BlueMonday1984 @ BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

Semi-OT: A coalition of record corps is trying to sue the Internet Archive out of existence

Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the "residential proxy" services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.

Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I'm dropping it here:

I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.

If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm

"Please" and "thank you" are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.

The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand

New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at 'America's Most Powerful'

The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the "Iraqi Most Wanted" playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the "art" decks do - the "merch" decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.

Hey, I've seen that EVILexa before!

New BlueSky post from Baldur Bjarnason:

New sneer from Tante, this time aimed at the entire field of CS:

The Israeli military’s use of “AI” targeting systems as an accountability sink in service of a predetermined policy of ethnic cleansing.

Said policy enjoys broad Jewish-American support, so I'm not even sure why Israel needs the accountability sink

Cursor's cofounder jumped in to try and quell the outrage. He is not pulling it off.

New piece from Tante: These are not the same, arguing that the infrastrucure left after AI bubble's burst will leave infrastructure which will be actively damaging to a democratic society.

Its not the first piece I've seen about the bubble's potential aftermath (that goes to MAIHT3K), but it does give another perspective on it.

ZITRON DROPPED

New piece from Ed Zitron - a 44-minute read about OpenAI's threat to the entire tech industry

I've repeated this prediction a bajillion times, but I suspect this bubble's discredited the idea of artificial intelligence, and expect it to quickly die once this bubble bursts.

Between the terabytes upon terabytes of digital mediocrity the slop-nami's given us, LLMs' countless and relentless failures in logic and reason, the large-scale enshittification of daily life their mere existence has enabled, and their power consumption singlehandedly accelerating the climate crisis, I feel that the public's come to view computers as inherently incapable of humanlike cognition/creativity, no matter how many gigawatts they consume or oceans they boil.

Expanding on this somewhat, I suspect AI as a concept will likely also come to be seen as an inherently fascist concept.

With the current bubble's link to esoteric fascism, the far-right's open adoration of slop, basically everything about OpenAI's Studio Ghibli slopgen, and God-knows-what-else, the public's got plenty of reason to treat use or support of AI as a severe indictment of someone's character in and of itself - a "tech asshole signifier", to quote Baldur Bjarnason.

And, of course, AI as a concept will probably come to be viewed as inherently anti-art/anti-artist as well - considering how badly the AI bubble's shafted artists, and artists specifically, that kinda goes without saying.

New YouTube video I ran across: The Art Of Poison-Pilling Music Files

Any military use of AI is already gonna be seen in a warcrimey light thanks to Israel using it in their Gaza Geneva Checklist Speedrun - add in the public being fully aware of your average LLM's, shall we say, tenuous connection to reality, and you have a recipe for people immediately assuming the worst.

Me, eight months ago

Fun fact: the rise of autoplag is now threatening the supply chain as well, as bad actors take advantage of LLM hallucinations to plant malware into people's programs.

Here's a screenshot of two screenshots of an AI bro getting humiliated:

They're giving the American people what they voted for

A Group of Indians

That's called a call center

Alternatively, "A Guy (from) India".

Zitron's preparing to drop his strongest diss of 2025: