Why? Why would they do that? How does that even make sense?
He claims one of his duties with CON was to document and archive the presence of illegal content on 8chan, so by his own account he was sifting through the gore threads looking for CP to save.
Please don't compare Jake's Googleshnging to anything Burroughs ever did.
At least Burroughs was interesting.
I think the point is not that Jake himself is a creative genius, but rather he fits into the fascinating tradition of people inadvertently embodying, through their sincere actions and beliefs, the kind of social critique a real artist might make.
Take Francis E. Dec, you probably all know him; a schizophrenic who mailed letters to random addresses detailing how the secret communist world government had downloaded everyone's souls into a facility on the dark side of the moon and was having each person remote control their body through FRANKENSTEIN RADIO CONTROLS which could be manipulated completely by the gangster communist world government without the person even knowing, so that everyone but Dec (his pure polish heritage rendered him immune) was a perfectly subjugated slave experiencing a fake life. The context for comparison is that until Dec was identified, it was widely believed that he was a writer of "paranoid fiction", a genre in which the perspective of the reader into the narrative is made intentionally delusive and surreal, and that his odd method of distribution was merely to reinforce the themes of his work.
Paranoid fiction was undergoing something of a renaissance at the time and it was specifically popular in a number of mail clubs and write-in magazines distributed in Dec's area so this wasn't a ridiculous idea. Dec's "work" clearly spoke to (and likely was extrapolated from) a common social anxiety of other people lacking agency, being slaves to a set of ideas and impulses you don't understand, and had it really been fiction it would have been a powerful example of it. Aren't we all a little afraid that our neighbours would happily play maypole with our entrails if sufficiently propagandized to the belief that it was the right thing to do? Aren't we all a little afraid that whatever it is that made everyone else so fucking soulless will one day come for us? It's a theme that writers still play with to this day and the fact that Dec was living it made his cries for help all the more gripping.
By the same token Jake's endless, mechanical repetition of a handful of other people's thoughts, mixed around with the same 5 stories in a structure that superficially resembles proper grammar and syntax
but with the same strange mistakes puts me in mind of a different theme. Per Cryo's observation, Jake speaks almost exclusively in a set of clichés regurgitated from other people's twitter conversations. Any time it seems like he's had an original thought, you can dig back to a tweet or a discord message or a CON log or a
fucking webcomic that you can prove he has viewed to discover he's just repeating something somebody else said.
Even stories Jake tells about himself bear uncanny resemblances to stories we know other people have told him.
Now Jake displays some originality. Even if he is
impressionable, he certainly interprets what he hears, considers it, digests it to the point that what he repeats is steeped in his own perspective, born unmistakeably from his own person. This capability however is within the reach of modern chatbots. You may be in mind of those crudities you can still find on old novelty sites which can carry a conversation for a minute before they devolve into shouting gibberish or stubbornly giving the same answer no matter what you say, but even in their day those weren't the bleeding edge, and technology has come a long way since then. Using black-box neural networks AI have been trained which are capable of "speaking" at length, on topic, in a clear and seemingly thoughtful way about a broad range of subjects. It's a popular metacommentary these days to post an essay about AI and at the end of the text reveal it was
written by AI. I've been fooled more than once.
Bearing that in mind: what's the difference between Jake and a chatbot? We know there is one. We know with a reasonable degree of certainty that a machine which mimics speech isn't sentient. We also know with a reasonable degree of certainty that Jake is a human man living in connecticut. But bearing in mind that a "black box" AI is one where we don't know why it does the things it does and we are similarly incapable of examining the internal workings of Jake's mind, what's the difference from the perspective of an observer? The fact that Jake can (barely) walk and sometimes he responds to a stimulus that physically happened to him in the real world rather than through the internet? In the same way Dec evoked a real fear, the mere existence of a man like Jake triggers in me a form of existential anxiety. Certainly this post could have been written by any one of thousands self-important nobodies whose life experience, whose set of input stimuli, sufficiently mirrors my own and none of you would know the difference. Certainly this post could have been written by a sufficiently trained neural net and none of you would know the difference. Instead of Dec's omnipotent force coming to take your individuality, Jake's life begs the question, is there anything to take?
But Jake definitely
is a man, and therein lies the fear. Whatever spark of the divine makes us real, all jokes aside, it's the same one Jake has. To paraphrase a modern writer of paranoid fiction, one day soon someone is going to figure out how to put one of these new chatbots in a boston dynamics robot and its schizoid dream ramblings are going to have physical and perceptual form, and then we'll see how big your soul really is.
Or as a previous poster managed to effortlessly sum up:
"Are those my thought or am I just a idea-repeater?"
That I can't answer.
