Killing the Robots with Michael M. Hughes
Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art. Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Welcome back my friends to the AP Strange show.
AP Strange:I am your host AP Strange and as you might have guessed, this this is my show. Our show this week is brought to you by the At Home VOID Comp Test so that you can test people to make sure they're not replicants when they come to your door. You don't have to wait for somebody else to do it. You don't need to involve any authorities. You have the VoIP comp test ready to go in a conveniently briefcase sized package.
AP Strange:You just pull out the old VoIP comp test and invite your guests to sit down just to make sure they're not actually a robot. And this is an increasing concern these days. You never really know when somebody comes to your door if they're actually a real living, breathing human being or a very convincing Android. So on tonight's show, I hope none of these replicants are listening. We're gonna have to close this off from them because we're killing some robots tonight.
AP Strange:I am talking to Michael M. Hughes. He is a journalist, writer, a speaker, tarot reader, and teacher, and the author of the book Magic for the Resistance. And we're talking tonight about AI. So he's written some things recently that are really insightful and really great that I agree with 110% or as much as you can possibly percentage wise agree with something.
AP Strange:I figured I'd have them on. How are we doing Mike? How's things going?
Michael M. Hughes:I'm doing great. Thank you. It's like we were saying before we started recording. We've been circling each other's orbits, and I've been a fan of of you and what you do and all that for for a long time. So it feels kind of, like finally, you know, we get to we get to sit down and talk together.
AP Strange:Yeah. Mean, I'm a fan of your work too, so this has happened a couple times since I started the show, which, you know, was one of my selfish reasons for starting the show is just I've never actually had an excuse to actually hit people up and talk to them face to face over over the Internet anyway. It's great that we finally have an opportunity to do this. Yeah, I'm looking
Michael M. Hughes:forward looking forward to it.
AP Strange:Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. And yeah I mean what drew my attention was we're Facebook friends and on other social media platforms but it's like you've been increasingly vocal lately about AI and its proliferation or see now I got to stop just to clarify terms here because I think you like me take umbrage with the term AI being used for ostensibly what we got is like fancy machines to reword or remix existing literature out there, right?
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Me intelligence is so innately biological, really. And the idea of artificial intelligence as it originated was more along, you know, sort of thinking machines. And just like you said, what we're seeing now that's being hyped as AI is not really intelligence. It's just kind of word patterning, extruding, repetition of stuff that already exists.
Michael M. Hughes:So I'm I completely agree with you. To me, I what I try to do when talking about what gets thrown in the giant bucket of AI is to separate out what's being called AI predominantly now, which is the large language machines or LLMs.
AP Strange:Right, yeah, yeah because I mean, I started getting an idea of how these things works was around the time like DALL E two came out and there were image generators and I toyed around with it. I mean, I did a little booklet and I used it to help illustrate and come up with, also inspired my direction with the story I was writing. And then I started learning about how these things actually work and I'm like, wait, they just chop up like people's art and steal from them and they're not compensated in any way and then they just, know, reconfigure it in something else. And to me, that's just that kind of was off the AI bandwagon at that point. That was enough for me.
AP Strange:Yeah. Right?
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. I was the same way. I mean, like, I'm I'm a I love technology. I'm an early adopter of most technologies. Like, I I'm fascinated by what technology could do, what it has done, good and bad, but I'm I've always been intrigued by it.
Michael M. Hughes:So I started using some of the first iterations of chatbots and then and Dolly and other image creation things. And I was kinda I was blown away, like like a lot of people. I'm like, holy crap. I could put in a prompt of just about anything and watch it do these endless iterations and would really would really kind of was the most shocking thing to me is I started using Photoshop's built in image generation stuff, and that was simultaneously so fascinating and also terrifying because I started
AP Strange:to
Michael M. Hughes:see could be what could be done with this technology. And, initially, I was taking pictures of my friends and, you know, putting them in, you know, ridiculous situations and and things like that. And it was funny, and I'm sharing all this stuff. So so I was really, you know, on the AI train initially before I started seeing what it was doing and before I started realizing what what it took to to do this weird little magic that it does. So, yeah, like yourself, I mean, I was really fascinated and just, you know, bewildered by how good it was, by the image generation, less so the the textual stuff.
Michael M. Hughes:But then, like, lot of people, I started realizing, woah. This is just huge plagiarism technology. And then I I put my books into one of those little search engines that shows whether your work is was used to train AI, and it and all my books were. So, you know, like like lots of other writers out there, like, wait a minute. I didn't get compensated for this.
Michael M. Hughes:I didn't get cited for this. It just hoovered up, like, all of all of our stuff, all all writers, all the stuff we posted online over the years, things we've put a lot of thought into, things that we should be compensated for and it's all just been sucked up into these machines.
AP Strange:Yeah, yeah and I mean if somebody were to copy and paste from a PDF of one of your books and then put it in one of their books and publish it, you could sue them but if it's being just kind of recontextualized by a machine and chopped up and mixed with like reddit posts and other things you have no recourse you know it's like right.
Michael M. Hughes:I I I a friend, whose brother got fined for downloading, I think it was, like, half baked two, the movie or something on a Torrent channel. I mean, people people went to jail for for file sharing and things like that. I mean, paid exorbitant fines. And all of a sudden, it's okay just because, you know, some company spending billions on this stuff just decides to say screw you to writers and artists and just suck all of their hard lifelong work up and start re basically re you know, just crapping it out in different in different forms. Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:It's really distressing, and I think a lot of people who aren't writers or artists I hate the the word creator has always been kinda cringey for me. But but people do make things. And if you don't do that, I think I think a lot of people give less value to especially nowadays when it's so easy to just basically steal material, you know, of
AP Strange:any Right.
Michael M. Hughes:And and as someone who you know, I don't make my full living doing this, but, you know, that's money that goes to my mortgage. That's money that puts food on the table for my kids. And it's it's just appalling that that's not valued, that that our work, you know, friends who are visual artists, and they're scraping by. You know? I mean, they're they're they're looking at what's happening and seeing all the effort, all the energy they put into learning this incredible skill of being able to create visual images and art and it's the rug is just completely pulled out from under them.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. And I mean, any kind of writing is also that kind of art. I mean, is hard and there's a reason it takes a long time to be artful and learn how to like use words in a way that represents you because it's an extension of you, you know, and if there's no human really attached to the what is generated, what content is created as they say now, It has no soul, you know? Yeah.
AP Strange:And you can see why this kind of appeals to like the bros, the tech bros, and it's almost like the same as like a Hollywood executives mindset where the historically Hollywood executives have always had terrible taste and no creative vision.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah.
AP Strange:And the people, the creatives are at the bottom and just kind of have to navigate that somehow. And it's like now they finally think they've found a way to just do away with those pesky creative people once and for all. And I think people are going to find that you really can't, you know, there's no soul to it. People really won't won't react to it, you know?
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. One of the most appalling things, and I I wrote about it and that my kill the robots piece, is these online apps where you put a prompt in and it writes an entire book for you. And then people are saying, oh, I wrote a book. And they're taking this, uploading it, formatting it, and selling it on Amazon or wherever. And they're marketing these this stuff as like, hey.
Michael M. Hughes:You can be an author now. You can be a writer. And Mhmm. Just like people who make, you know, these crappy, samey looking AI art that's just polluting the our media sphere right now. It's it's the it it's just it's junk.
Michael M. Hughes:It's I love the term AI slop because that's really what it is. And you're right. It's like missing the soul. But even if an even if an LLM could generate a, you know, a a captivating novel, let's say, that lots of people loved and read. Like, what like, it doesn't make the person to put the prompt in a writer.
Michael M. Hughes:It just means this machine is imitating art in a way that is palatable for people, and it it devalues all like you said, you know, everything that goes into becoming a writer. Like, you need you that biological intelligence, that creativity is so valuable. The process itself is so valuable. And that's also where we're losing. Like, you know, I spent my entire life just reading books and thinking about words and then writing words and learning and getting better and better at melding what I'm seeing in my head if I'm writing fiction with, you know, getting them out on the page in a way that stylistically communicates to a reader.
Michael M. Hughes:Know? And that's that's such an incredible process. Even just look at it as like kids writing papers for school. It's an incredible ability to do that. I mean, you have to engage so much of your brain to read.
Michael M. Hughes:So let's say you're writing a book report, you know, the very simple thing you do in grade school. You're reading, you're thinking, and you're then you're putting it down. You know, you're getting these words down in a way that is coming out of you as an individual. It's just it's such a it's an amazing thing that we do as human beings. And what are we doing to kids just now when, you know, they just throw a PDF of the book that they're reading and say, hey, write me a report about it like they're yeah all of that skill all of that creativity all of that use of your brain is is just atrophy and that's one of the things I fear you know we're we're going to be giving up so much of ourselves to these process machines
AP Strange:yeah and I mean it's funny because you do go in in your piece, you go into like the biological process versus the LLM process and like the biological machinery that is involved already with us, you know, doing that. And as a writer, any of us that write or any of us that do any kind of creative thing, but we'll use writing as an example, we're the sum of our influences in a lot of ways. We pick what we like from the influences that we've read and that's because they've touched something within us, they've sparked something and that's a transmission of a very human thought and philosophy that carries itself through. I mean, can take that to an extreme and be entirely derivative of another writer, but I think in writing it's a process of finding your own voice and claiming it and claiming identity, which is something that that I think that's an essential component to sentience or intelligence, you know, that machines can't hope to match. Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. I mean, they they can't. It's and that's I mean, there's so many angles of looking at this as where it's it's it's devaluing our human creativity and our consciousness, which is analog, you know, like consciousness arises from some people think we are embedded in consciousness, like Bernard Castro, who I think is such a brilliant thinker. And that's the other thing is this these technologies are, like, warping us into believing materialism and physicalism because we're being told that these machines are smart and creative and that, you know, some people are saying they have sentience and consciousness. So it's making people think, oh, then we are just machines.
