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Okay, one last post for now on this, directly relating AI to dangerous skepticism (which we rightly rail against here on the forum):
This Substack article gets at why I feel the way I do about AI's use in art and creative endeavors:
...like watching someone take a sledgehammer to a Stradivarius because they heard you can make music with a kazoo.
...
We're not just automating away individual careers. We're dismantling the entire pipeline that creates the next generation of visual storytellers.
Obviously, none of the stuff is going to go away,
I'm not so sure. The trajectory of investment vs real results doesn't seem sustainable over the long haul. Return on investment for these companies seems illusory at best, bordering on fraudulent.
To bring this back to the topic of the forum, I don't contend that people, including those of us on this forum, get pleasure from playing with these software tools or seeing/hearing the results of prompts.
I do contend that Epicurean philosophy is not pleasure at all costs. These tools, for me, are starting to fall under the "pleasures of the profligate" in some ways. They're like a quick hit that feeds on itself and leaves us wanting more. If I type this prompt I get this. What if I change this? What happens if I add another detail? For business needed "creative work ," why pay humans to create things that speak to other humans? That's expensive! Save £€¥$ and use the free software or subscribe for cheap. And meanwhile the AI dutifully responds again and again and again ad infinitum until all the electricity is being sucked dry.
Meanwhile human artists and poets and writers and cartoonists and musicians are either picking crops to live or are marginalized and paid as niche artisanal oddities to perform for the ultra-rich in some dystopian gated community.
There's also the implication of Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Humans remain intrigued and seduced by "magic," and AI can appear magical. However, it's Alexander the Oracle Monger's Snake God all over again.
Just tried it! It works.
I tried, and it didn't work with the " " around the -ai, but did without them.
Oh! Sorry for the confusion! I just used the quotes to set that off as a set phase. I didn't use the " " in my search either.
This discussion (and it's a good one!! Thanks to whomever it was that got this rolling!!) reminds me of the discussions we've had over the experience machine (which I believe was mentioned earlier?).
My primary reason for saying that one should not hook themselves up to the experience machine is the source of pleasures change from experienced to induced.
My understanding is that Epicurus said "All sensations are true" in that their source is natural and coming from some existing thing in the universe. There is a reality beyond our minds and bodies. We experience sensations because we are alive in a material world which has an effect on us.
The experience machine renders us a passive inert participant in someone else's idea of what pleasure is. We are at the mercy of the manufacturer and repairman of Experience Machine LLC.
Yes, our "experiences" would be "real" to us but only in the sense that a dream or hallucination is real. There would be no external stimuli coming from a real external universe. We would be cut off from the universe, encased in the shell (or wires or hoses, pick your mechanism) of the experience machine. I don't believe, from my understanding of Epicurean philosophy, that Epicurus would endorse a life of living in a dream or an hallucination. All our friends would be figments of our imagination. All our pleasures would be fake. Our life would be a pale reflection of what it could be.
Epicurean philosophy is not pleasure at any cost; it is taking responsible for moving one's life - navigating one's little boat - using pleasure as your North Star, weathering the storms through which the Star can be seen through the clouds and lightning, and steering one's own course. It does not mean abdicating one's pleasure to someone or something (eg, AI) else.
- Don't we have to be certain that *all* AI generated pleasure is going to harm us more than help us in order to reach that conclusion?
- Because certainly there are *some* major benefits to AI or else it would not be "taking the world by storm."
Those are two very different statements.
1. "*all* AI generated pleasure" - I'm not sure what you mean by this. The "pleasures" "generated" via AI go beyond what we're primarily discussing in this thread. I'm particularly concerned about the generation of artwork - prose and image - by AI algorithms. Machines are not "creative." They're "generative," in that they will indeed generate images and text but there is no creativity involves. It is a concrete process governed by an algorithm put in place by programmers (even if one says an AI engine "learns" from its large language model or "training" data. The learning is programmed into the machine.
There are benefits to AI in the sense of analyzing medical data, for example:
AI might also help with other problems for which time constraints preclude humans from tackling (we're mortal beings... we can't crunch numbers 24/7 for days at a time).
