Gentlemen, the time is now right to make a big announcement about both the present and future state of the Didactic Mind site, and all of its associated properties. As you may have noticed over the past several months, my output has diminished considerably, due to several factors – some within my control, others less so.
Some of you may be familiar with the various trials and travails I had suffered for several years, after losing my job in the FUSA and leaving during the First Legendary Reign of His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, the Lion of Midnight, the Chaddest of Chads ever to Chad across a stage, may the Lord bless him and preserve him. Since then, I have recovered and found my feet elsewhere, but it has been a long slog back to where I was.
That slogging process has kept me exceedingly busy much of the time, as I once again find myself with a day job – this time, one that I actually enjoy.
Also – and this is hardly a secret, I have been musing about it for a long time now – it is getting harder to find anything interesting to write about.
There are only so many times one can write about Something Happening Somewhere, or about How Horrible Modren Wammenzes Are, or What Idiots Politicians Are, or How Corrupt the Culture Is. Same shit, different day.
There have been many times over the past couple of years where I genuinely feel like I have been “phoning it in”. This is a disservice to you, the loyal reader – and I do mean loyal. Many of you have been reading my work for literal YEARS. There are at least two readers who have been following my work since the very beginning – TWELVE YEARS ago, when I wrote and thought rather differently, about many things, than I do now.
Rather than offer a substandard product or service, I would prefer either to shut down the site, or to streamline the production of its content.
And, since I do actually enjoy producing content, would rather generate good content, faster and better, on topics that are more of interest to the zeitgeist.
Which brings me to the big news for today.
You are all undoubtedly aware of the tremendous strides we have seen in Generative AI over the past several years. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is now possible to feed a Large Language Model the entire contents of a long-form blog – like, say, this one – and train it to produce articles on any given topic or theme, in the exact same lexicographical style and tone of the original author.
So it is with great pride that I inform you that all future site content will now be generated by my GenAI avatar, DAIdact.
Take a look at THAT, and tell me you wouldn’t prefer it as the face and personality of the site.
Now, there are undoubtedly going to be a fair few bugs and weirdnesses to sort out as we move the site over to a fully robot-driven model. For one thing, we all know that AIs cannot figure out human beauty standards very well, which bodes poorly for the Friday T&A segments.
I mean, take a look at this and tell me whether that is a real woman or not:
This means the Friday segments – which, let’s face it, are the real reason why half of you read this site – are more likely than not to contain DeepFake DeepThots, rather than actual ones. But, if you are willing to tolerate a few androids dreaming of electric sheep, then I do not see why we cannot make it work.
But, on the whole, I think this is a splendid idea. All I have to do is to feed DAIdact a topic and a few links, and I can get it to generate a 3,000-word rant in my precise style, tone, and witticisms – uh, such as they are, I am well aware that my sense of humour is perhaps not one that many of you share.
It remains to be seen how far we can push the technology, but I plan to roll out something similar for the podcast, too. It shouldn’t be too hard to train a bot on my vocal patterns, inflections, mannerisms, and speaking style, and then have it produce podcasts that start and end exactly on time, with exactly the right product placements and advertising, while making me sound like a brilliant public intellectual (instead of merely some yutz with a microphone).
It truly is a brave new world out there, gentlemen. The Dark Age of Technology is upon us, and Abominable Intelligence is the future. I say we embrace it, to our great advantage.
See you on the other side, gentlemen, as I step away and let DAIdact take over.
And, on the off chance you believed one solitary word of what I wrote above – LOOK AT THE DATE, YOU IDIOT!!!
Still and all, there is an element of seriousness underneath all of that. GenAI technology is quite retarded at this point – I need to do a podcast sometime soon about the trials I experienced while trying to get ChatGPT to process 150+ CVs for a recruitment process and assess them for quality against a rubric of my creation. It took me the better part of 2 days to get anything like an intelligent, intelligible result, while it took me, personally, about 8 hours to do the same thing, laboriously, line by line.
But, the fact is, GenAI technology is advancing at speeds that befuddle ordinary mortals. We are ALREADY talking about “old-model AI”, where young teenagers and twenty-somethings talk about earlier-generation LLMs in the same tones of ironic condescension that you and I might use to refer to someone who still buys CDs and reads physical books.
(Uh… that would be me, actually…)
It would not, in fact, be very difficult at all for me to download an Ollama open-source AI instance, feed it the entire 140MB or whatever XML file that contains the total output of this site over the past 12 years, and train and tweak it to produce articles in my exact style. The possibilities are tempting, and endless.
