as someone who is so passionately anti AI it's kind of fitting I'd fall into the dune obsession this way.

Everything in the universe contains flaws, ourselves included. Even God does not attempt perfection in His creations. Only mankind has such foolish arrogance.

— Cogitor Kwyna - Dune: The Butlerian Jihad (by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson)

the most frustrating thing about AI Art from a Discourse perspective is that the actual violation involved is pretty nebulous

like, the guys "laundering" specific artists' styles through AI models to mimic them for profit know exactly what they're doing, and it's extremely gross

but we cannot establish "my work was scraped from the public internet and used as part of a dataset for teaching a program what a painting of a tree looks like, without anyone asking or paying me" as, legally, Theft with a capital T. not only is this DMCA Logic which would be a nightmare for 99% of artists if enforced to its conclusion, it's not the right word for what's happening

the actual Violation here is that previously, "I can post my artwork to share with others for free, with minimal risk" was a safe assumption, which created a pretty generous culture of sharing artwork online. most (noteworthy) potential abuses of this digital commons were straightforwardly plagiarism in a way anyone could understand

but the way that generative AI uses its training data is significantly more complicated - there is a clear violation of trust involved, and often malicious intent, but most of the common arguments used to describe this fall short and end up in worse territory

by which I mean, it's hard to put forward an actual moral/legal solution unless you're willing to argue:

Potential sales "lost" count as Theft (so you should in fact stop sharing your Netflix password)

No amount of alteration makes it acceptable to use someone else's art in the production of other art without permission and/or compensation (this would kill entire artistic mediums and benefit nobody but Disney)

Art Styles should be considered Intellectual Property in an enforceable way (impossibly bad, are you kidding me)

it's extremely annoying to talk about, because you'll see people straight up gloating about their Intent To Plagiarize, but it's hard to stick them with any specific crime beyond Generally Scummy Behavior unless you want to create some truly horrible precedents and usher in The Thousand Year Reign of Intellectual Property Law

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Dune prequels but ‘The Butlerian Jihad’ was just…not good. At all. Nothing of note in that whole book it’s quite the achievement

Even though they had exchanged few words, Vorian found his imagination filled with this young woman. He had never met a female like her, with such self-confident beauty, intelligence, and willingness to speak her mind. Obviously Serena Butler had been raised to value herself as an individual - much as Erasmus worked hard to perfect his own independence.

Brian Herbert, The Butlerian Jihad

The Nine Houses are obviously deliberately technologically limited. Aside from having FTL capable spaceships, the most advanced piece of technology that we see in the Houses is "an electric transmitter box, with headphones and a mic." It's not clear entirely what sort of device this is, but it apparently requires you to stick an antenna out the window.

On New Rho, Cam has a beeping, and therefore presumably digital watch. Nona has to remind her that's it's called a "watch", and not the House term, "clockwork", which rather suggests House timepieces are analog.

There's a projector box embedded in the BoE conference table, which loads an image like dial up internet because they are "using shortwave" - presumably shortwave radio, which can transmit pictures. As We Suffer apologises for the slowness of the image loading because of shortwave, that suggests that other methods of transmitting an image do exist, but that for whatever reason they're not using those. Perhaps they do normally have something akin to the internet, but this is down due to the conditions on New Rho, or being avoided due to House or inter-cell monitoring.

The audio of Juno Zeta's proof of life is on "a little piece of electronics, a fingernail-shaped thing with prongs", which sounds like some kind of drive.

We also see We Suffer in the impromptu command centre in the tunnels with "a headpiece and a flip-top computer", presumably being used for some kind of communicatons or planning.

And of course, there's Cam and Pal's recorder, which from the descriptions of it making squeaks and garbled noises sounds rather like it might contain a cassette tape.

A paramilitary group on a beseiged planet may not be the best evidence for the level of technology outside of the Houses, but if it is in any way indicative, non-House society doesn't seem to have non-space travel technology beyond things that would have been available in the early 00s.

Some dark day, the greasers and beatniks will return to save us.

I know that a lot of people want to say that generative AI is like NFTs or Cryptocurrency in that it's a bubble and if you just wait long enough, it will go away; but like...generative AI actually has clear, practical applications. Like, certainly, there's a lot of baseless hype about it, but it won't be going away.

Somehow I have made it this long without realizing that none of the screen adoptions of Dune so much as mention the Butlerian Jihad. Like I guess it's burned into my brain so hard I sort of assumed it was part and parcel of the universe. Don't get me wrong, I think that's probably the first thing you learn if you want to dive deeper into the setting, but it still hits me like if the LotR movies showed us the big flaming eyeball tower and was like ‘Oh, that's why there are bad things, but don't worry, that's just background stuff.’ Yeah, you can understand the movie, but if the story is just like Frodo vs. The Witch King you are losing out on any of the conversation about the corruptive allure of power or theological undertones. So without further ado let's pretend this is for the benefit of interested new fans roped in by the movies and not part of my desperate attempt to silence the howling specters of literary analysis that live in my blood.