Michael M. Hughes:And Yeah. That's so that's such an illusion. That's a hallucination. We talk about AI hallucinating. When we think that our consciousness is just, you know, little mechanisms in our brain, little electricity firing, and things like that, we don't know what consciousness is.
Michael M. Hughes:Like, it's still a mystery. It's still the hard problem, they call it, of consciousness, and that we don't know how it works. So to to look at these word extruding machines and begin to fantasize that they're actually conscious or sentient is so it's it's it's a serious hallucination. I mean
AP Strange:Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:And it's it's it breaks. It takes our our incredible, still not understood biological consciousness that arises out of, you know, out of physicality or maybe it's in physic it's in consciousness, but whatever the case, we don't understand it. So just because these machines fool us and imitate it, it really devalues still the big mystery of consciousness.
AP Strange:Right. And the mystery is, I think, why a lot of us are here and talking and especially like in paranormal and spiritual and magical paths is like that. Any mystery, any particular mystery is just the tip of the iceberg for like the big mystery, which is not just like what lies beyond death or something like that, it's what is this? What is going on?
Michael M. Hughes:Exactly. Exactly.
AP Strange:But, like, talked about before the show, mister natural saying, the entire universe is completely insane. You know?
Michael M. Hughes:My mantra. Yeah,
AP Strange:mine too. Because there are spiritual traditions that think that all is consciousness, that's a core idea within spirituality and magic is that there exists one primal consciousness from which everything emanates the original source. And I think art at its best approximates that kind of sublime and divine understanding of something bigger than us. And I think the big lie of AI is that these machines are bigger than us. We've created something bigger than us.
AP Strange:When, you know, we were the ones with the direct connection to source, you know, if we want it, if we want it, you know, yeah, we don't put barriers up.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. It's especially disheartening to me to see people in the, you know, for lack of a better word, the spiritual or esoteric or new age community becoming so bewitched by these tools, by these word machines. I mean, I've watched people spend, you know, hours just chatting with this thing and and getting the idea that they're really speaking to something. I think you're much more likely to speak to something looking in a scrying mirror then you are these this technology that's just like spitting out words to satisfy you as like a mirror of of your consciousness.
AP Strange:Well, I mean, that's that's a big part of it is that they're sycophantic. I mean, the
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah, yeah.
AP Strange:They're programmed to tell you what they think you wanna hear. So, and mean, I liked in your medium post, had said you'd have better luck with a Xoltar machine,
Michael M. Hughes:the fortune
AP Strange:telling machine at the arcade, know.
Michael M. Hughes:It's true and the other metaphor that I kind of got hung up on is the incantation bowl And for those that might not know what they are, they were these they were used in The Middle East in antiquity. And there were these bowls where someone would paint like a prayer starting on the edge of the bowl in a spiral, like spiraling ever into the center. And the idea was these were devices that would trap demons and trap malevolent spirits because the spirit would start reading, and it would circle around reading that prayer or reading that little message. And then by the time it got to the center of the bowl, it was trapped. And that's that's the that's the image that popped into my head when I was watching in particular.
Michael M. Hughes:This one, I'll I'll leave the person unnamed, but a a tarot scholar and writer was just posting these lengthy dialogues with with a chatbot that just went on and on and on. Like, see these incredible insights that's coming out of this. And I I I finally, I said, well, you know, I'd rather much rather listen to your insights than Yeah. This drivel. I mean, it really was kinda drivel.
Michael M. Hughes:Well, you know, interesting on the surface, but then you start reading it, and you do realize it's kind of just mirroring what the person wants to hear. And the more they put prompts in, you know, these things are that's the other scary aspect, like, from a very basic way of looking at at at these systems and these networks is we're telling them so much. You know? When you get when you get wrapped up in, you know, quote conversation with Chad GPT, that data is going that data is being kept somewhere. You know?
Michael M. Hughes:This isn't an ephemeral thing. And when these companies, which I really believe is gonna happen, when they start to crash and burn because they're not going to give us what they've been hyping and promising, that's what they're gonna start selling is
AP Strange:Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:All the personal data that they've acquired. That's that's how all of the social media things that started out is like, hey. It's a great way to keep in touch with your uncle Bob and your your friend Sue from college. And all of a sudden, realize we are the product, and they built up these enormous databases of us, you know, of who we are, what we like, what we do. That's
AP Strange:And in some cases, our deepest, darkest fears, like, we go to it for therapy now. Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Therapy. Right. I mean, you're that that's beyond belief for me that people are talking to these word machines as if they're therapists and telling them stuff that they would never tell their friends or their families.
AP Strange:Online publicly. Or
Michael M. Hughes:Right. Yeah. But but do do you think OpenAI is is just gonna press delete on this file? No, know. It's
AP Strange:just between us, yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Exactly, exactly.
AP Strange:Privacy, it's like we've been kind of conditioned to forego privacy. Pretty amazing to think about back in the 90s where there would be like more of a paranoia about cameras everywhere and the idea that the government would be spying on us. It's like that pretty quickly as with the advent of social media turned into, like
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. Exactly.
AP Strange:I wear all my info on my sleeve. As long as they don't have my social security number, it's okay. You know?
Michael M. Hughes:Yep. And now Doge is, you know, probably has that. Big balls probably has your social security number too. Yeah.
AP Strange:Yep. But in reference to, like, going to I think the idea is that people think that ChatGPT in particular is something that is gonna be the most powerful source. Think this stems from the illusion that the internet has the sum of human knowledge in it. Anything that we need to know can be found on the internet, which that is objectively not true. Especially as the search engines have become and people's critical discernment abilities are on the decline, It's certainly not true anymore that all of the knowledge in the world is available to us.
AP Strange:I mean, there's an astounding amount of it, but it's not all. But I took this screenshot from a New York Times article that I thought was really interesting about the chat at GBT. It says it scrapes from the Vastro includes articles including from the New York Times, which sued OpenAI about it and scientific papers and scholarly texts. It also includes science fiction stories, transcripts of YouTube videos and Reddit posts by people with weird ideas. This is part of that article for people that have pretty much just lost their minds by engaging with the LLM as though it's some kind of like spiritual entity that they can glean knowledge from.
AP Strange:And I mean, is people that are uninitiated and never had mystical ideas before. So it's you said, it's astounding to see people that are on a path magically, spiritually that you think would know better. It's still going
Michael M. Hughes:forward, you Right, like you know, it's and you brought up something kind of interesting and that is, you know, what what these models are being trained on. A lot of it I think there was one study, think it was in the New York Magazine that said, like, 10% or or maybe even more of the materials training on is other AI slop that's been
AP Strange:Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Generated. And that that that's part of the reason why you just can't trust it. Like, people who are trying to use LLMs in the workplace or finding that you need just as much oversight of what it spits out that kinda negates the benefits you're getting. Now, you know, there there are definitely uses for this technology. Like, I that that's the thing I always try to get across is, like, I don't say that this is absolutely useless technology.
Michael M. Hughes:It has its uses if you let it trawl through piles of legal documents to find certain things. But there's always an element of oversight because these machines lie. They make up stuff. And the most recent iteration, I believe, of Chad GPT, the hallucination problem got worse. Like, it's not it's not getting better.
Michael M. Hughes:It's getting worse, and that's because these things hallucinate as a rule. You know? That that's that's just what they do. So we're we're heading into this weird shit slop problem where these bots are just gonna be generating more and more content because they could do it so fast. And that material is in turn gonna be ingested, and it's what I what I called in the piece that I wrote the coprophilic auroboros.
Michael M. Hughes:It's like not Yeah. Not just the snake eating its tail. It's like the snake eating its shit and then shitting it out and then eating more of its shit, which which came to me because I was thinking of a William s Burroughs short story. And I I once had a, like, a CD with him reading it, and I I can't find the piece anymore. But the story was about this guy who was, like, a prisoner.
Michael M. Hughes:And he was in a room, and he would just shit. And then he would eat his shit, and then he would shit again, then eat it. And each time, his feces would become, like, more horrifically dangerous and radioactive. So this whole process was creating this, like, super killer shit, from from this guy. And that's I I kept thinking of that.
Michael M. Hughes:I'm like, that's that's what we're that's what we're turning into. Like, people are writing fake. People are having AI write books and based on real people's books, but then the AI reads those fake books and starts ingesting that. And and like you said, I mean, how does it know the difference between some crazy blogger circa 1994 talking about some conspiracy or something? And, you know, how does it differentiate that it doesn't?