Granted, this Big Data issue has some dark underbelly, too, but it's being used as a tool; not as an end in itself. People are using AI to generate music, prose, artwork, as ends in themselves, many times as short cuts to $$$. The AI slop that has infected Amazon is staggering:
So, my answer to your "Don't we have to be certain that *all* AI generated pleasure is going to harm us more than help us in order to reach that conclusion?" would be that we have to be wary of AI's different aspects and usages and how it is being used to assess the harm/help.
2. "taking the world by storm." - One of the reasons that AI is "taking the world by storm" is due to hype, overselling, overpromising, underperforming, and "lather, rinse, repeat." AI companies - and AI executives - are precarious in many ways and appear, to what I've read, to engage in obfuscation and misdirection to appear smarter than they are. If you really listen to what some of these AI "geniuses" are saying... they're not saying anything. It's all buzzwords and empty rhetoric. And people don't want to say "the emperor has no clothes" so they nod their heads and the ruse goes on.
And the Better Offline podcast gives an unfiltered no-holds-barred look at what's going on in the tech sector: https://www.youtube.com/@BetterOfflinePod
So, in conclusion, I'm mostly okay with using AI as a tool to do what humans find impossible or highly onerous to do (e.g., crunching massive data). As for art, I want my art to be created by feeling, mortal humans with real emotions and real skills and real creativity.
One of the contributors wrote that beginning Google searches by typing “-ai” eliminates the AI overview feature.
Just tried it! It works. KUDOS to you, Pacatus !! I'll be sharing this little tip.
Maybe some temporal context might help?
This line from the letter in question (1.2.55) was written (per Wikipedia for now) :
Epistularum liber primus (First Book of Letters) is the seventh work by Horace, published in the year 20 BC. This book consists of 20 Epistles.
Horace's famous "Epicuri de grege porcum" appears in an epistle to Albius Tibullus (1.4.12-16) written around the same time (apparently) as the letter in question, in fact it's only two letters later in Book 1.
I don't have time right now, but it might be instructive to read the first few letters in Book 1:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of THE WORKS OF HORACE, by C. Smart, A.M..
to see what Epicurean themes - if any - jump out and whether Horace is providing his own take on the philosophy (whether or not he's a pig in the herd) or not.
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?
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.
the limitations of hypotheticals
This isn't a hypothetical. There are entirely AI-generated bands, artwork, animation, texts including poetry right now that are fooling people or "passing the Turing Test" if you will. We are well beyond hypotheticals at this point.
resuming 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 don't doubt you could get pleasure from the words, but the words are literally meaningless to the software that composed them. The poem would be nothing more than a glorified random word generator spewing out a line of words that the algorithm decided were likely to be adjacent to each other given a prompt. There is no - ZERO - human emotion, feeling, creativity (other than the clever programmers) that went into those words that you find pleasurable to read. There's nothing behind the poem's expression. It's a Potemkin village of a poem. There's no there there.
Now, if you want to compare it to taking pleasure in a sunset that was unplanned and due to random fluctuations in the atmosphere... okay? In relation to that AI poem, you - the reader - are imbuing that poem with meaning. The "author" of the poem is NOT trying to communicate their feeling to you. The AI poem is a Rorschach Test. A random inkblot that you can look at and say "that looks like a bee resting on a flower" or read a poem and say "Oh, this reminds me of a day I spent in the sunshine." YOU are imbuing algorithmically-selected words with meaning. Granted, we do SOME of this with all poetry, but the author has an intention of what they wrote if it's a human author.
I think the ethical problem here is full disclosure. If you are given the information that the game is CGI, you know what you're getting and you can choose not to view it.
Are you trusting an AI summary in your search?? 
Here's the first search results:
Ya gotta assess the individual search result links.
this phrase is derived from his writings, specifically from his "Epistles" (Book I, Epistle II, line 55).
The line is from the Letters, but that Perseus link doesn't go to Horace's Letters.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of THE WORKS OF HORACE, by C. Smart, A.M..
