I identified something really odd while I was out at PAX Aus; the normal cadence and tenor of the AI discourse began to vibrate at an especially high frequency. The conversation has always been fraught, but everywhere I turned the side which advocated for the tools was really spun up, aggressive, and emboldened, and I wasn't seeing the counterpunches I'm used to. My presumption is that it's connected broadly to the Anthropic IPO, which is a severe test of… well, it's a gut check for the whole ball of wax - the future they are attempting to sell.

It's not a conspiracy theory to suggest that mind-sculpting the public, that is to say Manufacturing Consent, is trivial and largely invisible in the social media era. It's the air we breathe. If you are here, tolerating me, it's possible you remember when they hadn't learned to do it online yet. Nobody ever believes it when I tell them; they're conditioned to demand that any proposed functional aspect of the past is a psyop, nostalgia. It's really, really important that they make you believe that. As the man says: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."  If you think humans have ever flourished outside of the future they will literally murder you to create, it's because you're a reactionary and a heckin' bad pupper.  

This is connected in some ways to staunch AI warrior Tim Sweeney, whose enthusiasms we have depicted in our thrice-weekly comic strip, Penny Arcade. Because Unreal Engine is moving to an AI-first workflow, and Steam requires that the use of AI tools be declared, everything made with the engine must wear a Scarlet Letter on their store page. He describes these as "abhorrent" and functionally a political statement. As I have said many times, a person's politics are often what they don't consider to be political. I don't consider AI political. So… there you go, I guess.  Until they're ready to discuss the original sin of the training data, I'm done discussing it with them.  

This is all the most recent set of maneuvers in an ongoing one-sided feud Tim has with Gabe Newell, a man who snorkels when he wakes up and lives on a yacht constellated by the other yachts he owns. It's a real madmen.gif situation. Right now, Valve is working on a game whose mystery is so ubiquitous that it constitutes an urban legend for three generations, and another game so dense and mad as to constitute continuously unfolding n-Dimensional Asylum. They aren't bound by the laws of the Earth. God has turned his eyes away.

Fortnite was a failed game that changed everything for Epic when a few human beings there identified PUBG's ascendance, cloned it, and drafted on that. Musical artists and a torrent of beloved characters, toys, and worlds have propped it up for almost a decade. Good luck making the unpredictable with your prediction engine.

(CW)TB out.