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Building a blueprint for a better brain by tinkering with the code.
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DATA DIET
May 18th, 2026
Many creatives are disturbed by the abilities of AI. Anyone who finds their lamenting to be childish or an eye-roll in some other way has likely never had the value of their identity threatened on a fundamental level. If you're a father with grown children, imagine finding out that the children are not biologically yours. If you're a mother, imagine losing that child. If you are an athlete, imagine becoming paralyzed. If you support a family with your hard work, imagine getting laid off, and your industry vanishing. If anyone loves you, imagine if they suddenly stopped loving you. These examples are extreme, and it might seem like a stretch to equate it to the loss of identity and artist might feel, but hyperbolic analogies are often necessary to bridge the vast gulf between two different groups judging one another for two very different experiences. Remember, no man is an island, and one day, the bell might toll for your sense of identity.But why the creative stuff? Why incredible images? Why can't they make the AI do my dishes and fold my laundry and make my bed? Why can't it do all the boring stuff that limits my time to do the cool stuff?
First it's important to realize that none of the AI researchers and companies actually intended to do this. That might seem like a strange thing to say. They started companies, those companies make money — from the product we are discussing. How could this not be intentional?
When I use the word intentional, I mean it in the sense that water coursing down the side of a mountain, carving a river in a flash flood does not intend to decimate a small town in it's path. There's no intent whatsoever, all you have is the structural particulars of a certain circumstance, and these particulars play out their natural course of events.
Individuals have free will, but I don't think groups of people do.
Actually I kinda doubt everyone has free will. It probably exists on a spectrum and part of what determines placement on that spectrum is situation: If you are in isolation in a max security prison, it's hard to claim much agency, and by extension, much free will. There is a gradient between that isolated bastard, and Elon Musk who can materialize the largest factories known to man by, well, deciding to.
But then think about everyone involved in the actual construction of that factory. Do they have free will? Well, certainly they can quit their job, and that's apparently an expression of free will, but for the overwhelming majority who don't quit, they are fairly locked in. Not max security isolation locked in, but fairly locked in. And there in lies my point: that group of people cooperating and coordinating to build a factory have very little free will as a group.
If you think about all AI companies as a group of people, do they have much free will over what they are doing? No, I wouldn't say so. And the reason why is the Data Diet.
For one very big obvious reason, humans did not find it worth their time to meticulously record hundreds — millions of hours of POV footage of themselves washing dishes and uploading all of that footage to youtube. Strange isn't it? No, it's not strange at all, because who the fuck would want to watch that? Same goes for folding clothes or making the bed or tidying the house. No, humans like beautiful, entertaining and interesting things, so we post beautiful, entertaining and interesting things. We don't like tedious, boring and mundane things, so we don't post those things. What we have posted to the internet is the data available for the diet of AI.
AI companies used what data was available to train the models that we have. And what was available was all the books in existence and all of the pictures we've posted online. So that's why AI has become good at those things first. Key word their... "first". Because now that AI companies know that this model architecture works, now they are going to try and find more data to create new models that can do other things. There are already data sweat shops filled with people sitting at desks, folding clothes with cameras strapped to their foreheads and wrists. We will eventually have those robots doing our tedious chores, but again, it's a question of diet, and what data we have available for it.
This insight raises a very useful question: what can't be captured in a data format? Perhaps nothing, given enough time, but in the same way that locks, keys, safes and security systems are just deterrents against thieves, what useful aspect of our personal experience would be the biggest pain in the ass to capture in a data format?
Many seem to think taste is the final moat of human cognition, but I honestly question this. Good taste only exists if some exclusive cadre of high minded people agree that it has taste. And if it exists across more than one person, then I sincerely believe that it can be modeled. It might not be modeled as efficiently as a tasteful human brain can right now (in the same sense that the brain only requires 20 watts of power, which is nothing compared to running a single GPU for a query), but modeled I believe it will be.
So what's the biggest pain in the ass to get data on? I can think of one thing: your unique perspective as it relates to your singular placement in space and time, and the path you've taken to get there and how the experiences of that path have shaped the way you look at things.
Some of that could one day be modeled. And perhaps powerful inferences could be made regarding how you would interpret those experiences based on your particular genome, but it will never capture the full resolution of your lived experience. (knock on wood or slap me across the face if it turns out I'm typing this inside of a Matrix style simulation.)
Regardless, it'd be an enormous pain in the ass to gather this data. So what sort of practical use is this insight? Well, for one, the more normal your life, the easier it's going to be to make a simulation of you as a person, because there will be plenty of "like" examples. But the more wayward, random, unexpected and borderline batshit crazy your life's path is, the harder it will be to model, and likely the more tangential your perspective and well of insight may be. Simply put:
The weirdest life will be the last to be automated.
