BlueMonday1984 @ BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

Tried to read it, ended up glazing over after the first or second paragraph, so I'll fire off a hot take and call it a day:

Artificial intelligence is a pseudoscience, and it should be treated as such.

Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:

Found a Bluesky thread you might be interested in:

On a Sci Fi authors’ panel at Comicon today, every writer asked about AI (as in LLM / algorithmic modern gen AI) gave it a kicking, drawing a spontaneous round of applause.

A few years ago, I don’t think that would have happened. People would have said “it’s an interesting tool”, or something.

Bearing in mind these are exactly the people who would be expected to engage with the idea, I think the tech turds have massively underestimated the propaganda faux pas they made by stealing writers’ hard work and then being cunts about it.

Tying this to a previous post of mine, I'm expecting their open and public disdain for gen-AI to end up bleeding into their writing. The obvious route would be AI systems/characters exhibiting the hallmarks of LLMs - hallucinations/confabulations, "AI slop" output, easily bypassable safeguards, that sort of thing.

Calling it a police cam for techbros seems like an obvious dunk. You can also make a gratuitous Simpsons reference and quip "Remember Humane? Its back, in OpenAI form!"

Hey, look on the bright side - humans are no longer the weakest links in cybersecurity.

Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.

My money's on OpenAI's Gadget^tm getting immediately compared to both of them as well, either by reviewers giving their (presumably negative) opinions on the product, or from people looking to dunk on OpenAI, if not AI as a whole.

The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?

On the one hand, OpenAI's reality distortion field has managed to hold strong up until now, and its difficult to see the tech press recognising OpenAI's Gadget^tm to be just the Rabbit R1/Humane Pin with a fresh coat of paint.

On the other hand, the Rabbit R1 and Humane Pin are industry laughingstocks whose names are synonymous with "godawful AI product" in the public consciousness, and who basically killed the concept of such an AI Gadget^tm in its crib - OpenAI could very well set themselves up to get relentlessly mocked for believing people wanted an AI Gadget^tm at all.

New piece from Tante: On "Vibe Coding" - take a wild guess what its about.

The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.

If Duolingo still had their userbase's goodwill, it would've probably worked. They've been pulling that shit since their mascot Duo turned into a meme, and its worked out for them up until now.

Mainly checked the YouTube comments and the like/dislike ratio - at the time of writing, he's got 7.3k likes to 147 dislikes, and the top comments are universally praising the guy. One particular comment quipped about how "everyone shilled for Honey except Markiplier".

Conover's video avoiding the hallmarks of a standard YouTuber Apology^tm is likely helping him out here - the public expects a lot of things from these kinds of videos, but "doing the bare minimum for an actual apology" is not one of them.

Adam Conover's put out an apology on YouTube regarding his milkshake duck-ing himself with Worldcoin, after his public apology on Bluesky. Seems his reputation's gonna make a full recovery.

EDIT: Found a banger comment after taking a quick peek:

Why does this matter?

Well, its a perfect demonstration that LLMs flat-out do not think like us. Even a goddamn five-year old could work this shit out with flying colours.

In other news, the ghost of Dorian has haunted an autoplag system:

New piece from Gary Marcus: AI may have just influenced Argentina’s election

He's not 100% certain that the AI deepfake a reader sent him ultimately influenced the election results, but the mere possibility that AI screwed someone out of getting elected is gonna be a major topic in Argentine politics for a good while, and I expect AI's effects on democracy will come under pretty heavy scrutiny as a result.

Got a pair of notable things I ran across recently.

Firstly, an update on Grok's White Genocide Disaster: the person responsible has seemingly revealed themselves, and shown off how they derailed Grok's prompt.. The pull request that initiated this debacle has been preserved on the Internet Archive.

Second, I ran across a Bluesky post which caught my attention:

You want my opinion on the "scab" comment, its another textbook example of the all-consuming AI backlash, one that suggests any usage of AI will be viewed as an open show of hostility towards labour.

TBF, Zitron has "wrap[ped] together everything I've written going back to [his] remote work coverage from 2021" with this piece - it was naturally gonna be long as hell.

Making an MCU comparison is deeply cliche at this point, but Zitron basically penned his personal equivalent to Avengers: Endgame with this - the impressive length is completely warranted.

ZITRON DROPPED

DomoAI just publicly partnered with Discord - W H Y

Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population

AI's already destroying people's cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldn't be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue it'll fuck up human's capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.

(and leading to me having to read slop all the time)

Thankfully, I've managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:

1. AI slop was banned from being uploaded back in 2022 (very early into the bubble), making it loud and clear that AI slop is unwelcome there. (Sidenote: A dedicated AI flag option was added in 2024)
2. The site primarily (if not near-exclusively) attracts artists, animators, musicians, and creatives in general - all groups who (for obvious reasons) are strongly opposed to gen-AI in all its forms, and who will avoid anything involving AI like the fucking plague.
3. The site is (practically) ad-free, meaning ad revenue is effectively zero - as such, setting up an AI slop farm (or a regular content mill) is utterly impractical, since you'd have zero shot of turning a profit.

(That I'm a NEET also helps (can't have AI bro coworkers if you're unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)

Update on the Artificial Darth Debacle: SAG-AFTRA just sued Epic for using AI for Darth Vader in the first place:

You want my take, this is gonna be a tough case for SAG - Jones signed off on AI recreations of Vader before his death in 2024, so arguing a lack of consent's off the table right from the get-go.

If SAG do succeed, the legal precedent set would likely lead to a de facto ban on recreating voices using AI. Given SAG-AFTRA's essentially saying that what Epic did is unethical on principle, I suspect that's their goal here.

Semi-OT: GamersNexus just put out a scathing expose of NVidia