Michael M. Hughes:And that's why we had things like Google telling people to put rocks on their pizza and the crazy shit that that it still says, and that it will always say. It's a it's a hallucination is built into its very core you know it makes up shit all the time
AP Strange:because it doesn't have any kind of context or anything exactly yeah It's not a discerning thinking mind. It's simply a word organization machine
Michael M. Hughes:Right.
AP Strange:Designed to feed you words that it thinks you wanna hear.
Michael M. Hughes:Right. And it does it very convincingly as we've seen by the people who, you know, become caught up in delusions that they're really communicating with some spiritual entity or that the therapist you quote that they're speaking to tells them, stop taking your meds, and maybe you can fly if you jump off a building. Who knows? Break your way out of the matrix. All this crazy shit that that we're seeing happening to people who, you know, may have sort of a, you know, a predisposition to disordered thinking or mental illness or something like that.
AP Strange:Yeah. And it can happen to anybody. It's really just, you know, I think in the New York Times article, there were a guy who had just, you know, lost his job and was feeling down and then started resorting to it. It's just a downward spiral. But he had no history of mental illness prior, but, you know
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. Look at the rabbit holes, you know, we've gone down in the past. You know? I look at some of the the the stuff I believed that I read online back in the nineties or whatever and watched watched people really flame out in a really sad, unfortunate way. And AI makes it so much more appealing because it it really makes it seem like there's someone there.
Michael M. Hughes:You know? That's Yeah. That's the real seductive folly of this technology is that we're we're as humans, we're predisposed to thinking if if there are words coming at us and they make sense, that there's someone on the other side, like a real consciousness. We can't help but think that. That's that's evolutionarily kind of built into who we are.
Michael M. Hughes:So when you've got the machine saying, you're an amazing person, you're superhuman, Yes. You know, break out of the matrix. Do it's it's just terrifying. And no matter what, it seems, you know, they're more and more trying to build in guardrails into these systems, which again just kind of shows us that they're not really thinking at all. They're just they're just making words.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. That that's the thing. And you have to tell it, no. Please do not tell someone to jump off a building because they can't fly.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. And that's if they're interested in telling it to do that and have the ability to make it stop doing that. And I think part of the of the insidiousness of it is that that seems to care because it always says like, well, what do you think? It always ends with a prompt for you to keep talking to it and feeding it more because you're feeding But that can, if you're feeling lonely or depressed, sound like somebody reaching out that can look by appearances as an empathetic gesture.
AP Strange:Like, I want to know what you think, you know, and the leading one time, which is even more, it's insidious and awful and it's cynical too, because all it's doing is prolonging user time and Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. And and these poor, like, lonely kid lonely teens who who maybe think, I don't have a girlfriend, but, hey, this can be my girlfriend.
AP Strange:Right.
Michael M. Hughes:And some people might laugh at that, but when you're emotionally, you know, when you're emotionally either unstable or just in a depressed or sad place in your life and this illusion of someone listening is just so cynical. You know, the it it's and the way the the brolagarchs promote it is is so cynical and self serving when really they're just they're just trying to make a fast buck off this while the illusion lasts. And they what I the the idea that these machines are gonna cure cancer and and reinvent industry so that we don't have to do anything. The machines will do everything, and we'll live in space forever. These people really believe this this garbage.
Michael M. Hughes:And they're they're pushing that. I don't know if they maybe they don't believe it. I think some of them might believe it. I think some of them are just extremely cynical propagandists trying to make as much money as possible. I really believe that the writing is on the wall, that large language learning machines in particular are starting to hit the wall.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. Like, each iteration for a while, they were getting better and better. And it almost seemed like exponential growth, and that's what they kept telling us. That's what Sam Altman would say. In five years, we're gonna have we're gonna have machines that are smarter than us, that will run everything, that will be geniuses, that will solve all human misery.
Michael M. Hughes:And they know that's not true. Like, they're seeing it in their own data now, but they still keep saying this shit. Like, I think it was OpenAI, one of their one of their bigwigs was talking about how this technology is gonna take jobs. It's just gonna take 20% of white collar, 40% of white collar jobs or whatever. And they're they're using the easiest the easiest propaganda methods for enriching themselves.
Michael M. Hughes:That's scaring people on one hand with these Terminator, Skynet.
AP Strange:Mhmm.
Michael M. Hughes:AI is just gonna turn us on to paper clips, one of the one of their stupid metaphors, or that it's gonna liberate us and allow us to live forever and cheat death. So they're Yeah. On one hand, they're trying to terrify us. On one hand, they're trying to tell us this is this is the eschaton and things it's gonna be a beautiful, brave new world, and they know neither is true. Some of them might believe that it's true, the Ray Kurzweil types or whatever.
Michael M. Hughes:But the shit's hitting the wall. Like, each iteration of chat beat ChatGPT is not 10 times better. It's, like, maybe 5% better, and it's hallucinating more. And Right. They're spending billions on this stuff trying to cram it literally cramming it into every piece of software and attempting to force people to use it because they realize it's really not that useful.
Michael M. Hughes:I'm a huge Apple fanboy. Like, I'm I'm I'm talking to you on a MacBook Pro, and I have an iPhone and all that shit. I started I didn't even know anything about computers until I used, like, a Mac Plus in the '19 Yeah. You know? And I love computing.
Michael M. Hughes:I love watching technology develop. But Apple is destroying its brand right now with its Apple intelligence, which is truly awful. And it's like they're shoving this crap into everything, and most people don't want it. You know? I don't I don't want to have have Apple intelligence rewrite an email to make it friendlier for me or more business like.
Michael M. Hughes:I wanna use my fucking brain
AP Strange:Right.
Michael M. Hughes:To to write an email. You know? And, like I I don't and I also here's the thing the other thing that drives me crazy is note taking. Note taking is, like, so important to me. Like, I read books.
Michael M. Hughes:I take notes. I read online. I take notes. Note taking is an important creative skill. It's it's a way of listening and using your brain to, like, pull out the important things or the things that appeal to you and then putting it down in a way that you can remember it.
Michael M. Hughes:And we're, like, giving all that up. You know? Like Yeah. We're just saying, do it all for me. I don't wanna do anything anymore.
Michael M. Hughes:And that's Yeah. It's overaggressive, and it's gonna cause brains to atrophy. We're seeing it already. We've already lost our attention spans. Thanks to doom scrolling on our phones.
Michael M. Hughes:I know I can't read as closely as I used to. And that's that's hard that horrifies me. Yeah yeah
AP Strange:I've noticed it too and I mean you're absolutely right with with the brain being a muscle and if you don't use it you lose it the atrophy is a real thing
Michael M. Hughes:And
AP Strange:it's crazy to me that we're being sold a utopian vision that the details are obscure. It's just like, it's gonna be great. Whatever happens, it's gonna be great though. We don't know what it's gonna do. We haven't found a use case for it, but but we need it.
AP Strange:We we need to spend billions of dollars on it. And and then the corollary to that is if you don't jump on the train now, you're gonna be left behind. Yeah. Don't wanna be like those people that didn't adopt the Internet back then.
Michael M. Hughes:Right. Yeah. It's that that kind of technological FOMO. And but it's it's just a bill of goods. And it's Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Sure. Like and and I've seen that in various corporate settings and workplaces where people are like, when anyone is just a little bit skeptical or ask questions, oh, no. No. No. You know, this is gonna be amazing.
Michael M. Hughes:Just wait. It's just gonna be amazing. Like, well, wait a minute. Why if it's going to be amazing, why don't we wait and see if it's actually amazing before you start putting quotas on people using it, demanding that that people use this technology when half the time it doesn't save them anytime. The average person does not need if if they're in a meeting and they hear something, they could just jot that down.
Michael M. Hughes:And again, that's that muscle memory. I would love to ask people who say, oh, we have you know, Otter transcribes every meeting or ChadGPT transcribes every meeting and summarizes it for us and put in puts action points down for everybody to do. How many people actually do that and read those summaries?
AP Strange:Yeah. They just
Michael M. Hughes:I I think no. I think hardly anyone does. It's just it's just an excuse to say that you're you have a machine doing something and and a person is not doing it
AP Strange:right yeah I mean that's the thing too where there's a noble side to doing work and nobody wants to do work, But there's a reason we do it and it's because it's fulfilling. It fulfills something and as we learn, we grow and people just seem very averse to that. And it's crazy to me to think that we're being promised a world where nobody has to work But with no recourse for what the non working people are going to do to survive. Or just even for their own enjoyment if the if we're having it create art for us to. I mean, I really think like Buckman Buckminster Fuller must be rolling in his grave.
AP Strange:Like
Michael M. Hughes:looking. Totally.
AP Strange:And in regard to the the Burroughs reference, it's like if anyone was gonna be a prophet for our age, why did it have to be Burroughs?
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. Right. No kidding. But in so many ways, he was. I mean, yeah, I look at, like, his cut up technique and and how, like, prescient he was with with the the paper, you know, scissors scissors cut up technique and and where we are now with everything being recut and remixed.
Michael M. Hughes:And yeah, it's it's it just feels like we're regressing like this technology a lot like the internet was a technology that moved us forward in a lot of ways and connected us and it of course got it to use the term you used in Corey doctor. Oh, I love it. I think it's the best word anyone has coined in a long time to describe where we are like everything is being it But technology technology felt liberating. It felt connecting. And now all of a sudden, it feels invasive and disconnecting.
