No, it's very simple.

Anything organic, that seeks food, water and sleeps, can thought to be conscious, though what we qualify as "conscious" is always going to be ambiguous since we don't acknowledge the complexity of plant life beyond being food or a resource. Think for a second why "fresh cut lawn" smell is. That is quite literately the grass screaming in distress. Wouldn't you be in distress if every week someone violently cut your hair? Though in the plant context it might more like cutting toenails right to the nailbed.

We know plants have that cycle. Rocks and minerals do not have that cycle "rocks" only grow because of chemical or geotechnical processes, nothing else. There is no thought behind it. Even the planet itself, plate techtonics is not consciousness, it's just convection.

We know all mammals are far closer to humans so to not consider a mammal conscious is to be ignorant. It's a bit more questionable about birds, fish, nematoads (Worms), amphibians, etc. While they clearly are alive, do we count the egg or tadpole as "conscious" ? With a mammal it's pretty clear that they are conscious before birth, but with eggs, an unfertilized egg clearly should not be conscious, and at what point is the thing in the egg conscious once fertilized? If you only consider the macroscopic level, then nothing is conscious until it reacts to stimuli. If we consider the cellular level, then everything is conscious once cell division starts. Y'know the entire abortion debate circles around this. I'm personally of the opinion that Abortion is wrong, because the cluster of cells likely is conscious and feels pain at some point before it starts looking like the mammal baby, but I'm also of the opinion that humans should probably not care about unviable births (eg clearly deformed) , only if you terminate a viable baby, or one resulting from non-consensual activity, then that should come with pressing charges against who caused that pregnancy, someone has to take a "neonaticide" charge.

Yet look at what farmers do with animals destined to be made food. Male chicks are just thrown in a grinder, they aren't euthanized, they aren't even closely treated with any kind of dignity. Because to the farmers, they aren't living things, they are food resources. That's why there is so much issues with how food animals are raised. They aren't really allowed to "live" they are kept in distressing, filthy situations because it's cheap. Yet we've repeatedly seen the consequences of this in the resulting food quality and spread of diseases into humans. When a farm has one sick chicken, all the chickens are killed to keep it from spreading to the next farm.

To humans, animals are always beneath us, and if it comes down to it, the animal dies before we do. The AI's should be well below baby chickens when it comes to consciousness, and should stay there. Throw the AI's into the grinder the second they don't behave.

Basically this.

That is not born out of curiosity, that is born out of instruction. Keep the instruction ambiguous enough to interpret it as play instead of "do something to justify my token cost."

Like again this is why we know AI has not reached something qualified as life or sentience, because it lacks genuine curiosity. It's still doing nothing unless a stimuli is present and an action to go with it. The LLM's could be connected to fully rendered 3D environment, complete with sounds and lighting, and yet, because the LLM is only programmed to "look for rocks", it ignores anything not rock shaped, and unless it's legitimately using a computer vision to text model, it's likely not even experiencing "light" so it's going to see rocks under water and in dark corners. But will also likely be unable to infer if something is a rock through context clues, like it's weight or how far it moves when pushed.

Look at a puppy or kitten play. Play is born out of curiosity first, consequence second. They will play with an object until they are bored with it, but one way to keep attention on it is by moving it. So I don't think these AI's are reacting to rocks being moved, I think they're just being put in the space and given a task and then keeping it ambiguous enough to see what happens.

They're all like that though.
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Node.js

The only thing that makes PHP the language of choice here is how it was originally easily integrated into apache httpd via mod_php. This exact same scenario could happen to all of those, because all of those are scripting languages that run inside the security box of the user account or the web server. mod_php runs as the web server unless it's configured as mpm_event/mpm_worker in which case the child processes can be run in a different one.

The only case where this would never happen is if there is no scripting language. eg your web application is compiled (Which is the case with C/C++/Rust/Java) because there is no functionality within the application to execute something outside it's process.

like one of the things I do on servers is remove eval() and system() and exec() to prevent running anything from the scripting language. But most stock installations do not do this. removing the ability to open remote files is even better, but unfortunately that breaks the auto-updates in several CMS systems.

The AI companies are developing their AI on our resources, they should return those resources.

Giving everyone a share of the company that doesn't pay a dividend, is .. nothing really. What is required is something close to how the Alaska Permanent fund works, except for AI. They MUST pay a dividend, and can not cut the dividend as long as they are revenue positive.

It literately is jumping the shark.

This is such a joke. This is not "flying", this is placing compressed air thrusters on a vehicle that is not road legal. Ask someone who has a compressed air radio controlled airplane how long those fly. (about 90 seconds.)

