The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.
The term "AI" damages sales when used in advertising - whatever script Boyle got was definitely written by people who knew that fact.
I also predicted something like this would happen (though within a very specific context) a while ago - seems my prediction's coming true.
This isn't the first time I've seen something like this, but its always nice to see someone actively piss all over AI in this manner.
A lawsuit that convinces the public and investors that LLMs are a dead end will kill most LLM companies.
To engage in some shameless self-promo, it'll probably destroy the concept of AI - the bubble's made "AI" synonymous with "LLMs and slop generators" in the public eye, so if LLMs get declared a dead end, AI as a whole will probably be written off alongside it.
Commander players are now freaking the hell out because they realized they’re absolutely next up on the shit-train to crapsville, but their response was to scream death threats to the one and only independent entity that could have made ANY sort of difference, resulting in said entity giving up and handing over full control to WotC.
Don't think I've seen a fandom self-destruct like this in a while.
Yeah.
Looking back at my quick-and-dirty thoughts about the suit, I feel like I handled it in a pretty detached way, focusing very little on the severe human cost that kicked off the suit and more on what it could entail for AI at large.
No, it was written by a Star Wars fan. Can't blame you for confusing the two, though - they're equally dumb
Between this high-profile disaster and character.ai's suicide lawsuit (which I've talked about here), it feels more and more and more like the current system's gonna end up getting torn to shreds once this bubble bursts.
Update: As a matter of fact, I did. Here's some Python code to prove it:
# Counts how many times a particular letter appears in a string.
# Very basic code, made it just to clown on the AI bubble.
appearances = int(0) # Counts how many times the selected char appears.
sentence = input("Write some shit: ")
sentence_length = len(sentence) # We need to know how long the sentence is for later
character_select = input("Select a character: ") # Your input can be as long as you wish, but only the first char will be taken
chosen_char = chr(ord(character_select[0]))
# Three-line version
for i in range (0, sentence_length):
if chosen_char in sentence[i]:
appearances = appearances + 1
# Two-line version (doesn't work - not sure why)
# for chosen_char in sentence:
# appearances = appearances + 1
# (Tested using "strawberry" as sentence and "r" as character_select. Ended up getting a result of 10 ("strawberry" is 10 chars long BTW))
# Finally, print the fucking result
print("Your input contains "+str(appearances)+" appearances of the character ("+character_select+").")
There's probably a bug or two in this I missed, but hey, it still proves I'm more of a programmer than Sam Altman ever will be.
Hell, I could probably special-case that shit, and I'm barely a programmer.
Also, it probably helped kneecap the popularity of Tolkien-style "Always Chaotic Evil" (TV Tropes page) races/species, by virtue of making the racialised elements much more difficult to ignore.
As TV Tropes' analysis page notes, however, there are a fair few ways to make Evil Minions^tm^ without throwing any racial baggage into the mix - ways that have let the base trope survive the change in political climate, even as its original version fell out of favour.
Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers
A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google's AI Overview.
Anyways, personal sidenote:
Beyond putting another blow to AI's reliability, this will probably also make the public more wary of user-generated material - its hard to trust something if you know the masses could be actively manipulating you.
A pretty solid piece on how AI is closed-source by nature, and a solid takedown on the OSI's FOMO-fuelled dumpster fire of an Open Source AI definition.
I've also thought a bit about AI's relationship with open-source as well - to expand my views a bit, I view AI as having a hostile relationship with open source, stealing whatever it wants and damaging open-source projects when it quote-unquote "gives back", and I suspect that we will see a severe decline in the FOSS ecosystem because of it.
With AI bros treating "publicly available" to mean "theirs to steal" (sometimes openly saying it, oftentimes suggesting it with their actions) and more-or-less getting away with it for the past two years, people have been given plenty of reason to view FOSS licenses (Creative Commons, GPL, etcetera) as not worth the .txt files they're written in, and contributing to it as asking to have their code stolen.
The recently-released Stallman Report (which you mentioned) definitely isn't helping FOSS either - all the diversity initiatives and codes of conduct in the world can't protect against a PR nightmare on the magnitude of "your movement's unofficial face becomes the Jeffery Epstein of coding".
Baldur Bjarnason's also talked about open-source's rocky financial future - I'd recommend checking it out.