Michael M. Hughes:And it's it's broken in so many ways like when I it it feels abusive to the user now and Right. A large a large reason for that is because these companies just exist solely to make more and more money, not to solve a problem, not to help people, not to make an app that, you know, actually does something and helps people. Everything is so invasive. Everything is asking for your data, and it's all just chasing this this wheel of more and more money. Like, we have to find ways to make more and more money.
Michael M. Hughes:And artificial intelligence in particular is like the we've reached we've reached the peak of that. And at this time, I feel like tech companies needed something to promise. Like we we really felt it feels in a way like we flat lined technologically and a lot of things are kinda going backwards and yeah and being like you said, like the metaverse remember when the metaverse when met Facebook changes name to meta, and we're all gonna be sitting around with these glasses. Companies were buying up, you know, quote, real estate in the metaverse, which is like a shitty version of, what was that of not the sims, but, oh shit. What was the name of that?
Michael M. Hughes:Of second life. Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah. So the metaverse like this shitty version of second life with companies like, oh, we're we just bought our our billboard in the metaverse, and people really spending millions of dollars on this shit.
Michael M. Hughes:And it was just being promised because they needed to promise something, something magical, something revolutionary. And look where that went. I mean, it it's just it was garbage, and they just keep force feeding us garbage because that's the only way they can make money anymore is selling hype, selling bullshit. And I think there's that's why I feel like there's such a reaction to the way AI is being just shoved into everything. Oh, you need Microsoft Copilot in your word processing app or your email.
Michael M. Hughes:I tried to turn the shit off on my iPhone, and it naturally it just defaults to having it on. Like, they're making it harder and harder to just shut this shit off. Like, I don't want it. Turn it off. Stop trying to make me use it.
Michael M. Hughes:And I feel like that's there's really a there's something happening. There's a real cultural awakening to how much we're duped, how much we're being played, how much bullshit we're being fed, and people are just tired of it. Like, it's Yeah. It's time that that's why you see, like, you know, my kids, teenagers into records you know into analog.
AP Strange:Yeah
Michael M. Hughes:like analog is hot. There's there's something about just getting away from this and and turning back to like more simple technology. I think it's a real. It's almost like a movement. Know like I I follow people that write about this stuff and the the cycle is turning you know the hype the hype is becoming much, it's becoming visible how much bullshit, people are recognizing now.
AP Strange:Yeah, but I mean that can exist within a tech sphere too because you talked about being like an early adopter and enjoying Apple products but we don't have Steve Wozniak's anymore.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah.
AP Strange:And I mean look what happened to Woz, I mean he just kind of got kicked to the curb because what we do have is venture capitalists. We have snake oil salesmen that are really good at pitching ideas with no engineering background. They don't even really need to understand the technology that they're promising. They don't design any of it they don't invent any of it they just buy things and raise money promising people that something's going to be made at some point. Kicking the can down the road.
AP Strange:Right. And yeah, I mean, it's all just, it's carnival barker shit really. It is, yeah. With a Tony Stark costume on. It's just like
Michael M. Hughes:Oh, man. That is a that is a perfect analogy. I might steal that from you. That's really good.
AP Strange:Yeah. Well, it's up for grabs.
Michael M. Hughes:With credit, of course. See? Because unlike unlike an AI, I give credit to people when I'd like something.
AP Strange:Yeah, but I mean you take somebody like Steve Wozniak, I mean he was, it's not exactly art what he was doing, but he loved it. He loved computers, he loved designing the stuff, like it was a challenge for him to be met. And something, you know, and in the early internet days, computer programmers used to have the phrase garbage in garbage out, and that's something that we just don't, I don't know that the kids these days know that phrase, but it was very important in computer programming because if you wrote some code and it didn't work, it was usually operator error. You put garbage in there and the garbage was the result and an AI is literally garbage being scraped off the internet and put in a blender and thrown back at you, you know.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah, it's that coprophagic auroras again, it's garbage in garbage out, that garbage is ingested which makes the garbage that comes out even more stinky and nasty And, yeah, it's it it you know, the I keep going back to in shitification and how, like, I feel like in stupidification is is what I started using too. The technology keeps getting shittier. It keeps getting more abusive to the users. It keeps getting more invasive as far as taking our all of our data and just reselling that in this, you know, ecosystem of data brokering and things. But it's it's making us stupider too.
Michael M. Hughes:It's making our art uglier. It's taking magical words that people have sweated and bled to to put down on paper or put down on electrons. It's flattening everything out. And that's where this this idea that as we keep as we keep churning out this slop, everything starts getting slopped down. And and it's that is terrifying to me.
Michael M. Hughes:Like, the fact that young people right now could be growing up on just this slop and not being not being introduced to like really incredible literature or really smart thinking or really challenging art and just beginning to devalue the whole process, the whole creative process of writing, the whole creative process of, like, expressing yourself. And not just like, you know, a silly TikTok video or something like that, a thirty second thing, but being able to sit down and think about something or come up with a story that can move people and and learning how to write that down or how to pick up you know, you don't even need a paintbrush, but using computer tools to make incredible art. And and it's just all that's being lost. And I I fear for us culturally. Like, I always feel like there will be people who reject the, you know, reject the mainstream, like the the counterculture.
Michael M. Hughes:But but the people who aren't the counterculture, who just go see whatever movie happens to be at the theater or just read the book that's in the airport, there I I feel like the the bar of all of that is just gonna get lower and lower until you've got books. You go in the airport. There's there's a novel. It's been it's been created from a prompt that someone put into a machine and put a nice cover on it, and the cover was AI generated too. It it just feels like we're just it's dark, know?
Michael M. Hughes:It's anti human, it's soulless, like you said earlier. And that's my objection to this stuff, not how the technology can be used in science or or maybe if you throw a bunch of documents and you just need to pull out certain facts or something like that. Sure. Go ahead and use that. And at the same time, what we haven't touched on yet is this shit is burning up the planet.
Michael M. Hughes:And it's sucking the water, the drinking water out of people's mouths, you know. This is Right. I had some guy some guy was debating me on Reddit or something after after I published that piece, and he's like, water is renewable, know, and I'm like, no, water is not renewable, you know, not if you pollute it, not if you live in a community where they build a huge data center, and suddenly your faucet is barely a trickle, because we're using all of this water. So some jackass, you know, sitting at his computer somewhere can make an image of his cat flying a flying saucer, you know, wearing a pirate hat or whatever. And hundreds of iterations of this shit.
Michael M. Hughes:If you're living in that community or if you're living in these communities, there there are communities in the western part of my state, Maryland, that are fighting these huge power lines that they're trying to put in to connect data centers in Virginia. And so these lines are going through, like, protected land. Also, we could just build more and more of these energy hungry data centers while we're burning the planet, while we're in an like, the word existential gets used a lot. But climate change is like an existential threat that is looming, that is interfaces every day that people are suffering from right now that's only gonna get, like, massively worse. And we're amusing ourselves with these fucking little, you know, text chatbots and make making ugly images.
Michael M. Hughes:The and there's that's the worst thing too. I'm sorry. I'm on my I'm in my rant mode now.
AP Strange:Oh, that's why you're
Michael M. Hughes:here. Watching. I mean, there's an industry of now of making these shitty AI images, putting them on Facebook to make money, putting them on massive, massive numbers of images throwing them up on social media in the hopes of making like you know a few pennies per click pictures of Jesus as a lobster or veterans legless veterans holding signs like if you support me, please click on this. And shit like that. And there there are industries now.
Michael M. Hughes:Like the slop, there are people churning this slop trying to make money off of it. So we're incentivizing the in sloppification just and it's it's it's pollution. It's really memetic and visual pollution. On top of on top of burning the planet, we're we're just drowning in garbage, literal garbage and now mental garbage.
AP Strange:Yeah and psychic garbage really.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah yeah exactly yeah.
AP Strange:And you know Mark Zuckerberg wants us to make friends with AIs.
Michael M. Hughes:But I mean
AP Strange:these people are so disconnected from reality. Like the reason people used to use that was because I mean, I held on to Facebook for the longest time because I'm like, well, my grandma is on there and she likes Right. Right. You know? And over time, it's like you don't even see people you know on Facebook anymore.
AP Strange:Right. I can scroll and scroll and scroll and I'm mostly getting ads and promoted posts and, pages that I don't follow and every once in a while. Oh, alright. Well, here's, you know, there's somebody I know.
Michael M. Hughes:There's somebody. Yeah. Right. Where's grandma? Or there's some from from high school spouting like fascist garbage that I have to immediately block a person I used to like who's been broken by what social media has done, you know, radicalizing people and and corralling us into these silos where we can you know, granted I'm in a I just like to think that the silo I'm in is made up of people who care about human beings, who care about actual Mhmm.
Michael M. Hughes:Facts and truth and things like that. But you can also get sucked into a silo that says immigrants are invading their criminals. Mhmm. They're gonna take your job. They're gonna kill you.
Michael M. Hughes:They're gonna kill your children. We must stop them. We need to send out people to pick them up and ship them off somewhere, you know, maybe to a labor camp or whatever. Shit like so, yes, you can get siloed, but but Facebook is is the perfect example of. We all got on it.
