In other news, reports of AI images turning everything yellow have made it to Know Your Meme.
BlueMonday1984
Hot take: A lying machine that destroys your intelligence and mental health is unsafe for everyone, mentally ill or no
You want my take, this probably isn't gonna injure Disney all that much - they're one of the largest megacorps on the entire planet, and they've got damning evidence of infringement against Midjourney.
How much damage Midjourney's gonna take (at least in the immediate term), I'm not sure. If they settle ASAP, they can probably limit the damage, but if they try and fight, they'll probably be bankrupted by the case.
I expect they think they can get a precedent here.
That's true - the case is pretty clear-cut thanks to how much damning evidence they've managed to pull out. The old trend of using AI to make offensive shit in the Pixar style likely helped as well, but that's speculation on my end.
Midjourney is also odd in that it didn’t take money from outside investors and it’s actually profitable selling monthly subscriptions. This is an AI company that is not a venture capital money bonfire, it’s an actual business.
I suspect Disney isn’t out to just shut Midjourney down. Disney’s goal is to gouge Midjourney for a settlement and a license.
In practice, I doubt Disney's gonna get to shake much out of Midjourney before they end up going under - given that gen-AI is built to facilitate plagiarism and copyright infringement, a win for Disney here would lead to a de facto ban on generative AI.
Eric "Slophand" Slopton: He's like Eric Clapton, but somehow more racist
New Blood in the Machine: The weaponization of Waymo, about protesters torching Waymos in a repeat of last year's Waymo Warm-Overs.
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:
AI is a pseudoscience that conflates a plagiarism-fueled lying machine with a thinking, living human mind. Fuck off.