It depends I suppose on how you define “book series”. If human development had somehow skipped capitalism and gone straight to something more like what we’d think of as industrialized socialism, there would probably be less individualized fiction book series written by a single author.

But if we define book series as simply a continuation of storytelling within the same universe, fiction or nonfiction, I don’t see how society would ever not have that. Before writing, a lot of history got passed down orally I’m pretty sure. In order to have an oral history, you would have had to be memorizing and passing down a lot of important stories about what came before. These may not be series in the sense of strictly chronological series of events with a clean beginning and ending, but they are still expansive storytelling, as opposed to one-off one-and-done stories.

If anything, I’m inclined to argue that one-off narratives are the more abnormal thing. That it is more normal in human history for narratives to be about the same “world”, usually a nonfiction one. From a logistical standpoint, even in the context of fiction, this is just easier to do; the main force opposing it is intellectual property rights, but fan fiction sometimes bypasses this anyway and gets away with it because it’s not competing for money / claiming to be official works. Making seemingly “original” works is kind of overblown as valuable and harder than it sounds, and some of the works that are perceived as original were inspired heavily by works that came before them. I can’t remember the details off the top of my head, but I’m pretty sure Star Wars was inspired by movies before it (maybe WWII stuff?). I know some of the music took intentional inspiration from Gustav Holst’s The Planets (and he surely took inspiration from things from his era).

So originality is a bit of a myth, depending on how you look at it.

You have to keep in mind that white people are much more shocked when they hear about other white people being treated inhumanely because they actually see white people as human. Even the best intentioned white person won’t tend to have as strong of a reaction to a non-white person being treated inhumanely because of how white supremacy is constantly pushing racist messaging on people since birth, internalizing it in them.

They’d be saying stuff like “imagine if it was your daughter/sister/wife/etc.” but aren’t as likely to jump at that when it’s non-white because white and non-white are treated as two distinct concepts, with one being lesser.

So, I will pull back and say it might be a bit hyperbolic to say there would be a civil war, but there would be a much more intense reaction and some of it probably would get violent.

That said, there are white people who care and are fighting. But on a broad level, we know that white people don’t react as strongly when it’s non-white being victimized and that white people are more apt to side with the authority figures in that situation. Renee Good and Alex Pretti get instilled into people’s consciousness far easier than the non-white people they were trying to protect.

If this was happening to white people, there’d be a civil war.

It works by making subtle changes in the AI’s word choices across the text it generates, which are supposed to be imperceptible to a human but, in aggregate, form a pattern that is detectable with the tool.

It’s definitely not a bulletproof approach. Anthropic says that the watermarks will “persist through some editing,” but if it’s pasted and rewritten with another chatbot, that signal could be destroyed, Ars Technica noted in its breakdown. And there’s a worry that the word choices the AI goes with to create a watermark might deteriorate the quality of its prose.

Attempting to watermark text has to be one of the more ridiculous things I’ve ever heard of. Humans are great at recognizing patterns. They already spot AI-isms to the point that they can sometimes falsely assume something is AI when it isn’t. They’re going to notice when text is intentionally changed to form a pattern that a tool can detect.

And there’s a worry that the word choices the AI goes with to create a watermark might deteriorate the quality of its prose.

Yeah, no shit, it’s almost like word choice matters. Sorry, the writer in me is getting genuinely irritated at the magical thinking present in the idea of watermarking text. Let me put it differently. Consider the following two sentences:

“She went to the grocery store.”

“She went to the food store.”

The second one is technically fine for conveying “place you go to in order to buy food”, but people will tend to say “grocery store” in English. Or they might say “supermarket”. It may vary by region and norms. Even within a single language, connotations of a single word or phrase can vary by region and history of it. When translating between languages, it gets worse. Some words in one language simply don’t exist in another language in quite the same way. Meaning is complicated.

It’s why the obsessive writer could spend a bunch of time thinking about a single word choice, only to second-guess it in the end anyway. Do I say “proletarian” or “working class”? These mean more or less the same thing, but they also have different connotations. Proletarian connotes class struggle. Working class can connote class struggle, but it can also be a vague term used in service of the status quo. There’s a good chance you’re in the presence of somebody with class consciousness if they’re an English speaker saying proletarian; not necessarily so if they’re saying working class.

This is just one example of how reckless it is to be swapping out words in an automated way and for the purpose of “watermarking” of all things. Laughable and there’s going to be nothing subtle about such a practice.

I didn’t say you were. I’m simply making some points about what people usually mean when they talk about Chinese AI as a good thing vs. western AI. If you want engagement beyond that, you’re going to have to clarify what you mean beyond a bad faith claim about people in the community without any context to back it up.

Strange comment.

Anyway, Chinese people born and raised in Socialist China probably wouldn’t think of a thing like this as a use for AI because they aren’t so intensely estranged, isolated, and culturally narcissistic like people are in the US. It illustrates Altman’s own narcissism that he is seemingly blind to how weird it sounds to have an AI make a podcast about your own life or the lives of your children. “Now your kid can grow up feeling like a child celebrity who has no privacy! What a boon!”

P.S. The thing about Chinese AI isn’t that all use cases are good if it’s Chinese AI. It’s that because China’s culture and power structure is fundamentally different, they are not going to tend to develop/use AI in the same reckless way that western “culture” does. The other thing about Chinese AI is that western imperialism not having a monopoly on the proliferation of AI tech is a very good thing for the world. The last thing we need is white supremacy trying to reassert its hegemony through AI-based colonialism/imperialism.

My favorite fiction series. I love how off the wall it is.

Time for the fishers of the world to unite. 😎

❤️ 🔨 🪝

I can’t find a sickle emote, so this will have to do.

