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

Drake used AI to duo with Tupac in one of his songs

this is something different from what the article’s talking about, but also that sounds tacky as fuck

Also he did it in his dumbshit feud with Kendrick Lamar - you know, the one which ended with Drake getting the ass-whooping of a fucking lifetime

Programming and supporting fascism - name a more iconic duo

Against my better judgement I typed steve.ai into my browser and yep. It’s an AI product.

But is chickenjockey.ai domain parked

This sounds like the setup for a deeply fucked up comedy skit, or a Filthy Frank episode, or some shit like that, but nope, its real, its actually happened, the tech industry has invented a new and interesting form of racism.

I imagine a lotta people will be doing the same now, if not dismissing any further stuff from SciShow/Crash Course altogether.

Active distrust is a difficult thing to exorcise, after all.

Hank Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) recently made a vaguely positive post about AI on Bluesky, seemingly thinking “they can be very useful” (in what, Hank?) in spite of their massive costs:

Unsurprisingly, the Bluesky crowd’s having none of it, treating him as an outright rube at best and an unrepentant AI bro at worst. Needless to say, he’s getting dragged in the replies and QRTs - I recommend taking a look, they are giving that man zero mercy.

New piece from Tante: Forcing the world into machines, a follow-on to his previous piece about the AI bubble’s aftermath

Went to the original Tweet, and found this public execution of a reply:

Found a thread doing numbers on Bluesky, about Google’s AI summaries producing hot garbage (as usual):

Semi-OT: Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast just won a Webby:

TL;DR: They’re a boutique video game company who scam video game collectors with overpriced physical releases of video games, and dress up their entire operation in the guise of video game preservation.

Recently, their inner workings have been exposed, showing the company to be an abusive hellscape roughly on par with Activision-Blizzard (minus the rampant misogyny), with employee abuse at basically every level and widespread financial misconduct.

Going off-topic a bit - there’s a new expose on Limited Run Games, and its a doozy

Semi-OT: A coalition of record corps is trying to sue the Internet Archive out of existence

Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the “residential proxy” services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.

Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I’m dropping it here:

I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.

If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm

“Please” and “thank you” are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.

The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand

New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at ‘America’s Most Powerful’

The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the “Iraqi Most Wanted” playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the “art” decks do - the “merch” decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.

Hey, I’ve seen that EVILexa before!