People are falling in love with their chatbots. There are now dozens of apps that offer intimate companionship with an AI-powered bot, and they have millions of users. A recent survey of users found that 19% of Americans have interacted with an AI meant to simulate a romantic partner.
I watched Her last night. I wouldn’t judge someone for falling in love with a general AI.
I will however judge someone for falling in love with a racist, hallucinating chat bot.
A “general A. I” would just be a person.
General 爱
I am currently learning Japanese so I thought something was wrong with either my eyes or brain until I realized that’s Simplified Chinese.
I was debating whether I should use the traditional/Japanese or simplified version of the character
After learning over 2000 of these characters I unfortunately have completely accepted the immortal wisdom of Chinese scribes and would always choose traditional. Interestingly while I understand why the Chinese simplified the traditional characters in 20th century to reduce stroke count and make writing faster I actually find that in computer age traditional characters have advantage in being more distinct from each other while reading them. It’s a strange trade-off.
What, you’re learning kyuujitai?
You do inevitably learn kyuujitai variants for a lot of kanji especially when reading but I suppose with history as long as Chinese characters one has to specify what is really traditional. I am sure Han scribes would be disappoint at using typeface design characters as opposed to clerical script even if my handwriting wasn’t bad. Much like how Ottoman scribes were so indignant when Italians printed Arabic script books to sell in Ottoman markets. Still maybe I will try to practice different forms of characters too when I am at least somewhat comfortable writing the standard modern characters with a brush pen.
I was rather talking about the implications of more extensive simplification undertaken by China in second half of 20th century where they heavily cut through stroke counts in more common and complex characters such as the one for 爱 instead of 愛. It is definitely faster and easier to write the left one when handwriting is concerned but because in digital environment writing either is same key strokes rather than different brush strokes there is no extra writing difficulty while it introduces a bit more ambiguity with characters because it reduces the radical count and variance. This applies to a lot of kyuujitai as opposed to shinjitai which is why I think the count of Kanji used in Japanese material is going up instead of down.
I only use oracle bone script
spoiler
jk, I’m totally illiterate in chinese and japanese. Your comment is super interesting, though
Oracle bone script is really cool! It actually helps a lot when you want to internalize some of the characters to remember them to look up oracle bone script originals because a lot of them are a lot more pictographic, especially things like kanjis for animals but not only.