Here's the context:
Money is sought, and a wife fruitful in bearing children, and wild woodlands are reclaimed by the plow. [To what end all this?] He, that has got a competency, let him wish for no more. Not a house and farm, nor a heap of brass and gold, can remove fevers from the body of their sick master, or cares from his mind. The possessor must be well, if he thinks of enjoying the things which he has accumulated. To him that is a slave to desire or to fear, house and estate do just as much good as paintings to a sore-eyed person, fomentations to the gout, music to ears afflicted with collected matter. Unless the vessel be sweet, whatever you pour into it turns sour. Despise pleasures, pleasure bought with pain is hurtful. The covetous man is ever in want; set a certain limit to your wishes. The envious person wastes at the thriving condition of another: Sicilian tyrants never invented a greater torment than envy. He who will not curb his passion, will wish that undone which his grief and resentment suggested, while he violently plies his revenge with unsated rancor. Rage is a short madness. Rule your passion, which commands, if it do not obey; do you restrain it with a bridle, and with fetters. The groom forms the docile horse, while his neck is yet tender, to go the way which his rider directs him: the young hound, from the time that he barked at the deer's skin in the hall, campaigns it in the woods. Now, while you are young, with an untainted mind Imbibe instruction: now apply yourself to the best [masters of morality]. A cask will long preserve the flavor, with which when new it was once impregnated. But if you lag behind, or vigorously push on before, I neither wait for the loiterer, nor strive to overtake those that precede me.
Here's the Latin from Wikisource: https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Epistulae…ius)/Liber_I/II
Oh, and it's Sperne voluptates; nocet empta dolore voluptas, and not speme?
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...
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.
You're very kind, Bryan. Thanks for reminding me the fun one can have digging into these issues! I may her back into the mix. There's still a number of VSs that need looked at.
That's because if we start and stop with that letter we are taking Epicurus' words out of context, and not accounting for the circumstance that Epicurus was writing for students who wanted summaries to make things easier to remember, but who were otherwise very familiar and had intimate access to his full views.
That's one reason I wrote My translation and commentary of that letter, to provide some context, both historically and philosophically. I need to give that a thorough reread and maybe do an updated edition. It's been a few years now.
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.
antinatalists want to minimise pain
I interpreted it that they want to minimize existence. A non-existent thing/entity/person cannot be said to "not experience pain." The "being" that is not born doesn't exist. Less beings in the world doesn't alleviate the pain experienced by the already existing beings.
“throw the baby out with the bathwater”
I found your choice of metaphor directly on point. Well played!
Besides, it’s not like Epicureanism is an inherently pro-natalist philosophy. Epicurus never told us to “be fruitful and multiply”. As far as I’m aware, it’s fairly neutral on the question of whether or not we should procreate.
Generally true. The philosophy doesn't take a pro or anti stance other than to value existence over non-existence and to evaluate whether to have children in light of acknowledgement of the pleasure and pain involved. It's a very subjective decision.
Not directly relevant to the natalist question, but at least Epicurus was genuinely concerned with the continued well-being of Metrodorus' children, enough to specifically address their care in his will.
I came across this article today:
I knew the term anti-natalism but never heard of Benatar or his work. But it struck me as diametrically opposed to Epicurean philosophy.
For example:
Like a boxer who has practiced his counters, Benatar has anticipated a range of objections. Many people suggest that the best experiences in life—love, beauty, discovery, and so on—make up for the bad ones. To this, Benatar replies that pain is worse than pleasure is good. Pain lasts longer: “There’s such a thing as chronic pain, but there’s no such thing as chronic pleasure,” he said. It’s also more powerful: would you trade five minutes of the worst pain imaginable for five minutes of the greatest pleasure? Moreover, there’s an abstract sense in which missing out on good experiences isn’t as bad as having bad ones. “For an existing person, the presence of bad things is bad and the presence of good things is good,” Benatar explained. “But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed—then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn’t be bad, because there’d be nobody to be deprived of those good things.” This asymmetry “completely stacks the deck against existence,” he continued, because it suggests that “all the unpleasantness and all the misery and all the suffering could be over, without any real cost.”
Plutarch (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Plutarch was a prominent citizen and even the priest of Apollo at Delphi, being instrumental in reviving and reconstructing the site. He traveled extensively, and was a strong proponent and student of Plato's philosophy.
Plutarch's anti-Stoic and anti-Epicurean writings "are often captious and in many instances betray a less than fair engagement with the views being opposed (see Warren 2011, 290–293 but also Kechagia 2011, 135–294 for a vindication of Plutarch’s polemics in Against Colotes)."
