From Bluesky, an AI slop account calling itself “OC Maker” (well, that’s kinda ironic) has set up shop, and is mass-following artists with original characters (OCs for short):
Shockingly, the artists on Bluesky, who near-universally jumped ship to avoid Twitter stealing their work to feed the AI, are not happy.
It also helps that digital clones are not real people, so their welfare is doubly pointless
This is that “A computer can never be held liable” image writ fucking large. Jesus Christ.
This is completely orthogonal to your point, but I expect the public’s gonna have a much lower opinion of software engineers after this bubble bursts, for a few reasons:
Right off the bat, they’re gonna have to deal with some severe guilt-by-association. AI has become an inescapable part of the Internet, if not modern life as a whole, and the average experience of dealing with anything AI related has been annoying at best and profoundly negative at worst. Combined with the tech industry going all-in on AI, I can see the entire field of software engineering getting some serious “AI bro” stench all over it.
The slop-nami has unleashed a torrent of low-grade garbage on the 'Net, whether it be zero-effort “AI art” or paragraphs of low-quality SEO optimised trash, whilst the gen-AI systems responsible for both have received breathless hype/praise from AI bros and tech journos (e.g. Sam Altman’s Ai-generated “metafiction”). Combined with the continous and ongoing theft of artist’s work that made this possible, and the public is given a strong reason to view software engineers as generally incapable of understanding art, if not outright hostile to art and artists as a whole.
Of course, the massive and ongoing theft of other people’s work to make the gen-AI systems behind said slop-nami possible have likely given people reason to view software engineers as entirely okay with stealing other’s work - especially given the aforementioned theft is done with AI bros’ open endorsement, whether implicitly or explicitly.
The same goes with DuckDuckGo, because the venn diagram of programmers and AI bros is apparently a circle.
Either they’re lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
I’m thinking the latter - Silicon Valley is full of true believers, after all.
Update on the University of Zurich’s AI experiment: Reddit’s considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
In terms of actually being useful, an AI data center is also worse than a boat.
Consider humans your competitive advantage.
Words to live by.
Less a standard piece and more “Ed Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutes” this time around
Stumbled across a piece from history YTer The Pharaoh Nerd publicly ripping into AI slop, specifically focusing on AI-generated pseudohistory found on YouTube Shorts.
Most data centre electrical equipment is only made outside the US. President Trump’s tariffs exempt electronics — but that expires 9 July. If it isn’t extended, then US data centres are screwed — no new buildouts, and huge maintenance problems for existing data centres. [Verdict]
Trump had the opportunity to do the funniest thing by setting them for the 4th of July.
At least the data centres are paid for by private companies and not bank loans. This means the bubble pop won’t cause a banking crisis too.
That’s waiting until rampant deregulation puts everything in place for another 2008 style crisis
"How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”
Its a silicon-based insult to life, it can’t be conscious
New piece from the Wall Street Journal: We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All (archive link)
The piece falls back into the standard “AI Is Inevitable™” at the end, but its still a surprisingly strong sneer IMO.
And sadly, it wasn’t somebody’s porn alt.
Wow Trannyporno really put that depraved woman in her place
That can’t be a real username. That fucking can’t.
New thread from Dan Olson about chatbots:
I want to interview Sam Altman so I can get his opinion on the fact that a lot of his power users are incredibly gullible, spending millions of tokens per day on “are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”
For the kinds of personalities that get really into Indigo Children, reality shifting, simulation theory, and the like chatbots are uncut Colombian cocaine. It’s the monkey orgasm button, and they’re just hammering it; an infinite supply of material for their apophenia to absorb.
Chatbots are basically adding a strain of techno-animism to every already cultic woo community with an internet presence, not a Jehovah that issues scripture, but more something akin to a Kami, Saint, or Lwa to appeal to, flatter, and appease in a much more transactional way.
Wellness, already mounting the line of the mystical like a pommel horse, is proving particularly vulnerable to seeing chatbots as an agent of secret knowledge, insisting that This One Prompt with your blood panel results will get ChatGPT to tell you the perfect diet to Fix Your Life
r/changemyview recently announced the University of Zurich had performed an unauthorised AI experiment on the subreddit. Unsurprisingly, there were a litany of ethical violations.
(Found the whole thing through a r/subredditdrama thread, for the record)
Drake’s a culture vulture, he doesn’t understand taste
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason, taking aim at AI coders and vibe coders alike:
Giving a personal sidenote, I expect “vibe coding” will stick around as a pejorative after the AI bubble bursts - “AI” has already become synonymous with “zero-effort, low-quality garbage” in the public eye, so re-using “vibe code” to mean “crapping out garbage” isn’t gonna be a difficult task, linguistically speaking.