FaceDeer

The Darvaza gas crater is a hole in Turkmenistan that’s leaking natural gas and is on fire. I’m quite sure they don’t have a “poet laureate”, it’s literally just a hole in the ground.

But even if it was some metropolis, yeah, he’d be just some guy.

You can get whatever result you want if you’re able to define what “better” means.

Why publish books of it, then?

The whole point of poetry is that it’s an original expression of another human.

Who are you to decide what the “point” of poetry is?

Maybe the point of poetry is to make the reader feel something. If AI-generated poetry can do that just as well as human-generated poetry, then it’s just as good when judged in that manner.

I do get the sense sometimes that the more extreme anti-AI screeds I’ve come across have the feel of narcissistic rage about them. The recognition of AI art threatens things that we’ve told ourselves are “special” about us.

Indeed, there are whole categories of art such as “found art” or the abstract stuff that involves throwing splats of paint at things that can’t really convey the intent of the artist because the artist wasn’t involved in specifying how it looked in the first place. The artist is more like the “first viewer” of those particular art pieces, they do or find a thing and then decide “that means something” after the fact.

It’s entirely possible to do that with something AI generated. Algorithmic art goes way back. Lots of people find graphs of the Mandelbrot Set to be beautiful.

Now watch everyone jumping to the support of AI.

That’s not how synthetic data generation generally works. It uses AI to process data sources, generating well-formed training data based on existing data that’s not so useful directly. Not to generate it entirely from its own imagination.

The comments assuming otherwise are ironic because it’s misinformation that people keep telling each other.

Kind of, but frankly I think that’s a self-defeating hair to split.

What ultimately matters in the end is simply “is more carbon going into the atmosphere, or less?” It doesn’t matter where the carbon is coming from, all that matters is that less carbon ends up in the atmosphere.

If I have a plastic object and I send it for recycling or whatever, some of that carbon ends up in the atmosphere. Possibly all of it if it ends up being incinerated, since a lot of plastic “recycling” is not really recycling as you’d expect. If I put it in the landfill, on the other hand, the carbon is locked away effectively indefinitely.

It doesn’t matter where that plastic object came from, I’m just faced with a choice of what to do with it.

It’s funny, for years I’ve been downvoted or thought to be joking when I point out that putting non-biodegradable plastic into landfills is carbon sequestration. I seriously think it’s a good idea, though. If people are concerned about carbon in the atmosphere then that’s a good way to get it out for the long term.

The “how will we know if it’s real” question has the same answer as it always has. Check if the source is reputable and find multiple reputable sources to see if they agree.

“Is there a photo of the thing” has never been a particularly great way of judging whether something is accurately described in the news. This is just people finding out something they should have already known.

If the concern is over the verifiability of the photos themselves, there are technical solutions that can be used for that problem.

Not necessarily. If they’re low on cash then cutting unnecessary costs is not unreasonable. What is Mozilla’s core goal? Perhaps the “advocacy” and “global programs” divisions weren’t all that relevant to it, and so their funding is better put elsewhere.

Entertainment.

If you think it’s supposed to be predictive you’re perhaps confusing it with futureology, which is a more scientific field.

Fearing AI because of what you saw in “The Terminator” is like fearing sleeping pills because of what you saw in “Nightmare on Elm Street.”

To achieve that, we must decommission all existing fossil fuel powered machinery, from power plants, to manufacturing, transportation, and agricultural equipment, and replace them with net zero emission alternatives.

By 2030? Not going to happen, then.

That means we need to come up with a different “right” action in the meantime. We shouldn’t be relying on a dream scenario that has basically no chance of actually coming to pass.

There are people who want AI, crypto, and IoT things. If there weren’t then there’d be no money to be made in selling it.

You’ve made a heck of a lot of assumptions about how a time capsule like this would be set up. But even so, how is being mined for raw materials better than having some of my stuff be misattributed?

No.

There’s rather a big difference between a time capsule and a landfill.

We’d need to take some cues from how the ancients did it. Either arrange for long term security, like the Egyptians, or rely on secrecy, like the Mongols. It won’t work forever, but as long as it works for a couple of generations I’d be satisfied.

One idea that comes to mind for modern grave goods would be to bury them in a nuclear waste disposal facility.