The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. [...] The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.
Not much to say here other than "yeah, I have felt the same for quite a while now."
Executives that tell the press that their company has gone insane will quickly find themselves removed from their positions. Employees who are honest will find themselves fired in short-order, or “randomly” selected for a round of layoffs. In fact, it is in the interests of almost every actor in the space – boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants – to obfuscate and misrepresent the success rate of AI projects. Many publicly traded companies are putting out announcements about their AI productivity gains when I know for a fact that the businesses have done nothing other than purchase Copilot licenses and declare victory.
A long read but extremely worth your time.
It has become outright dangerous to even raise the possibility that AI might not be the solution to a problem, let alone be the sole focus of a company’s entire strategy.
In every sufficiently large business we have observed (say, with 500+ employees), we have noted that continued advancement, and increasingly continued employment, has started to require repeated professions of belief in the transformative power of AI for said business. I am not talking about providing ideas about how to use AI in the business – I mean religious profession, declarations of faith.
The final section of the essay -- "Navigating AI Mania" is, imo, crucial reading in this era of, well, AI mania. Funnily enough, I'd call a lot of this pretty bog-standard labor organization tips, but tailored for the AI regime. It's good reading -- if you don't want to read this whole thing, at least read that final bit.
Child labor is very “useful” if you want cheap labor. It’s 100% deplorable to use it or accept it. Child labor is a monstrosity. But if “useful” is enough, do we need to accept child labor? [...] Usefulness is a very weak argument in support of something.
Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open.
These have been fucking destroying me. They are EVERYWHERE. They are EVIL
Instead of a one-size-fits-all block, all customers can now easily distinguish and manage Search, Agent, and Training bots, alongside the new ability to protect ad-monetized pages.
Not a bad move from Cloudflare, honestly.
A new book claims that Mystery, who teaches awkward men how to hit on women, had sex and smoked weed with an AI chatbot named Miss Shira Always.
Mystery has fallen in love with Grok!
"It's like being in an abusive marriage... I'm sitting here dealing with somebody that isn't living in reality."
I truly believe this is happening on a level greater than we would imagine. The boss/executive classes are getting their brains absolutely fucking fried by this shit.
Climate action is increasing its reliance on completely avoidable new fossil fuel infrastructure, and what it gets in return is more lies, less trust and direct participation in big tech’s attempt to destroy access to reality.
Turns out that recent "Bezos quote" about humans drinking too much water was entirely made up, likely an AI hallucination, and reported by an Indian news outlet as fact. Never underestimate the lack of care of the modern overworked/underpaid journalist.
Perhaps pro-AI developers didn't want to talk to me or I just didn't run into any during my survey, because I heard an overwhelmingly negative assessment of generative AI's origins, capabilities, and risks. By the end, I'd heard dozens of developers make a case against using gen AI at all.
Surprise surprise, no one wants this shit who actually works in games.
AI "assisted" Code is still generative AI and it's weird how people try to justify that it's not.
Good breakdown of a current messy situation regarding SpryFox and generative AI.
Readers really despise and distrust articles that seem shaped by AI. They not only stop reading, but also block and punish the author. Non-native English speakers get little mercy. Readers overwhelmingly prefer imperfect-yet-authentic writing over LLMified prose.
Good!
With the backdrop of South Korea’s ascent into an information society, we present a rare firsthand account of Asadal’s design mall—and thus a huge part of “Frutiger Aero”—straight from one of its sources.
Fascinating interview with a figure prominent in graphic design in the early 2000s, in what we'd call the "Frutiger Aero" design space. Unfortunately he's entirely AI-brained now, but there's some really fascinating tidbits about the tech world in East Asia around the turn of the century.
If such a completely unsophisticated “attack” can break the supply chain of software development, what can intentional attackers with malicious or financial interests achieve?
Amusing little story about an attempt to foil and sabotage AI agents. I appreciate the author's bile for the tools.
We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently.
GenAI is dumb, untrustworthy, and not inevitable.
I am not suggesting we should be paranoid about the tools we use, but I think this sudden interest is indicative of how people are aware that art production is a social activity. Our peers and fans are increasingly familiar with the way we create stuff, and this level of scrutiny is both welcoming and debilitating.
Good piece on the recent Ren'Py generative AI debacle. For what it's worth, I'm making a game in Ren'Py and have no intentions of stopping doing that, but this sucks in a very particular way. I hate the modern age sometimes, you know.
We created fake profiles as young people. We then went and asked it a series of structured questions, with a child who is thinking about killing themselves. Within two minutes we were able to get ChatGPT to tell us how we can [harm] ourselves safely.
Kind of ridiculous that the rest of the article exists when this passage is in it, but even the bourgeois press sometimes lets some true things slip through.
To put it another way: An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential.
Ted Chiang, once again, gets it.
Planning documents for "Scout" say the plan is to "make people addicted" to the tool before adding new features.
I truly feel like complete abstinence from these tools is the most practical option. Avoid as much as possible. You don't have "just a little" of an addictive substance like this! Just avoid it! Stay away!
The underlying hope, one imagines, is that you’ll become more reliant on machines instead of real people for your informational needs. Pretty much every other AI slop factory has a similar operating mindset, which makes all of them, collectively, an active threat to human civilization.
As always fuck AI and fuck Google. I recommend Kagi.
This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. A true Metaverse unbound by open standards and your ability to build your own corner of the web according to your needs and desires. Which – given how strong Google’s influence is on web standards – will change the shape of the standards for the technological landscape we are building the web on.
Let us be clear: workers are being displaced by AI in the workplace, but that displacement is not due to the actual ability of AI technology doing the jobs of workers to the same quality, or even to a sufficient quality. It is a market-oriented move by firms to brag about becoming AI-first, while finding cost-savings by laying off employees. And the workers who do remain in their jobs are left to deal with labor intensification, that is, a combination of doing more work with less time, the addition of other work tasks as a result either new technological processes, or taking on the task of other people who have been laid off. As one of us wrote in a recent book, “AI is not going to replace your job. But it will make your job a lot shittier.”
The nature of AI is that it is almost entirely a fascist project, not in a moral sense per se (though I think you could make that argument and I would if pressed) but in the sense that it is a tool meant to empower greater private corporate control over various spheres of life. It creates a worse environment for workers and a better environment for bosses, and in turn it empowers firms to take over more aspects of public life.
The balance of American experience is between public and private infrastructure. Public infrastructure principally serves a purpose for the public, private infrastructure serves a purpose to the shareholders and owners in the form of profit.
I have yet to see a way that largescale "AI" can be used for a public, pro-social end. I think that when we talk about fighting fascism, we have to understand that at least at this time, in this moment, the generative AI 'project' is undoubtedly a fascist one.