Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this…)
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.
I have to agree. There are already at least two notable and high-profile failure stories with consequences that are going to stick around for years.
And sadly more to come. The first story is likely to continue to get a hands-off treatment in most US media for a few more years yet, but the second one is almost certainly going to generate Tacoma Narrows Bridge-level legends of failure and necessary restructuring once professionals are back in command. The kind of thing that is put into college engineering textbooks as a dire warning of what not to do.
Of course, it’s up to us to keep these failures in the public spotlight and framed appropriately. The appropriate question is not, “how did the AI fail?” The appropriate question is, “how did someone abusively misapply stochastic algorithms?”
Said policy enjoys broad Jewish-American support, so I’m not even sure why Israel needs the accountability sink
I think you are much more optimistic than me about the general public’s ability to intellectually understand fascism or think about copyright or give artists their appropriate credit. To most people that know about image gen, it’s a fun toy: throw in some words and rapidly get pictures. The most I hope for is that AI image generation becomes unacceptable to use in professional or serious settings and it is relegated to a similar status as clip art.