BlueMonday1984

Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:

Found a Bluesky thread you might be interested in:

On a Sci Fi authors’ panel at Comicon today, every writer asked about AI (as in LLM / algorithmic modern gen AI) gave it a kicking, drawing a spontaneous round of applause.

A few years ago, I don’t think that would have happened. People would have said “it’s an interesting tool”, or something.

Bearing in mind these are exactly the people who would be expected to engage with the idea, I think the tech turds have massively underestimated the propaganda faux pas they made by stealing writers’ hard work and then being cunts about it.

Tying this to a previous post of mine, I'm expecting their open and public disdain for gen-AI to end up bleeding into their writing. The obvious route would be AI systems/characters exhibiting the hallmarks of LLMs - hallucinations/confabulations, "AI slop" output, easily bypassable safeguards, that sort of thing.

The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.

If Duolingo still had their userbase's goodwill, it would've probably worked. They've been pulling that shit since their mascot Duo turned into a meme, and its worked out for them up until now.

Why does this matter?

Well, its a perfect demonstration that LLMs flat-out do not think like us. Even a goddamn five-year old could work this shit out with flying colours.

In other news, the ghost of Dorian has haunted an autoplag system:

Got a pair of notable things I ran across recently.

Firstly, an update on Grok's White Genocide Disaster: the person responsible has seemingly revealed themselves, and shown off how they derailed Grok's prompt.. The pull request that initiated this debacle has been preserved on the Internet Archive.

Second, I ran across a Bluesky post which caught my attention:

You want my opinion on the "scab" comment, its another textbook example of the all-consuming AI backlash, one that suggests any usage of AI will be viewed as an open show of hostility towards labour.

Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population

AI's already destroying people's cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldn't be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue it'll fuck up human's capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.

(and leading to me having to read slop all the time)

Thankfully, I've managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:

1. AI slop was banned from being uploaded back in 2022 (very early into the bubble), making it loud and clear that AI slop is unwelcome there. (Sidenote: A dedicated AI flag option was added in 2024)
2. The site primarily (if not near-exclusively) attracts artists, animators, musicians, and creatives in general - all groups who (for obvious reasons) are strongly opposed to gen-AI in all its forms, and who will avoid anything involving AI like the fucking plague.
3. The site is (practically) ad-free, meaning ad revenue is effectively zero - as such, setting up an AI slop farm (or a regular content mill) is utterly impractical, since you'd have zero shot of turning a profit.

(That I'm a NEET also helps (can't have AI bro coworkers if you're unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)

Update on the Artificial Darth Debacle: SAG-AFTRA just sued Epic for using AI for Darth Vader in the first place:

You want my take, this is gonna be a tough case for SAG - Jones signed off on AI recreations of Vader before his death in 2024, so arguing a lack of consent's off the table right from the get-go.

If SAG do succeed, the legal precedent set would likely lead to a de facto ban on recreating voices using AI. Given SAG-AFTRA's essentially saying that what Epic did is unethical on principle, I suspect that's their goal here.

>proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by helping to justify a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses

Not to mention, the aforementioned bubble's given us shit like some jackasses' ghoulish (and failed) attempt to "revive" George Carlin, attempts to automate end-of-life care, "AI seances" designed to scam the grieving, and God-knows-what-else.

So, the very concept of "defeating death with technology" has probably been thoroughly discredited as impossible, inherently ghoulish, or a combo of the two.

Here's a better idea - treat anything from ChatGPT as a lie, even if it offers sources

An invaluable repository of programming knowledge ground into dust as the last tokens of good will are cashed in for stinky money. It was a unique place, where self-moderation by the community actually worked to a large extent.

That's the worst part about this situation - Joel's burning the coder's Library of Alexandria in pursuit of that cash. Whatever comes to replace StackOverflow is gonna be a pale imitation of what came before, and I suspect the entire field of programming's gonna be feeling the setbacks for a long, long time.