Artificial intelligence and cheating/lying: two great tastes that go together

New thread from Ed Zitron, gonna focus on just the starter:

You want my opinion, Zitron’s on the money - once the AI bubble finally bursts, I expect a massive outpouring of schadenfreude aimed at the tech execs behind the bubble, and anyone who worked on or heavily used AI during the bubble.

For AI supporters specifically, I expect a triple whammy of mockery:

• On one front, they’re gonna be publicly mocked for believing tech billionaires’ bullshit claims about AI, and publicly lambasted for actively assisting tech billionaires’ attempts to destroy labour once and for all.

• On another front, their past/present support for AI will be used as grounds to flip the bozo bit on them, dismissing whatever they have to say as coming from someone incapable of thinking for themselves.

• On a third front, I expect their future art/writing will be immediately assumed to be AI slop and either dismissed as not worth looking at or mocked as soulless garbage made by someone who, quoting David Gerard, “literally cannot tell good from bad”.

Dr. Abeba Birhane got an AI True Believer^tm email recently, and shared it on Bluesky:

You want my opinion, I fully support acausal robot deicide, and think AI rights advocates can go fuck themselves.

Alright that’s it: anime streaming needs to return to fansubbing

Fansubs are openly doing it for the love of the anime, so chances are they’d avoid AI slop like the plague (though the CHUDs would be okay with ChatGPT subs if it meant avoiding The Woke^tm)

(note: this link contains a skintight anime bosom so don’t open it in front of your boss unless your boss is chill)

Good thing I’m a fucking NEET, then

…Lotus, you clever bastard.

In other news, someone tried selling a vibe-coded ytp-dl wrapper and got publicly called out for it:

Not to mention, these discussions partially enabled the rise of technofascism, making Yudkowsky and friends outright complicit in this shit.

Found a piece which caught my attention: Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing?

You want my personal opinion, the basic idea of “decomputing” that author Dan McQuillan is putting forward is likely gonna gain plenty of traction. The Trump administration more generally and DOGE more specifically have thoroughly undermined any notion of tech being an apolitical force, so arguing against the politics inherent to AI is gonna be an easier sell.

the model was supposed to be trained solely on his own art and thus I didn’t have any ethical issues with it.

Personally, I consider training any slop-generator model to be unethical on principle. Gen-AI is built to abuse workers for corporate gain - any use or support of it is morally equivalent to being a scab.

Fast-forward to shortly after release and the game’s AI model has been pumping out Elsa and Superman.

Given plagiarism machines are designed to commit plagiarism (preferably with enough plausible deniability to claim fair use), I’m not shocked.

(Sidenote: This is just personal instinct, but I suspect fair use will be gutted as a consequence of the slop-nami.)

I almost feel like now that Chatgpt is everywhere and has been billed as man’s savior, perhaps some logic should be built into these models that “detect” people trying to become friends with them, and have the bot explain it has no real thoughts and is giving you just the horse shit you want to hear. And if the user continues, it should erase its memory and restart with the explanation again that it’s dumb and will tell you whatever you want to hear.

Personally, I’d prefer deleting such models and banning them altogether. Chatbots are designed to tell people what they want to hear, and to make people become friends with them - the mental health crises we are seeing are completely by design.

All connection technology is a force for homogeneity. Television was the death of the regional accent, for example.

Listen to a Geordie for five minutes and say that to me with a straight face. I fucking dare you. (Not you, the orange site member)

If a human customer service rep [added charges without telling people and lied to them], it’d just be fraud. But being able to blame the computer, that’s the use case for AI!

Potential hot take: In situations where the company attempts to diffuse responsbility, the CEO should take the blame automatically.

Update from Brian Merchant: The first edition of AI Killed My Job has just dropped

It’s all gotta be in the models by now, but it’s gonna be a cool resource for something, right?

It’ll also be helpful for helping the 'Net recover from the slop-nami once AI finally dies.

For once, I’m hoping a megacorp actively squeezes the infringer for everything they’re worth. The looming threat of getting drained dry is the only thing keeping AI fucks from stealing anything they fucking want.

Dan McQuillian just dropped the text of a seminar he gave: The role of the University is to resist AI

I was half-expecting a shitpost of some kind, but nope this is a solid deep-dive into a single segment from the most infamous troll fic of all time.

Also, that ending paragraph is fucking brutal. Straight from the top rope.

Starting this off with Baldur Bjarnason sneering at his fellow techies for their “reading” of Dante’s Inferno:

Reading through my feed reader and seeing tech dilettantes “doing” Dante in a week and change, I’m reminded of the time in university when we spent half a semester discussing Dante’s Divine Comedy, followed by tracing it’s impact and influence over the centuries

I don’t think these assholes even bother to read their footnotes, and their writing all sounds like it comes from ChatGPT. Naturally so, because I believe them when they claim they don’t use it for writing. They’re just genuinely that dull

At least read the footnotes FFS

If they were reading Dante for pleasure, that’d be different—genuinely awesome, even. But all of this is framed as doing the entirety of “humanities” in the space of a few weeks.

Exploiting software copyright could be profitable, but to my knowledge its an unproven method. At this moment, they’re probably eyeing the fact that defense spending is ballooning worldwide and thinking “there’s some easy money to made”.