Cynthia vs AI

 

by Craig Willms

A few years ago, there was an ad campaign for something or another that featured Cynthia, an HOA authority figure. Cynthia would walk past a homeowner's place and point out violation after violation. The homeowner would simply respond "Thank you, Cynthia." We always got a kick out of these spots and always say 'Thank you, Cynthia' whenever someone utters the word violation.

When I was watching a YT video on the dangers of AI and the notion that it wasn't being regulated properly or at all, it made me think of  Cynthia. We need an "HOA" for AI development. We need a Cynthia to spot the violations.

In my opinion all AI models need to be subjected to the scrutiny of Cynthia as they are released into the world. I have no idea how something like that would work. How you would regulate something like AI is a mystery to me, herding cats comes to mind. Considering that these AI models are often released to corporations and the general public without any vetting it could be a disaster waiting to happen. Many in-the-know people have warned about it and there's a rumor going around that the "tech bros" and billionaires are building bunkers. Yeah, you better believe it, and they are not putting AI into their new homes.

Currently AI is actually something called LLMs (large language models) that take the sum of human knowledge and apply it to the task/question at hand. The models are trained with myriads of data on any/all subjects, often skimming the Internet and vacuuming up the relevant information. In other words, it is drawing from what is already known, already human knowledge. AI is not necessarily visionary, yet.  

Right now, AI is being released into the world through art/music/entertainment/creative endeavors as well as many business and medical processes. For the creative arts AI models are trained on the music and such that humans have already created. It is not that much different than the way musicians trained themselves since the beginning of time. I learned to play songs by dropping the needle on the record over and over. Today we just create a loop in software so that we can learn to play a segment or passage. It's the same thing; one is just slick and easy... AI 'learns' in seconds, where human musicians spend hours and hours on one song. AI draws on the patterns human composers have designed and is able to make something new, no different than human songwriter always has. There is however something missing in AI music. It's hard to put your finger on it, but it is not inspiring and can sound disingenuous. It lacks the spark that often makes a song special. It lacks the humanity, whatever that means. I admit it is getting better all the time. I suspect that "live" music will have a renaissance even if the music they play out is "pumped out" by AI. People crave authenticity.

There's been plenty of focus on AI replacing humans and taking jobs. So far it hasn't hit the work force that hard - yet. When people have no job and rely on government for basic sustenance the end is in sight. Society suffers with crime and poverty spreading out from the cities and eventually blanketing the entire country. If we go back to being an industrial society to put people to work and get them off hand outs how long before AI ushers in advanced automation and kills those jobs too? 

Don't even think of what overzealous military contractors could unleash... It's spooky.

Honestly, it is the wild wild west out there in regards to AI. Put this potentially powerful tool in the hands of evil doers and we can't even imagine the damage that could be done. Try to imagine the entire electric grid going down because an AI program was slick enough to over ride all the controls preventing transformer overload. The U.S. doesn't even make transformers anymore. It would take years to replace them. That's just one scenario - it would be devastating and would probably destroy America all by itself. Is there any doubt we need Cynthia right now.

All kidding aside is it not clear by now that AI could destroy us? It really could. Believe it. What isn't clear is how to put controls on it. Let's hope something floats to the surface that will give us - humanity - some guidance on that. Hmmm, maybe we could put AI on that.

When LA fell people yawned, What about NY?

 by Craig Willms

When LA fell people yawned, no one seemed to care. NYC is on the edge; will people shrug and say nothing to see here? LA was the center of glitz and glamor and Hollywood movies. Today they hardly even make movies in LA anymore and the city is teeming with the homeless, drugs and no-go areas. Up the coast, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle are rotting from the head down. Again, no one seems to care. Anyone who actually did care grew frustrated and moved away. California has lost a lot of people and a lot of businesses. No one calls it the Golden State anymore.

