huh. Maybe I'm too serious. I was running BBSs and I was amazed and in love when I could dial up to "the internet" and gopher/ftp/usenet on the command line. When the www came out I was sure it would enlighten the world. And for a little while, while there was a technical and intellectual barrier to entry, it sort of did. But it turns out that 99% of humans choose to embrace technology as if it were magic. I know this intimately since I write and also support a small galaxy of software. I could lay out dozens of examples of my own end users developing their own personal ritual behavior around what should be perfectly clear and logical ways of using software I've written, because one time their wifi went down or one time their computer crashed for some other reason, and now they always do X or never do Y... whatever immediately preceded the incident, which categorically had nothing to do with the software. Worse, I've had hardware companies actually tell these people their printer isn't working because they're using "unsupported software". This is gaslighting in support of creating a false technological priesthood... (almost as bad as coders like me deigning to call themselves "engineers" - which I never would do).

So to get to your point... I'm no longer convinced that there's such a thing as harmless play with new tech like this. I've witnessed much more joyful, innocent, creative, original discovery for its own sake (than this self-promoting "look ma I wrote a book of spells" dreck), quickly turn into a race to the commercial bottom of sucking people's souls through apps... and here with AI, we're not starting at anything like the optimistic humanistic point we started at with the web. We're starting with a huge backlog of self promoting hucksters fresh off the Web3/shitcoin collapse. With no skills besides getting attention. Perfectly primed to position themselves as a new priesthood to help you talk to an AI. Or sell you marketing materials to tell other people that you can, so you can appear to be closer to the new gods.

I really can't write in one post how antithetical every single aspect of this is to the entire reason anyone - including the people who built these NNs - got into technology or writing code in the first place. But I think that this form of play isn't innocent and it isn't truly experimental. It's just promoting the product, and the product doesn't solve problems... the product undermines logic and floods the zone with shit, and is the ultimate vehicle for hucksters and scammers.

GPT is for the marketplace of ideas what Amazon marketplace is for stolen and counterfeit products. Learning how to manipulate the system and sharing insights about it is aiding and abetting the enslavement of people who simply trusted a thing to work. Programming is a noble cause if it solves real problems. There's never been a line of code in the millions [edit: maybe 1.2 to 1.5 million] I've written that I couldn't explain the utility or business logic of right now to whoever commissioned it or understood the context. That's a code of honor and a compact between designer and client. Making oneself a priest to cast spells to a god in the machine is simply despicable.