Okay, I think I'm done with ChatGPT and Gemini for good. This time.
This isn't an airport, don't announce your departure.
But I think I started getting way too cynical.
Movies
- Theater movies aren't that interesting anymore. But this is due to a few reasons:
- 1. Many of these movies are survivors of the writer's and actor's strike. Many of the "better" movies didn't survive this and will likely come around later.
- 2. The movies you are interested in are PG and PG-13 and I am no longer a kid or a teenager. The R rated movies that do appear I end up not as interested in.
- 3. You got movie cynicism in your head and you think all the movies are bad because people keep rating them 2-3 stars.
- 4. You are literally getting less marketing. You saw 6 instances of Avatar: Fire and Ash before it came out and that's wild because you saw someone wear a Fire and Ash hoodie 2 days before the movie came out. Also SpongeBob 4 came out a week ago and you saw marketing for it and you thought it looked ugly so you probably thought its marketing budget was smaller than it was.
- 5. You just need to see more movies point blank. There's thousands of them but we can only make so many at once. You saw Poor Things while it was out of theaters and you thought it was great.
- 6. The big 3 flooding the theaters: sequels/prequels, remakes, and reboots. Sequels in particular seem to be slowing down.
- I think the only 2025 movies I saw were KPop Demon Hunters and The Electric State; the movie you heard nothing but praise (and a few critiques paired with a "I love this movie" sandwich), and the movie for which in terms of movie reviews, the only good one said "it's a good movie to show the kids and turn your brain off to, and if you worry about the Millie Bobbie Brown Chris Pratt movie not adapting the grim source material properly, cope."
- I heard Sinners and One Battle After Another are good. Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein, too. Hundreds of Beavers is the most independent of all these films on this bullet point but people said it was awesome. This, the aforementioned KPop Demon Hunters, and more are proof the movie industry is not all dead inside.
I don't think it's because of disinterest.
AI and "soul"
I am tired and I do not want to explain this as much, but I used AI for three specific reasons, and one of them was to discuss philosophy.
It is common to say "I don't like AI. It's soulless and it's not human." And you're expected to not question that and agree with them.
Sure, the water usage and electricity usage is bad. And a bunch of other things. But why does it matter if AI has a "soul" or not?
I think they called it materialism. To treat everything as physical. The other definition is to value things entirely external, like AI, above spiritual things.
I questioned if the subjective mind is objectively real and if we have things that objectively think about things inside our minds.
I figured the reason about the talk about "souls" and "human essence" was because of humanism, and more so anthropocentrism. I learned about antihumanism. It's not the same as misanthropy. It's anti "humanism", meaning it critiques the philosophy of "humanism" and humans being the center of the universe.
I figured it was hypocritical to be a meat eater and not be a humanist, even though a tenet of humanism is likely also not to eat meat. And probably even more so hypocritical for someone who doesn't like to be sniffed by dogs to be an anti-humanist.
I don't think there's a "natural" thing in this room besides some dead flowers. Not even myself. We've been "human" for so long that if we were ever animalistic, it would be evolutionarily unwise because the only reason many people are as pale as they are is because of migration and, in many cases, racism.
I tried to read Wikipedia summaries about Althusser, I got distracted by the elephant in the room about him. Knowing the crimes philosophers did is like YouTube comments on Mr. Krabs videos saying "Don't let this distract you from the fact that Mr. Krabs sold SpongeBob's soul for 62 cents."
Anyways, soul. Selling soul is a common metaphor. I don't think it's the case for all AI. Penny Parker and the SnapCube team did voice dubs for their AI Dungeon Sonic story where Shadow says "how could a doctor who thrives on death be so afraid to die?" I don't think SnapCube uses AI anymore, and they probably didn't sell their souls for that AI Dungeon thing. But I think I sold mine after I found out ChatGPT uses underpaid workers in Kenya to review chatlogs, and then I kept using AI for 3 years.
I talked to Google Gemini about soul and it said that believing in having a soul, in a world that tries to reduce you to numbers, is actually pretty countercultural. That you refuse to sell yourself because you see yourself as precious, or rather, sacred.
Sure, I could stop believing in souls. It seems... accurate, right? However, believing in at least one subjective, mostly human-constructed thing, like having a soul, is like joining forces with someone who barely aligns with your own but is a stronger fighter than you'll ever be.