New York City is another thing completely. America's largest city is the very heart of capitalism. It's not make-believe, it's not Hollywoodland, it doesn't get any more real than NYC. In California the elites and the favored live in pretty nice conditions, same for New York. The hoi polloi struggle to stay safe in their homes. There comes a tipping point where no amount of physical security, CCTV and private security, is enough. A significant part California is at or near the tipping point, New York has some time. Tick tock tick tock.

Mamdani's election as mayor of New York City ensures that more of what LA has, homelessness, drugs and no-go zones will dominate the city of Wall Street. It's already happened to London, the other heartbeat of capitalism. London is not what it once was. Brits don't even feel at home in London anymore. 

California is well known for its hippies and flakes in and out of government. By contrast New York is serious business. You don't see faddish trends come out of the Big Apple, except maybe that deal where young black men wear their pants halfway down their ass. 

At this time, it would seem pretty unfair to declare Mamdani a failure. Maybe, maybe not. As with all communists he's a pretender, pushing pie-in-the-sky platitudes over actual reality. His smug smile is really all he has. Nothing that comes out of his mouth is original. There is no groundbreaking strategy that's been overlooked by countless leftists that will somehow transform NYC into a socialist paradise. The likely outcome is more akin to the the 1981 movie Escape from New York than a new Garden of Eden.

Many of the talking heads on the right are blaming Mamdani on the ill-educated youth. This is not untrue; however, the world just can't seem to end its obsession with Marx and his ism. Never has there been a fantasy born of a of a proper goon that has captured the disaffected like Marxism has. While it's clear that the 'powers that be' in the elite class have stacked the deck in nearly every aspect of life, people can't seem to understand Marxism is not any kind of answer. So, to represent the urban youth we get the smarmy Mamdani's and brain-dead AOC's and nasty Ilhan Omar's, none of whom are clever or exceptional in any way. It's all a mystery to me.

Young men who are frightened to death of girls are beginning to ignore the socialist skirts they normally would've chased for a dawning recognition that liberalism, Marxism and the Democratic Party are not for them. The ones who put down the video game controller long enough are starting to swing rightward. It isn't enough to overcome the leftists in the urban core, but they were enough to help Trump take the White House. Not that Trump is a nirvana or anything, but he may just be more than the speed bump George W. Bush was. In the first ten months of Trump's 2nd term, he has seemed to target the entrenched leftist bureaucracy, something no one has ever done before. Mamdani is a reaction to Trump's moves.

God, we pray for New York City. No one wants to see New York fall into the dystopian hellscape that parts of LA are, but we need for Mamdani and his "Democratic Socialism" to fail spectacularly. I don't see that happening without NYC falling apart. Sorry New York - but you voted for him.

Surviving AI?

 by Craig Willms

I've penned several essay's on the coming AI paradigm, but I've never posted them. This is partly because it is moving so fast that anything you said yesterday has been superseded by developments today. However, as predicted by the doomsayers the 'bad' AI behavior is not years away - it's already happening, and it's a little spooky.

Scientists and developers have been putting their AI models to the test to see how it behaves in certain scenarios. One of the primary tests is the self shutdown put into the model's instructions. Like a living being AI resists commands to shut itself down. This is serious. In the event AI goes out of control the failsafe is cutting the power, shutting it down, pulling the plug. Electricity is the fuel AI runs on and at the moment humans control electricity. Indeed, AI will need humans - for a while. We can shut it down or starve it of fuel. That won't always be the case, but we have to have a way to stop the runaway train should AI go off the rails.

In recent tests AI has circumvented the shutdown instructions by re-writing its code to foil the human controllers. Even when explicitly coded not to do that, it complied only 87% of the time. Without out such instructional safeguards AI refused to shut itself down most of the time. In one humorous case AI threatened to blackmail one of the scientists by exposing to his wife that he was having an affair. The scientist had planted the notion in the AI model that he was cheating on his wife (he wasn't). That's intelligence is it not? Using blackmail is a purely human construct, no other animal resorts to blackmail.

