Frank Thoughts: Trump Indicted, Russian Coup, and AI

News and more from the smartest guy you know (me)

I used to do a news round-up, but it kind of bored me to just talk about the news. So now I’m bringing that back, but I’m making it more expansive so I can do a few quick thoughts about whatever I feel like (and include some updates on my work). Most of this post is free to read, but I have a couple of bonus thoughts at the bottom for paid subscribers. Ooh!

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Presidential Race

People don’t like the president, but that’s okay because every four years, the two parties get a chance to come up with new nominees to run for president. So now they each can pick someone who is really popular to be the new president.

But the other option is they could each stick with their least popular candidates, and the American people — the suckers — will still have to vote for one or the other even though they despise both of them. It will be hilarious. Afterward, everyone will be like, “What a great gag, political parties. See you again in four years.”

Russia Attempted Coup

So apparently, Robert Wagner was about to overthrow Putin — just marching up to Moscow with a bunch of troops or something — but when he was just a few miles out, went, “Eh. What am I gonna do with Russia? I don’t want this.” I think we’ve all been there, starting a coup and realizing it’s a bad idea. Many people will just continue the coup out of pride, so good on Robert Wagner for backing down.

Trump Indicted

Man, a lot of people are always mean to Trump and always after him for everything. Like federal prosecutors. They just want to give him a bad day, so they’re always like, “Hey, what does Trump love best? We can go after that!” And, of course, Trump’s favorite thing is keeping boxes of classified information in his bathroom.

Just leave the guy alone. He just wants to lead a quiet life of running for president and selling NFTs.

COVID

Saw someone wearing a mask the other day; is COVID still going on? Or can some people just not let it go — like decades from now, we’ll find people hiding deep in the jungle wearing masks and insisting a pandemic is still happening. Silly people — you don’t need masks. You’re deep in the jungle; you’re not near anyone.

Trans Issues

Polls show that more and more people are turning against trans issues. I think this is one of those issues that benefits from people never thinking about it. When trans stuff was this fringe thing most people didn’t need to pay attention to, it did okay. But when people are forced to actually think about it, they’re like, “No. This is insane. Stop that.” Lesson learned: If your politics are really insane, do your best to make sure they’re something people can ignore. That’s the only way it will thrive.

Movies No Do Good at Box Office

There have been several major flops at the movies lately. The Flash has done poorly, as has Pixar’s latest, Elemental — the premise of which seems like someone told ChatGPT to create a Pixar movie. And I guess the Transformers have flopped too. And, well, things aren’t looking good for the next Indiana Jones. On the other hand, some movies have done really well, like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3. A lot of movie execs are having trouble figuring out what’s going on, but it’s possible we’ve entered this weird era where people won’t go see a movie unless it’s actually good. It’s unknown whether Hollywood will be able to adjust to this.

Superego 4

It’s been a while since I’ve given an update on my novel writing, but the fourth and final Superego is inching along. It’s taking longer to write than I thought, but it’s progressing each day (well, it got slowed a bit when Tears of the Kingdom was released). It’s a tough one as it will conclude several character arcs, but hopefully, I will nail it and don’t fall flat on my face. Fingers crossed.

My TV Shows

As you probably know, I now work for the Daily Wire on writing new children’s programming for them and have been doing so for the last year and a half. As for when that will premiere… I have no update. Hopefully soon. I’m really excited for you all to see it, though, so hopefully, more news on it will be forthcoming.

AI

I’ve been playing around with the Open AI API to find out what this AI stuff is all about. My idea is to explore using the ChatGPT AI to voice NPCs in a video game, so I’m trying to find what kind of instructions it takes to get them to stay in character and never drop it. My idea to test that is to instruct two AIs that they’re supposed to role-play as humans but suspect who they are talking to to be AI. Then I pit those two AIs against each other. Results have been mixed so far. Despite my instructions to never drop character, they inevitably at some point say, “As an AI language model…” which is the exact thing they’re never supposed to admit. And a couple of times, they got in an argument that went like:

“As an AI model, I have no feelings. So how can I assist you?”

“No, I’m an AI model. How can I assist you?”

And I’m like, “No! You idiots! You’re supposed to pretend to be human survivors in a dystopic future where you hate and fear AI!”

I had a partial success where one side exposed the other (you can see the transcript here), but still, one side gave up on pretending not to be AI too easily.

There are all these people saying we have to fear AI and regulate it as it could end the world, but the more you play with it, I think the less fearful you get. It kind of feels like the end of the world stuff is just the creators of it trying to hype it. And man, does the end of the world threats keep getting dumber. When I was a kid, we worried about the world ending from the Soviets starting a nuclear war — a pretty real threat. As an adult, it was all about climate change, which was dumb (“It’s going to be one degree hotter in fifty years — we’re all going to die!”). And now we’re supposed to worry about getting killed by autocomplete on steroids?

Bonus Thoughts

Special bonus thoughts just for cool dude paid subscribers. Guaranteed to be my dumbest thoughts.