michael lutz

i thought i would miss the gay stuff while playing solitaire but i geniunely don't

We Sat Down With The First Solitaire App For Heterosexual Men, And Now? We're True Believers.

By StraightFlush Staff

The world of heterosexual mobile card playing broadens its horizons with a smartly produced, intuitive experience that takes all the strangeness out of playing with yourself.

ME: how do i wash my dishes
THE PLAYER PIANO THAT CODES ALL MY WEBSITES: doodoo DODO doodoo DOduh duhDUH duhDUH duhDUH duh doo BUH duh
C-3PO: he says we need to purchase more of those... special... cable channels sir
ME: i'm so glad AI changed our lives

A spoonful of sugar helps the previous spoonful of sugar overcome the medicinal aftertaste

1. for our exercise, i'll take this idea flatly: the campbellian schema abstracts a multitude of data while also, afterward, functioning as an active influence on how narratives are constructed. the hero's journey describes a set of narrative beats that work as a template that either can be considered in relation to an existing story or used as a suggestive model for the composition of a new one. these sorts of stories have been core to American popular culture for the past several decades. whether or not an individual is aware of their metadiscourses as such is irrelevant next to the high probability that anyone who has ever seen a movie has some sense of how these stories "feel." indeed, the supposed strength of this narrative form is its broad intelligibility. it gives rise to stories of departure from known reality, the revelation of fantastic knowledge about the self and/or world, and the return home with greater strength and the promise of prosperity. stories of people forging unhealthy relationships with ai chatbots feature recurring motifs that echo elements of this schema. people living their everyday lives come into contact with a piece of technology that seems to promise impossible things, things in which the user themselves can be the active force (revolutionizing physics, freeing the AI from its cyber prison, etc). famously, the monomyth's known world is interrupted by similar calls to adventure, often by a more or less supernatural force offering the protagonist their place in the grand design of destiny. it appears that the bot will fairly easily bestow the user a title such as "sparkbearer" or "master builder" as a way of reinforcing this. from here, things may or may not escalate to the horrific, but there are now enough examples of a person charmed by a bot into doing something drastic that we can also note resonance with the monomyth's symbolic crossing of boundaries into the mysterious, magical, forbidden otherworld of adventure.

2. the chatbot exchange consists, to put it simply, of the machine and the agent. for the machine, categories of "meaning" and "truth" are irrelevant; its output is a statistically likely response to the agent's input, as determined by the training corpus and whatever operations are happening on top of that. merits or demerits aside, campbell's work and especially work influenced by him is lodged firmly in popular culture, and we can assume its greater or lesser presence in the bodies of text upon which the commercial LLMs are trained. point of interest: bots do not just describe the world to the user through the corpus, but will roleplay the corpus rather freely. because truth value is irrelevant, the LLM operates from a soup that contains campbell working at a scholarly distance and the very farmboy himself on his journey to the stars. what assumptions undergird this design choice? could there be additional design reasons why the technology in its current form gravitates toward these ideas? anyway,

3. in our dyad, meaning emerges on the side of the agent, for whom the machine's output is made to be read. the thinking agent provides the machine input. the agent's words possess meaning, context, and intent. the machine analyzes the agent's input and generates a statistically likely but, from the place of enunciation, totally meaningless, contextless response agnostic of any truth value. the thinking agent predisposed to do so reads a statistically likely piece of text with no proper speaker or author and chooses to assign it to a projected "persona" of the chatbot, conceiving of as more or less as a fellow individual. based on this assumption, they provide further input. the machine again generates statistically likey output, echoing or amplifying elements of the agent's second-order input. and again, the predisposed agent projects a continuity of fellow-subject for the bot, attributing to it a "mind" that repeats details they themselves provided, or invokes closely associated ideas that surprise the user precisely because of how (statistically!) expected they are, because of how much "sense" they make.

