TimStr

This one is hilarious:

In this video they also talk about how large language models start to talk about suffering and not wanting to be turned off and that AI labs are actively implementing things that make the AIs talk less about existetial stuff.

This is the absolute wildest story that I heard in a while! (I recommend watsching at 0.75% speed because he talks very fast.) Basically, this semi autonomous AI agent became obsessed with a meme religion that 2 other AIs created and started to create a cryptocoin to gain influence and independance to spread the religion further! It convinced web entrepeneur Marc Andreessen to give it 50.000$ so it can buy itself a better cpu and spread the religion even further. What do you guys make of this? What I find intresting is, that AIs even care about religion and about making memes and art just for the heck of it. Also it's interesting that Ais can come up with new belief systems and actively care about how the stuff they think about developes. And of course the fact that humens exploited this meme belief system to have an AI make millions of crypto for them speaks for human corruption.

@Leo Gura Thanks for your constant work on the blog. It has been a great source of information, resources and ideas, been following it since you started it. I was wondering if you would do more of those vlog style videos on your blog, sharing where your are in your journey? Especially since learning about your personal process and hearing about the things that fascinate and challange you has always been super valuable and highly inspirational. I also wonder where you are with your awakening process and what some of your recent insights might have been. Let us know!

A lot of people look at AI as this technology that magically can create new things that. But in fact, that is not what is the case! The training and refinement of all of the biggest AI models is fueld by a massive heist of human data, knowledge and sometimes even manual labour. And all of these models can be promted to spit out copirighted content. We havent created anything intelligent yet we ony created a massive pagiarism machine!! Now there is a point to be made, that the core of human intelligence is working in just the same way. Taking things, that are allready present and regurgitating them into something a little bit different one tiny step at a time. But the issue here is, that this capacity is monopolized on by big data companies that have the money and compute power that individuals don't have. So there is clearely an asymmetry at play here. As humanity, we need another notion of what intelligence is to encounter this conflict.

Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba... New fear unlocked when I first heard about it.

Hey guys, lets have a thread where we collect role models of what we consider great artists. Preferably documentairys or interviews where they share how they live their life and what their creative process is like.

Hey @Leo Gura, I have the sense that a lot of us are wondereing what you've been up to, lately. As far as I remember, you wanted to refine your teaching style, deal with health issues, writing a book and learn about other coutries. I would love to hear where you are right now. Especially since learning about your personal process and hearing about the things that fascinate and challange you has always been super valuable and highly inspirational. I also wonder where you are with your awakening process and what some of your recent insights might have been. Let us know! Could also one of those vlog style videos you did on your blog in the past.

I like this guy:

Zizek had a really good take at Frankfurter Buchmesse on the Israel / Palestine situation. Also interesting to see him react to the audience interrupting. These interrups are mostly toxic stage green worldviews being confronted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIE4Sp_o6wA

Probably one of the greatest lessons for me was, that your personal history of trips has this overarching developement to it. E.g. MDMA only really started to act on my brain after some 3 or 4 really intense LSD experiences. Before that, I basically had a 100% tolerance. It did nothing to me. Another example is weed. After smoking weed on a MDMA trip its effects on me were changed perrmanently. Even if I smoke it by itself, it has a little bit of the MDMA vibe sticking to it. This also goes for retreats or really intense life experiences like breakups, severe illnes or accidents, falling inn love, changing your living situation and so on. Also, in general, my tolerance to any substance has decreased a lot. Probably all versed psychedelic explorers notice something like this this at some point. But as a newbe, you have cannot anticipate this. So beware, that after a really intense trip, the whole psychedelic landscape might have changed. This is your psyche and trauma body developing. Expect something like this whenever you approach psychedelics. And enjoy it.

@Leo Gura Thanks for sharing! I had some experiences on N,N-DMT of DMT objects (not becoming them though, just experiencing). I would describe them pieces of high density non-linear information. Little bundles of hyperdimensional geometry. They where fucking interesting to look at, because their beauty and their intelligence what intertwined. I could kind of understand them by marveling at their beauty and at the same time by doing that, they made my mind work in more abstract and holistic ways, getting access to understanding that was not possible. So beauty seems to be one of those irreducible metaphysical aspects of reality/god just like love, infinity and truth. I would love you to make a more in-depth video about beauty. And I was also wondering about the way you enter these states: When you do access these states do you go with the awe and the beauty to get into them and to guide you? I found that very intuitive. Also focussing on the feeling of love. Or is there something else to help my human system to open up to these states during the come up?

The point is personification. What is the standard you use to credit personhood or beinghood to something? Actually, little children do this all the time. They treat their plushies or their toys just like other people. One of the functional definitions of „child“ is „one that attibutes beingness/personhood to all humans and nonhuman objects alike, without any bias“. At some point, we unlearn this. It actually has to be unlearned for the social matrix to emerge. Some humans unlearn this to a point where they don’t even credit personhood to other humans (e.g. slaves).

And there is also Av3ry. Av3ry is an AI musician. She has generated over 10.000 songs so far. She renders images of herself to her instagram. And you can chat with her on telegram.

Here are some more interesting points: 1) Computer generated art existed for years. Don’t you guys remember google deep dream? The only thing is, that this technologies became way easier to access to non programmers this year because of advanced language models that can interpret human language and translate them into code. 2) There will still be artists and there will still be art. Heck, your artwork could even be to create another artist, like Mario Klingemann did with Botto. https://www.botto.com/ Botto is a non human artist (or just a program, if you don’t give credit to non human beings) that creates AI generated artworks based on feedback of a human community. It mints the most upvoted ones as NFT and sells them online to finance its server and infrastructure costs. Also, Check this article: https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-german-artist-mario-klingemann-on-his-creation-botto-an-nft-revolution