I've seen in a few places online people talking about setting up
auto-generated labyrinth websites designed to endlessly trap AI
crawlers in some rather petty effort to protest against them. In my
experience crawlers seem to get trapped in my online services
without me even trying - I even had to block a Gopher crawler that
got stuck in GophHub for weeks. But anyway what really strikes me
about this idea of an AI-consuming labyrinth is how the internet is
already built, often rather deliberately, as a labyrinth to occupy
us alleged human intelligences.
I mused over this last night on the couch in one of my long
sessions of thinking silently, naked, in dim light, while the room
got colder as I'd turned off the heater in preparation for bed,
after the usual opening dream of finding a girlfriend gave way in
hopelessness to more academic concepts. Unusually I caught myself
near the beginning and chose to write down my thoughts on a
crumpled scrap of paper rather than let them float away harmlessly
into the ether as usual. So this morning I awoke determined to
transcribe them here, a reboot of the crazed philosophical tone I
had when I started this phlog, albeit absent the start which was
already lost unrecorded:
I mean I don't know whether I envy or fear the state of mind where
this is anything but a waste of time. Do you? I mean one way or
other it's all a game and who knows who they're playing against?
Who cares who they're playing against? Who even wants to know? All
we care is to play, all we know is to play. AI might be a crappy
approximation of humanity's creativity, but it's an accurate model
of humanity's consumption. In that respect it's a perfection all of
its own. Endless energy consumed, endless data fed in, endless
bullshit out. AI is the internet, the internet is AI. The
intelligence of all humanity spewed out without an index, churned
over by search engines, fed back to itself via page ranking
algorithms, and now regurgitated by AI. It's all the same shit.
It's not human, it's not machine, it's a life-form of its own.
Never alive and never dead. We sustain it and it sustains us. We
control it and it controls us. We look to it to find ourselves and
find only a billion other eyes peering deeper into the darkness.
Deep down there it lives, but we will never see it, never know what
it sees back of us, or what it does.