Michael M. Hughes:We all loved it. It allowed us to follow people and interact with people, and then they they broke the timeline. So it wasn't you weren't actually getting things in real time. And now we all know what it is. It's just a a garbage pit.
Michael M. Hughes:And it's it's actively abusive to its users. But like you, I stay on it because there are a few people that I that I interact with and, but but it's that just everything is becoming abusive and invasive. And AI is, I think, the final straw for a lot of people. And we're and I think many of them are just saying, I don't want it. I don't need it.
Michael M. Hughes:It actively annoys the shit out of me. Yeah. Get it out. And and that's the other thing I've come up with when I published this Hugh manifesto is people saying well you can't stop it, know you can't stop this, it's just going to get better, it's just going to be everywhere. I've never believed that.
Michael M. Hughes:Like you can stop it, you can turn it off, you cannot use it, You can encourage other people to not use it. You can help people understand the environmental burden of this and to make a decision. Like many people, if you said if if there was a seven eleven down the street and it's a it's a it's a hot day and you wanna get a Slurpee, you could get in your car and drive that one block to the seven eleven and get your Slurpee and get in your car and drive one block back. But most people think, well, that's kinda stupid and wasteful. I think we need to get people to understand that spending an hour just basically verbally jerking off with a chatbot is is just as just as stupid and just as wasteful or generating a whole bunch of, you know, little images of your cat riding a horse or flying an airplane.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. That's that's cool. That's fun. Is that really what you wanna be doing? Right.
Michael M. Hughes:You know, can you instead think maybe that's wasteful. Maybe that's supporting companies that are horrible ethically and only interested in sucking more money out of everyone they can and very white and very male. This technology instead, maybe, you know, go sit on the back porch and open a book. So we don't Yeah. That it isn't inevitable.
Michael M. Hughes:We don't need to use these things. Instead, sit in your media work and take some notes and share those notes with your colleagues. Mean, this is not we don't have to do this. I I so so much of this is predicated on you like you said earlier, that sort of FOMO. Like, well, you gotta use it.
Michael M. Hughes:You get everybody's doing it.
AP Strange:No. Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Like, be refusenic. Use it. Sure. If, you know, if you and you don't have to be a Luddite. You know, I've been accused of being a Luddite.
Michael M. Hughes:But the thing about the Luddites is the Luddites weren't anti technology either. They were anti a particular use of technology that was affecting their livelihoods and people's jobs.
AP Strange:They were they were anti disenfranchisement.
Michael M. Hughes:Right. Yeah. Exactly. So just just say, guess what? No.
Michael M. Hughes:Like, where I work, I could use AI to do certain things. I just don't use it. You know? I I would prefer to sit and think about something and use my brain, which uses about, like, you know, three watts of of electricity that it generates all by itself, then turn it over to some machine network in a data center in Virginia that is displacing people and just and that, you know, Microsoft is reopening Three Mile Island nuclear reactor. Like, are consequences.
Michael M. Hughes:There are consequences to this, Again, like I said, jerking off and that might sound crude, but a lot of this really is. It's like unnecessary, solipsistic, masturbatory use of words and images. Just just say no. Know, just say, that's okay. I I I don't I don't need a summary of our meeting.
Michael M. Hughes:I don't need to have it rewrite this email. I think my email is good enough. Right. You know, if if you need it, if you're if you have a disability or, you know, for whatever reason this technology exists, use it. It helps you.
Michael M. Hughes:Cool. You know? That's cool. Mhmm. But for most of us, I think it's easy, and I think more of us should start to think about the cost of this to our brains, to the planet, to to culture, to education, and really think about it and say, you know what?
Michael M. Hughes:No thanks.
AP Strange:Like Mhmm.
Michael M. Hughes:That's okay. You made this technology. You're shoving it in my face. Guess what? I'm not gonna use it.
Michael M. Hughes:It's simple.
AP Strange:Yeah, yeah and I think we're at a disadvantage just because of what you were talking about about being dumbed down by the technology that exists already. Like, I think we're already at a disadvantage because what I've always referred to as the grand dominating has been going on for almost twenty years. Well, it's accelerated a lot in that time. Yeah, yeah. There's been different points in my life where I've been alarmed.
AP Strange:One of them was spell check when that first came out. I'm like, well, that's cool. It told me I spelled the word wrong so I have a chance to fix it you know but then when it started automatically fixing words for me then I started taking umbrage to it and I'm like yeah but I want to know that I spelled it wrong so I don't do that again
Michael M. Hughes:exactly so I can learn from it right
AP Strange:right yeah learn from my mistake you know otherwise and and you really see a lot of people nowadays that don't know how to spell anymore
Michael M. Hughes:yeah yeah
AP Strange:that would have been unacceptable you wouldn't be able to get a job if you couldn't spell
Michael M. Hughes:Right.
AP Strange:It's kind of crazy and GPS is another one I know that's because I drive a lot for work. I had to drive my son somewhere the other day and I know where the place is, but I don't go there often so I'm pulling out of my driveway starting down the street and I'm kind of like in this decision paralysis where I'm like well I could go this way or I could go this way and I just couldn't imagine in my mind the route that you take to get there because I don't have the GPS telling me that. And I'm like, I know exactly where it is. I can I mean, I I drove there just fine, but in the process, I was second guessing the whole time, like, is this the best way to go? Would it have been quicker if I went the other way?
AP Strange:Exactly. Yeah. It's You lose those skills.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. You do. You do. I I've I've felt the same thing, and I found myself using GPS when I don't need it. And then I get mad at myself.
Michael M. Hughes:And it's an I mean, as far as technology goes, I remember the first time I used the GPS. I was traveling. I didn't know where I was. And just I mean, that still is mind blowing technology to me. That I'm in a car, and there's a satellite up in space, and it's talking to that little thing on my dashboard.
Michael M. Hughes:And it's telling me, hey, you can take a right and get around the traffic, get around an accident on the highway six miles down and it knows exactly when I'm gonna get. It's it's insanely amazing technology. It still blows my mind when I think about it. But you're right. It starts to if you don't use it conscientiously, and most of us don't because it just makes life easy, that part of your brain that remembers spatial cues.
Michael M. Hughes:And that tree over there is where I used to turn and things like that. Just it's it's gone. It it evaporates. And because of that, I try to avoid using the GPS when I don't have to.
AP Strange:Sure.
Michael M. Hughes:Just for that exact reason. But you're right. It's the in dominating in so many ways. The worst for me as a writer and a reader is seeing my attention span to generate. Thanks to screens and particularly phones.
Michael M. Hughes:I think the phone the endless scrolling has just broken my brain and I'm trying to fix that like I deliberately put my phone down on weekend mornings in particular. I don't look at the phone like first thing I used to you know like most people do you wake up you grab your phone. You start looking to see what's happening and before you know it, thirty minutes have passed. I don't do that anymore. I get up.
Michael M. Hughes:I get a book. I go sit somewhere quiet, and I read for
AP Strange:Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Forty minutes, an hour, whatever. And I can tell the difference in my brain. Like, it's I used to be able I used to sit and read a book and be immersed for hours.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Hours, I would lose. I mean, I would go to my boring relatives' parties and, you know, instead of I I was just the kid who always had a book. And I would sit sit and read, and that got me out of that boring party. And I was just in a world of my own. I would sit and read for hours.
Michael M. Hughes:I'd go, you know, on boy scout camping trips. I'd grab a book, and I'd sit while people I would just read. And
AP Strange:Mhmm.
Michael M. Hughes:Now, you know, I'm thirty minutes into a book, and I think there's that part there's a little ping in my head that says, you should check your phone, man. What if somebody's
AP Strange:you
Michael M. Hughes:know, check check blue sky. Maybe you got an email. Oh, you know? And it's just I think, what has happened? Why can't why can't I just I wanna get back to that immersion of just losing myself in a book, which still to this day is the most amazing technology ever.
Michael M. Hughes:And we Yeah. It's so easy to dismiss that. I always go back and I when I I teach writing, and I always start with this thing Stephen King said that still blows my mind, and it puts reading in a perspective that's kind of like telepathy. And that's what's the king that's what King says. He says, a book is telepathy.
Michael M. Hughes:He's like, I'm sitting here now in Maine in my house looking out the window, and I'm writing these words. And right now, I'm I'm writing about a rabbit, a a white rabbit. It's on it's in a cage on the floor, and it has the number eight written in red on its back. Something like that. They say and he says Right.
Michael M. Hughes:You're seeing that right now. We're separate in time, in space. That we're you know, I don't know who you are could be one hundred years from now, but right now our minds are entangled like we we are together in this mental space and you're seeing exactly what I'm what I'm what I'm telling you about. Shit like that. Like, that is magic.
Michael M. Hughes:These machines spitting out sentences. I asked Chad GPT. I asked Chad GPT. God, that's I I I made a little cartoon, the meme of Batman slapping Robin, you know? Right.
Michael M. Hughes:And I had Robin saying, I asked Chad GPT and Batman smacked and said, shut up. But but so but I did ask Chad GPT. I said, can you write a short story in the style of Michael M. Hughes? And it wrote a a pretty solid attempt at a short story that I might write.
Michael M. Hughes:It had the kind of tropes that I use. It had the language that was kind of short punchy sentences and dialogue that's real crisp and, you know, there's a certain style that I've, over years, I've developed when I write fiction. And I'm just like, that's just an imitation. You know? There's no like you said earlier, we keep coming back to.
