Brain Wave #25: Wake Me Up When September Ends

 Brain Wave #25: Wake Me Up When September Ends

I guess by now that we all know how generative AI works, whether it is videos or images most of us can recognise the "uncanny" aspect of AI generated content: it almost looks as cartoony and never photo-realistic enough for us to look at it being something captured out there in the wild. One big element for how we recognise such things simply comes to some imperfections that we can spot as we analyse the image: maybe a hand has more or less than 5 fingers, maybe the background doesn't seem really that consistent with whatever is going on in the image, heck I've even seen some AI ads for scarves of which patterns didn't even make sense lol.

I currently live in this uni accomodation with a bed that seems to be even smaller than single, and let me tell you as someone who rolls around bed all night it is not at all comfortable. Me, I'm someone who cannot just fall asleep, I need the lights to be off, I need my surroundings to be silent and whatnot. Also I tend to have weird ass dreams, and those are quite frequent too, but I mean that is only out of the one or two I remember on a daily basis, based on the hundreds that we have every night apparently. Well a few days ago I had such a weird one that it made me think deeper on how I might see dreams in the future, let me tell you. Even from the start it gets quite convoluted as it is never explicitly shown, but the whole premise of the dream is that I'm going into a sort of simulation or dream we could say in which I have to do certain things. So for brevity and not to make my words reduntant, I'm gonna cut out the "middle world" bits and go straight to the "simulation" I'm inside, in the dream. Also my dad is with me in this "mission" during the dream, but I don't really recall us being side by side the whole time. So basically inside this simulation that is build by a Skynet type of AI: we are basically just crossing a road in this steampunk looking world, with our objective being to act like everything is normal, even though this simulation is full of "anomalies". You could think of this simulation as a reverse of that one game "The Exit 8" where you have to exit a Japanese train station, but you have to spot whether there are "anomalies" to go back and go towards the right direction that has none of them, the objective of the game is to keep going through this station and exit through a path that is completely normal. Well this simulation I'm in is the complete opposite, the steampunk city is filled to the brim with anomalies: the surroundings desynchronising, people around melting or looking unhuman, people's voices going through different abnormal pitches, objects moving in all sorts of directions, you name it. So basically our mission is to just walk through this city and act like everything is normal, act like we are part of the imulation as well: if we do anything that even hints at us realising that we are in a simulation and we are trying to avoif such anomalies, we will be immediatly disintegrated and sent out of the simulation. Well, let me tell you, it wasn't that easy, especially when we are literally not told our objective other than the fact that after we walk around the town we are just supposed to meet up with the AI which will get us back to reality. So after plenty of disintegrations and having to explain my dad how this whole thing works, we managed to walk around without even caring about the fact that everything around us was going to shit, also because the anomalies grew in frequency the more we stayed in the simulation. The whole dream ends quite normally, average movie tale where at the end when meeting up with the AI everything and anything seems unreal for how unhinged the anomalous world has gotten to but we manage to overcome it and basically get out and shit.

I don't really care about the outcome of the dream to be honest, as much as what that made me realise. You see over a year ago or so I had this sort of idea of why, as previously mentioned, AI generated stuff might look so "uncanny", if us humans are training machines to think just like us, to make computers as similar as we could to our brains, it would only make sense that these machines might not surpass us any time soon, but they might just start to think like us. We only know a certain small percentage of how the human brain works, and we're all putting it into these intricate machines that are starting to act just like how we "teach" them, so in my opinion it would just make sense if they start to process things like images just how our brains do. I am so sure that other that this one dream I just had any other dream that could even be hyper-realistic, it cannot have sharp detailed images just like the ones we see in our everyday life. Unless you're blind or got bad eyes? You fucking get what I mean anyway. What I'm trying to get to is that if you just take a brain, put billions of "image data" inside of it, but no eyes to actually fathom what reality looks like, for me it only makes sense that it would try its best to make some images that might just look like they might be real, but they have this "artificial" element to it that doesn't really make it real. Well y'know...because it just happens to be artificially made. So maybe, just maybe, any image that we make with our brain in our dreams happen to be similar to the ones AI make (maybe without taking down forests,,,that is a major difference) and of course AI will get better at its craft and shit, but just so you know, our brains are just like it, if not a bit more advanced, y'know the whole "we don't know all our brain" or "we don't use 100% of our brain" kind of bullshit. Like my brain is wired to some nerves and receptors that tell me if I need to take a shit, AI can't do that, yet?

I just know that there is a whole bunch of people who is not willing to listen (read even) to a bunch of reasoning, but also to a fucking story behind it lmao, like this whole train of thoughts is all based on a dream and I'm sure as shit that there is going to be some motherfucker out there who is gonna be annoyed by the fact that I'm talking about generative AI and giving it some "positive" reasoning, whereas all I'm talking about is just how I think it works, and where I think it is going. If it really makes you happy, I will go out of my way and say: yes AI art and shit is bullshit, even though it has nothing to do with ANYTHING that I've talked about so far lol. And just you know, if you are one of the type of person that I've just mentioned, stop reading and check yourself in a mental hospital because you might seriously be unable to listen or read, heck who knows if you're lucky enough you'll find me in there too!

Good bai for now, poposwag.