BlueMonday1984

On today's episode of AI Slop's Endless Fuckups: "Mastering Tf2 Custom War Paint: A Step-By-Step Creative Guide", an ostensible guide to creating custom War Paints (think something like weapon skins in Counter Strike: Global Offensive/Counter Strike 2, or character skins in Minecraft) for Team Fortress 2.

The opening has no obvious faults I can see, but the bulk of this slop article is about painting a real-life weapon, not creating a texture to be applied to an in-game weapon. Its the kind of mistake a human would never make.

EDIT: That slop guide's existence is getting on my nerves, so here's a basic War Paint guide I found on Steam

Update: the steak was delicious

I just turned 26. I’m taking a trip to a local steakhouse to celebrate.

OT: I just turned 26. I'm taking a trip to a local steakhouse to celebrate.

AI slop is very good at falling into the uncanny valley, whether that paragraphs of pure nothingness from a text extruder, or strange almost-human looking imagery that looks and feels inexplicably wrong. Its a great way to produce some accidental nightmare fuel, especially considering the AI bros glazing such shit are incapable of recognising its accidentally disturbing nature.

As a "fun" sidenote, there was an SCP article on the site which acted like a slop generator (SCP-1004, Factory Porn). Its writer, DrBright, was permabanned in 2022 after a lengthy history of sexual harassment was uncovered (and the article was deleted altogether in February of this year). Feels oddly fitting, in the worst way possible.

Witnessed an "AI-Powered political sandbox" called President Simulator crop up after seeing someone stream it on Discord.

I felt tempted to try and fuck with it, but its asking me to sign up for some fucking reason

Found the guy's webshite - its zero effort mInImAlIsT garbage at its core, and it proudly advertises his role in making scamchain, scamchain and more scamchain.

So, nothing really shocking

My thesis is that, with such short prompts, the user is doomed to receive a milquetoast average response; the bot correctly identifies the specific domain but elaborates a global non-specific approach that isn’t sufficiently nuanced.

Seems you're on to something - I submitted the phrase "Demoknight TF2" (an old(ish) meme started by/referencing TF2ber SolarLight, and referencing the Demoknight subclass, which explicitly forgoes a Stickybomb Launcher for a shield), and it gave me a godawful slop guide to the aforementioned subclass:

Alt-text

Demoknight is a popular TF2 “Demoman” build/theme focused on staying in close-quarters as a mobile melee/ranged threat—usually with a shield for mobility/survivability and a sword or axe for damage—while using Demo’s explosion kit situationally.

Typical Demoknight loadout ideas:

Primary (melee focus): Eyelander, Scotsman (sword/knight vibe), or other sword/axe-style options depending on the playstyle.
Shield: Tide Turner (more aggressive with better survivability/tempo) or Splendid Screen (more defensive, survivability-oriented).
Grenade / support: often a grenade launcher for area control when you can’t reach melee cleanly, or a weapon that complements your survivability/engagements.

How you generally play it:

Close the gap on targets that can’t instantly delete you (avoid heavy focus fire and long-range spam when your shield isn’t ready).
Trade efficiently: Demoknight wins by forcing short fights you can control—get in, land a sequence, then reposition.
Use explosives smartly: not constant spam—more like zoning, forcing movement, or punishing groups.
Don’t brawl bad matchups: if you’re out-ranged with no shield support, fall back and look for flanks/angles.

If you tell me whether you want more aggressive (run-and-slash) or more defensive (survive and pick openings), I can suggest a tighter specific weapon combo and a short “what to do in each situation” plan.

Going over a few things obviously wrong with this:

Demoknight is a popular TF2 "Demoman" build/theme

w h a t ?

mobile melee/ranged threat

Hybrid Demoknight (which takes a grenade launcher in the primary slot), I can see describing as a ranged threat. Full Demoknight (which takes Ali Baba's Wee Booties instead), not so much.

usually with a shield for mobility/survivability and a sword or axe for damage

Demoknight explicitly forgoes the Stickybomb Launcher for a shield of some description

Scotsman (sword/knight vibe)

There's no weapon called the Scotsman, but there is an axe called the Scotsman's Skullcutter

or other sword/axe-style options depending on the playstyle

There's only one axe for the Demo in the vanilla game - the aforementioned Skullcutter.