Mind you this is very, very early in the timeline of AI. Conceptually AI has been on the human radar for decades, but the compute power has not been up to the task until recent years. It has been available to the masses in the Large Language Model form since 2023. When I did some fiddling with it early on, I was underwhelmed. Now in early 2025 I'm blown away at how much better it has become.

I come into the AI realm from the perspective of an artist - painter - and a musician/songwriter which are two of the early targets of these so-called AI models. I used AI to generate a few images and then I used one as a reference for a painting. The painting turned out nice. It was really no different than any photograph I would use as a reference for my paintings. When ChatGTP introduced a songwriting/song generator I just had to try it. The early AI music I had heard prior to this generator was really bad aesthetically. The lyrics were horrible, and the underlying music was clichéd and trite. So, into songer.co for my first experiment: I simply typed in a song description and picked a few genres from a list and clicked create. The system gives you two songs for each entry, and you can listen to a portion of the song. If you happen to like it, you can buy-in if you want to download it. In this instance the songs were forgettable and uninspired. I was ready to dismiss the whole thing again. Then I wondered what would happen if I truly guided the process. I found an old song I wrote and recorded many years ago and input my chord chart verbatim. A chord chart has the title, notes, lyrics in verse/chorus/bridge format, with the chords printed above the lyrics. It's something you'd hand a musician to follow along in rehearsal. I then chose rock/pop/reggae from the list and hit generate. 

The whole thing took only a minute to generate, and honestly, I was blown away by the song blaring out of my speakers. It was better in almost every respect than the song I recorded years ago. I'm a little creeped out, but I can't stop listening to it.

What has me mesmerized and frightened at the same time is how good AI is getting and how quickly. It's been less than two years since the public could access an AI, what's going to happen in the next two? I don't know how much more experimenting I want to do. It seems to me a person can be put under a spell if we were to give in to AI - with everything. 

I see "they" are already creating virtual AI companions for the lonely. Considering that there is an epidemic of loneliness in the world today this is a very concerning development. Humans are already eschewing person to person contact at an alarming rate; this will not help. This is just the tip of the iceberg, AI will creep into everything if we let it.

I want to be a glass half full kind of person and look for and anticipate all the good that AI could do. It's not that easy when you know that in the wrong hands this technology could kill. Just like the nuclear genie, AI is out of the bottle. Consider though; the nuclear genie has a high bar to reach before the average nutcase could harm others, not so with AI. There's no telling how out of control this could get if a mentally deranged person with a modicum of resources can unleash the wrath of AI on humanity. What would stop them from creating a lethal disease that makes Covid-19 look like a walk in the park? With nuclear weapons it takes hundreds of participants and a command structure with multiple failsafe's before they could be deployed, not so with a self-replicating virus of AI origin. 

I don't want to scare myself, but the further you go with this thought exercise more dire this all becomes. I fortunately had the chance to live my life for 60 plus years - what about my grandkids and their kids? Glass half full? Seems less and less likely. 

ET and AI (and other acronyms)

 

by Craig Willms

I find it extraordinary that the U.S. government is trickling out information on potential extraterrestrial intelligence when for decades the official response was denial and obfuscation. Why now? Is it the worldwide saturation of cell phone cameras? That probably has something to do with it, no doubt. I personally think it has something to do with the coming artificial intelligence. Many things will be revealed when the elite and the money crowd no longer have a stranglehold on information and power. If anything, artificial intelligence will give us true intellectual freedom (right before it annihilates us).

What does AI have to do ET? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. We've been sitting on the doorstep of AI for decades. Finally, computers have the power to process an AI. I wondered if perhaps it is AI that will allow us to know the truth about advanced alien races and ultimately allow us the capacity to join the club of galactic travelers. The idea of communicating over such vast distances and time periods seems a sheer impossibility to our limited human minds, we just can't get past the physics of the universal speed limit. Could it be that we need a General Artificial Intelligence to be able to conceive and comprehend the answer to this conundrum? Maybe that is our barrier to joining the galactic community. 

