New Blood in the Machine: The weaponization of Waymo, about protesters torching Waymos in a repeat of last year's Waymo Warm-Overs.

Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo's jumping headfirst into it.

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

Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the "residential proxy" services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.

Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I'm dropping it here:

I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.

New BlueSky post from Baldur Bjarnason:

Ran across a new piece on Futurism: Before Google Was Blamed for the Suicide of a Teen Chatbot User, Its Researchers Published a Paper Warning of Those Exact Dangers

I've updated my post on the Character.ai lawsuit to include this - personally, I expect this is gonna strongly help anyone suing character.ai or similar chatbot services.

On another somewhat orthogonal point, I suspect AI has likely soured the public on any kinda tech-forward vision for the foreseeable future.

Both directly and indirectly, the AI slop-nami has caused a lot of bad shit for the general public - from plagiarism to misinformation, from shit-tier AI art to screwing human artists, the public has come to view AI as an active blight on society, and use of AI as a virtual "Kick Me" sign.

Okay, quick prediction time:

• Even if character.ai manages to win the lawsuit, this is probably gonna be the company's death knell. Even if the fallout of this incident doesn't lead to heavy regulation coming down on them, the death of one of their users is gonna cause horrific damage to their (already pretty poor AFAIK) reputation.

• On a larger scale, chatbot apps like Replika and character.ai (if not chatbots in general) are probably gonna go into a serious decline thanks to this - the idea that "our chatbot can potentially kill you" is now firmly planted in the public's mind, and I suspect their userbase is gonna blow their lid from how heavily the major apps are gonna lock their shit down.

YouTube rolled out a new dogshit AI feature and it near-immediately accused someone of being the meme behind the slaughter:

Off-the-cuff prediction: there probably won't be one dominant search engine after Google stumbles, for a few reasons:

• All of them are making the exact same mistakes as Google, as self noted (when they aren't having their own unique dumpster fires)

• AI has made it much easier to spam searches with SEO shite, so any attempts at algorithmic search risk being spammed to death in short order

• Public trust in tech is utterly shot to hell - not sure how much people trust search specifically, but I suspect people are currently trusting word-of-mouth (e.g. Reddit, TikTok) over whatever any of the major search engines are providing right now

"Positive is that if you didn't tell someone it was GenAI, they might not notice!"

Nah, they'd be able to immediately tell from just how fucking garbage it is

The Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley isn't directly about TESCREAL, but its dissection of Silicon Valley's complete and utter misunderstanding of sci-fi/fantasy does still work wonders against Yudkowsky et al's views IMO.