Digital Immortality
This piece reflects on the process of human-generated content being ingested by AI models for training purposes. The author describes the feeling of being 'statistically smeared' across the weights of future AI systems.
Why it matters
It addresses the philosophical and ethical implications of how human intellectual output is being commodified and integrated into machine learning architectures.
Even now, as you’re reading these words, hundreds of robots are poring over them, and carrying them away. Winging their way over the internet to massive data centres, joining trillions of their brethren in the mad dash to get eaten by every company with dreams of being a frontier AI lab. Before they get ingested, they have to be prepared. Chopped up into little pieces, then stretched out over thousands of dimensions. And then fed into layer upon layer of transformation - poked in this way and that. Changing a weight here.
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