I feel like there is an enormous range of stories to tell and that AI only makes these more accessible. I have gone off on tangents many times exploring parts of my universe because of directions the LLM took. Like I limit the model to generate a sentence at a time and I’m writing half or more of every sentence for the first 10k tokens. Then it picks up on my style so much that I can start the sentence with a word or change one word in a sentence and let it continue with great effect. It is most entertaining to me because it is almost as fast as me telling a story as fast as I can make it up. I don’t see anything remotely bad about that. No one makes a career in the real world by copying someone else’s writing. There are tons of fan works but those do not make anyone real money and they only increase the reach of the original author.

No, I think all the writers and artists hype was all about Altmann’s plan for a monopoly that got derailed when Yann LeCunn covertly leaked the Llama weights after Altmann went against the founding principles of OpenAI and made GPT3 proprietary.

People got all upset about digital tools too back when they first came on the scene; about how they would destroy the artists. Sure it ended the era of hand painted cartoon cell animation, but it created stuff like Pixar.

All of AI is a tool. The only thing to hate is this culture of reductionism where people are given free money in the form of great efficiency gains and they choose to do the same things with less people and cash out the free money instead of using the opportunity to offer more, expand, and do something new. A few people could get a great tool chain together and create a franchise greater, better planned, and more rich than anything corporations have ever done to date. The only thing to hate are these little regressive stupid people without vision, without motivation, and far too conservatively timid to take risks and create the future. We live in an age of cowards worthy of loathing. That is the only problem I see.

Stories about Skynet or The Matrix are about a similar struggle of the human class against machine gods. These have no relationship to the actual AI alignment problem and are instead a battle with more literal machine gods. Point is that the new thing is always the boogie man. Evolution must be deeply conservative most of the time. People display a similar trajectory of conservative aversion to change. In this light, the reasons for such resistance are largely irrelevant. It is a big change and will certainly get a lot of push back from conservative elements that collectively ensure change is not harmful. Those elements get cut off in the long term as the change propagates.

You need a 16 GB or better GPU from the 30 series or higher, but then run Oobabooga text gen with the API and an 8×7b or like a 34b or 70b coder in a GGUF quantized model. Those are larger than most machines can run but Oobabooga can pull it off by splitting the model between CPU and GPU. You’ll just need the ram to initially load the thing or deepspeed to load it from NVME.

Use a model with a long context and add a bunch of your chats into the prompt. Then ask for your user profile and start asking it questions about you that seem unrelated to any of your previous conversations in the context. You might be surprised by the results. Inference works both directions. You’re giving a lot of information that is specifically related to the ongoing interchanges and language choices. If you add a bunch of your social media posts, it is totally different in what the model will make up about you in a user profile. There is information of some sort that the model is capable of deciphering. It is not absolute or like some kind of conspiracy or trained behavior (I think), but the accuracy seemed uncanny to me. It spat out surprising information across multiple unrelated sessions when I tried it a year ago.

If you read some of Karl Marx stuff, it was the fear of the machines. Humans always make up a mythos of divine origin. Even atheists of the present are doing it. Almost all of the stories about AI are much the same stories of god machines that Marx was fearful of. There are many reasons why. Lemmy has several squeaky wheel users on this front. It is not a very good platform for sharing stuff about AI unfortunately.

There are many reasons why AI is not a super effective solution and overused in many applications. Exploring uses and applications is the smart thing to be doing in the present. I play with it daily, but I will gatekeep over the use of any cloud based service. The information that can be gleaned from any interaction with an AI prompt is exponentially greater than any datamining stalkerware that existed prior. The real depth of this privacy evasive potential is only possible with a large number of individual interactions. So I expect all applications to interact with my self hosted OpenAI compatible server.

The real frontier is in agentic workflows and developing effective niche focused momentum. Any addition of AI into general use type stuff is massively over used.

Also people tend to make assumptions about code as if all devs are equal or capable. In some sense I am a dev, but not really. I’m more of a script kiddie that dabbles in assembly at times. I use AI more like stack exchange to good effect.

I painted cars for nearly a decade. I intuitively know how various color hues are made. For instance, there are only two kinds of black. The most common is made from carbon and it is a yellow base. It will always tint a color towards yellow when added to any other base. Then there is the much more rare purple based black. Some color mixing systems do not even have a purple based black and it in impossible to hit some color matches as a result. Some special edition Harley Davidsons are too dark to hit with my old PPG mixing system. I usually kept a bit of purple black from BASF for this purpose.

