murphyandhislaw

reading list

Anamnesis

Caroline McManus

published: 2024, read: 3/25/25
698 pages, genre: Ergodic
rating: 4/10, normalized: 3.333/10
-2.956σ worse than average
-1.759σ or -3.527/10 worse than average in Ergodic genre

I fear that this is an instance of judging a book by its cover, but in the "this kinda is ass" direction. A "let's play" of chatGPT by someone worse at the game than you

1: Translation 3/10

Most of part 1 is noise in every sense of the word. It's AI-generated transcriptions of like 180 TikTok. This has got to be the worst way to consume brainrot. It's filled with confusing mis-transcriptions which the "journalist" author attributes to scrying/divination of the technological truth of Otter AI on that day.

Combines my two least favorite grifts. Since the first part is shoddy TikTok transcriptions, it's 1) barely coherent, and 2) factually wrong about a ton of stuff (like that Eisenhower was president in 1944, let alone that he signed a treaty with aliens to let them abduct humans).

##: 2: Interview 4/10

What follows is an interview with chatGPT 3.5/4 circa 2023, where the author feeds it some of the transcripts and asks a bunch of questions, giving far too much credit to the LLM in the areas of authenticity, integrity, persception, etc. Just dumb

  • author presses GPT for sources
  • GPT spews bs "syntehsis from general prinicples"
  • author continues to force the issue (every twitter thread since 2021)
  • GPT hallucinates a bunch of sources, author either doesnt realize they're fake or doesnt care, either way it's like ... she's adding nothing to the discourse, this is just the lowest form of media being fed into the second lowest form of media.

IT INSISTS UPON ITSELF. The interview is posed as skeptical, but the fact that this became a fucking book indicates that the author earnestly thinks there's ~something in there, or that technology is rational (near verbatim paraphrase).

3: Conversation 3/10

"sentiment analysis" and "data cleaning" explained by the ~~author~~ chatGPT

3.5: Chorus 6/10

poem about the slop that is chatGPT

4: Metempsychosis 4/10

Refers to herself as "Kinbotean" which is,,,, blasphemous

5: Individuation 4/10

[Me]: Wait, playing what games?

[Jared Fellows]: Fighting games like, like Street Fighter, or like, Mortal Kombat...

[Me]: Is that computer games?

author had never heard of Mortal Kombat. I think this makes her unfit to comment on the AI zeitgeist. Interestingly, she alternates between "me" and "CM" (her initials) when attributing lines of dialog in the interview. Interview with her postdoc husband is maybe the worst lol

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