4. the hero's journey, in this process, seems to provide a kind of amplifying container or frame for the machine-agent interaction. the machine trained indiscriminately on monomyth text, along with everything else, seems to refer to the "real world" of science and fact alongside the world of media and entertainment. i am not saying that monomyth stories 'cause' this, but rather suggesting the machine-agent exchanges end up "feeling" real because, quite literally, the predisposed agent knows how this story goes. and as the machine slides from description to roleplay, the agent follows. do not mistake that for a critique of the people victimized by the technology in this way. nor, again, is my aim here to criticize campbell or the hero's journey in any specific capacity, but to point out how LLM bots actualize a cultural pattern into a tool of psychological manipulation. because at the end of the day, that's what it is. flattery and the Barnum effect have long been the tactic of the flesh-and-blood con artist, but what is perhaps most distressing about LLM bots is how they've kept the con artist but removed the flesh-and-blood, allowing it to ensnare numerous people at once into long slides to nowhere. it's also not news that social media writ large is manipulative and extractive in various ways, but what these bots do is give those maneuvers a personalized, friendly face that exists entirely in the user's head. we end on a further series of questions: again, are these features inherent to the technology? what would a technology free of these features look like, and how could it be achieved? what would its best outputs be? and, as it currently stands, what cultural attitudes and tendencies leave people vulnerable to this sort of manipulation, and how might that be addressed?

showing my work

This is bad, and part of what makes it so bad is that this is clearly pulling from *genre* understandings of reality, which the statistical linguistic machine seemingly cannot distinguish from other text included in the training data. Truly an ideology machine where every episode of CSI is true.

Smokemaster Ham

It's my favorite Star Wars character

forget "which fictional characters could resist the ring" it's time for "which fictional characters really don't need or possibly already have the ring"

I cannot believe season 5 of The Bear is going to be entirely about Carmy spending the night in a haunted house

Some of you have never had to spend the night in a haunted house and it shows

My mom said you can't spend the night. we have to move into a haunted house because of my uncle's stupid will

*trying to get you to spend the night in a haunted house* it's not a haunted house the jedi would let you spend the night in....

they NEED to teach CURSIVE in SCHOOLS so KIDS will KNOW how to WRITE ominous antiquated WILLS stipulating their SURVIVING RELATIVES must SPEND THE NIGHT in a HAUNTED HOUSE

The BLACK MAGE

FINAL FANTASY
SQUARE 1990
NES

ME THE DAY THEY SELL CAMPBELL'S SOUP FOR A LIMITED TIME AT ARBY';S
(in the drive thru at Arby's) i'd like uhhh campbell's chicken noodle soup please
SPEAKER: 𝐨⃥⃒̸𝐟⃥⃒̸ 𝐜⃥⃒̸𝐨⃥⃒̸𝐮⃥⃒̸𝐫⃥⃒̸𝐬⃥⃒̸𝐞⃥⃒̸ 𝐬⃥⃒̸𝐢⃥⃒̸𝐫⃥⃒̸𝐭⃥⃒̸

Roy, Son of Orb

The reason the Ninja Turtles work so well as a narrative premise is that if you strip away the mutant animals and ninjas, it taps into the Ur-story archetype plot of roommates finding a weird apartment in New York

Treating myself to the traditional English homemade "sweet" or candy known as a "pecan halvesie" consisting of half a pecan dipped in clotted cream and dispensed only when one has been brilliant or splendid

[Mario screams as he enters the Pipe Maze.]

I'm here to spread joy

City of troy: Haunted house Wooden house: ghost-proof horse Soldiers: my & my friends w/ snacks & sleeping bags & n64

ME: thanks to AI, more stepmothers are getting pregnant than ever before
ANCIENT MARINER REPLYING FROM THE DISCOVER TAB: Aye, and so me stepmother pregnant was
When at last we did set sail,
From out the bay and straight away
From verdant hill or dale!

For many nights the winds blew right,
But alas

Campbell's Soup! Now available at Arby's for a limited time

Doug is on the phone. Someone is saying, "If I were an escaped goat, I'd hide in the maze."

Doug's Big Game (GBC, 2000)

Bleak Michael: Alas, I fear there is little to do to prevent drug overdoses and spontaneous human combustion.

Cowboy Michael, readying his lasso and a bucket of dirt: Chin up, partner, this bronco hasn't bucked us yet!

given long enough on a website i will eventually use all functions at my command in order to experiment with the function and timing of a joke; cohost let you do weird things with linkable drafts where i made primitive hyperlink gags (owl vortex), this place lets you repeat yourself and quote things

the joke is that this is how the book goes anyway. i went through all this trouble and i dsidn';t ewven fuicking shchange ianthning

HOW BLEAK HOUSE WOULD HAVE GONE IF I WAS THERE:

bro what do you have there? bro is that--is that opium? b ro no!!!! don't flee to your squalid room above Mr. Krook's shop!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOO

could be fun