wise or brilliant, who sit with hair dyed yellow, outraging the character of gentlewomen, causing the overthrow of houses, the ruin of nuptials, and accusations on the part of children?"

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blond

Perhaps then this, from the Wikipedia:

"The comic playwright Menander (c. 342/41–c. 290 BC) protests that "no chaste woman ought to make her hair yellow".^[77]

...so then she definitely looks like a hetaira.

...and I probably had to specifically ask the AI to make her hair blond.

On the poetry site where I publish my poems, AI-generated poetry is generally forbidden. A number of poets who run poetry contests there require that your entry include a statement that no AI was used in writing the poem – without that statement, you are disqualified.

I wholeheartedly approve that sentiment.

Thanks for bringing that up Pacatus. Let me ask you this:

And if in fact someone posted a poem that so appealed to you that you in fact found it to be one of the most enjoyable poetic experiences of your life to read it, would you then wish that you had never read it if you found out later it had been generated by AI?

Quote from Cassius

And if in fact someone posted a poem that so appealed to you that you in fact found it to be one of the most enjoyable poetic experiences of your life to read it, would you then wish that you had never read it if you found out later it had been generated by AI?

Yes. For the same reason that I would rather listen to YoYo Ma play the cello, than a robot who played the same concerto perfectly.

And I am not saying that I couldn’t be fooled by a sufficiently “aesthetic” AI – but that would just make me sad and angry. Art, like passion, is a human affair.

Respectfully I don't think I would reach that same conclusion myself. I suppose we have another issue with the limitations of hypotheticals, but I think I can state pretty broadly that if in fact I found a poem to be one of the most enjoyable I had ever read, I don't think I would wish that that experience had never happened to me just because I later found out that the poem was AI-generated. I'm not saying that finding out it was AI generated would not have major implications for future conduct, but presuming that the poem did in fact cause me great enjoyment and that I could continue to read the poem in the future with enjoyment and with no necessary harmful effects, I would not wish not to have had the experience.

I know I know that it will be objected BUT THERE WILL BE HARMFUL EFFECTS but I do not at least at this point believe it makes sense from an Epicurean perspective (no fate / no necessity) to say that overridingly harmful effects will necessarily occur simply from the fact that a particular poem is AI generated. More would be needed to reach that conclusion.

I feel sure others will have different perspectives and I'd like to hear them.

Quote from Cassius

Respectfully I don't think I would reach that same conclusion myself.

Respectfully … we disagree.

Since we’re into hypotheticals: imagine watching the most exciting baseball game you’ve ever seen – and discovering that it was all CGI, done so well that you thought you were seeing actual human players at the top of their game. I would feel cheated.

Or imagine that you've just listened (in the auditorium) to a brilliant, moving "performance" of your favorite symphony (say, Beethoven's Ninth) -- only to discover that the actual orchestra players were just going through the motions (including the conductor), while the actual music was an AI-generated recording. I would feel cheated.

Or imagine the "discovery" of a heretofore unknown symphony by Beethoven -- that turns out to be an AI generated fake. No matter how "good" it seems, I would rather listen to an imperfect rendition of Beethoven's Ninth.

[After all, imperfection is part of the human aesthetic -- part of the beauty of it -- as Japanese culture has deeply understood.]

++++++++++++++++++

BTW, thanks for the challenging discussion! You're not an AI bot are you?

Just as an aside – it seems we’re bordering (lightly, I want to stress) on Brave New World stuff here. Would you rather share physical sexual intimacy with a real person (no matter their imperfections) – or with a “perfect” robotic substitute? (Okay, now we’re into the Stepford Wives … )

Quote from kochiekoch

I think the ethical problem here is full disclosure.

Fair point.

Why You Should Never Use AI Under Any Circumstances for Any Reason No Matter What

We’re in the midst of what Chomba Bupe calls “Slopageddon,” a reference to the rapidly proliferating heap of “AI slop” that’s clogging up the Internet.

open.substack.com

I saw this article on my Substack feed and, initially starting to read thought, this might be good to share at the forum but it's not specifically applicable. Then I got to this section...

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I’m reminded here of myriad reports of people believing that they’ve made their AI conscious or self-aware, and that they’re now able to communicate with angels or even God through it....

This is a phenomenon that, I think, not many of us in the field of AI ethics really anticipated....

here we have AI systems privately convincing people that their delusions and/or perceived communions with supernatural deities are real (or really happening).

So, yeah, AI slop is infecting every aspect of human experience. It's evangelists are trying to convince the rest of us to join their delusional fantasies and ignore the evidence of our senses. That seems directly on point for this forum after all.

PS. I am more than happy to have this deleted or delete it myself if this veers too political for the forum.