Tante has a couple of questions for Anthropic:

Do we know if Anthropic named their (technically garbage) "Agentic AI" protocol MCP in refence to the antagonist of the TRON movie?

And if it is: Holy shit can tech dudes just stop showing us how little they understand text or anything? Like, we understand. You can't read.

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 somewhat lighter news, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the game, and gave him a "conversational AI" to let him talk to players in the voice of James Earl Jones (who I just discovered died last year).

To nobody's surprise, gamers have already gotten the AI Vader swearing and yelling slurs.

ZITRON DROPPED

Less a standard piece and more "Ed Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutes" this time around

Hank Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) recently made a vaguely positive post about AI on Bluesky, seemingly thinking "they can be very useful" (in what, Hank?) in spite of their massive costs:

Unsurprisingly, the Bluesky crowd's having none of it, treating him as an outright rube at best and an unrepentant AI bro at worst. Needless to say, he's getting dragged in the replies and QRTs - I recommend taking a look, they are giving that man zero mercy.

Ran across a short-ish thread on BlueSky which caught my attention, posting it here:

the problem with a story, essay, etc written by LLM is that i lose interest as soon as you tell me that’s how it was made. i have yet to see one that’s ‘good’ but i don’t doubt the tech will soon be advanced enough to write ‘well.’ but i’d rather see what a person thinks and how they’d phrase it

like i don’t want to see fiction in the style of cormac mccarthy. i’d rather read cormac mccarthy. and when i run out of books by him, too bad, that’s all the cormac mccarthy books there are. things should be special and human and irreplaceable

i feel the same way about using AI-type tech to recreate a dead person’s voice or a hologram of them or whatever. part of what’s special about that dead person is that they were mortal. you cheapen them by reviving them instead of letting their life speak for itself

New piece from Baldur Bjarnason: AI and Esoteric Fascism, which focuses heavily on our very good friends and their link to AI as a whole. Ending quote's pretty solid, so I'm dropping it here:

I believe that the current “AI” bubble is an outright Neo-Nazi project that cannot be separated from the thugs and fascists that seem to be taking over the US and indivisible from the 21st century iteration of Esoteric Neo-Nazi mysticism that is the TESCREAL bundle of ideologies.

If that is true, then there is simply no scope for fair or ethical use of these systems.

Anyways, here's my personal sidenote:

As I've mentioned a bajillion times before, I've predicted this AI bubble would kill AI as a concept, as its myriad harms and failures indelibly associate AI with glue pizzas, artists getting screwed, and other such awful things. After reading through this, its clear I've failed to take into account the political elements of this bubble, and how it'd affect things.

My main prediction hasn't changed - I still expect AI as a concept to die once this bubble bursts - but I suspect that AI as a concept will be treated as an inherently fascist concept, and any attempts to revive it will face active ridicule, if not outright hostility.

r/SubredditDrama's watching shit go down in r/EffectiveAltruism, and there's a lotta sneers going on

You're a podcast bro, you have absolutely nothing of value to give humanity, please fuck off and never come back

Not a sneer, but ~~Kendrick~~ Ed Zitron just dropped.

Its damn good as usual, with Zitron taking aim at the current state of SaaS and tying it into his previous sneers on AI.

(it is a fucking hilarious tweet tho)

Anything that takes the edge off a possible Great Recession sequel's fine in my book

https://nitter.poast.org/edzitron/status/1819591404873568715

Zitron's sample size may be limited to his Twitter following, but its a bad sign for AI if bashing it gets you praise from both sides of the political aisle:

Bonus Tweet from Chris Alvino:

I was just thinking about this today. I had a thread go viral where I bashed AI, resulted in thousands of new followers, and I've had to block a bunch bc they turned out to be on the far right. Honestly amazing how bipartisan AI hate is. Never seen anything like it before 😂