Another color that would blow your mind is this one white (that is used on Toyotas IIRC). It was so bright of a white that, when I first encountered it, I tried just using my brightest white base because in my mind, there was no way that tinting was going to produce a brighter white. Almost all whites go one of three directions in tint. They are all either yellow - most common, blue - maybe 2/5ths of white cars, or red - very rare at maybe around 1 in 20 and extremely subtle. All of these are very subtle to notice but to a painter they are plainly obvious.

So this one Toyota white looked like I sprayed a blotch of grey primer even after using my brightest white. I was in trouble because a small panel job might turn into a whole side of a car to blend out a color difference like that in ways no one will see. I finally looked at the color formula from the color code and mixed an approximation of it. The formula involved a mix of odd colors, but the result was actually brighter pure white and that blew my mind. It did not tint in any tone or go darker at all but actually went brighter.

I have some of the best color vision of any other painters I encountered. This is actually how I ran my paint business. When you mix paints there is a minimum amount you’re supposed to mix to make it right. It is really about the minimum amount that can be measured and how much of the smallest amount of a color is involved. So if the formula has 1% of this one red, and the minimum I can dispense is 1 gram, I must mix 100 grams of paint in total. I may only need 50 grams, but industry standard is that ai mix 100 regardless and have to use or toss it. I don’t need to use formulas like this. I can look up the base ingredients and make the colors from scratch in smaller quantity. I also kept around 10 bottles of common base colors that I would mix together. So if I painted a silver car and had some color left over, I would put that in my silvers bottle. Then on my next job with a silver car, I would take my left over silvers bottle tint it a little bit and spray that just over my primer over the repair. Then I would mix a very tiny amount of the proper silver from scratch and use this to blend out the actual final color coat. I did things like dilute the small amounts of colors I needed in special ways like by combining it with clear binder, solvent, or one of the base colors in the formula I was replicating. This gave me access to a smaller amount than the 1 gram of red.

Painters must tint the formula for any color they mix anyways. As cars age, the color degrades for many reasons. So even when making the minimum formula, it is just a baseline for tinting. I simply flipped this paradigm and tinted everything while only using the formula as a reference. This means I spent far less on paint per job, and I could approach smaller repairs more cheaply than most people doing automotive paint. I also have hacker skills with clear coat application that make smaller repairs possible.

Generally, I consider something to be dystopian if it is making negative assumptions about the future that are rooted in speculative fiction. These are more like science fiction, fantasy, or geopolitical.

I consider something utopian when it is unrealistic and glossing over aspects that are impossible or poorly premised while presenting them as positive.

An example of dystopian would be the Terminator films or most films and books about AI. These fall into a trope of the machine gods. These are no more than a retelling of a pantheon like mythos of supernatural gods. The issues of future AI are unrelated to this mythos. They are also based on the fallacy of dominance caused extinction. By this logic Earth is a monoculture. These conceptual abstractions are dystopian because they are making stupid handwaving assumptions that result in a dark and grim setting.

Depicting the messiness of reality does not mean a fictional story is either dystopian or utopian.

An example of a utopia is something like a biblical paradise. It is premised on brutal authoritarianism that lacks any objective nuances about the true diversity of life and opinions. It is glossing over the real differences in what people want and expect out of life in an idealized story arc that harms a lot of people. When these people are sidelined as irrelevant, the true underlying dystopian reality comes into view. Utopia is always a story of propaganda-like perfection masking a terror that lies beneath.

One can paint such abstractions on almost any story. These are not really genera even if someone calls them such.

You mentioned your story involves massive geopolitical upheaval. This concept could be painted as dystopian depending on how you write it. Throughout history there were many underlying reasons for changes. Like in the era of Alexander the Great, the conquests of the Macedonians in that age were more due to advances in equipment and a professionally trained army in an era that primarily consisted of less formal city states and small raiding parties. The era of the Romans was mostly the beginnings of broader social cohesion and coalitions of regions. The Great War and WW2 was the era of solidifying global boarders and the role of imperialism. If you are proposing a new era of evolving change, the reason for that change and why that change is a form of evolving progress in a geopolitical sense is important if you would like to abstract a label of utopian or dystopian. Otherwise it sounds like “war fiction” IMO.