The Butlerian Jihad is an event set ~10k years prior to the events of Dune in which humanity won their freedom from the machines that they had enslaved themselves to. As a result, it is a religious taboo to create a machine that thinks like a human. That's frankly the bulk of the information presented by Frank Herbert in the text without dipping into books 7+, but whether or not those are canon is frankly an enormous can of worms, which really makes sense when you consider the size of the worms. But boy howdy, Frank loved his subtext and parallelism. Everyone has a foil character, every theme is hit from multiple angles, and Villinueve has been doing an excellent job of capturing a lot of that in repeated imagery and dialogue. The Butlerian Jihad happens off camera, but it's themes are absolutely critical to the big picture.

The Butlerian Jihad was a holy war. It was not merely a rebellion against the machines, it was a crusade against them. The prohibition against thinking machines isn't just a law, it's in the pan-universal Bible. Absolute psychopath Pieter DeVries himself claps back at the Baron for insinuating he might have a use for a computer, and this is a guy who has been hired specifically for his preternatural absence of morals. Let's hold onto that idea for a minute. 

Probably my favorite scene in the first book is the one where planetologist Liet-Kynes is dying out in the desert. As the last of his strength fades to dehydration he hallucinates conversations he had with his father concerning terraforming Arakkis for human habitability. He's told that the means are not complicated. There is already enough water on the planet, the Little Makers just have it all trapped deep underground as part of the sandworm reproductive cycle. You just need to isolate enough water to start irrigating plant life, and once it's established that'll keep the water on the surface on its own. The hard part is making sure everyone on the planet is environmentally conscious enough to foster a developing ecosystem. Nobody can drink any of that water while it's being collected, because they'll just introduce it back into the water cycle where the Little Makers are. It's going to take generations, so that sort of water discipline is going to have to go above and beyond a social convention. People need to be willing to die before they'll take a sip and compromise the plan. Ghost Dad Kynes concludes that the only mechanism in the human experience to enforce this consensus is religion. 

In the context of this whole parallelism thing, you have probably noticed that the Butlerian Jihad is not the only holy war in the narrative. Paul sees a new jihad as the only way of creating a future where humans can flourish. Now you might be saying ‘Wait now, Machines. I thought the point of Paul’s holy war was to avenge Leto and disempower established power structures by taking away the control of the spice!’ And you’d be right. The thing is, without getting into spoiler territory, Dune Messiah is not going to be about how everything just gets so much better now that Paul has destroyed the economy, government, and untold billions of human lives. This isn’t the endgame. Dude can see the future and the way he does it involves looking into the past. Paul lives in a society defined by a holy war and his goal is to redefine society. 

Putting it all together you can see what I mean about the Butlerian Jihad being essential to the themes even though the story never shows us a thinking machine or a narrative beat where the absence of computers changes the outcome. It helps us see the big picture. I’ve seen a lot of dialogue lately on whether Paul is a tragic hero or a consummate villain and I’m not here to answer that, but I am here to underline the critical detail. Paul intends to be seen as a tyrant. Just like Kynes’ hallucination says, religion is the lever to make a value stick around forever. He wants to traumatize humanity to hate chosen ones and emperors the same way the machines traumatized humanity to change them forever. The Water of Life ritual doesn’t invert his values, it lets him realize these visions of war are the means, not the ends. He is absolutely not happy about it, but this is Paul’s terrible purpose. 

Elon quoting the books about tech overlords getting smashed is great.

Dune takes place in the year 10,191, but that isn't 10,191 A.D.

The world of Dune uses the Universal Standard Calendar, which began not longer after the Butlerian Jihad (humanity's holy way against artificial intelligence) which is roughly 11,000 years in our future and lasted two centuries.

So the story of Dune actually takes place around 23,354 years from now.

I feel like we should stigmatize AI more, even for memes and shit. Like, don't harass or hurt anyone of course but like, anything that replaces creativity and our ability to discern truth from fiction and should be considered an enemy of everyone, and we should react to it with the same disgust, disapproval, and boycotts as crypto or techno-libertarians

An accumulation of facts does not always lead to comprehension.

— Erasmus , Dune: The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

From a conversation between 'thinking robots', where one is pointing out the other should have enough data by now to understand humans. The reply is intriguing and sounds like something that should be drilled into teachers who focus on rote memorisation without understanding etc.

begone demon