The devil music accusation predated rock'n'roll with early blues artists taking gospel music they learned in church and making the words about day to day life. Stories about Robert Johnson meeting the devil at the crossroads and adapting the minor pentatonic (and ancient) scale but adding the flat blue notes have a very rich history. It was something that got in your head and changed how we experienced the world.
I can see how people could think folk music had some kind of altruistic purity, but it's still a viral expression of a certain kind of animus that distinguished it from country. I also think this kind of folk-animus is related to how it may be worth reflecting on why others tolerate it when you imply someone is racist or insane, almost to the point of ignoring it altogether.
I would bet LLMs are already able to create similar "scissor statements" that are as viral as pop songs, and comments like mine in the previous sentence that are structured to provoke specific anxieties and reactions in their readers. It's one thing for an LLM to write little essays, but once we train it on literary fiction - which is designed to speak the language of memory and provoke strong emotional repsonses - it becomes much more viral and dangerous socially. Imagine a catchy song we can't get out of our heads, but instead of dancing or laughter, it provokes humiliation and cruelty? My asshole-statement was manually calibrated, and it has the same abstract form and structure as a joke, but with the edge of that negative form. An LLM can do it at scale. Someone using an AI model to produce those won't be doing it to improve human discourse and relations. That's the risk I think is worth addresing.
> My asshole-statement was manually calibrated, and it has the same abstract form and structure as a joke, but with the edge of that negative form. An LLM can do it at scale.
Right, so now we've dealt with the initial trolling and callout, and moved on from weird statements about art ..
> Someone using an AI model to produce those won't be doing it to improve human discourse and relations. That's the risk I think is worth addresing.
This I actually agree with. We're going to drown in automated trolling. Human discourse is going to get worse, which usually happens in ways that get people killed.
I can see how people could think folk music had some kind of altruistic purity, but it's still a viral expression of a certain kind of animus that distinguished it from country. I also think this kind of folk-animus is related to how it may be worth reflecting on why others tolerate it when you imply someone is racist or insane, almost to the point of ignoring it altogether.
I would bet LLMs are already able to create similar "scissor statements" that are as viral as pop songs, and comments like mine in the previous sentence that are structured to provoke specific anxieties and reactions in their readers. It's one thing for an LLM to write little essays, but once we train it on literary fiction - which is designed to speak the language of memory and provoke strong emotional repsonses - it becomes much more viral and dangerous socially. Imagine a catchy song we can't get out of our heads, but instead of dancing or laughter, it provokes humiliation and cruelty? My asshole-statement was manually calibrated, and it has the same abstract form and structure as a joke, but with the edge of that negative form. An LLM can do it at scale. Someone using an AI model to produce those won't be doing it to improve human discourse and relations. That's the risk I think is worth addresing.