BlueMonday1984

Sounds like they'd be right at home on awful (barring the rats, of course :P)

ChatGPT's new search feature hasn't even launched and already its shitting the bed

The sneers are writing themselves

AI companies work around this by paying human classifiers in poor but English-speaking countries to generate new data. Since the classifiers are poor but not stupid, they augment their low piecework income by using other AIs to do the training for them. See, AIs can save workers labor after all.

On the one hand, you'd think the AI companies would check to make sure they aren't using AI themselves and damaging their models.

On the other hand, AI companies are being run by some of the laziest and stupidest people alive, and are probably just rubber-stamping everything no matter how blatantly garbage the results are.

Not a sneer, but still a damn good piece on AI from Brian Merchant:

The great and justified rage over using AI to automate the arts

(Personal sidenote: Tech's public image is almost certainly gonna take a nosedive as a result of this AI bubble. "We made a machine with the express purpose of putting artists out of business" isn't a business case, its the setup for a shitty teen dystopian novel.)

(Fuck, now I wanna try and predict how the AI bubble bursting will play out...)

Just an off-the-cuff prediction: I fully anticipate AI bros are gonna put their full focus on local models post-bubble, for two main reasons:

1. Power efficiency - whilst local models are hardly power-sippers, they don't require the planet-killing money-burning server farms that the likes of ChatGPT require (and which have helped define AI's public image, now that I think about it). As such, they won't need VC billions to keep them going - just some dipshit with cash to spare and a GPU to abuse (and there's plenty of those out in the wild).

2. Freedom/Control - Compared to ChatGPT, DALL-E, et al, which are pretty locked down in an attempt to keep users from embarrassing their parent corps or inviting public scrutiny, any local model will answer whatever dumbshit question you ask for make whatever godawful slop you want, no questions asked, no prompt injection/jailbreaking needed. For the kind of weird TESCREAL nerd which AI attracts, the benefits are somewhat obvious.

One answer perhaps would be that anyone who thinks AI art is good probably lacks the taste to appreciate anything beyond the generic, and the discernment to tell that it is submerged in the depths of uncanny valley.

Very true - arguably truer today than it was earlier, if DALL-E's declining quality is any indication.

DALL-E 2 had some degree of artistic talent (in the loosest sense), but because DALL-E was made and run by creatively sterile techbros without a shred of art skill, that talent was drowned very fucking quickly.

An invaluable repository of programming knowledge ground into dust as the last tokens of good will are cashed in for stinky money. It was a unique place, where self-moderation by the community actually worked to a large extent.

That's the worst part about this situation - Joel's burning the coder's Library of Alexandria in pursuit of that cash. Whatever comes to replace StackOverflow is gonna be a pale imitation of what came before, and I suspect the entire field of programming's gonna be feeling the setbacks for a long, long time.

Mumsnet becomes the latest company to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.

Why AI bros are scraping TERF Island's Finest I'm not sure, but it'll be fun to watch the two of them slapfight each other.

Yeah. There probably was a fair bit of stealth-crawling up to this point, but the perps knew they needed to keep it on the down-low.

The AI bubble, on the other hand, lacks the ability to keep it subtle, making it plainly obvious people's shit was getting stolen and showcasing AI bros/techbros' utter disregard for anyone but themselves (e.g. by ignoring robots.txt).

Personally, I expect this will lead to much stronger scraping protections being developed to combat shit like this - Cloudflare's already offering to block AI scrapers for its users and Kudurru's offering a similar service, I can easily see a new market opening up here.

(Off-the-cuff prediction: anti-AI scraping measures will likely start feeding false info to AI scrapers they detect - beyond simply throwing a wrench into those models, it'd also make it less likely AI scrapers will realise "hey, our shit's getting blocked")

I wonder how long it will be until there are companies actively promoting their lack of AI.

Its already happening, to some extent, but not mainly among the big corps. Grabbing some random examples I could find:

• Cara blew up a few weeks ago off the back of Instagram going all-in on AI

• Glaze and Nightshade earned a lot of popularity by offering means to sabotage them

• Dove also made waves by directly taking shots at AI, too

• Nintendo publicly eschewed using it, stating they're focused "delivering value that is unique to Nintendo and cannot be created by technology alone".

• Newgrounds put the hammer down early on AI, but more publicly disavowed it alongside adding an option to flag something as AI-made in March this year

• Last, but not least, Beth Spencer cooked up a quick-and-dirty "Made with Human Intelligence" badge which has since blown the fuck up online

I'm probably missing some examples, but I think my point's made.

The good news is I barely use Protonmail (or email at all, for that matter).

The bad news is I have a fucking Proton account. Fuck.

Not a sneer, but an observation on the tech industry from Baldur Bjarnason, plus some of my own thoughts:

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.

Baldur has pointed that part out before, and noted how its kneecapping the consumer side of the entire bubble, but I suspect the phrase "AI" will retain that meaning well past the bubble's bursting. "AI slop", or just "slop", will likely also stick around, for those who wish to differentiate gen-AI garbage from more genuine uses of machine learning.

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.

Part of me suspects that the AI bubble's spread that "tech asshole" stench to the rest of the industry, with some help from the widely-mocked NFT craze and Elon Musk becoming a punching bag par excellence for his public breaking-down of Twitter.

(Fuck, now I'm tempted to try and cook up something for MoreWrite discussing how I expect the bubble to play out...)