The whole history of “artificial intelligence” since 1955 is making impressive demos that you can’t use for real work. Then they cut your funding off and it’s AI Winter again.
I’ve found myself wondering if I was being overly harsh in calling artificial intelligence a pseudoscience. Clearly, I was not.
New article from Axos: Publishers facing existential threat from AI, Cloudflare CEO says
Baldur Bjarnason has given his commentary:
Honestly, if search engine traffic is over, it might be time for blogs and blog software to begin to deny all robots by default
Anyways, personal sidenote/prediction: I suspect the Internet Archive’s gonna have a much harder time archiving blogs/websites going forward.
Up until this point, the Archive enjoyed easy access to large swathes of the 'Net - site owners had no real incentive to block new crawlers by default, but the prospect of getting onto search results gave them a strong incentive to actively welcome search engine robots, safe in the knowledge that they’d respect robots.txt and keep their server load to a minimum.
Thanks to the AI bubble and the AI crawlers its unleashed upon the 'Net, that has changed significantly.
Now, allowing crawlers by default risks AI scraper bots descending upon your website and stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, overloading your servers and attacking FOSS work in the process. And you can forget about reigning them in with robots.txt - they’ll just ignore it and steal anyways, they’ll lie about who they are, they’ll spam new scrapers when you block the old ones, they’ll threaten to exclude you from search results, they’ll try every dirty trick they can because these fucks feel entitled to steal your work and fundamentally do not respect you as a person.
Add in the fact that the main upside of allowing crawlers (turning up in search results) has been completely undermined by those very same AI corps, as “AI summaries” (like Google’s) steal your traffic through stealing your work, and blocking all robots by default becomes the rational decision to make.
This all kinda goes without saying, but this change in Internet culture all-but guarantees the Archive gets caught in the crossfire, crippling its efforts to preserve the web as site owners and bloggers alike treat any and all scrapers as guilty (of AI fuckery) until proven innocent, and the web becomes less open as a whole as people protect themselves from the AI robber barons.
On a wider front, I expect this will cripple any future attempts at making new search engines, too. In addition to AI making it piss-easy to spam search systems with SEO slop, any new start-ups in web search will struggle with quality websites blocking their crawlers by default, whilst slop and garbage will actively welcome their crawlers, leading to your search results inevitably being dogshit and nobody wanting to use your search engine.
…Honestly, I can’t help but feel you’re on to something. I’d have loved to believe this was an honest thought experiment, but after seeing the right openly wage a war on empathy as a concept, I wouldn’t be shocked if Roko’s Basilisk (and its subsequent effects) weren’t planned from the start.
ZITRON DROPPED (sadly, its premium)
Darwin Award-as-a-service
Lying machines have no place in anything involving facts or knowledge. Get the fuck out.
LGBT neo-nazis
New Tante piece: “ChatBot” is bad design
Idk personally i kind of expect the ai makers to have at least had the sense to allow their bots to process math with a calculator and not guesswork. That seems like, an absurdly low bar both for testing the thing as a user as well as a feature to think of.
You forget a few major differences between us and AI makers.
We know that these chatbots are low-quality stochastic parrots capable only of producing signal shaped noise. The AI makers believe their chatbots are omniscient godlike beings capable of solving all of humanity’s problems with enough resources.
The AI makers believe that imitating intelligence via guessing the next word is equivalent to being genuinely intelligent in a particular field. We know that a stochastic parrot is not intelligent, and is incapable of intelligence.
AI makers believe creativity is achieved through stealing terabytes upon terabytes of other people’s work and lazily mashing it together. We know creativity is based not in lazily mashing things together, but in taking existing work and using our uniquely human abilities to transform them into completely new works.
We recognise the field of Artificial Intelligence as a pseudoscience. The AI makers are full believers in that pseudoscience.
Posted this on a Discord I’m in - one of the near immediate responses was “I’m glad they made a non-invasive procedure to lobotomise people”.
Nothing more to add, I just think that’s hilarious
Best case scenario here is that this is how one department of Google get money out of the other bits of Google, because the internal bean counters cannot control their fiscal sphincters when someone says “ai” to them.
That’s my hope either - every dollar spent on the technological dead-end of quantum is a dollar not spent on the planet-killing Torment Nexus of AI.
I wouldn’t be shocked about it - the general throughline of “AI rots your brain”, plus the ongoing discussion of AI in education, would give any shrewd politician an easy way to pull a Think Of The Childrentm on the AI industry, with minimal risk of getting pushback.
Found a primo response in the replies:
Hot take: Dropping a single nuclear bomb over Silicon Valley would solve most of the world’s issues
Damn, seems everything from the Y2K era’s coming back - even email viruses. Calling it right now, we’re gonna have the next ILOVEYOU within a year.
Least fascist programmer
AI is a pseudoscience that conflates a plagiarism-fueled lying machine with a thinking, living human mind. Fuck off.
In other news, reports of AI images turning everything yellow have made it to Know Your Meme.
Considering how many actual programmers fell for botshit and autoplag, it probably never did. That’s probably being a bit harsh, but I feel this bubble’s shown that your ability to puke out computational word salad does not translate into having any sort of useful skill.