So, who knows? Perhaps one day, we WILL see a true DAIdact take over this site…
9 Comments
FWIW, I can still recognize AI well over 90% of the time (though that does seem to be dropping over time and the images improve), and the IG account you put the pics from definitely has the “AI Look ™” to me.
Saying that the whole site was gonna be AI LLM-generated was a bit over the top, making the joke prety obvious too 😉
Still, all in all, a very good April Foll’s post.
I, for one, welcome our new DAIdact overlords.
Again, look at the date.
Wow. Has it really been twelve years? Geez, let me check the date… yep, I started my creepy Altar to everything Didact in 2013. It’s now covering over three walls of the smallish warehouse I rented for it. I was starting to run out of room.
Seriously, though, I came here back before you had your Monday browser buster, before the Friday TNA, and found my way here over from Vox Day’s site incredibly long ago, back before you were forced to switch boards and lost nearly all your content briefly.
It’s been a long road.
I was always after the Monday content crush and enjoyed your divergence from the slavish cult of the Dark Lord. Don’t get me wrong, he is almost as smart as he thinks he is, but like all overly intellectual people, it’s difficult for him to admit to a lack of expertise in anything… and he gets extremely irate if anyone dares to have an opinion that differs from his in any way. (quote: if you disagree you are WRONG, from last week’s post) and it’s also been interesting watching you shift from being a subtle atheist to a legitimate conviction that God is real.
But you covered a lot of similar material, and were much more relaxed and less interested in spending half your time trying to smear your intellectual superiority in other people’s faces at every opportunity. You know that I disagree with you in some areas (I was a liberal mormon, converted to a semi-libertarian agnotic until I realized that libertards were even more insane than liberals, then I realized that conservatives utterly lied to themselves with every breath, there’s no chance that agnostic science is remotely possible, and I am currently a new testament anti-zionist, which kind of contrasts with your proto-zionist catholicism)
But the reality is, I realized over a decade ago that if I ever had the chance, I’d definitely hang out with you for a few beers, although as an Irish-descent American who’s forebears were sold by Oliver Cromwell for slave labor to America centuries before the first Negro set foot on American soil, You might not be able to keep up with the rounds.
Why? because you aren’t a dick, especially when you are wrong, or you have to correct someone like me when WE are wrong. I just keep hoping that someday you are going to announce that you finally met some girl in Novosibirsk (who are just as hot as Moscow women but seldom turn into angry, entitled pit bulls when you marry them) to settle down with and crank out a horde of screaming olive babies with.
My hopes will be with you 🙂 and here’s hoping you will still be keeping us entertained twelve years from now, when we will be able to tune into Didact’s Reach from the few remaining network capable machines in whatever city-state hells still have power after our country collapses and is eaten by whatever zionists own the coming corporate dystopia.
Cheers!
Well all I can say is that I am very thankful for your kind words, and for your friendship and longstanding readership. It has been QUITE a journey, as you say – intellectual, moral, and spiritual – and this site is, if anything, a testament to how facts and evidence can change a man’s mind.
I am also fortunate and blessed indeed to have such loyal readers as yourself, who keep me on the straight and narrow, and prevent my head from getting too big – as you say, those of an intellectual bent can get high on our own supply.
I do have to correct you slightly on one point: while I respect the Catholic Church (up to a point), I do not agree with them on many things, and do not consider myself beholden to their theology. That said, I have no particular issues worshipping in one of their churches.
And indeed, I would gladly have a drink (or three) with you – but, you are right, I wouldn’t last long in a drinking contest!
i would like to nominate a theme song for the AI hoes of the future:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W3mIFhEFmc
That’s a good one.
For a more modern spin on the same idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCIgHeVVEts
Erf. Redhead, I had to check.
Ambra Fontana. Virtual model. existed since January 25th
Damned good fake (le sigh)
eh, i was already figuring out from the absurd amounts of underboob that it wasn’t very plausible. also, i don’t think the facial structure is very consistent in some of the shots.
.
but i must admit, she’s a quite attractive ImaginAIry Lover. should be interesting when you can print your own at home.
.
wink
Hmmm… She doesn’t have six fingers on a hand, like you still see in a lot of AI, and there are freckles and a few wrinkles, but I don‘t see any noticeable tats or any piercings, so she must be AI.