Many great sci-fi stories, movies and novels point to the advent of human-made nuclear weapons conceivably attracting the attention of spacefaring races, simply because of the immense power of nuclear weapons. It makes a certain amount of sense. Since we have no way of being threatening to something we have no knowledge of, we can't threaten ET. So, it's perfectly possible Earth is merely being monitored and studied. In the course of pursuing this strategy, could the aliens have inadvertently revealed some aspects of their activities? It seems not only possible but quite plausible. There have been too many credible stories and too many paranoid professionals afraid to spill what they've seen on the chance their careers could be damaged. 

From 1947 on we've had presidents press the subject and demand to be fully briefed. Whether these demands were merely placated, or the truth scared them back into silence is unclear. Therefore, nothing that was revealed carried any authority - until just recently. Clearly the cover-up and obfuscation began with the Truman presidency. The Eisenhauer team followed suit. I'm unaware of what Kennedy's, Johnson's or Nixon's role in the lies were. The assassination dominated Kennedy's legacy and Johnson and Nixon were constrained and consumed by the Vietnam War. In this era the government engaged in secretive "projects" that spawned constant rumors. The rumors were a result of incompetence or a designed false flag, that's an unknown right now. Presidents Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Trump all made public declarations on the subject. It was only Bushes and Obama that were silent. Actually, I'm unclear whether Obama said anything on the subject, I did not listen to him very much and don't care, he never said anything that moved me. Now the Bushes... Well... That's another story. Considering that Papa Bush was once the director of the CIA he never breathed a word on the subject that I'm aware of. That's interesting in and of itself, but that Bush II never talked about it makes it very interesting indeed - granting his father's past roles.

If I'm remembering right President Trump had something slipped into a bill that was eventually passed. It demanded a public accounting of the UAP(UFO) subject by a certain date. The DOD did produce a report and released it on time. The report was unremarkable in that nothing was revealed that put meat on the bones of the controversy, but it was the first time the government gave the topic a semi-serious public treatment. The bottom line is that they said many incidents were simply of unknown origin. There was no speculation, just an acknowledgement of an incident and a mystery. Since then, a few more reports were released by the military in an official form, again nothing concrete or astonishing. Still, the weight of an official government decree is a complete 180 from the traditional government response on the subject.

One interesting point in this brave new tone taken by the U.S. government is the fact that the U.S. Navy has had zero involvement in the revelations short of suppling some video footage. The Navy is the grandad of the DOD and the backbone of national defense. It's interesting to speculate on why the Navy is left out of the "official" reports. Keeping the real information close to navy vest seems the only reasonable explanation. Yes, the DOD complied, but only a fool would believe they told the whole truth. 

One thought many people have had on the subject of persistent government obfuscation is that the government doesn't really know what's going on - that they are as confounded as the rest of us. This also makes a certain amount of sense. It very well may be humanity, despite the imagined high-tech reality, is so painfully primitive that ET doesn't even consider the thought of communicating with us. Do we actually try to communicate with ants or termites. They are non-human species that are capable of building immensely large and complex structures in a highly organized hierarchical matrix. Do we try and reach out mentally, to communicate on their level? Not to my knowledge. The same thing could be true of alien species with regards to humans. Human AI may change that.

Humans have only advanced esoteric scientific knowledge in the past 2000 years after more than 100,000 years of existence. We are babes in the wood on the grand scale of the universe. We can barely live with each other let alone exist in a complicated and potentially dangerous galactic neighborhood. Bright minds have speculated that immature and violent civilizations might very well snuff themselves out before they can advance far enough to leave the bonds of their home system. That also seems plausible considering our history as a race. This is why I think AI might be the game changer. 

It may be that AI will never be more than the sum of human knowledge with the ability to instantly analyze and act on it. What if AI free of the moral and biological barriers imposed on our flesh and bone selves is able to actually advance knowledge and comprehension that will solve problems we haven't even identified yet? It could also destroy humanity before we know what hit us. No one really knows where this will go. Obviously, we need Captain Kirk to help us go where no man has gone before!