"both Stoicism and Epicureanism were still thriving, mainly in virtue of their ethics. Plutarch wanted to show that Stoic and Epicurean ethics rest on mistaken assumptions about human nature and reality, which render their ethical doctrines useless"
"Two further features of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy appear to annoy Plutarch considerably: first, their dismissal of the aporetic/dialectical spirit that Socrates embodies, and which Plutarch regards as central to Plato’s philosophy and also to his teacher’s Ammonius (De E 385C; see also below sections 2, 3), and second, the Stoic and Epicurean adoption of a corporealist or materialist metaphysics and their rejection of the intelligible realm (that comprises God, Forms, intellects, souls), which was essential to Platonism."
"Ironically, perhaps, Plutarch’s polemical writings are of great value for us today also for the many quotations they contain from Stoics, Epicurus, and other authors whose works were not preserved into modern times, and for his reports and paraphrases of their views drawn from works no longer available to us. Were it not for Plutarch, our grasp of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy would be much less extensive than it is, and our ability to reconstruct and appreciate their ideas much reduced."
14. 14 Given that we have both a mind and a body, it is ridiculous for Epicurus to place the good entirely in the body, and say that the mind has no good of its own.
Plutarch maintains there's a body and there's a soul (mind), σώματος καὶ ψυχῆς, and they have very different desires and pleasure they experience. Epicurus on the other hand acknowledges they are inextricably linked with one relying on the other.
It's obvious too that Plutarch is vehemently against seeing the gods as irrelevant to one's life in the sense of having blessings come from them or to fear being cursed by the gods. Plutarch sees the gods as being indispensable in living properly. Epicureans obviously threw him into apoplectic rage! He must have saw the school as an extreme danger to society and worked hard to stamp out the Gardens influence. Plutarch goes on a while about the Deity both in Nonne posse and Against Colotes.
25. 25 Since Epicurus said that fear of punishment is a bad thing, and it helps men refrain from doing evil if they fear punishment from the gods, men would be better off if they were more superstitious so that they feared the gods and punishment after death even more than they do, and thus refrained from doing evil.
The way Plutarch puts it ...
And Epicurus is of opinion that the only proper means to keep men from doing ill is the fear of punishments. So that we should cram them with more and more superstition still, and raise up against them terrors, chasms, frights, and surmises, both from heaven and earth, if their being amazed with such things as these will make them become the more tame and gentle. For it is more for their benefit to be restrained from criminal actions by the fear of what comes after death, than to commit them and then to live in perpetual danger and fear.
So religion is a tool to keep people afraid of punishment after death.
27. 27 The belief that we cease to exist at death is demorailzing and dispiriting and thus prevents us from enjoying life.
This one really annoys me. Plutarch says
Wherefore they must needs cut the very throats of them that shall with Epicurus tell them, We men were born once for all, and we cannot be born twice, but our not being must last for ever. For this will bring them to slight their present good as little, or rather indeed as nothing at all compared with everlastingness, and therefore to let it pass unenjoyed and to become wholly negligent of virtue and action
The emphasized line is aggravating! So understanding that one ceases to exist should not --does not-- slight the present!! It makes it all the more special and precious.
Plutarch also denigrates the memory of loved ones...
If then (as Epicurus saith) the remembrance of a dead friend be a thing every way complacent; we may easily from thence imagine how great a joy they deprive themselves of who [p. 200] think they do but embrace and pursue the phantoms and shades of their deceased familiars, that have in them neither knowledge nor sense, but who never expect to be with them again, or to see their dear father and dear mother and sweet wife, nor have any hopes of that familiarity and dear converse they have that think of the soul with Pythagoras, Plato, and Homer.
I don't expect to "converse" with my deceased loved ones , but remembering times with them brings me joy. I can accept they're not living in the afterlife, and it doesn't diminish the pleasure of recollection. So, with all due respect, Bite me, Plutarch, you insufferable jerk! Egads!
A wee grumphie in the heird o Epicurus!
γλῠκῠ́ς (glŭkŭ́s, “sweet”)
And that's where we get glucose from in English.
From Etymology Online: name of a group of sugars (in commercial use, "sugar-syrup from starch"), 1840, from French glucose (1838), said to have been coined by French professor Eugène Melchior Péligot (1811-1890) from Greek gleukos "must, sweet wine," related to glykys "sweet" (see gluco-). It first was obtained from grape sugar. Related: Glucosic.
So, is Philodemus saying we shouldn't learn to play or just that we don't have to learn to play?
I'm assuming he'd think someone needs to learn how to play if there are public performances to enjoy?
