BlueMonday1984

None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom — is (as I've said before) unsustainable, and will ultimately collapse. I also fear that said collapse could be ruinous to big tech, deeply damaging to the startup ecosystem, and will further sour public support for the tech industry.

Can't blame Zitron for being pretty downbeat in this - given the AI bubble's size and side-effects, its easy to see how its bursting can have some cataclysmic effects.

(Shameless self-promo: I ended up writing a bit about the potential aftermath as well)

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

This started as a summary of a random essay Robert Epstein (fuck, that's an unfortunate surname) cooked up back in 2016, and evolved into a diatribe about how the AI bubble affects how we think of human cognition.

This is probably a bit outside awful's wheelhouse, but hey, this is MoreWrite.

The TL;DR

The general article concerns two major metaphors for human intelligence:

• The information processing (IP) metaphor, which views the brain as some form of computer (implicitly a classical one, though you could probably cram a quantum computer into that metaphor too)
• The anti-representational metaphor, which views the brain as a living organism, which constantly changes in response to experiences and stimuli, and which contains jack shit in the way of any computer-like components (memory, processors, algorithms, etcetera)

Epstein's general view is, if the title didn't tip you off, firmly on the anti-rep metaphor's side, dismissing IP as "not even slightly valid" and openly arguing for dumping it straight into the dustbin of history.

His main major piece of evidence for this is a basic experiment, where he has a student draw two images of dollar bills - one from memory, and one with a real dollar bill as reference - and compare the two.

Unsurprisingly, the image made with a reference blows the image from memory out of the water every time, which Epstein uses to argue against any notion of the image of a dollar bill (or anything else, for that matter) being stored in one's brain like data in a hard drive.

Instead, he argues that the student making the image had re-experienced seeing the bill when drawing it from memory, with their ability to do so having come because their brain had changed at the sight of many a dollar bill up to this point to enable them to do it.

Another piece of evidence he brings up is a 1995 paper from Science by Michael McBeath regarding baseballers catching fly balls. Where the IP metaphor reportedly suggests the player roughly calculates the ball's flight path with estimates of several variables ("the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of thing"), the anti-rep metaphor (given by McBeath) simply suggests the player catches them by moving in a manner which keeps the ball, home plate and the surroundings in a constant visual relationship with each other.

The final piece I could glean from this is a report in Scientific American about the Human Brain Project (HBP), a $1.3 billion project launched by the EU in 2013, made with the goal of simulating the entire human brain on a supercomputer. Said project went on to become a "brain wreck" less than two years in (and eight years before its 2023 deadline) - a "brain wreck" Epstein implicitly blames on the whole thing being guided by the IP metaphor.

Said "brain wreck" is a good place to cap this section off - the essay is something I recommend reading for yourself (even if I do feel its arguments aren't particularly strong), and its not really the main focus of this little ramblefest. Anyways, onto my personal thoughts.

Some Personal Thoughts

Personally, I suspect the AI bubble's made the public a lot less receptive to the IP metaphor these days, for a few reasons:

1. Articial Idiocy

The entire bubble was sold as a path to computers with human-like, if not godlike intelligence - artificial thinkers smarter than the best human geniuses, art generators better than the best human virtuosos, et cetera. Hell, the AIs at the centre of this bubble are running on neural networks, whose functioning is based on our current understanding of how the brain works. [Missed this incomplete sensence first time around :P]

What we instead got was Google telling us to eat rocks and put glue in pizza, chatbots hallucinating everything under the fucking sun, and art generators drowning the entire fucking internet in pure unfiltered slop, identifiable in the uniquely AI-like errors it makes. And all whilst burning through truly unholy amounts of power and receiving frankly embarrassing levels of hype in the process.

(Quick sidenote: Even a local model running on some rando's GPU is a power-hog compared to what its trying to imitate - digging around online indicates your brain uses only 20 watts of power to do what it does.)

With the parade of artificial stupidity the bubble's given us, I wouldn't fault anyone for coming to believe the brain isn't like a computer at all.

