New piece from Brian Merchant: Four bad AI futures arrived this week, taking a listicle-ish approach to some of the horrific things AI has unleashed upon us.
BlueMonday1984
joined 1 year ago
🎶 Guess who's back, back again
🎶 Holmes is back, tell a friend
E: ow god im really in a ‘take science fiction too seriously’ period.
People taking sci-fi too seriously was how LessWrong and the AI bubble happened, I'd say you're pretty far from taking it too seriously :P
I've already seen all the discourse surrounding that clipart fembot, but you want my take, that design can fuck off back to the dark depths of the uncanny valley. Give me someone like Aigis any day of the week:
Ran across a Bluesky thread which caught my attention - its nothing major, its just about how gen-AI painted one rando's views of the droids of Star Wars:
Generative AI has helped me to understand why, in Star Wars, the droids seem to have personalities but are generally bad at whatever they're supposed to be programmed to do, and everyone is tired of their shit and constantly tells them to shut up
Threepio: Sir, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3720 to one!
Han Solo (knowing that Threepio just pulls these numbers out of Reddit memes about Emperor Palpatine's odds of getting laid): SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!
"Why do the heroes of Star Wars never do anything to help the droids? They're clearly sentient, living things, yet they're treated as slaves!" Thanks for doing propaganda for Big Droid, you credulous ass!
With that out the way, here's my personal sidenote:
There's already been plenty of ink spilled on the myriad effects AI will have on society, but it seems one of the more subtle effects will be on the fiction we write and consume.
Right off the bat, one thing I'm anticipating (which I've already talked about before) is that AI will see a sharp decline in usage as a plot device - whatever sci-fi pizzazz AI had as a concept is thoroughly gone at this point, replaced with the same all-consuming cringe that surrounds NFTs and the metaverse, two other failed technologies turned pop-cultural punchlines.
If there are any attempts at using "superintelligent AI" as a plot point, I expect they'll be lambasted for shattering willing suspension of disbelief, at least for a while. If AI appears at all, my money's on it being presented as an annoyance/inconvenience (as someone else has predicted).
Another thing I expect is audiences becoming a lot less receptive towards AI in general - any notion that AI behaves like a human, let alone thinks like one, has been thoroughly undermined by the hallucination-ridden LLMs powering this bubble, and thanks to said bubble's wide-spread harms (environmental damage, widespread theft, AI slop, misinformation, etcetera) any notion of AI being value-neutral as a tech/concept has been equally undermined.
With both of those in mind, I expect any positive depiction of AI is gonna face some backlash, at least for a good while.
(As a semi-related aside, I found a couple of people openly siding with the Mos Eisley Cantina owner who refused to serve R2 and 3PO [Exhibit A, Exhibit B])
In other news, SoundCloud's become the latest victim of the AI scourge - artists have recently discovered the TOS allows their work to be stolen for AI training since early 2024.
SoundCloud's already tried to quell the backlash, but they're getting accused of lying in the replies and the QRTs, so its safe to say its not working.
Quick update from Brian Merchant: he's looking for stories about AI screwing people over.
If you've got any, send them to [email protected]
Got a nice and lengthy sneer from film blog That Final Scene: the uncanny valet is not your friend (and other AI stories)
Beyond being an utter castigation of AI bros' "attempts" at aping art, its also wonderfully written from start to finish. Go check it out.
hymns to the benefits of global supply chains
We did it, we discovered awful's equivalent to Nostalgia Critic's The Wall
Fresh(?) off the PUBG Bridge
This is going to be grounds for an appeal which might reduce the sentence.
If that appeal succeeds, I suspect "AI victim testimonies" will become seen as a major legal liability, and the problem will (mostly) solve itself.
That ain't clickbait, Xe Iaso's personally-made anti-scraping measure (originally made to deal with Amazon overloading their git server) has ended up being used by the literal United Nations.
I recommend reading the full blogpost, its a wild ride.
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Hopefully, the AI bubble's spectacular implosion will wipe out your fellow programmers' adoration of these plagiarising lie boxes and we can hopefully move on from these godforsaken blights on humanity. (At the cost of another 2008-style global economic meltdown. And America imploding in on itself. And maybe the end of the world, if our luck's sufficiently shit.)
(ah, who am I kidding, most programmers are fucking idiots (no offence), they'll probably still be enamored with autoplag even if all that happens)