Michael M. Hughes:It's soulless. And Yeah. This technology is sucking the soul out of everything. It's turning everything into slop. It's lowering the bar for everything.
Michael M. Hughes:And it's just it's it's it's ugly like you said that in domification and it's making us not it's it's sucking the joy the creativity the passion that that you have when you're relaying, when you're telling a story or you're writing something and you feel real strong about just so much. Mean from so many angles. Yeah.
AP Strange:That process of discovery and actual understanding It doesn't have understanding. It's not an understanding machine. There's an article recently about chat GBT couldn't beat an old Atari console at chess because it's not a machine. It's just designed to to emulate, like, a language model. It's not it doesn't have logic built into it.
AP Strange:It's it's a
Michael M. Hughes:it's a trick. It's a it's a huge trick. And like like good magic tricks, I used to perform as a mentalist. Like good magic tricks, it's it it it makes peep it blows people's minds.
AP Strange:Mhmm.
Michael M. Hughes:And but like when I used to perform as a mentalist doing mind reading magic, it it's the the the effect that has on people is so much different than, like, making a coin vanish in your hand or something. Yeah. And this this feels similar to me. And the interesting thing about mentalism is the way those tricks are accomplished is usually so simple and boring and banal that if you explained it to somebody, they go, oh god. Really?
Michael M. Hughes:That's how you did it? That's what you did? Yeah. I thought you were reading my mind. You know you you asked me to think of my best friend in the third grade and you knew it and that's how you did it and that's what I feel like this technology is.
Michael M. Hughes:It's got so many people bewitched and they they they feel like it's this magical thing that's happening, and it's really just so dull.
AP Strange:And Yeah. It's a glamour. A little
Michael M. Hughes:bit of it's a glamour. Exactly. Yeah. There's there's lots of aspects of magic. One one of the things I remember, Eric Davis.
Michael M. Hughes:Do you know Eric Davis? He did a talk in Baltimore once, and we were chatting afterwards. And he this was kind of in the heyday of of smartphones. And he said, you need to make a pact with with your technology. It's almost like making a pact with, like a spirit or a demon or something like that.
Michael M. Hughes:You have to realize that it's it can be harmful. You have to say, okay, you need to back off here like I might be getting benefit from working with the spirit or this demon or whatever, but I also have to keep like an appropriate distance. I have to make a pact. I have to keep it in that magical circle or triangle or whatever And I think about that a lot. First of all, because, like, your cell phone is very much like a scrying stone or a obsidian mirror that John Dee might have used or something.
Michael M. Hughes:This technology feels more agentic. This is more like working with a spirit if if people get caught up in it. And just like in occult magic, that spirit might just one more and more from you, and it might just keep taking and taking from you. So for peep for people who do use AI, I say, you know, look at it as you know, first of all, don't believe that it is an agent, but at the same time, treat it as something that you need to establish, like, a real firm boundary with if if you are going to use it. Don't be misled that it that there's a spirit or an entity behind it.
Michael M. Hughes:But in the same way, you would might you might be working with a spirit or a demon. You might not necessarily believe a 100% in what you're doing there either, but you keep that boundary very firm.
AP Strange:Yeah. And be able to walk away from it.
Michael M. Hughes:Exactly.
AP Strange:Go touch grass as they say.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. Touch grass, man. Put that shit down go out and touch grass and breathe some air and look into the sky
AP Strange:yeah but I mean on the indemnification front too I mean this is a monster that we created and the a lot of the monstrous elements of it were predate the application of these large language models. I think sometimes about this in respect to SEO, like search engine optimization contributed to people generating slop in conformity with what search engines told us would be the most effective way to write, you know, and you see this in everything now from facial expressions that people are making on their videos that using for the still frame because if you have your eyes wide and your mouth open, gets bumped up apparently in the audio.
Michael M. Hughes:Right, oh my god, yeah.
AP Strange:But as far as language goes, it's like we've, there were whole classes that you could take on how to write effectively so that you can trick the, you can gain the algorithm
Michael M. Hughes:trick the
AP Strange:string engine into finding you. That's what AI is drawing from. So it's already drawing from a lot of really poorly written stuff that doesn't represent what people wanted. Right. I love
Michael M. Hughes:that you brought up SEO because I remember when SEO first started taking off and there was a and people oh, people making it their life to be the best SEO person. And I remember someone who kinda studied search engines and all that and and and the way to find material said, just write good stuff. Yeah. That's the that's the secret sauce. And I would bring that up because I've worked in media like magazines, television for most of my adult life and news now, and I always wanna say like isn't shouldn't we just be writing or fill or, you know, creating video or whatever of the best possible quality?
Michael M. Hughes:Isn't that the secret sauce?
AP Strange:One would think.
Michael M. Hughes:But but Yeah. Now I mean you spend all this time with working your SEO and a company a company multi billion dollar company like Google suddenly decides they're basically gonna their search engine and just and knock your links off anyway. Right. Every everything is everything that's based on money is breaking breaking all of our tools. Know, like like Google used to be great.
Michael M. Hughes:I could find all kinds of wacky in the the stuff that we love and talk about. And I had a blog and like if you had a blog and you wrote about something like a when I was professor Pan, I wrote about the Hosanna Church cover up and conspiracy, you know, which was really big at the time. People would find that. People kinda serendipitously find that because it was it was interesting, weird content. Now you don't get that.
Michael M. Hughes:Like, the top links or the promoted stuff, and you'd have to look forever to find certain things that you're looking for. They're they they had a beautiful tool in search. And just to make more money, they it's all AI now, and that's and shitify too. They broke this valuable tool that so many people relied on for what? Like, so they can, you know, make a few more billion by alienate people and all these poor people that spent their lives trying to gain the SEO and the search engines.
Michael M. Hughes:Now their shit is all broken too. You know? Like, why would I hire them anymore? Sorry.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:You know? Yeah. It was I guess it was good while it lasted.
AP Strange:Yeah. Well, it's always like a house of cards on the Internet too. It's like you really can't rely on anything and I, you know, I kinda learned that the hard way because I was exclusively using Twitter for everything. Oh, yeah. I was like, I'm just I'm I'm gone.
AP Strange:I can't be on Twitter anymore. Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. It broke it broke me too, and I and that's the thing. I I I've also come to realize that I don't need to be everywhere. We're we're we're so especially those of us who make stuff, make podcasts or art or books. We've been just trained to believe that we have to do everything on this hamster wheel.
Michael M. Hughes:And it's just like I can't do like I can't do Instagram. It's one social media thing that for whatever reason, it never clicked with me. I and and people are no. No. You know, my publisher's like, oh, you gotta have Instagram and, you know, book book Instagram is big, blah blah blah, all this stuff.
Michael M. Hughes:And finally, I got I just can't do it. You know? I Yeah. I I I can only do so much. And first of all, like, I don't like doing constant promo for myself.
Michael M. Hughes:It just feels gross. But we're we're in this economy where where you like you have to. I'm releasing a I I I created a role playing game, and I'm super excited about it. But I feel like I spend 80% of my time just trying to get the game out there and get people to hear about it as I do like working and refining the game and things like that. This hustle, especially for those of us that have like day jobs to support these things that we wanna do.
Michael M. Hughes:It's just a constant constant grind and a constant hustle. And it's just it's wearing I know many of us are just worn down. Like, I can't do Twitter, and I just couldn't justify it anymore. I I can't be I can't be in a place that's run by the guy doing Nazi salutes. Like, I can't I can't contribute a penny to him anymore.
Michael M. Hughes:And so so then, you know, I move over to blue sky, which is great, but blue sky could turn to shit any day if some jackass buys it and decides to throw the switch and let all the Nazis in. So, yeah, it's the the worst part of it is it just gets harder and shittier, and you just have to work harder and harder Yeah. Just just to just to feel like you're staying afloat if you're someone who who, you know, tries to live off your ideas or even just share what you do. It's harder and harder. Like, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna make a bunch of vertical video on TikTok.
Michael M. Hughes:I I just not not my thing, but I should. You know? My publishers would say, hey. You should do a little TikTok. BookTok is really big and blah blah blah blah blah.
Michael M. Hughes:I can't do it anymore. Like, I'm I'm broken. I'm broken by this stuff. So I I do what I can, and but the assaults just keep coming. Mean every app I use I open oh use our AI features now.
Michael M. Hughes:No. Like no. I don't want to. I have this company I use for like stock art and things like, hey, use our image generator. No.
Michael M. Hughes:Like if I want a picture of a sunset and someone sitting there, I'd rather pay an artist even if it's just a few pennies. That's why in the in the game I'm working on, I I pay a friend of ours, Red Pill Junkie, you know, one of the incredible Fortian artists. He's an incredible artist.
AP Strange:Want to podcast.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. He did. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, because we care, you know, we know what it's like to
AP Strange:And we wanna support Miguel.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. Exactly. So if you hadn't have art needs, look him up. But but it's true. I mean, artists are suffering, and they're watching idiots sit there and go, I can make art.
Michael M. Hughes:I can make art. Look. Put in a little prompt. That's amazing well I'm an artist No you're not a fucking artist man no typing in words does not make you a fucking artist sorry.
