New thread from Baldur Bjarnason:

Keep hearing reports of guys trusting ChatGPT’s output over experts or even actual documentation. Honestly feels like the AI Bubble’s hold over society has strengthened considerably over the past three months

This also highlights my annoyance with everybody who’s claiming that this tech will be great if every uses it responsibly. Nobody’s using it responsibly. Even the people who think they are, already trust the tech much more than it warrants

Also constantly annoyed by analysis that assumes the tech works as promised or will work as promised. The fact that it is unreliable and nondeterministic needs to be factored into any analysis you do. But people don’t do that because the resulting conclusion is GRIM as hell

LLMs add volatility and unpredictability to every system they touch, which makes those systems impossible to manage. An economy with pervasive LLM automation is an economy in constant chaos

On a semi-related note, I expect the people who are currently making heavy use of AI will find themselves completely helpless without it if/when the bubble finally bursts, and will probably struggle to find sympathy from others thanks to AI indelibly staining their public image.

(The latter part is assuming heavy AI users weren’t general shitheels before - if they were, AI’s stain on their image likely won’t affect things either way. Of course, “AI bro” is synonymous with “trashfire human being”, so I’m probably being too kind to them :P)

from someone who helped build their LLM

Nice to get a look on the inside from one of the 21st-century Oppenheimers.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation fills its tabloid papers across Australia with right-wing slop. Now the slop will come from a chatbot — and not a human slop churner.

The quality of its tabloids will remain exactly the same, I presume.

r/cursor is the gift that keeps on giving:

Don’t Date Robots!

Kill them instead

In other news, IETF 127 (which is being held in November) is facing a boycott months in advance. The reason? Its being held in the United States.

This likely applies to a lot of things, but that would have been unthinkable before the election.

At this point, using AI in any sort of creative context is probably gonna prompt major backlash, and the idea of AI having artistic capabilities is firmly dead in the water.

On a wider front (and to repeat an earlier prediction), I suspect that the arts/humanities are gonna gain some begrudging respect in the aftermath of this bubble, whilst tech/STEM loses a significant chunk.

For arts, the slop-nami has made “AI” synonymous with “creative sterility” and likely painted the field as, to copy-paste a previous comment, “all style, no subtance, and zero understanding of art, humanities, or how to be useful to society”

For humanities specifically, the slop-nami has also given us a nonstop parade of hallucination-induced mishaps and relentless claims of AGI too numerous to count - which, combined with the increasing notoriety of TESCREAL, could help the humanities look grounded and reasonable by comparison.

(Not sure if this makes sense - it was 1AM where I am when I wrote this)

o7

We can add that to the list of things threatening to bring FOSS as a whole crashing down.

Plus the culture being utterly rancid, the large-scale AI plagiarism, the declining industry surplus FOSS has taken for granted, having Richard Stallman taint the whole movement by association, the likely-tanking popularity of FOSS licenses, AI being a general cancer on open-source and probably a bunch of other things I’ve failed to recognise or make note of.

FOSS culture being a dumpster fire is probably the biggest long-term issue - fixing that requires enough people within the FOSS community to recognise they’re in a dumpster fire, and care about developing the distinctly non-technical skills necessary to un-fuck the dumpster fire.

AI’s gonna be the more immediately pressing issue, of course - its damaging the commons by merely existing.

Update on the Vibe Coder Catastrophe^tm: he’s killed his current app and seems intent to vibe code again:

Personally, I expect this case won’t be the last “vibe coded” app/website/fuck-knows-what to get hacked to death - security is virtually nonexistent, and the business/techbros who’d be attracted to it are unlikely to learn from their mistakes.

New piece from Brian Merchant: DOGE’s ‘AI-first’ strategist is now the head of technology at the Department of Labor, which is about…well, exactly what it says on the tin. Gonna pull out a random paragraph which caught my eye, and spin a sidenote from it:

“I think in the name of automating data, what will actually end up happening is that you cut out the enforcement piece,” Blanc tells me. “That’s much easier to do in the process of moving to an AI-based system than it would be just to unilaterally declare these standards to be moot. Since the AI and algorithms are opaque, it gives huge leeway for bad actors to impose policy changes under the guide of supposedly neutral technological improvements.”

How well Musk and co. can impose those policy changes is gonna depend on how well they can paint them as “improving efficiency” or “politically neutral” or some random claptrap like that. Between Musk’s own crippling incompetence, AI’s utterly rancid public image, and a variety of factors I likely haven’t factored in, imposing them will likely prove harder than they thought.

(I’d also like to recommend James Allen-Robertson’s “Devs and the Culture of Tech” which goes deep into the philosophical and ideological factors behind this current technofash-stavaganza.)

TV Tropes got an official app, featuring an AI “story generator”. Unsurprisingly, backlash was swift, to the point where the admins were promising to nuke it “if we see that users don’t find the story generator helpful”.

Ran across a short-ish thread on BlueSky which caught my attention, posting it here:

the problem with a story, essay, etc written by LLM is that i lose interest as soon as you tell me that’s how it was made. i have yet to see one that’s ‘good’ but i don’t doubt the tech will soon be advanced enough to write ‘well.’ but i’d rather see what a person thinks and how they’d phrase it

like i don’t want to see fiction in the style of cormac mccarthy. i’d rather read cormac mccarthy. and when i run out of books by him, too bad, that’s all the cormac mccarthy books there are. things should be special and human and irreplaceable

i feel the same way about using AI-type tech to recreate a dead person’s voice or a hologram of them or whatever. part of what’s special about that dead person is that they were mortal. you cheapen them by reviving them instead of letting their life speak for itself

The “legal proof” part is a different argument. His picture is a generated picture so it contains none of the original pixels, it is merely the result of prompting the model with the original picture. Considering the way AI companies have so far successfully acted like they’re shielded from copyright law, he’s not exactly wrong. I would love to see him go to court over it and become extremely wrong in the process though.

It’ll probably set a very bad precedent that fucks up copyright law in various ways (because we can’t have anything nice in this timeline), but I’d like to see him get his ass beaten as well. Thankfully, removing watermarks is already illegal, so the courts can likely nail him on that and call it a day.

In other news, Ed Zitron discovered Meg Whitman’s now an independent board director at CoreWeave (an AI-related financial timebomb he recently covered), giving her the opportunity to run a third multi-billion dollar company into the ground:

As an added bonus, its clear he’s getting trolled for his terminal startup brain:

EDIT: Found some dipshit trying to defend the guy in the wild, rehashing the arguments used for AI art:

The most generous reading of that email I can pull is that Dr. Greg is an egotistical dipshit who tilts at windmills twenty-four-fucking-seven.

Also, this is pure gut instinct, but it feels like the FOSS community is gonna go through a major contraction/crash pretty soon. I’ve already predicted AI will kneecap adoption of FOSS licenses before, but the culture of FOSS being utterly rancid (not helped by Richard Stallman being the semi-literal Jeffery Epstein of tech (in multiple ways)) definitely isn’t helping pre-existing FOSS projects.

Ran across a new piece on Futurism: Before Google Was Blamed for the Suicide of a Teen Chatbot User, Its Researchers Published a Paper Warning of Those Exact Dangers

I’ve updated my post on the Character.ai lawsuit to include this - personally, I expect this is gonna strongly help anyone suing character.ai or similar chatbot services.

You could probably do good art with an AI

Hot take: A plagiarism machine built to spew signal-shaped noise is incapable of making good art

ZITRON DROPPED