I fucking hate holodecks.

They are dangerous, psychologically destructive machines that have no place on earth. We have no idea what prolonged exposure to simulated environments does to the human brain. People are spending hours inside fake worlds instead of interacting with reality. Children are probably going to grow up thinking consequences aren't real because their parents let them spend twelve hours a day fighting robots in a simulated medieval castle.

And don't even get me started on the fact that the computer can generate literally anything you ask for.

That is not progress. That is an existential threat to society.

So, naturally, I have volunteered to personally test every single holodeck in the world.

Every last one.

I will spend as much time as necessary inside these horrible, dangerous machines so that nobody else has to endure the terrible psychological consequences of using them.

You are welcome.

Listen here you little shit..

Star Trek is also a post scarcity society and they aren't using water to run the models. IP ownership in the Federation is still a thing though, so long as the genAI isn't using copyrighted material, it's fine.

Meh I thought the holodeck was mostly a writer's crutch and an excuse to loot the Paramount lot for period costumes.

Even in the future it breaks containment and endangers human life.

Star Trek's universe: Federation citizens live in essentially zero scarcity where labor is optional and people can dedicate their lives to basically anything they like that this within their capabilities.

Star Trek's AI: A typically flawless tool (when the plot doesn't require an incident), optionally used by the individual, to perform complex calculations, simulations or provide immersion entertainment, complimenting whatever task needs done.

Our universe: We live in a capitalist society where the survival of 95% of the population requires them to sell their labor, where the majority of the population works in any job(s) they can get to make ends meet, where working in a creative or intellectually fulfilling field is a rare blessing and prohibitive to most, where your capitalist overlords claim the majority of your productivity for themselves and see the wages they do pay you as a burden to them that should be minimized regardless of your well-being.

Our AI: Devalues or replaces creative and intellectual roles. Forced down the throats of workers and consumers. Used to collectively monitor everyone. Used to push more wealth to a concentrated few. Notably and constantly unreliable while given unearned trust. Not actually intelligent, just good at specific kinds of prediction and parroting based on training from real works from real people that was stolen without the consent of the creators to be fed into the machines to be plagiarized on request. A genuine risk to the stability of our economy. A nightmare for the mental health of children and those vulnerable to delusions and/or thoughts of self-harm. Increasingly used to replace thought and skill development making us collectively dumber and more reliant on it.

The simplest answer, real world LLMs and AI are real, and holodecks are fictional. Plenty of things are cool in fiction and not something we should actually build.

See the classic tweet about the Torment Nexus.

It's a little more than just the genAI part tho.

You can fuck the holograms. If real world genAI was fuckable, FuckAI would not be an anti-AI community; it would be a NSFW one.

The difference is that Starfleet has the ethical standards in place to make that technology non disruptive to their society. We wouldn't survive being gifted ships that can glass the planet, for example. Wed fuck that up immediately.

If I could have generative AI make me a paradise world that I could escape to whenever I'm not making money to pay for the paradise world, I wouldn't give AF. Also, Star Trek has Fusion and Matter/Anti-matter power generation that's nearly entirely clean.

Unfortunately, the best our AI can do is make people with 6 fingers and write bad code while using all the water and electricity.

Artificial intelligence in science fiction is intelligence that's artificial.

Artificial intelligence in real life is more akin to what we'd call "artificial flavors" in some fruit drink that contains 0% fruit. Isn't fruit, doesn't taste like fruit, but it's purple and sweet, so fuck it: "grape". We've accomplished the "artificial" part, but not the bit that actually matters.

So, yeah, AI in sci-fi is unironically great. "AI" irl is shit. If the real version ever comes close to the sci-fi version, you'll see a lot of the haters change our tune, but until then we'll call a turd a turd.

If we got all the other socialist progressive benefits of the Star Trek universe, including no billionaires, then I think we'd be a lot less unhappy with generative AI as presented in that world.

How they built it, and what they plan to do with it is a pretty big part of the reason for our anger.

"Make an opponent capable of defeating Data"

ST AI: Have a supercharged Moriarty.

RL AI: deletes production database

There's a handful of differences, I'll leave other point them out.