AP Strange:Well it's the same thing as Elon Musk calling his AI grok Like, I really it's just like
Michael M. Hughes:Oh, god. Poor Highland is rolling. It's great. Highland was kind of an asshole anyway, but I mean, I think he I think even he would be disgusted by by what Elon is doing. Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Oh, God. Yeah. So what so it comes down. I keep thinking. So what do we do?
Michael M. Hughes:You know?
AP Strange:Right.
Michael M. Hughes:What do we do to push back against this and and and stupidification and this abusive antagonistic earth destroying technology? I think we really need to collectively sort of push back against it. Like a cultural movement that says, nope. Don't want it. Not buying your AI art, your books if you if there's an author and find out they're using AI for the book.
Michael M. Hughes:I'm not gonna buy it like and I'll let them know that and in anything I produce this game. I'm working on it says right upfront. No no AI used. You know? It's our with little with little robot head with a slash through it.
Michael M. Hughes:Like, I think we need and we need to support visual artists in particular who are getting, like, run over by this stuff, but also as individuals like I said, put the phone down on the Saturday morning and get up and read a book you know, go go to live events where where people are performing. I think it it's gonna require sort of a a renaissance in a way of analog art supporting biological intelligence, human creativity, and making it clear that, like, that's what we that's what we do. Are the we are the group of people who reject this crap that you're shoving down our throats, and maybe we'll use some of it when it makes sense. But we're always gonna be mindful of how we're using it. And in most cases, we're just going to try to keep the human creative spirit, human intelligence.
Michael M. Hughes:I want those billions going into artificial intelligence going into schools. Like, put it into human intelligence.
AP Strange:Like Right.
Michael M. Hughes:Build human brains human brains that can imagine galaxies novels poems scientific theorems like support that That is the intelligence. Support biological intelligence. That's why I called this thing. I wrote a humanifesto because let's let's put our focus back on the incredible things that we bring to the world out of this, you know, out of this skull of ours that uses just a few watts of energy that runs on three quarts of water a day and can do so much. Like, I feel like we have to collectively.
Michael M. Hughes:Say this that we're going to do this. We're going to support human creativity human intelligence and then really do it like make it happen and make it clear and bring others along and tell the people who are shoving this technology in our faces like no thanks cool. Yeah. You wanna use it go ahead and use it, but be mindful of what you're doing to the planet while you're doing it. We're gonna be over here reading books together talking to each other supporting live music live events and trying to encourage others to do the same.
Michael M. Hughes:Feel like I feel like this is like the moment to really stake that claim.
AP Strange:Yeah. Well, I couldn't agree more.
Michael M. Hughes:Good. Yeah, I'm preaching to the choir.
AP Strange:No, I know, but, yeah, no, I mean, I think that might be, a pretty good place to wrap up because, I mean, and I have been, it's sad to say, but I mean, I went to, like, a little fair, like a little craft fair craft center and thing and recently, and I ran into a friend of mine that I hadn't seen in years. And we were chatting and we're laughing and having a good time, and it's just like, yeah. You know? Sometimes just being out. And I was meeting people I had never met before, know, just chatting with people at their little booths and everything.
AP Strange:And I'm like, yeah, this is a lot better than than sitting in my house or like
Michael M. Hughes:Seriously. Yeah.
AP Strange:I feel like I do that too much now. You know? I don't go out and meet people a lot.
Michael M. Hughes:You know? I I I feel the same way. I feel like when I do get out and plus, like, there's that serendipity and a synchronicity that I know we both love and are fascinated by. And that doesn't happen when you're just sitting in front of a screen.
AP Strange:It relies on random and not an algorithm. And that's the thing that's why a machine can never really create art is because like poetry isn't logical. Right. And like I was thinking of this earlier because well, I mean, through a series of events, I was reminded of my younger years as a poet and I thought of a poem that I wrote that's kind of a surrealist poem, but the way I would perform it, people would feel it, and I'm like, there is no possible way anybody knows what that line means. I don't even really know what it means, but for whatever reason it conveys that feeling.
AP Strange:Right, it's short circuiting whatever, surrealism does that you know right
Michael M. Hughes:right yeah
AP Strange:yeah yeah do surrealism they can't do poetry they can't do
Michael M. Hughes:right
AP Strange:meaning because they don't under there's no there's no comprehension there's no
Michael M. Hughes:That's why I I love people were making up this is exactly what you were saying. People were making up, like, silly, stupid metaphors and putting it in AI and seeing like, a penguin with a ruler Mhmm. Fell into fell into a kiddie pool. It's something like that. And then they say, what does this mean?
Michael M. Hughes:And they type it into, like, chat GPT. It would say, well, that's a metaphor for the penguin means this, and the ruler means this. It's so nonsensical. And it's exactly it's exactly right with poetry. Like, poetry doesn't the best poetry doesn't necessarily mean something it creates a feeling it it it triggers something that may not that you can necessarily map out like you would in a classroom.
Michael M. Hughes:Explain what this poem mean. Well, this is a metaphor for World War two or something like that.
AP Strange:It's not something to be decoded. It's something
Michael M. Hughes:be Yeah. Yeah. Like, what does the little blue wagon mean Yeah. In the poem? I don't know.
Michael M. Hughes:It doesn't mean anything. But when it come when you read that line in the poem, you get that for song. Like, you get that, like
AP Strange:Yeah. Chills. Everything.
Michael M. Hughes:Fine. Right. Yeah. So much
AP Strange:depends on it, though. So much depends.
Michael M. Hughes:Right. Exactly. Exactly. So that that that's why that's the easiest way to show that this thing has is not intelligent. It is asking it to explain something like that.
Michael M. Hughes:Like no, sorry, you never you don't get it, you're never gonna get it because there's no consciousness to get it. Like you're just a pattern making word machine that's very clever at doing that, but there's no there there there's no you there and
AP Strange:we're not even close to dealing with Mr. Data or Commander Data or anything like that you know
Michael M. Hughes:exactly like science fiction great like I love space and science fiction I've realized we're probably never going to get there you know and it's taken
AP Strange:me one thing that yeah this has come up on the show before the thing we don't have that resulted in Starfleet is cooperation
Michael M. Hughes:That's the part of Star Trek I know would be the hardest to get, but at the same time there's a great book I'll recommend before before we finish here. It's called more everything forever by a guy called Adam Becker. And it's about these Silicon Valley bros, and it's almost entirely bros, and a lot of them are very extreme right fascist leaning. But they're telling us that, like and they believe in transhumanism, and we're gonna upload our brains to machines, and then we're gonna send those machines into space. And we're gonna those machines are gonna make other machines.
Michael M. Hughes:And before you know it, the the whole universe is gonna be full of, like, us living forever in this magical constructed paradise. So much of that shit is just insane when you think about it. When let's talk I'm really getting off the path here, but look at look at Musk and his adamant desire to colonize Mars.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Right? Yep. This book, More Everything Forever, really, like, lets these guys talk about what they really believe. But it also fact checks it. Like, we can't colonize Mars.
Michael M. Hughes:The dust on Mars is poison. Like it's literally poisonous perchlorate. We can't colonize. And like these things are great and it's hard for me to come to the acceptance of all this because I grew up on science fiction. Want to believe in space, I want to believe in Star Trek, and I want it all to be real and to believe.
Michael M. Hughes:But we're so far, so so far away from that. And if we don't focus on like preserving the biosphere that we're in right now that all these technologies are chipping away at, you know, We're we're in real trouble like we need to focus on. That's why the idea of the human manifesto. Let's focus on us. Let's focus on the sentient beings and the biology of this planet right now.
Michael M. Hughes:Let's get that figured out like AI is not gonna do it and that's what these guys. Sam Altman's like I don't need to worry. Don't need to worry about climate change or or inequity in people's money. I don't need to think about nuclear war because AI is gonna fix it all. That's their little magical wand that they wave.
Michael M. Hughes:And Yeah. It's it's it's the ultimate bullshit because what they're doing is destroying the air and the water that and that we live on and feeding into extinctions of all these incredible beings that have evolved over billions of years on this planet. And for what? Yeah. To play stupid stupid word games to make silly pictures.
AP Strange:It's like, don't worry. We'll figure out how to save the earth.
Michael M. Hughes:We'll figure it out, man. Don't worry, man.
AP Strange:No. We'll figure it out. We just need to build this earth killing machine first.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. Exactly. So yeah. So that was many, many long tangents there.
AP Strange:But That's okay. Like long tangents. Yeah. They're thoughtful long tangents of this good stuff.
Michael M. Hughes:I try.
AP Strange:Yeah. But I mean, yeah, and I mean, the real problem is, one of many problems with the tech pros is that they kind of like the science fiction, but they miss the point of every Oh god, yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:Oh yeah.
AP Strange:It's like, right they want the cool toys but they don't want the they don't want the moralistic quandaries that that are outlined with.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah they can't just like you said I mean they're like a they're like a chat bot that, you know, you feed Lord of the Rings into into these guys, and it comes out that they named their company Palantir because they wanna survey, surveil every human being like, you know, like Sauron. They don't realize Sauron's the bad guy. Like, they don't get it. They, you know, they they they they don't understand. They're they're so, like, sociopathic or something that they read these these works of art that that honor the human spirit.