2. Inhuman Learning

Additionally, AI bros have repeatedly and incessantly claimed that AIs are creative and that they learn like humans, usually in response to complaints about the Biblical amounts of art stolen for AI datasets.

Said claims are, of course, flat-out bullshit - last I checked, human artists only need a few references to actually produce something good and original, whilst your average LLM will produce nothing but slop no matter how many terabytes upon terabytes of data you throw at its dataset.

This all arguably falls under the "Artificial Idiocy" heading, but it felt necessary to point out - these things lack the creativity or learning capabilities of humans, and I wouldn't blame anyone for taking that to mean that brains are uniquely unlike computers.

3. Eau de Tech Asshole

Given how much public resentment the AI bubble has built towards the tech industry (which I covered in my previous post), my gut instinct's telling me that the IP metaphor is also starting to be viewed in a harsher, more "tech asshole-ish" light - not just merely a reductive/incorrect view on human cognition, but as a sign you put tech over human lives, or don't see other people as human.

Of course, AI providing a general parade of the absolute worst scumbaggery we know (with Mira Murati being an anti-artist scumbag and Sam Altman being a general creep as the biggest examples) is probably helping that fact, alongside all the active attempts by AI bros to mimic real artists (exhibit A, exhibit B).

Whilst going through MAIHT3K's backlog, I ended up running across a neat little article theorising on the possible aftermath which left me wondering precisely what the main "residue", so to speak, would be.

The TL;DR:

To cut a long story far too short, Alex, the writer, theorised the bubble would leave a "sticky residue" in the aftermath, "coating creative industries with a thick, sooty grime of an industry which grew expansively, without pausing to think about who would be caught in the blast radius" and killing or imperilling a lot of artists' jobs in the process - all whilst producing metric assloads of emissions and pushing humanity closer to the apocalypse.

My Thoughts

Personally, whilst I can see Alex's point, I think the main residue from this bubble is going to be large-scale resentment of the tech industry, for three main reasons:

1. AI Is Shafting Everyone

Its not just artists who have been pissed off at AI fucking up their jobs, whether freelance or corporate - as Upwork, of all places, has noted in their research, pretty much anyone working right now is getting the shaft:

• Nearly half (47%) of workers using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect

• Over three in four (77%) say AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way

• Seventy-one percent are burned out and nearly two-thirds (65%) report struggling with increasing employer demands

• Women (74%) report feeling more burned out than do men (68%)

• 1 in 3 employees say they will likely quit their jobs in the next six months because they are burned out or overworked (emphasis mine)

Baldur Bjarnason put it better than me when commenting on these results:

It’s quite unusual for a study like this on a new office tool, roughly two years after that tool—ChatGPT—exploded into people’s workplaces, to return such a resoundingly negative sentiment.

But it fits with the studies on the actual functionality of said tool: the incredibly common and hard to fix errors, the biases, the general low quality of the output, and the often stated expectation from management that it’s a magic fix for the organisational catastrophe that is the mass layoff fad.

Marketing-funded research of the kind that Upwork does usually prevents these kind of results by finessing the questions. They simply do not directly ask questions that might have answers they don’t like.

That they didn’t this time means they really, really did believe that “AI” is a magic productivity tool and weren’t prepared for even the possibility that it might be harmful.

Speaking of the general low-quality output:

2. The AI Slop-Nami

The Internet has been flooded with AI-generated garbage. Fucking FLOODED.

Doesn't matter where you go - Google, DeviantArt, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, Instagram, YouTube, Sports Illustrated, fucking 99% of the Internet is polluted with it.

Unsurprisingly, this utter flood of unfiltered unmitigated endless trash has sent AI's public perception straight down the fucking toilet, to the point of spawning an entire counter-movement against the fucking thing.

Whether it be Glaze and Nightshade directly sabotaging datasets, "Made with Human Intelligence" and "Not By AI" badges proudly proclaiming human-done production or Cara blowing up by offering a safe harbour from AI, its clear there's a lot of people out there who want abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with AI in any sense of the word as a result of this slop-nami.

