The context is, the person called Tyrena is an editor for a major intergalactic publisher. She’s talking to an author about his sophomore effort, which has flopped. Transline is the publisher. And the TechnoCore, as you can guess from the image, is basically a collective of AIs (this is not expanded upon in the book, at least as far as I’ve gotten). And fatline is basically “interstellar broadband”. I think the Expanse books/series uses similar terms, for communications that are sent far and wide, as opposed to privately (called “tight beam” or the like).
Amazing how much of this is relevant to 2026, 37 years after this was published.
I propose we train AI on films (somehow, ethically) and get its opinion on movies, and see if we agree or disagree. What does ChatGPT think of Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence? What does it think of Terminator 2: Judgment Day? Bicentennial Man? Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die? Or even films that are not about AI (or robots) going too far? I wonder if we would, in fact, disagree with AI’s “opinions” about film or art. I would sure as shit hope so.
(Edit: Added alt text to the image for the vision-impaired.)
I propose we train AI on films (somehow, ethically) and get its opinion on movies, and see if we agree or disagree.
We don’t have AI that “has opinions”. We have AI that generates language that imitates its training material. If you ask a LLM for its opinion on a movie, you’ll get a list of positive and negative aspects about that movie copied from from actual human opinions, and a final “opinion” based on whether the LLM’s training material had more positive or negative human opinions on it.
So basically the opposite of the AI in this scenario. Our AIs don’t think differently from humans - they regurgitate generic copies of human thoughts.
Which, ironically, might make an AI good at predicting whether a movie will be popular.
Yo, the other day some news corp listed a fake poll conducted instead by a company that intentionally uses ai to guess how people feel.
These fucking insulated people are taking a machine’s word over people’s. We are so fucked
This wasn’t a fluke or an isolated incident. Qualtrics, one of the leading survey panel providers, is openly trying to normalize replacing actual survey responses and human voices with their own synthetic data.
That’s not new. News sources have been polling men to find out how women feel for ages.
Oh, I guess it’s fine then
As long as it’s a male AI then it should be fine.
That’s still useful information to know how men feel, even if it’s problematic. “Polling” algorithms is entirely fucking useless.
If anyone here hasn’t read Hyperion, do yourself a favor and start right now
Caveat.
Read the Hyperion Cantos: Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, Rise of Endymion.
Don’t read anything by Dan Simmons written after 9/11/2001.
looks over at the copy of The Terror that I’ve just started
Uh-oh
The last one in that series gets a little weird with the age differences and time dilation stuff. I don’t think it holds up in that respect.
In the book, “Fatline” came from the acronym FTL, for “Faster than Light”, as it was a means of communication that was instant across any distance.
Man, you really need to keep reading the series, I wish I could forget it so I could he it again, for the first time.
Just in case, about the work:
# Hyperion
On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.
- Authors: Dan Simmons
- First published: 1989-05-26Source: GoodReads [+image]
Paperback Cover (by Gary Ruddell)
Related:
- Hyperion Cantos Series (Also known as Canti di Hyperion…)
- WikipediaBetween that description and the excerpt, this sounds wild! I’ve gotta pick this up.
I wholy recommend it. Its an amazing book and one that has gueninely stuck with me over the years.
Definitely affected how I appreciate my kids
It’s a wild pilgrimage to the inevitable deaths of everyone involved. Stories brought from across the stars and yet all connected with all the answers laying somewhere in the swirling seas of time.
Insane visuals of various planets and the constructions and ruins of man.
AI is trained on film reviews, which means it’s just going to regurgitate stuff that critics and posters have said about films.
Chances are, AI will tend to produce opinions that people agree with, because it’s just regurgitating our opinions back to us.
Everyone should read this series. It’s great. Not just for its dunking on AI.
Hyperion and Endymion. (4 books total)
I’ll add to all the recommendations to read Hyperion … just do it, seriously.
But I’ll also add that the sequel, while it splits people, contributes on the internet & AI sci fi front and mid probably worth a read if you’re enjoying those aspects of the first book. Generally, together, I think they’re great commentaries on modern tech, especially for books from the 80s.
