The government is backtracking on this cut. But when they said “AI,” they meant magical chatbots with costs in the fabulous future that would make them look cool. They didn’t mean medical systems that work, but cost money right now. This was always about the press releases.

In the grander scheme of things, I expect this shitshow will further reinforce notions of “AI” being utterly useless as a tech - auto-contouring was a real-life example of AI being useful, and it got thrown in the bin because it wasn’t a magical chatbot that made radiologists obsolete.

Addendum: If you wanna support the artist, she has a Tumblr and a personal portfolio.

Update on The Shadiversity Drama^tm: he’s still malding about being an utterly soulless waste of oxygen:

Now, some of you may be wondering “Monday, how is that AI-generated? That piece actually has a soul!” Well, as it turns out, it wasn’t AI - Shad quite literally stole someone’s artwork and passed it off as AI.

In other news, the Guardian landed an exclusive scoop on cuts to “AI cancer tech funding in England”. Baldur Bjarnason’s given his commentary:

Turns out rebranding even the genuinely useful Machine Learning as “AI” doesn’t help them get funding. The only beneficiaries of the bubble seem to be volatile media synthesis engines

You want my opinion, future machine learning research is probably gonna struggle to get funding once the bubble bursts, both due to the “AI” stench rubbing off on the field, and due to gen-AI sucking up all of the funding that would’ve gone towards actually useful shit. (Arguably, its already struggling even before the bubble’s burst.)

Taking a shot in the dark, journalistic incidents like Bloomberg’s failed tests with AI summaries and the BBC’s complaints about Apple AI mangling headlines probably helped with accelerating that fall to earth - for any journalists reading about or reporting on such shitshows, it likely shook their faith in AI’s supposed abilities in a way failures outside their field didn’t.

And by “more fuckable”, he means “refusing/unable to consent”.

In other news, Jazza’s AI-generated cousin is back to continue pretending to be an actual artist. This time, its by actively denigrating the works of Studio Ghibli:

Unsurprisingly, he is getting raked over the coals by basically everyone. He’s also having an utter meltdown in the replies.

In case you missed it, a couple sneers came out against AI from mainstream news outlets recently - CNN’s put out an article titled “Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown”, whilst the New York Times recently proclaimed “The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes”.

You want my take on this development, I’m with Ed Zitron on this - this is a sign of an impending sea change. Looks like the bubble’s finally nearing its end.

In other news, Elon Musk’s personal chatbot has proudly proclaimed its available on Telegram, and its proclamation got picked up by The Verge:

Right now, the integration is limited to “Grok’s available as an optional chatbot”, but going by what I’ve seen on BlueSky, people are already taking this as their cue to jump ship to Signal.

It was a compilation of random Ghibli memes an AI bro had compiled.

Yud was right - we should bomb the shit out of AI servers!

Not to prevent a superintelligent AI from becoming sentient and killing us all, but because this shit should not be allowed to fucking exist

EDIT: For context, this was reacting to Erikson showing me AI-generated Ghibli memes.

In other news, the Open Source Intiative’s publicly bristled against the EU’s attempt to regulate AI, to the point of weakening said attempts.

Tante, unsurprisingly, is not particularly impressed:

Thank you OSI. To protect the purity of your license – which I do not consider to be open source – you are working towards making it harder for regulators to enforce certain standards within the usage of so-called “AI” systems. Quick question: Who are you actually working for? (I know, it is corporations)

The whole Open Source/Free Software movement has run its course and has been very successful for business. But it feels like somewhere along the line we as normal human beings have been left behind.

You want my opinion, this is a major own-goal for the FOSS movement - sure, the OSI may have been technically correct where the EU’s demands conflicted with the Open Source Definition, but neutering EU regs like this means any harms caused by open-source AI will be done in FOSS’s name.

Considering FOSS’s complete failure to fight corporate encirclement of their shit, this isn’t particularly surprising.

I’m kinda tired, but this puzzle’s shoved itself into my brain. The obvious solution I can see is, roughly speaking:

1. Take the duck and carrot across

2. Take the duck back

3. Take the duck and potato across

I’ve already heard of this - mainly thanks to the nuclear backlash it (and basically anything related to AI) is getting. Pulling out a particular highlight, here’s Ashley Lynch tearing the whole thing a new one:

Stuff like this is perfect because it shows how utterly devoid of creativity genAI evangelists are. Great, you recreated a photo that already exists in a drawing style that only has currency because of who you’re stealing it from giving the world something with absolutely no value or meaning. I can’t tell you how excited I am that we’re literally burning the Earth up for this garbage.

Every genAI techbro needs to be sent to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity with how they’ve traded our future for this absolute bullshit. Straight up capital punishment for every one of these fucking losers responsible for cursing us with this garbage. I have zero chill on this issue anymore. They represent the end of humanity.

Discovered an animation sneering at the tech oligarchs on Newgrounds - I recommend checking it out. Its sister animation is a solid sneer, too, even if it is pretty soul crushing.

He’s an AI bro, having even a basic understanding of art is beyond him

>sam altman is greentexting in 2025

>and his profile is an AI-generated Ghibli picture, because Miyazaki is such an AI booster

> at least ed zitron got to make fun of him

New piece from Brian Merchant: Deconstructing the new American oligarchy

looking at the history of AI, if it fails there will be another AI winter, and considering the bubble the next winter will be an Ice Age. No minduploads for anybody, the dead stay dead, and all time is wasted.

Adding insult to injury, they’d likely also have to contend with the fact that much of the harm this AI bubble caused was the direct consequence of their dumbshit attempts to prevent an AI Apocalypse^tm

As for the upcoming AI winter, I’m predicting we’re gonna see the death of AI as a concept once it starts. With LLMs and Gen-AI thoroughly redefining how the public thinks and feels about AI (near-universally for the worse), I suspect the public’s gonna come to view humanlike intelligence/creativity as something unachievable by artificial means, and I expect future attempts at creating AI to face ridicule at best and active hostility at worst.

Taking a shot in the dark, I suspect we’ll see active attempts to drop the banhammer on AI as well, though admittedly my only reason is a random BlueSky post openly calling for LLMs to be banned.

Quick update on the CoreWeave affair: turns out they’re facing technical defaults on their Blackstone loans, which is gonna hurt their IPO a fair bit.