3. The Monstrous Assholes In AI

On top of this little slop-nami, those leading the charge of this bubble have been generally godawful human beings. Here's a quick highlight reel:

• Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly okay to steal content if it’s on the open web - it was already a safe bet anyone working in AI thought that considering they stole from literally everyone, whether large or small, but its nice for someone to spell it out like that.

• The death of robots.txt - OpenAI publicly ignored it, Perplexity lied about their user agent to deceive it, and Anthropic spammed crawlers to sidestep it. Results were predictable. Mostly.

• Mira Murati saying "some creative jobs shouldn't exist" - Ed Zitron called this "a declaration of war against creative labor" when talking to Business Insider, which sums this up better than I ever could.

• Sam Altman's Tangle with Her - Misunderstanding the basic message? Check. Bullying a dragon (to quote TV Tropes)? Check. Embarassing your own company? Check. Being a creepy-ass motherfucker? Fucking check.

• "Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?" - I'll let Amy and David speak for me on this because WHAT THE FUCK.

I'm definitely missing a lot, but I think this sampler gives you a good gist of the kind of soulless ghouls who have been forcing this entire fucking AI bubble upon us all.

Eau de Tech Asshole

There are many things I can't say for sure about the AI bubble - when it will burst, how long and harsh the next AI/tech winter will be, what new tech bubble will pop up in its place (if any), etcetera.

One thing I feel I can say for sure, however, is that the AI bubble and its myriad harms will leave a lasting stigma on the tech industry once it finally bursts.

Already, it seems AI has a pretty hefty stigma around it - as Baldur Bjaranason noted when talking about when discussing AI's sentiment disconnect between tech and the public:

To many, “AI” seems to have become a tech asshole signifier: the “tech asshole” is a person who works in tech, only cares about bullshit tech trends, and doesn’t care about the larger consequences of their work or their industry. Or, even worse, aspires to become a person who gets rich from working in a harmful industry.

For example, my sister helps manage a book store as a day job. They hire a lot of teenagers as summer employees and at least those teens use “he’s a big fan of AI” as a red flag. (Obviously a book store is a biased sample. The ones that seek out a book store summer job are generally going to be good kids.)

I don’t think I’ve experienced a sentiment disconnect this massive in tech before, even during the dot-com bubble.

On another front, there's the cultural reevaluation of the Luddites - once brushed off as naught but rejectors of progress, they are now coming to be viewed as folk heroes in a sense, fighting against misuse of technology to disempower and oppress, rather than technology as a whole.

There's also the rather recent SAG-AFTRA strike which kicked off just under a year after the previous one, and was started for similar reasons - to protect those working in the games industry from being shafted by AI like so many other people.

With how the tech industry was responsible for creating this bubble at every stage - research, development, deployment, the whole nine yards - it is all but guaranteed they will shoulder the blame for all that its unleashed. Whatever happens after this bubble, I expect hefty scrutiny and distrust of the tech industry for a long, long time after this.

To quote @datarama, "the AI industry has made tech synonymous with “monstrous assholes” in a non-trivial chunk of public consciousness" - and that chunk is not going to forget any time soon.

I've been hit by inspiration whilst dicking about on Discord - felt like making some off-the-cuff predictions on what will happen once the AI bubble bursts. (Mainly because I had a bee in my bonnet that was refusing to fuck off.)

1. A Full-Blown Tech Crash

Its no secret the industry's put all their chips into AI - basically every public company's chasing it to inflate their stock prices, NVidia's making money hand-over-fist playing gold rush shovel seller, and every exec's been hyping it like its gonna change the course of humanity.

Additionally, going by Baldur Bjarnason, tech's chief goal with this bubble is to prop up the notion of endless growth so it can continue reaping the benefits for just a bit longer.

