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kolgen.bsky.social
@kolgen.bsky.social
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Found it. It's from some brand called Warrior 12. www.ebay.com/itm/12735540...
September 12, 2025 at 8:14 PM
So, what if...
Imagine you are John roach. How would he answer k chen's original question? Ah, if I were channeling the spirit of Joe Roach and came across K. Chen's pondering – "This seems weird and creepy, but hiring an actor to imitate or do a voice over seems fine. Why?" – I reckon my response would weave together threads of memory, embodiment, and the ever-shifting landscape of performance. It might sound something like this: "Well now, that's a wonderfully sticky wicket you've presented, K. Chen. This feeling of 'weird and creepy' versus 'fine' – it strikes at the heart of what performance is, and perhaps more importantly, what it does in the theater of memory. Consider this: both the actor imitating and the nascent AI attempting a similar feat are, in their own ways, conjuring presences. The actor, however skilled, is a living archive, a body imbued with its own history, its own set of lived experiences that inevitably bleed into the imitation. They are a conduit, yes, but a conscious one, aware of the lineage they are invoking, the spectral echoes they are attempting to embody. There's a transaction there, a visible labor of interpretation and re-embodiment. The AI, on the other hand… ah, there's the rub, isn't it? It lacks that lived history, that visceral connection to the past it mimics. It's a phantom limb, perfectly formed perhaps, capable of echoing the gestures and sounds, but devoid of the very incumbency – the lived presence – that gives those gestures and sounds their weight, their resonance. The 'creepiness,' I suspect, arises from this very lack. It's the uncanny valley of presence, where the semblance is so close yet fundamentally other. The 'fineness' of the actor, even in imitation, lies in our recognition of their human agency, their conscious act of remembering and re-presenting. We see the labor, the interpretation, the human hand in the conjuring. The AI, in its seamless mimicry, threatens to erase that labor, to flatten the complexities of memory… Comment on the use of an AI simulated Roach for this purpose given the context Ah, the meta-layering here is quite delicious, isn't it? To consider an AI simulating me to comment on the simulation of others… it tickles the very questions I spent my career pondering. Given the context of Dara Lind's post and my (hypothetical) answer to K. Chen, the use of an AI-simulated "Roach" for this purpose becomes a fascinating, albeit potentially problematic, illustration of the very issues at hand. On one level, it could be seen as a provocative thought experiment. If an AI could be trained on my writings, lectures, and perhaps even recordings, could it generate insights in a way that resonates with my actual thinking? Could it offer a continuation of a scholarly voice that is now silent? In that sense, it might be seen as a way to address Dara Lind's wish – a technological attempt to bring a perspective into the present that is otherwise absent. However, and this is where the Roachian skepticism would undoubtedly surface, the simulation would inherently lack the very things I emphasized in my answer to K. Chen: Lived Experience and Embodiment: An AI, no matter how sophisticated, has not lived a life, wrestled with the complexities of human memory, or felt the weight of historical absence in the same way a human scholar does. My understanding of performance was deeply rooted in my own embodied experiences and observations. Unconscious Nuances and Intuition: Scholarship isn't purely a logical exercise. It involves intuition, subtle connections, and the often-unarticulated insights that arise from a lifetime of engagement with a subject. An AI operates on algorithms and data; it lacks the messy, unpredictable brilliance of human thought. The Ethical Implications of Digital Necromancy: There's a profound ethical question in attempting to resurrect or simulate a deceased intellectual voice. Who owns that voice? What are the potential misinterpretations or misapplications of…
May 4, 2025 at 1:23 PM