N.B.: I am a few drinks into writing this, apologies in advance if it comes out unintelligible.
It’s going to be impossible to answer that in a single comment. I think whatever it is, it’s related to why nerd humour/culture is so cringeworthy.
I think for the majority of cases of people making cool things, they are well read and are able to call upon a breadth and depth of knowledge from their domain. As you move away from creator to consumer, that level of knowledge is less and less common. Plus, generally, if a creative work is trying to crystallise a range of ideas and make them understandable for the consumer, then they are actively allowing the consumer to be able to not engage with the source material for those ideas.
So then you have these well-read creatives making interesting, beloved works of art that hold a lot of social capital. You have people consuming these works at all kinds of levels of engagement. In many cases, especially within nerdy circles, works become exalted, and even if you don’t engage with those works at all, you are still expected to revere those works, lest you draw the ire of the nerds above you who love these works.
So IMO, and as you have pointed out, it’s highly unlikely that there’s any real influence from Adams on the output of these bots. They namedrop him to hopefully garner more social capital. It’s the same reason why I learned how to play “Still Alive” on guitar to impress nerds at my university. It’s the same reason I used to read wikipedia plot summaries for marvel movies while I was working at a small search company.
Anyway the better answer to all this would be to say: watch the “Darmok” episode of star trek TNG. Which I have not seen (lmfao). But I have listened to the official star trek podcast episode (guested by Reza Aslan, notable linguist) that discusses it, and my understanding is that it better encapsulates some of why this is all so fucked.
intoxicated or not, this is a very good overview of why corporations assimilate art and culture. musk has done this so many times — one of my earliest memories of white-hot rage towards musk was when he declared himself a socialist because he was also (claiming to be) a Culture fan. the first example I know of corporations butchering nerd culture was Google turning April Fools pranks into deeply unfunny corporatized marketing opportunities, but I’m sure it’s been happening much longer than that
what’s interesting, and you touched on this in your post, is the degree to which nerd culture itself interacts with a thin facade that substitutes for the artistic work it claims to exalt. in college I volunteered at a couple of conventions, and two things were obvious:
con nerds don’t give a fuck if you’re bleeding and broken, they’ve got overpriced cultural signifiers to buy and you’re in the way (part of my job was to keep injured folks safe before the ambulance and folks with real medical training came — it’s kind of amazing how many folks walked up and asked us about the vendor booths or event schedule while we were dealing with, ah, gore)
the kid who won’t stop listing DS9 episode summaries and asking you gotcha trivia questions to prove you’re not a fan doesn’t know anything about the text or subtext of the series. they memorized a whole bunch of facts to prove their worth as a fan to other toxic assholes, but couldn’t tell you anything about the cultural or artistic merit of the work they claim to love
Perhaps the reason they fetishize AI so much is because they consume culture and art the way an AI would- purely as a stream of signifiers, tokens and easter eggs, with no cognition of the ideas living inside of it.
The makes a ton of sense. Cf. also franchise media. Pile in the fan service with specific references that trigger recognition dopamine, don’t pay attention to the original themes.
If you’re perfectly happy to see a deepfaked Carrie Fisher in a movie because you recognise her, you’ll probably also be happy with a GPT-written movie script peppered with a statistically appropriate number of bottomless pits & droid snark.
TLJ: “Forget the Jedi texts. What’s important is the present. Also, you aren’t from one of the magic families Lucas made up in the 70’s, but you don’t have to be someone special to be significant.”
ROSk: “Oh sorry we offended you last time because we dared to deviate from your nostalgia. Alright. So now it’s really important that everything is Skywalker or Palpatine related. We even put “Skywalker” in the title! And made a Palpatine cloning machine! Phew, ok. Now that we’ve placated you, here’s 5000 new funko-pop ready characters.”
N.B.: I am a few drinks into writing this, apologies in advance if it comes out unintelligible.
It’s going to be impossible to answer that in a single comment. I think whatever it is, it’s related to why nerd humour/culture is so cringeworthy.
I think for the majority of cases of people making cool things, they are well read and are able to call upon a breadth and depth of knowledge from their domain. As you move away from creator to consumer, that level of knowledge is less and less common. Plus, generally, if a creative work is trying to crystallise a range of ideas and make them understandable for the consumer, then they are actively allowing the consumer to be able to not engage with the source material for those ideas.
So then you have these well-read creatives making interesting, beloved works of art that hold a lot of social capital. You have people consuming these works at all kinds of levels of engagement. In many cases, especially within nerdy circles, works become exalted, and even if you don’t engage with those works at all, you are still expected to revere those works, lest you draw the ire of the nerds above you who love these works.
So IMO, and as you have pointed out, it’s highly unlikely that there’s any real influence from Adams on the output of these bots. They namedrop him to hopefully garner more social capital. It’s the same reason why I learned how to play “Still Alive” on guitar to impress nerds at my university. It’s the same reason I used to read wikipedia plot summaries for marvel movies while I was working at a small search company.
Anyway the better answer to all this would be to say: watch the “Darmok” episode of star trek TNG. Which I have not seen (lmfao). But I have listened to the official star trek podcast episode (guested by Reza Aslan, notable linguist) that discusses it, and my understanding is that it better encapsulates some of why this is all so fucked.
intoxicated or not, this is a very good overview of why corporations assimilate art and culture. musk has done this so many times — one of my earliest memories of white-hot rage towards musk was when he declared himself a socialist because he was also (claiming to be) a Culture fan. the first example I know of corporations butchering nerd culture was Google turning April Fools pranks into deeply unfunny corporatized marketing opportunities, but I’m sure it’s been happening much longer than that
what’s interesting, and you touched on this in your post, is the degree to which nerd culture itself interacts with a thin facade that substitutes for the artistic work it claims to exalt. in college I volunteered at a couple of conventions, and two things were obvious:
in short, fuck nerds
Perhaps the reason they fetishize AI so much is because they consume culture and art the way an AI would- purely as a stream of signifiers, tokens and easter eggs, with no cognition of the ideas living inside of it.
The makes a ton of sense. Cf. also franchise media. Pile in the fan service with specific references that trigger recognition dopamine, don’t pay attention to the original themes.
If you’re perfectly happy to see a deepfaked Carrie Fisher in a movie because you recognise her, you’ll probably also be happy with a GPT-written movie script peppered with a statistically appropriate number of bottomless pits & droid snark.
Absolutely. TLJ vs ROSk is a microcosm of this.
TLJ: “Forget the Jedi texts. What’s important is the present. Also, you aren’t from one of the magic families Lucas made up in the 70’s, but you don’t have to be someone special to be significant.”
ROSk: “Oh sorry we offended you last time because we dared to deviate from your nostalgia. Alright. So now it’s really important that everything is Skywalker or Palpatine related. We even put “Skywalker” in the title! And made a Palpatine cloning machine! Phew, ok. Now that we’ve placated you, here’s 5000 new funko-pop ready characters.”