This is that "A computer can never be held liable" image writ fucking large. Jesus Christ.
BlueMonday1984
joined 1 year ago
This is completely orthogonal to your point, but I expect the public's gonna have a much lower opinion of software engineers after this bubble bursts, for a few reasons:
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Right off the bat, they're gonna have to deal with some severe guilt-by-association. AI has become an inescapable part of the Internet, if not modern life as a whole, and the average experience of dealing with anything AI related has been annoying at best and profoundly negative at worst. Combined with the tech industry going all-in on AI, I can see the entire field of software engineering getting some serious "AI bro" stench all over it.
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The slop-nami has unleashed a torrent of low-grade garbage on the 'Net, whether it be zero-effort "AI art" or paragraphs of low-quality SEO optimised trash, whilst the gen-AI systems responsible for both have received breathless hype/praise from AI bros and tech journos (e.g. Sam Altman's Ai-generated "metafiction"). Combined with the continous and ongoing theft of artist's work that made this possible, and the public is given a strong reason to view software engineers as generally incapable of understanding art, if not outright hostile to art and artists as a whole.
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Of course, the massive and ongoing theft of other people's work to make the gen-AI systems behind said slop-nami possible have likely given people reason to view software engineers as entirely okay with stealing other's work - especially given the aforementioned theft is done with AI bros' open endorsement, whether implicitly or explicitly.
The same goes with DuckDuckGo, because the venn diagram of programmers and AI bros is apparently a circle.
Either they’re lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
I'm thinking the latter - Silicon Valley is full of true believers, after all.
Update on the University of Zurich's AI experiment: Reddit's considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
In terms of actually being useful, an AI data center is also worse than a boat.
Consider humans your competitive advantage.
Words to live by.
Less a standard piece and more "Ed Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutes" this time around
Stumbled across a piece from history YTer The Pharaoh Nerd publicly ripping into AI slop, specifically focusing on AI-generated pseudohistory found on YouTube Shorts.
Most data centre electrical equipment is only made outside the US. President Trump’s tariffs exempt electronics — but that expires 9 July. If it isn’t extended, then US data centres are screwed — no new buildouts, and huge maintenance problems for existing data centres. [Verdict]
Trump had the opportunity to do the funniest thing by setting them for the 4th of July.
At least the data centres are paid for by private companies and not bank loans. This means the bubble pop won’t cause a banking crisis too.
That's waiting until rampant deregulation puts everything in place for another 2008 style crisis
"How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”
Its a silicon-based insult to life, it can't be conscious
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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It also helps that digital clones are not real people, so their welfare is doubly pointless