BlueMonday1984 @ BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

As a famous swindler once said, there's a sucker born every minute.

New article from Jared White: Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill, aimed at sneering the shit out of one of Simon Willson's latest blogposts. Here's a personal highlight of mine:

Generative AI is tied at the hip to fascism (do the research if you don’t believe me), and it pains me to see pointless arguments over what constitutes “vibe coding” overshadow the reality that all genAI usage is anti-craft and anti-humanist and in fact represents an extreme position.

Baldur Bjarnason's given his thoughts on Bluesky:

My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.

I’ve heard so many examples of closed source projects that get shipped but don’t actually work for the business. And too many examples of broken closed source projects that are replacing legacy code that was both working just fine and genuinely secure. Pure novelty-seeking

Personal rule of thumb: all autoplag is serious until proven satire.

Fuuuuuuuuuck. I used to watch that guy.

The Repubs more-or-less renamed themselves Team Skynet with this open attempt to maximise AI's harms, I absolutely think they're McFucking Losing It™ right now.

Breaking news from 404 Media: the Repubs introduced a new bill in an attempt to ban AI from being regulated:

“...no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,” says the text of the bill introduced Sunday night by Congressman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The text of the bill will be considered by the House at the budget reconciliation markup on May 13.

If this goes through, its full speed ahead on slop.

Its definitely petty, but making Altman's all-consuming incompetence known to the world is something I strongly approve of.

Definitely goes a long way to show why he's an AI bro.

Also minus any mention of johnny depp.

Depp v. Heard was my generation's equivalent to the OJ Simpson trial, so chances are he'll end up conspicuous in his absence.

🎶 Certified Keeper guy? Certified pedophile

(the joke presented itself, I had to :P)

Okay, complete shot-in-the-dark prediction here - I expect Newgrounds is gonna see an influx of musicians from this.

I am admittedly biased on this (I'm heavily active on there), but I do have precedent to point to - Tumblr's NSFW ban in late 2018 led to a minor influx of artists in November, followed by a site-crashing influx in December, after the ban was officially announced.

the constant adoration of LLMs is driving me mad.

^{Aaaah I want out}

Hopefully, the AI bubble's spectacular implosion will wipe out your fellow programmers' adoration of these plagiarising lie boxes and we can hopefully move on from these godforsaken blights on humanity. (At the cost of another 2008-style global economic meltdown. And America imploding in on itself. And maybe the end of the world, if our luck's sufficiently shit.)

(ah, who am I kidding, most programmers are fucking idiots (no offence), they'll probably still be enamored with autoplag even if all that happens)

New piece from Brian Merchant: Four bad AI futures arrived this week, taking a listicle-ish approach to some of the horrific things AI has unleashed upon us.

🎶 Guess who's back, back again

🎶 Holmes is back, tell a friend

E: ow god im really in a ‘take science fiction too seriously’ period.

People taking sci-fi too seriously was how LessWrong and the AI bubble happened, I'd say you're pretty far from taking it too seriously :P

I've already seen all the discourse surrounding that clipart fembot, but you want my take, that design can fuck off back to the dark depths of the uncanny valley. Give me someone like Aigis any day of the week:

Ran across a Bluesky thread which caught my attention - its nothing major, its just about how gen-AI painted one rando's views of the droids of Star Wars:

Generative AI has helped me to understand why, in Star Wars, the droids seem to have personalities but are generally bad at whatever they're supposed to be programmed to do, and everyone is tired of their shit and constantly tells them to shut up

Threepio: Sir, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3720 to one!

Han Solo (knowing that Threepio just pulls these numbers out of Reddit memes about Emperor Palpatine's odds of getting laid): SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!

"Why do the heroes of Star Wars never do anything to help the droids? They're clearly sentient, living things, yet they're treated as slaves!" Thanks for doing propaganda for Big Droid, you credulous ass!

With that out the way, here's my personal sidenote:

There's already been plenty of ink spilled on the myriad effects AI will have on society, but it seems one of the more subtle effects will be on the fiction we write and consume.

Right off the bat, one thing I'm anticipating (which I've already talked about before) is that AI will see a sharp decline in usage as a plot device - whatever sci-fi pizzazz AI had as a concept is thoroughly gone at this point, replaced with the same all-consuming cringe that surrounds NFTs and the metaverse, two other failed technologies turned pop-cultural punchlines.

If there are any attempts at using "superintelligent AI" as a plot point, I expect they'll be lambasted for shattering willing suspension of disbelief, at least for a while. If AI appears at all, my money's on it being presented as an annoyance/inconvenience (as someone else has predicted).

Another thing I expect is audiences becoming a lot less receptive towards AI in general - any notion that AI behaves like a human, let alone thinks like one, has been thoroughly undermined by the hallucination-ridden LLMs powering this bubble, and thanks to said bubble's wide-spread harms (environmental damage, widespread theft, AI slop, misinformation, etcetera) any notion of AI being value-neutral as a tech/concept has been equally undermined.

With both of those in mind, I expect any positive depiction of AI is gonna face some backlash, at least for a good while.

(As a semi-related aside, I found a couple of people openly siding with the Mos Eisley Cantina owner who refused to serve R2 and 3PO [Exhibit A, Exhibit B])

In other news, SoundCloud's become the latest victim of the AI scourge - artists have recently discovered the TOS allows their work to be stolen for AI training since early 2024.

SoundCloud's already tried to quell the backlash, but they're getting accused of lying in the replies and the QRTs, so its safe to say its not working.

Quick update from Brian Merchant: he's looking for stories about AI screwing people over.

If you've got any, send them to AIKilledMyJob@pm.me

Got a nice and lengthy sneer from film blog That Final Scene: the uncanny valet is not your friend (and other AI stories)

Beyond being an utter castigation of AI bros' "attempts" at aping art, its also wonderfully written from start to finish. Go check it out.