Wow! Is it her first published book? It must be very gratifying to see something of hers (and Midjourney) as a tangible thing.

>Dehumanizing language that equates any disagreement with non-personhood is shitty and you should feel bad for doing it.

As I indicated, I am among those who don't automatically dismiss the likes of GPT as "just autocomplete". On the contrary, pattern matching is a fundamental part of intelligence. I doubt there is a Redditor who has not replied with a meme or copypasta. That's normal and natural.

Being unable to do anything else is not normal or natural, or at least should not be. I wish I could find the Reddit post; it was astounding how many, many hundreds of comments all said the exact same thing. That they used slightly different wording made it worse, not better; at least if they had all used the exact same words it would be clear that doing so is part of collectively participating in a larger metajoke.

Instead, hundreds of allegedly sentient human beings a) immediately posted the first and only thing that came to their minds in response to TEXAS = BAD, and b) did not bother to check (or did not care) whether anyone else might possibly have come up with the same brilliant riposte. That is behavior that the term "NPC" well describes.

That quick a turnaround from "hearing about something" -> "making money with it" is incredible. Any examples that we can see?

There absolutely are human NPCs, who react in predictable ways without intelligence.

A recent Reddit post discussed something positive about Texas. The replies? Hundreds, maybe thousands, of comments by Redditors, all with no more content than some sneering variant of "Fix your electrical grid first", referring to the harsh winter storm of two years ago that knocked out power to much of the state. It was something to see.

If we can dismiss GPT as "just autocomplete", I can dismiss all those Redditors in the same way that /u/AvgAIbot did; as NPCs.

CC: /u/lurking_intheshadows

A Chinese equivalent of this week's open letter calling for a 6-month moratorium would never, ever be written, let alone published.

New York ^Homeless Fusion cooking

> But then I’d get asked some ignorant ass shit like if I’d ever been to the ocean. Bitch I live closer to the ocean than you do, open a fuckin map. Or I’d say, California is nice but I could buy a house on a starting salary back home. And they’d just respond “yeah but I’d have to live in NC..” and I’d ask if they’d ever been? To which they’d say no. Yeah ok, well informed opinion there my man.

Now consider what happens on Reddit whenever anything positive about Texas is ever mentioned. The problems with the electrical grid from the bad winter two years ago is nowadays the first go-to, but even had that not happened something else would be.

The terminally online here are basically calling the state's tens of millions, and the many, many thousands that every year move to Texas from elsewhere, all idiots. As if they aren't human beings with agency and the freedom and intelligence to decide that, hey, living in Texas seems like a good idea to me.

1980 shows how the UK was the sick man of Europe (and why Argentina thought it could win the Falklands War), and why Thatcher was elected prime minister three times for the economy turning around during her government.