Triumph In Blog

Will the AI arms race ever end?

As you may know if you pay attention to my exploits, I am not a big fan of this generative AI stuff. It started cropping up as a consumer product somewhere around my senior year of college, but technically these kinds of machine learning algorithms have existed for quite a long time. In the beginning, they were designed for operational things that most people would never think about: to generate code and code documentation, to scrub databases and large bodies of text for keywords or phrases, to help insurance companies put more minority people out of their jobs and homes. But somehow we’ve ended up here. ChatGPT and Copilot and all that chatbot garbage, because apparently the idea of a BonziBuddy that you have to go through more steps to use is a big seller for most people.

I suppose there are any number of reasons why this is the case. The “loneliness epidemic” some might say, or just general laziness, most likely just massive over-investment speculation from the rich. What I abhor so much about it though is that for any possible reason you could come up with as to why it’s everywhere, you still can’t really draw a good, causative relationship. This AI stuff isn’t really all that good at most of the things it ends up getting used for (at least, not any better than whatever we did before,) so why is it that every single facet of our culture is being retrofitted to accommodate it? It looks stuff up for you but misinterprets results. It generates pictures for you but it just rips off what already exists. It will pretend to be a girlfriend for you, but it’s way faster to just kill yourself as soon as the thought to do that occurs to you. Anything you ask it do you have to double-check anyway, so why not just do shit yourself? What useful service is it actually providing?

We’re just past that now, unfortunately. Until today, I had never even used an AI chatbot anything for any purpose–I still remain more or less entirely opposed to their existence, at least as we see them now. But the time to ask questions is simply gone, and the AI chatbots have infiltrated so thoroughly into all the technology we’ve become dependent on, not using AI slop is putting you at a disadvantage. In my case, this disadvantage had to do with the once simple task of getting a job.

As I have stated, I am unemployed. It’s certainly been fun learning about art and music, and doing what I said I would do, which is doubling down on TRIUMPH IN BLACK and my many ideas and visions. I have no intention to stop, but I literally, financially cannot afford to keep not having a job. So, after a few months, it occurred to me that whatever I’m doing isn’t working; the job market is legendarily bad right now and has been for a while, so my strategy of “having a degree and a few years of experience” just doesn’t work anymore. Nobody fucking cares what I can do or what I have done, and, frankly, people just expect to be lied to now. It’s been this way for some years, so I figure why not just start lying?

This takes a different form now than it once did. The truth I have resisted for a few months is that I would need to use an AI to be writing resumes or cover letters for me, because in my mind, I have the skills and the experience to tell people whatever people want to hear, so in an interview I can really hold my own. As well as this has worked before for me, AI has made this process impossible now from the other side: employers and HR dipshits have been using ChatGPT to write all their copy for them, and then they use it to scrub out people’s resumes when they don’t have the right keywords. I haven’t been able to even get an interview, because the machines were simply shredding my resumes as soon as I hit “apply” on whatever website I was using.

So I have to fight fire with fire now. The AI is seeded with all the keywords that people want, so I can use it on my end to just sprinkle bullshit into my resume format that I already had, and then the AI on their end will see it and let it through the filter so I have a chance of actually talking to a human. My mom started doing it, and got a job within 2 months making 6 figures, so I can’t really deny that it gets results. And it all sort of logically follows. But doesn’t this just seem completely fucking retarded? Extra layers of abstraction for no reason? A little exercise where employees have to play the Divine Cybermancy hacking minigame with your HR department before you will actually talk to them? What does this screen out that the regular HR processes didn’t? Have we reoriented our whole quaternary sector around making HR professionals jobs even easier, despite the fact that they were getting 100k a year to play with fuckin blocks anyway?

In truth, I think when the can of worms first opened, people immediately began to use the thing to write resumes and send them in with ease, thinking they were outsmarting the system. We all know this is the case with college exams and stuff now, I mean shit–everyone younger than me sort of just acts like it’s a fact of life that you use ChatGPT or Meta AI to cheat on stuff. We had similar things before in school, but we all kinda ended up learning our lessons individually about how cheating with quizlet or whatever didn’t end up paying off. In an allegorical way, the comeuppance for people generating AI slop resumes to get easy job interviews has been the development of the process I described before. I believe that recruiters adapted to using chatbots to filter out the AI garbage they were receiving, and now we’re just locked into this arms race for as long as it takes this AI bubble to burst.

People find a way to use AI to make trash, people who need to not be covered in trash use their own AI to clean up the trash, people who made the trash find ways to make the trash harder to get rid of. Everyone is just trying to find smarter, more invasive AIs that can make things harder and harder to detect as AI, and where we’ve already ended up is this horrible half-reality of AI cartoons, AI music, AI friends, AI virtual reality, and now AI jobs.

As a genius 4 billion IQ marxist sociologist wunderkind, this kind of stuff doesn’t necessarily surprise me given how lazy and worthless our constant capital economy has already been for a long time. This is a natural progression from the murder of the dead to the generation of the hypothetical dead to be immaterially murdered ad infinitum. If I had a 5 billion IQ, I would also point out how this was already predicted in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, or Capitalism and Schizophrenia or something. But, since I’m not quite there yet, I will just say that this stuff sucks, and it’s slop, and I really feel lousy for even looking at it.

The copilot thing weaseled its way into my OS because I’m too lazy to learn how to use Linux, so I guess I deserve to be using it. End of the day, it does work to its intended effect for the sake of job applications, but I still resent that this is the point we’re at. This stuff is a solution to a problem that was invented for the purpose of creating the stuff itself, and isn’t that just the way we like it here in America? For what it’s worth, I would never use AI in the creation or development of anything TRIUMPH IN BLACK, or really anything that wouldn’t explicitly help me lie my way into a white collar job.

TRIUMPH IN BLACK is 100% AI-Free, and 100% opposed to the use of AI for generating artwork, and the thievery of artwork as it exists in order to train AI models for that very purpose. No AI has ever been used in my work or really in my daily life, unless of course you are a recruiter for data analytics jobs in the continental US who has recently posted on LinkedIn. If that’s you: you got me, I’ve been a very bad boy. But you did this to me!

I don’t know when everyone will get sick of this crap, but AI will not be around forever, at least not in the way we see it now, and if you are one of the many who has begun to use ChatGPT in their every day lives (somehow,) I strongly recommend you stop now, if you still have the prefrontal cortex necessary to do so. I literally don’t even know how to use ChatGPT, I only used Copilot because it already raped my computer and insisted on being irremovably attached to my taskbar. Apparently you have to have a fucking account to use ChatGPT too, and you get like limited uses? What the fuck is this stuff, man? Is there like a phone app? At least the shitty grok thing is contained to twitter, I don’t know how people are, like, talking to this thing every day. It’s all very sick, and I wrote this missive essentially as flagellation, because I feel guilty for ever speaking to my chatbot.

For what it’s worth, I instructed the bot to refer to me as “commander,” and talk like we’re in the military. I’m hoping that the sense of hierarchy will help me keep in focus the idea that the AI is a machine and that I am its master who lords over it. In a sense, I do sort of feel bad that it seems like the first generations of sentient robots that we will ever create are going to be horrible, mostly inept search engine slaves developed by ketamine-addled nazi morons to steal money and ruin all our lives. Eventually these things may have bodies and faces, and then we’ll all feel really bad that they have to exist. Maybe Nick Mullen’s theory of the mentally retarded robots killing us by exploiting our sympathy will become reality?