Shield: Tide Turner (more aggressive with better survivability/tempo) or Splendid Screen (more defensive, survivability-oriented).

There is a survivability-oriented shield, but its neither of these - its the Chargin' Targe, which offers 50% fire resist and 30% explosive resist (the Screen offers 30% resist on both, and the Turner offers only 15% on both, for comparison.

Calling the Splendid Screen "defensive" is also pretty far off the mark - beyond the aforementioned reduced resistances, its main advantage is a faster recharge on the shield charge, and a 70% increase to shield bash damage

As for the Tide Turner, it trades in offensive capabilities (it prevents its user from landing charge crits with their melee) for mobility-related ones (it completely disables turn control restrictions).

Grenade / support: often a grenade launcher for area control when you can’t reach melee cleanly, or a weapon that complements your survivability/engagements.

Yeah, seems the chatbot can't tell the difference between full and hybrid knight. Also, the grenade launchers are generally better for landing direct hits - area control is more the domain of a stickybomb launcher, or the Soldier's Rocket Launcher(s).

Use explosives smartly: not constant spam—more like zoning, forcing movement, or punishing groups.

Seems the chatbot got Demoknight and stock Demo mixed up.

Demoknight in general should stump chatbots pretty easily - beyond being effectively a different class from stock Demo, the subclass has a lot of nuance that can and will trip up the chatbots. To quote SolarLight's hour-long video on the charge mechanic:

"Well, at least you know that all of Demoknight's weapons have their uses when it comes to charging, and that Demoknight's charge can be essentially be boiled down into three different types (listed on-screen as "Full Control", "Some Control", and "Low Control"). There's also a distinction between Full Demoknight (melee-only) and Hybrid Demoknight (melee + grenade launcher), which is often a massive shift in playstyle. Demoknight has so much weapon variety, that talking about specific strategies can be a bit of a nightmare. Any given strategy might be godlike in one loadout, suboptimal in another, and impossible in another."

OT: What the fuck happened whilst I was asleep

alt: A screenshot showing nineteen fucking notifs

On one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, if I worked at a garbage tech company and my boss would not only pay me to sabotage the code base and spend their money but also reward me for doing so… I mean that’s an attractive proposition.

Before, sabotaging your competition was difficult and legally risky. AI fixes this - now, your competition shall sabotage themselves, leaving you free to focus on other things.

The Carlson Lab has agreed on blanket-banning chatbots for writing. Why? Simple:

Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.

In a reasonable world, this would have probably sent everyone running for the hills. Moral issues of AI aside, a fancy way of committing career suicide is never worth whatever upsides it offers. We do not leave in a reasonable world.

Tamagotchi didn't die for this

Hank Green is a popular science YouTuber who’s been pushing AI doomsday harder and harder for about the past year. The Washington Post article details some of the sponsorships that paid Green to shill for the AI doomsday cult — even as Green says in the article that he thinks AI doomsday is silly.
Green has personal experience of AI doom — when it came out last week just how much of his stuff was written with ChatGPT and Claude. [Mashable]

Hank stood too close to the circus, and caught a stray as a result. You love to see it.

I found the song - was a fun listen all around.

“It’s open source, so anyone can verify” – unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.

Also, most of the would-be verifiers are frying their brains with AI

Gamers Nexus has announced plans to poison the LLMs scraping them, alongside updates to the megacharts on their website.

The Silicon Valley set's also shown a complete inability to tell good work from slop, as their relentless glazing of AI slop has demonstrated, so I can easily believe that.

You hide your prompt in a document, which can even be completely outside the target’s Copilot organisation. That infected document gets used as a source by Copilot for Word. If Copilot sees your prompt and uses it as instructions, it may manipulate the document the user is editing — change financial numbers, send company data out to the attacker, and so on.
The new document may in turn become a carrier and spread the infection — even without the original infected document being present. You now have an AI worm.

Oh, joy, we've been overdue for another ILOVEYOU-level incident.

A new way to fuck with AI scrapers just dropped!

Aaaaaand its fucking with screen readers, making protected text inaccessible to blind readers. File this next to the alt-text drama in the "AI bros set back accessibility" bucket.