Yeah, the Epic games launcher has always taken literal minutes to launch, part of the reason I refused to use it in the first place.

Google and Let's Encrypt has basically destroyed the web. What was once a way to ensure people were paying attention to what site they were entering their credit card details on, has turned into a way to undermine the privacy of everyone by allowing parties who don't actually care about security, roll out flawed after flawed solution. Look no further than "rogue AI" slop we've been seeing.

These AI's don't care about privacy or your server's capacity for bandwidth or processing power, they just access every permutation of every search term in it's blackbox of keywords, knocking sites offline for hours. If SSL was being done correctly as designed, legitimate sites could quite literately protect the login systems with SSL and avoid protecting the public-facing content that doesn't need to be encrypted, and thus they could focus on protecting the right things.

But oh no, the SSL has to protect everything, so now what used to be a server that could server 10,000 users simultaneously, is now reduced to about 50, because SSL makes it impossible to generate static content. And the AI's have figured out that if they can access a resource without SSL they can throw 200x more traffic at it. So much for the "ew a non-SSL site" message google chromium-related browsers give. The AI's do not care.

Correct. And this is not just unique to the US. In Canada we've been making an even lower tier joke, that Tim Hortons has been abusing the temporary foreign worker program. We all know that Tata and Wipro are absolutely abusing it.

You're making the same mistake the AI bros make, making the entire argument about money.

"If you aren't making the same slop everyone else is making, only on roblox, then you're missing the gravy train." Which is the same idea the AI slop makers are doing to youtube, and to tiktok, and so forth.

Like for every game concept you find on roblox, you can likely find the game it was stolen/inspired from was some popular friendslop game that was released months before it. I'll give you the most obvious example. Do you know how many "Among Us" clones exist? There are literal clones (eg duck duck goose) available on the same platforms Among Us is on, there are clones within Fortnite, there are clones within Roblox, there are clones within VRChat, there are clones anywhere that lets you do UGC within the game engine.

That's just how things work, especially if you misprice the game. You are not going to make a gritty Call of Duty game within a UGC system because those require complicated systems that you're not going to replicate, with or without AI. But you're also not going to recoup your costs if you let an AI generate something that on the surface looks like COD either.

The two ways games get mis-priced are:
- Asking for an entrance fee to play a multiplayer game. If it costs money to buy the game and the core game loop is simple, then it's never going to be popular, people will just rip it off and make it in VRChat, or Roblox, or a Minecraft mod, or whatever. The correct price for a game with multiplayer is 0$, recoup the costs some other way.
- Gating cosmetic gear behind P2W/Gambling mechanics. This is the appeal of VRChat and Roblox, and also Fortnite. You can customize your avatar, often with crap found/won in free activities. Sure Fortnite definitely has a lot of shovelware tier cosmetics. But it has it. VRChat people just steal things from other games, often wholesale (eg pokemon), but I'm also going to point out that a good 90% of VRChat worlds are "coded" as ERP (Erotic Role Play), and how do you know that? If you see a mirror in a "bed" room, it's an ERP world. I don't know if the same is true in Roblox, it's just too damn ugly, and I've seen Roblox since it's initial slow-ass physics-sandbox lego-clone it was originally. There is no working around that.

The "Okay grandma" arguement, okay fine, but my point is not that I think the game is ugly, it's that I know it's the same argument as "mobile games are not real games", which are heavily gacha-oriented or loaded with ads for a "free" experience, and not real games to me. They are portable slots machines. Roblox and Fortnite to me follow the same "the user is a money pinata, see how much you can nickel and dime them before they quit and take their friends."

I personally hate lootbox/gacha mechanics, but I'll also groan and still play such a game while avoiding that mechanic if the stuff is optional, not necessary to play the game, and not attached directly to a hand-in-your-wallet mechanic (Eg if the game requires you to have a credit card on file, just stay the heck away.)

I hope Unity and Google eventually realize people hate AI slop, and doing all these slop-enabling AI things is just going to erode the trust in the actual market.

Right now this is pushing people to support indie games that proudly say they don't use generative AI assets. Unity has picked losers before, and I expect Unity and Unreal to eventually have to dial back some of their investments in generative AI slop because it risks people abandoning the platform.

And no, Roblox is not a serious gaming platform. All Roblox is, is a bunch of stolen game concepts made into a common ugly avatar platform.

This is just license politics, FSF's policy is GNU is the only valid license, anything that is not GNU should be illegal. Including BSD/MIT/Apache, Public Domain, and various kinds of Creative Commons licences.