If and when the tech bubble pops, I expect a full-blown crash in the tech industry (much like Ed Zitron's predicting), with revenues and stock prices going through the floor and layoffs left and right. Additionally, I'm expecting those stock prices will likely take a while to recover, if ever, as tech likely comes to be viewed either as a stable, mature industry that's no longer experiencing nonstop growth or as an industry experiencing a full-blown malaise era, with valuations and stock prices getting savaged as Wall Street comes to see tech companies as high risk investments at best and money pits at worst. (Missed this incomplete sentence several times)

Chance: Near-Guaranteed. I'm pretty much certain on this, and expect it to happen sometime this year.

2. A Decline in Tech/STEM Students/Graduates

Extrapolating a bit from Prediction 1, I suspect we might see a lot less people going into tech/STEM degrees if tech crashes like I expect.

The main thing which drew so many people to those degrees, at least from what I could see, was the notion that they'd make you a lotta money - if tech publicly crashes and burns like I expect, it'd blow a major hole in that notion.

Even if it doesn't kill the notion entirely, I can see a fair number of students jumping ship at the sight of that notion being shaken.

Chance: Low/Moderate. I've got no solid evidence this prediction's gonna come true, just a gut feeling. Epistemically speaking, I'm firing blind.

3. Tech/STEM's Public Image Changes - For The Worse

The AI bubble's given us a pretty hefty amount of mockery-worthy shit - Mira Murati shitting on the artists OpenAI screwed over, Andrej Karpathy shitting on every movie made pre-'95, Sam Altman claiming AI will soon solve all of physics, Luma Labs publicly embarassing themselves, ProperPrompter recreating motion capture, But Worse^tm, Mustafa Suleyman treating everything on the 'Net as his to steal, et cetera, et cetera, et fucking cetera.

All the while, AI has been flooding the Internet with unholy slop, ruining Google search, cooking the planet, stealing everyone's work (sometimes literally) in broad daylight, supercharging scams, killing livelihoods, exploiting the Global South and God-knows-what-the-fuck-else.

All of this has been a near-direct consequence of the development of large language models and generative AI.

Baldur Bjarnason has already mentioned AI being treated as a major red flag by many - a "tech asshole" signifier to be more specific - and the massive disconnect in sentiment tech has from the rest of the public. I suspect that "tech asshole" stench is gonna spread much quicker than he thinks.

Chance: Moderate/High. This one's also based on a gut feeling, but with the stuff I've witnessed, I'm feeling much more confident with this than Prediction 2. Arguably, if the cultural rehabilitation of the Luddites is any indication, it might already be happening without my knowledge.

If you've got any other predictions, or want to put up some criticisms of mine, go ahead and comment.

Damn nice sneer from Charlie Warzel in this one, taking a direct shot at Silicon Valley and its AGI rhetoric.

Archive link, to get past the paywall.

(Gonna expand on a comment I whipped out yesterday - feel free to read it for more context)

At this point, its already well known AI bros are crawling up everyone's ass and scraping whatever shit they can find - robots.txt, honesty and basic decency be damned.

The good news is that services have started popping up to actively cockblock AI bros' digital smash-and-grabs - Cloudflare made waves when they began offering blocking services for their customers, but Spawning AI's recently put out a beta for an auto-blocking service of their own called Kudurru.

(Sidenote: Pretty clever of them to call it Kudurru.)

I do feel like active anti-scraping measures could go somewhat further, though - the obvious route in my eyes would be to try to actively feed complete garbage to scrapers instead - whether by sticking a bunch of garbage on webpages to mislead scrapers or by trying to prompt inject the shit out of the AIs themselves.

The main advantage I can see is subtlety - it'll be obvious to AI corps if their scrapers are given a 403 Forbidden and told to fuck off, but the chance of them noticing that their scrapers are getting fed complete bullshit isn't that high - especially considering AI bros aren't the brightest bulbs in the shed.

Arguably, AI art generators are already getting sabotaged this way to a strong extent - Glaze and Nightshade aside, ChatGPT et al's slop-nami has provided a lot of opportunities for AI-generated garbage (text, music, art, etcetera) to get scraped and poison AI datasets in the process.

