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.
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.
I've repeated this prediction a bajillion times, but I suspect this bubble's discredited the idea of artificial intelligence, and expect it to quickly die once this bubble bursts.
Between the terabytes upon terabytes of digital mediocrity the slop-nami's given us, LLMs' countless and relentless failures in logic and reason, the large-scale enshittification of daily life their mere existence has enabled, and their power consumption singlehandedly accelerating the climate crisis, I feel that the public's come to view computers as inherently incapable of humanlike cognition/creativity, no matter how many gigawatts they consume or oceans they boil.
Expanding on this somewhat, I suspect AI as a concept will likely also come to be seen as an inherently fascist concept.
With the current bubble's link to esoteric fascism, the far-right's open adoration of slop, basically everything about OpenAI's Studio Ghibli slopgen, and God-knows-what-else, the public's got plenty of reason to treat use or support of AI as a severe indictment of someone's character in and of itself - a "tech asshole signifier", to quote Baldur Bjarnason.
And, of course, AI as a concept will probably come to be viewed as inherently anti-art/anti-artist as well - considering how badly the AI bubble's shafted artists, and artists specifically, that kinda goes without saying.
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 😂
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.