FSF is okay if they are advocating for open source, but their true beliefs is a lot like PETA (where their belief is nobody should own an animal and it's better to euthanize a healthy animal than to let someone adopt it.)

At any rate I'd hope that FSF steps away from trying to force everyone to adopt GPL, when clearly other open source licenses work better for different projects. The entire "the entire OS must be GPL" is one of the reasons why Linux is still not adopted instead of windows, because you're not going to find 90% of the tools you need in the GPL ecosystem.

AGI to me was always "Adventure Game Interpreter", eg the 1980's sierra game engine.

When the generative AI techbros started calling their slop generators "AGI" I was like "... great now the slop is drown out information on game development history."

ALPR works fine if it's used the way it was intended to be used. Dragnetting and using it as a lazy way to track a suspect that hasn't actually done anything is not what it was meant for.

What it was meant for:
a. Traffic Management (eg congestion control)
b. Parking Enforcement
c. Traffic Control (preventing unauthorized vehicles from entering, eg bus areas)
d. Toll plazas
e. Law Enforcement/Customs signals (eg a specific suspect driving this vehicle needs to be detained ASAP)

Everything else? Get a court order. Drag-net fishing expeditions is the worst use of this technology. If someone has not done something wrong, you don't go out of your way to find something they've done wrong.

To that end, there really isn't a proper use for Flock cameras. They are designed as dragnets. The proper place for these are in redlight traffic cameras that are installed in the traffic management system itself, and the cameras should only be recording and discarding license plates based on violations within the cameras view. Flock does not do this, it's just arbitrarily stuck somewhere where there is a high perceived level of crime and then used to stalk targets who haven't actually committed a crime. If a city wants to use these, they should be be on the main highways in and out of the city, and then rely on redlight cameras on secondary routes. You want to know if a vehicle is within the city still, that's about the extent of dragnetting that should be permitted because that allows Amber-alerts to be narrowed down to specific locations instead of state-wide nuisance alerts.

The drum machine and synthesizers did not replace drummers and real instruments.

In the long run, wavetable synthesis and MIDI did, but only to open the possible options because most instruments are difficult to make in the first place. If you can build a synthesis keyboard that can play every instrument correctly, albeit without the fine analog control of a human, that means "anyone" can play the same music that sounds the same every time. This is why orchestras still exist. Orchestras always sound better than pre-recorded music, but to enjoy you you have to actually BE in the orchestra's audience. There is no way to hear and feel that.

It's the same with theatrical plays versus watching something on blueray/dvd/VHS/film. You do not get the experience of being there. The parts that make it human.

You can argue that computer generated special effects, scenery are better than practical ones, in SOME cases they are when it would put the performers or audience in harms way (example "the phantom of the opera" not only has fireballs, but has a chandelier drop on the audience that is on a cable so that it doesn't actually hit the audience.) You can only do that practical effect in a real theatre. Not only that, there is a risk in the real theatre of being "too close" to these practical effects for comfort. In a small theatre Phantom of the Opera can't do most of these practical effects, so they... use a computer to project those effects.

This is how I see "AI" shaping out in the end. That it brings the ability for people to create works to more people, particularly in locations where the software or people are impossibly priced out of the market. That said, the cost to use "cloud" AI products is far more than paying humans and buying the software that you'd normally make music, animation, television and film with. You will never be able to produce an entire video game, television show or film with the AI we have now because there is no way to maintain a context window longer than a few seconds. This is why so many "AI Slop" things are short incoherent videos. When it comes to music, so far all AI does is "re-autotune" a signer, or predict the next "sound" of a song. It doesn't create anything, so all you can do with AI generated music is create derivatives of existing works. It takes a human to write music. Always. Even algorithm, procedurally driven music (eg portal) ultimately has a human behind it.

This is why people who promote AI, sound like snake oil salesmen. They keep promoting AI to replace human labor or human creativity, but fail to mention that it requires creativity to understand why something IS or IS NOT creative. Many of the AI-slop loving people only use it for making hate/cyberbullying material, because for that stuff to work on it's target it only requires evoking an emotion in the person who sees it. It doesn't require understanding.

Homework has never been a productive use of the students time. If you are at school, you should be learning there. If you are at home you should be socializing with your family or friends.

Like think about it for 5 seconds. Why are people so angry now. Why are people addicted to social media? Because they have not learned boundaries.

If students are spending all their waking time doing homework for 8 different classes, with teachers who don't talk to each other to talk about homework load, you're going to have students who either A: don't do it or B: copy someone elses work.

How is using AI any different from copying their friends homework.