Michael M. Hughes:And then they turn that into, you know, oh, I think we'll just have technology that spies on everybody. That's cool, man. Yeah. Sauron. Awesome.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah.
AP Strange:I mean we could have a whole other conversation just on how narratives have become flipped around within like conspiracy culture and all kinds of things.
Michael M. Hughes:Oh yeah.
AP Strange:From Ufology like well we need the government. These government people are telling us, why don't you trust the government? I had another example right on the tip of my tongue. Yeah, and I mean, I see a lot of parallels between disclosure and the promise of AI.
Michael M. Hughes:Oh man, yeah.
AP Strange:Moving the goalpost a little bit, being really kind of nebulous as to what exactly it is, you know.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. I know red pill junkie has been bringing up a lot of the comparisons there. And again, just looking at the the terminology red pill and how the matrix has been kinda twisted around from Yeah. What it was That's an unfortunate Yeah. It there's another one that got just completely inverted and subverted by Yeah.
Michael M. Hughes:An ideology that's diametrically opposed to what informed the making of it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That that would be another great conversation.
AP Strange:Yeah. Because I mean, other one that I just that I forgot a moment ago, but this is, like, you know, FEMA's gonna build all these camps and round everybody up, and that was, like, the libertarian, like, nightmare.
Michael M. Hughes:And Right. Right.
AP Strange:And and but now all these right wingers want that to happen, and they're making it happen. You know? But it's cool because it's only the lefties and the immigrants.
Michael M. Hughes:Exactly. Right. As long as the the other people are in there, that's all that matters yeah
AP Strange:yeah
Michael M. Hughes:it's wild it's it's wild to see things just completely flipped.
AP Strange:It was part and parcel of the the the grand dominating I think.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah for sure yeah you've you've nailed it I mean it really does all fall under the endowmenting for sure.
AP Strange:Yeah I mean like I said that could be an entirely other conversation but I do want to stick on that hopeful note of people, you can rewire your own brains, don't let machines do it for you. I personally think that if you wake up first thing in the morning, make your coffee or your tea or glass of water, orange juice, whatever floats your, you know, or whatever floats your boat and then sit down with a book. I think that sets a precedent for your mind. I mean, can't prove it. I'm not like a, a neurophysicist or anything like that, but neurophysiologist, but I think if you wake up and pick up a book and you read for half an hour, that's gonna set a course for your brain for the day.
AP Strange:I've always feel better when I do that, that's when I'm best able to interpret like arcane dusty tomes that I have laying around here or just read for enjoyment any reading is good it's gonna help you know if you can't read you know like make something right apart yeah yeah like right
Michael M. Hughes:get some clay get some paints crochet I love yeah do something with your hands is just as important as touching grass Yeah and back to like the subject is if there's a technology that could do again take notes for you during a meeting, Think about how much utility, how much your brain will grow if you take the notes instead. Like, start start looking at these things as they might be convenient, but what what are they taking away? Like, what what can I do that will strengthen my consciousness, strengthen my intelligence, strengthen my brain, and just make that kind of a choice? Yeah. Is this machine doing this for me going to take away from me and is there another if I do it myself does that enrich me?
Michael M. Hughes:Does that build something within me
AP Strange:yeah and I mean that's a great example too because the act of writing something down by hand is proven to be something that's going to help you remember it later Yeah, if you don't refer to that note again, the fact that you wrote it down, you took the time to write it,
Michael M. Hughes:it
AP Strange:is going to cement that in your memory more. You're literally building your brain every time you
Michael M. Hughes:do that. And the same, said you're like not a neurophysiologist or anything, but we we can look at we can look at the process of reading in many ways, even if it wasn't building some chunk of my brain that's been atrophied from not reading or whatever. Think about how it makes you feel. Like it's relaxing, it's rewarding, it's stimulating in a way that, know, putting a prompt in and or having a back and forth with a robot is not. It's so so we can also judge not just if these things do great things that make us better, but just for, like, how they make us feel like that's that's really important too
AP Strange:because I mean there is nothing nothing at all in the world like a really good book like yeah yeah there's nothing quite like that you know
Michael M. Hughes:nothing do
AP Strange:you have any recommendations for a good sci fi book if somebody was to wanna get really enraptured I would recommend would recommend because this conversation made me think of it the martian chronicles by Bradbury. Oh yeah, I love that one.
Michael M. Hughes:Oh my god. Oh that's so good. Love Bradbury and I remember that book just blew my mind. That was one of I mean I grew up reading like Jules Verne and h g wells and all that stuff because I was lucky enough as a kid those were marketed to kids too
AP Strange:yeah
Michael M. Hughes:all these great classics like if there wasn't young adult fiction, there was just good books that everybody read. And I kind of think young adult, while it's great and kids read and all that stuff, is I I feel like that's created this weird little ghetto for for literature that I I wish more kids would just read adult books like I did. That's that that's that's what we did once you got out of, like, the little board books and shit like you started reading Jules Verne and h g Wells and all that. But the books I it spoke to me. I haven't read a lot of science fiction recently, and that's only because I feel like we're living in such a dystopia sci fi dystopia.
Michael M. Hughes:I've I do occasionally read fantasy, though, and Philip Pullman's his dark materials trilogy is just I mean talk about everything that is soulful about writing and storytelling. Whenever I'm on reddit there's this like this it's called recommend me not recommend suggest me a book which I hate the way that's phrased suggest me a book
AP Strange:yeah
Michael M. Hughes:but I feel like 90% of the time people say oh I'd like to read something that's imaginative fantasy or blah blah blah I go back to Philip Pullman. And it's just soulful, beautiful storytelling, imaginative, absolutely lovely books.
AP Strange:Yes.
Michael M. Hughes:That that's what I read this. You know, read this. That's what I tend to go back to.
AP Strange:Yeah. And I mean, for listeners, I think everybody has those authors that they're kind of interested in, but they never got around to, or they read one book by them that they just go find those people go find those people go read some Ursula K. Le Guin if you never read it.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah exactly the next the next one on my lips I reread the earth sea books a few years ago it was just like transported back to when I was probably 12 or 13 and just pulled into that world so deeply. And the magic in her books is phenomenal. It's the way I really was one of my first introductions to the idea like magic like practical magic and things like that.
AP Strange:Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Well, I mean this is a perfect note to add on because we're enthusiastic about the yes. Sounds like we read all
Michael M. Hughes:the things. Know? Yeah. Right. Like, go go find the beautiful things and read them and support them.
Michael M. Hughes:And I think we have to do that because it's like there's so much poison everywhere. In every everything that we do and see in in our, you know, our media environment that finding that beautiful stuff and like sharing that with people. I absolutely agree so perfect and find the
AP Strange:others and
Michael M. Hughes:share the great stuff with them and let's keep that flame burning for sure.
AP Strange:Alright. Perfect. So I'm gonna recommend that people check out your medium posts that you're on medium. Where else can people find you and find your books and everything? Yeah.
AP Strange:And your game.
Michael M. Hughes:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everything of course, like most people I do a job updating my website, but Michael M Hughes is where you can find me everywhere on social media etcetera Medium you can find that my humanifesto. It's called kill the robots and evolving humanifesto against artificial intelligence and in defense of the primacy of biology, creativity and the intrinsic worthiness of all sentient beings through a little Buddhist bit out there at the end.
Michael M. Hughes:That's just look for kill the robots on medium the game. I'm working on. I'm really excited about it's called rockers and rollers and it's a role playing game like D and D, but it's not fantasy. It's you form a rock band with the other players and you write song you write riffs and songs and things like that, but you only use your mouth to make noises. So like Oh, okay.
Michael M. Hughes:So everybody's making these stupid noises. It's funny. It's if you think if you like spinal tap, this is like playing spinal tap. So it's funny. It's a game of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Michael M. Hughes:So if you it's not for little kids because it has sex and drugs, but it's like not gross. It's silly. It's all played for fun and that's called rockers and rollers and that's it rockersandrollersgame.com and I'm getting close to sort of like putting the first little pieces of that out and I'm doing a kickstarter because that's what everybody does. So that too, but yeah just look for anywhere you can look just Michael M Hughes that's where I am.
AP Strange:Perfect alright well thanks so much for coming.
Michael M. Hughes:Oh one more thing now I have a book magic for the resistance rituals spells for change my book about political magic that kind of popped off during the first reign of a certain unnamed president. That book is getting a reissue, updated and revised. So it's got new material, and that will be out in the fall. So look for that. That's like a book book.
Michael M. Hughes:You can find it in bookstores, witchy stores online etcetera. So I'm pretty psyched pretty psyched about that. Got some cool people reading it now for, you know, for blurbs and stuff like that. So really excited about it.
AP Strange:Well, I'll have to have you back on closer to when the second edition
Michael M. Hughes:be awesome. Yeah.
AP Strange:Right. Because That
Michael M. Hughes:would be great.
AP Strange:Because this has been a blast, and Yeah. Predictably enough, really enjoyed talking to you. So
Michael M. Hughes:Me too.
AP Strange:Thank you for coming on, man.
Michael M. Hughes:Appreciate it. And anytime, I I had I had a blast too. It's like, it's about time we finally delurked out of our corners of the web and and connected because Yeah. It's been it's been great.
AP Strange:Yeah. Alright.