Welcome to the semantic apocalypse - by Erik Hoel

Studio Ghibli style and the draining of meaning

A photo of my kids reading, transformed Studio Ghibli style by an AI (the AI flipped the book upside down). An awful personal prophecy is coming true. Way back in 2019, when AI was still a relatively niche topic, and only the primitive GPT-2 had been released, I predicted the technology would usher in a “semantic apocalypse” wherein art and language were drained of meaning. In fact, it was the first essay ever posted here on The Intrinsic Perspective. I saw the dystopian potential for the future the exact moment I read a certain line in Kane Hsieh’s now-forgotten experiment, Transformer…

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