You’re right, I did think of that some time after I posted. I’d be curious to know how it compares in that way to past decades, especially at the height of Red Scare propaganda.

I was hoping they got specific, but you’re right:

Cato Institute Senior Editor Michael Chapman explained that the poll did not define socialism, leaving it up to the respondents to determine what the term meant.

So kind of meaningless data, since we have no idea how the respondents define it in their head.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with the increased interest in surveillance and facial recognition technology. Pure coincidence! (said with so much sarcasm my eyes roll out of their sockets and go off to seize the means on their own)

That’s one of the reasons I recommend Blackshirts and Reds. Not because it’s the best analysis on everything, but because it makes a point of differentiating between real communists and people who took advantage of working class energy to do something else (the fascists). It validates the idea that there is such a thing as real deception in working class movements, while also going into detail on those who weren’t frauds, who really did make a difference on a revolutionary level.

Yep, good points. And if we look at successful communist revolutions in history, it was never like, “They got along swell with the ruling classes and then they did a peaceful of transfer of power after defeating the rulers in public debate.” It’s always, “They got in varying degrees of trouble with the law; often had to go underground to build and survive; some faced exile, imprisonment, or worse; and they succeeded not through better ideas in the abstract but through better practice: theory and organizing as a coupled dynamic, willingness to take power seriously, and making use of every advantage they could get from evolving conditions.”

In a word, the ones who seek to liberate from an exploitative power structure are always, in a sense, fugitives; if not in the beginning, they become that as their power and influence grows among the masses. It is not that they seek to be fugitives, not that they seek to violate the law, but that by opposing the exploitative system, a series of confrontations becomes inevitable, due to the unwillingness of the existing system to allow an alternative that unseats them from power. Those who seek to be only compatible and “change the system from within” are allowed more freedom of movement precisely because the exploiting classes know they can dilute and flatten some reformists on the inside with relative ease. What they can’t do with ease is manage the ones who refuse to comply, who insist there is a better alternative than what we have that is proven to be better in practice, and that the exploiting classes are only in it for themselves and are refusing a better life for millions for this selfish reason.

The rehabilitation of Stalin’s image is less about the rehabilitation of Stalin as a historical individual and more about defending and upholding Marxism.

Exactly.

Put it this way: If we as communists cannot defend practicing communists, then what business do we have being communists? Of course this does not mean we should dogmatically and religiously defend anyone who claims to be communist. But, broadly speaking, if all we can do is defend communism in the abstract, then we might as well go join a pacifist commune and cover our ears about what’s going on in the world.

And if our starting point for what’s “valid” to defend is what the imperialists, the colonizers, and the capitalists have said is valid to defend, then we’re left with no meaningful practicing communism to defend in the first place!

It’s absurd to look at a system that is exploiting you and go, “I’ll only criticize what they say is okay to criticize and only support who they say is okay to support.” It’s the stuff of newbie “leftists” who are dipping a foot in, who still believe in the system and what it taught them. They’re mad, but they haven’t yet come to terms with the idea that they’ve been lied to about a lot. In this sense, rehabilitation isn’t even the right word. It’s shoveling the lies out of the way so that people can see clearly. It’s challenging slander.

Solidarity with comrade Rorie and the working class bees who sacrificed themselves for the interests of the masses. 🫡

Eviction is already a cruel enough act without it being fake ownership of land stolen from indigenous people and done to an elderly person with cancer.

I am having a lib moment. I want to call him Narco Rubio (as if a mean nickname will make him fall).

Anyway, this is so shitty and like the last paragraph implies, it seems like a good example to help show people how bullshit the stuff about Maduro and Venezuela is.

White supremacists in general are awful, but it’s especially galling to me when it’s a fucking colonizer being like “what are you doing in my country.” If anything, it’s the indigenous who should be saying that to the colonizer.

ML with CAT (Marxism-Leninism with Chronic Anxiety Thought).

Okay, I am joking about the last part. Kind of. But I adhere to ML in its various practiced forms because history and theory have shown it to consistently succeed in rapidly transforming entire societies out of exploitative, desperate conditions into largely equal and modern societies that look after their people as a priority.

I see it kind of like this:

“When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a ‘Newtonian’ or of a biologist when asked if he is a ‘Pasteurian.’ There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoples’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them.” – Ernesto “Che” Guevara

When you get past the bubble of imperial slander, the evidence is overwhelming.

Now does this mean I think ML is the “end of history” theory development of Marxism? No. However, it is currently the most proven and reliable means of dealing with the recent (history) conditions. I always try to keep an open mind to further scientific development, but that doesn’t mean further developments will come from people throwing out ideas at random either; they will have to come from being tested against reality and so far, ML is the one that holds up.

Note that when I say “ML in its various practiced forms”, I’m going by the idea that, for example, China is its own expression of ML in culture and conditions (e.g. “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”), not a unique branch of Marxism. Same with the USSR. Same with Cuba. Etc.

Therapy is a rather disappointing institution. It’s not without value and I say that from experience of doing it for like two years, but it’s also painfully limited in what it can actually accomplish. Bougie ideology taints it with a directive of “getting people back to work” and in general, it’s not built to do much more than tell you what might be going wrong and urge you to do stuff that might fix it, or help you process something which can help some but probably won’t result in dramatic change. Because most of the problems aren’t actually caused by what you’re doing in the first place and bougie therapy can’t say that. It can only tell you what to do differently. So it reinforces individualism and pushes you more toward internalizing problems you have as having largely internal causes. This conveniently lets the systemic exploiters off the hook, even if it’s not expressly what the therapist intends.

I’m sure some therapists are better about this than others, but as a whole, the practice is, I guess I would say, a lot more underwhelming than I thought of it at some points in my life.