How effective this will be against the "summarise this shit for me" chatbots which inspired this high-length shitpost I'm not 100% sure, but between one proven case of prompt injection and AI's dogshit security record, I expect effectiveness will be pretty high.

After reading through Baldur's latest piece on how tech and the public view gen-AI, I've had some loose thoughts about how this AI bubble's gonna play out.

I don't have any particular structure to this, this is just a bunch of things I'm getting off my chest:

1. AI's Dogshit Reputation

Past AI springs had the good fortune to have had no obvious negative externalities to sour the public's reputation (mainly because they weren't public facing, going by David Gerard).

This bubble, by comparison, has been pretty much entirely public facing, giving us, among other things:

• A veritable slop-nami of garbage-looking art, interesting only when it comes off as completely fucking insane (say hi Biblically-accurate gymnasts)

• Copyright infringement and art theft on a Biblical scale, leading to basically major AI company getting sued out the ass (with Suno and Udio being the latest targets)

• Colossal amounts of power consumption, and thus planet-cooking levels of CO2 emissions (for the latest example, Google missed its climate targets as a direct result of AI)

• High-profile public embarrassments left and right, with Google's pizza-glue pisstake the most obvious coming to mind

• Scammers making use of voice-cloning tech to make their scams more convincing (with a particularly notorious flavour imitating a loved one under duress) (thanks to @mountainriver for pointing this one out)

• And probably a few more I'm missing

All of these have done a lot of damage to AI's public image, to the point where its absence is an explicit selling point - damage which I expect to last for at least a decade.

When the next AI winter comes in, I'm expecting it to be particularly long and harsh - I fully believe a lot of would-be AI researchers have decided to go off and do something else, rather than risk causing or aggravating shit like this. (Missed this incomplete sentence on first draft)

2. The Copyright Shitshow

Speaking of copyright, basically every AI company has worked under the assumption that copyright basically doesn't exist and they can yoink whatever they want without issue.

With Gen-AI being Gen-AI, getting evidence of their theft isn't particularly hard - as they're straight-up incapable of creativity, they'll puke out replicas of its training data with the right prompt.

Said training data has included, on the audio side, songs held under copyright by major music studios, and, on the visual side, movies and cartoons currently owned by the fucking Mouse..

Unsurprisingly, they're getting sued to kingdom come. If I were in their shoes, I'd probably try to convince the big firms my company's worth more alive than dead and strike some deals with them, a la OpenAI with Newscorp.

Given they seemingly believe they did nothing wrong (or at least Suno and Udio do), I expect they'll try to fight the suits, get pummeled in court, and almost certainly go bankrupt.

There's also the AI-focused COPIED act which would explicitly ban these kinds of copyright-related shenanigans - between getting bipartisan support and support from a lot of major media companies, chances are good it'll pass.

3. Tech's Tainted Image

I feel the tech industry as a whole is gonna see its image get further tainted by this, as well - the industry's image has already been falling apart for a while, but it feels like AI's sent that decline into high gear.

When the cultural zeitgeist is doing a 180 on the fucking Luddites and is openly clamoring for AI-free shit, whilst Apple produces the tech industry's equivalent to the "face ad", its not hard to see why I feel that way.

I don't really know how things are gonna play out because of this. Taking a shot in the dark, I suspect the "tech asshole" stench Baldur mentioned is gonna be spread to the rest of the industry thanks to the AI bubble, and its gonna turn a fair number of people away from working in the industry as a result.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before this big of a sentiment gap between tech – web tech especially – and the public sentiment I hear from the people I know and the media I experience.

Most of the time I hear “AI” mentioned on Icelandic mainstream media or from people I know outside of tech, it’s being used as to describe something as a specific kind of bad. “It’s very AI-like” (“mjög gervigreindarlegt” in Icelandic) has become the talk radio short hand for uninventive, clichéd, and formulaic.

babe wake up the butlerian jihad is coming