Authentication
The rapid rise in Artificial Intelligence being discussed in the public sphere was brought in by the unveiling of ChatGPT-3.5. All at once, in December of 2022. It’s almost incredible how quickly it spread on social media.
Peering under the hood of this chatbot, it appears that the hype might be Artificially Inflated just a wee bit. The “supervised fine-tuning” component of this newest version of ChatGPT (hence the .5) paints the chatbot to be more nuanced than the current version actually is.
Within this supervised fine-tuning is the directed guidance from humans, instructing the chatbot on what is acceptable within current culture, such as not repeating content deemed to be hateful or offensive. This can explain the abundance of biased responses users have received when wading into political territory. The human supervised guidance is what gives the chatbot “life” to the interactive user, and along with all the inherent biases that come with the human supervisors.
It’s the superficial polishing trick to play when you want to make your product appear better than it actually is, get a lot of attention, and a $10 billion investment.
Cynicism aside, I do admit that AI will be a major force in the near future, though it will almost certainly be piloted by humans in very specific ways to achieve specific means. This will, as always, be motivated to gain either power or money (almost the same thing), usually through manipulation, and will be relatively sloppy in the these early stages. It will also likely be a potent tool for sabotage, with which the endgame will still be power consolidation for those who would be deemed clinically psychopathic.
I imagine deepfakes will become commonplace, and new ways to authenticate legitimacy will be needed.
There’s been increasing speculation over the years regarding the point of technological singularity, and whether we have reached it.
I do think there’s an observable convergence point that is rapidly approaching, but it has to do more with a battle over eye ware:
The above screenshots comes from the poignant documentary1 “They Live” by John Carpenter, released in the year I was born. Anyone unfamiliar with the story really should watch the movie in full, but the synapsis (spoiler) is that an alien race is disguising themselves as humans to control the planet, and these sunglasses allow the user to see through the disguise and identify who is an alien entity, as well as see through the propaganda of the mass media (hence the display of “OBEY” on an otherwise innocuous billboard ad).
One way to frame the current state of globalism is to apply the same sunglasses metaphor from the movie above, only inverted; the technocratic elite are striving to make their own version of glasses that can be distributed (sold) to the masses, which solidifies the current illusion of “normalcy” into their psyches, rendering that simple perspective shift provided by the hypothetical black sunglasses in “They Live” rather worthless to the untrained eye. This is my outlook of the future metaverse, AI-content moderation, and our burgeoning biotech-fueled society, and what the ultimate end game is here = it’s a race towards mandated filtration of our reality (think google-glasses / smart-glasses / augmentation-glasses … the final frontier for maybe cementing the illusion in place.)
Thankfully, in our current reality, the metaphor for the black sunglasses is easier to create and distribute to the public, through many forms of independent media and creative expression. The larger problem is the unwillingness of many in the general populace to be open to viewing the world through this illusion-shattering lens. This becomes especially difficult when “disinformation” is ubiquitously wielded like a casual weapon, used on every subject to obfuscate the undesirable truths from those acting as the servant class for the alien elite.
All this leads me to search for a more reliable way to validate and authenticate humanity within a growing sea of ideologues with nefarious agendas.
And so, I set off on a musical meditation, melodically meandering through the medium of an electric piano, and a potential future began to unfold in the foggy part of my imagination. I still can’t quite put it to proper words, but I started to feel it through song. And thus, a simple demo track was born:
What begins as a dark-dreary vibe morphs into one of brighter possibilities, side-stepping into less dissonant chords & melodic flow as the tune progresses. This runs parallel to the foggy path of our current technological trajectory, where a dystopia-inducing invention can still be utilized to forge a happier path forward, depending on the will of the wielder for this metaphorical double-edged sword.
This is where my faith in blockchain technology potential is rooted, and I can see cryptographically-secure private chains being built which can be used on a selective basis to form early incarnations of what could eventually mature into Network States. That is, until quantum computing becomes a real thing, but we still have a number of years to go til that becomes more of a concern.
SubStack2 isn’t run on a blockchain, but the self-hosting of identity-validating data could be, and that’s the trajectory I’d like to go in. Everyone hosting their own server, catered to their desired use, is certainly a feasibility in today’s world where functioning smartphones are starting to outnumber people; it’s a matter of adoption and implementation, and though it’s all in the early stages still, an internet run on a legitimately distributed network, with autonomy over data disclosure, is right around the corner, and while I’m utilizing youtube and the like at the moment, this is the hypothetical next platform I plan on jumping onto. Once I do that learning thing; there’s a lot to take in.
Thus, the following here can act as a stepping tone towards self-authentication, in the crude form of a quick clone video of piano & bass3 for the rough demo track above:
I imagine in the future, this sort of thing won’t hold up for validating there’s a human behind the screen typing these words I’m typing and creating the tunes I’m creating. I also realized in hindsight that the computer screen in the background here isn’t clearly visible, which is meant to be displaying this post I’m typing up here. The goal was to do something like holding up a newspaper in a photo to prove a timestamp. Yet even in 2023, a simple overlay on the video above could make the time and setting appear wildly different, and invalidate the entire premise. (Kids are being raised on some crazy smartphone apps playing what will inevitably viewed as the crude prequel to deepfake filters.)
But the musical components here are quite organic (despite the electronic keyboard), and I have doubts that AI generated music will ever truly replicate the dynamics and mysticisms that have passionately moved humans for many millennia. There’s a soulful component within the vibrations we create (through instrument or Voice) that is difficult to synthesize and adequately trick a finely trained ear. [another slightly more lively clone jam can be found here, which was the soundcheck and prequel to recording the Authentication video.]
And so that is what I’d like to explore more within this SubStack going forward = the components of humanity that still exist within our ever-escalating-digitized world, and which I hope can never be eliminated by the Borg of the future.
Upcoming technologies are going to be simultaneously grotesque and exquisite, and I’m hesitantly eager to see how it all progresses, and how all of these new tools are utilized by humans.
And perhaps more importantly, why.
isn’t it?
A SubStack in and of itself is an excellent tool for accelerating the path towards developing a better understanding of the author, which can be used to safely elevate the ceiling of Dunbar’s number over time. After all, modernity has warped all of our perspectives on what is possible within the realm of the human mind, and so why not throw preconceptions out the window?
apologies for the slightly out of tune bass; it needs to be properly setup again after an extended period of dormancy.