Veering semi-OT: the guy behind the godawful Windows 11 GUI has revealed himself:
Looking at his Twitter profile, its clear he’s a general dumpster fire of a human being - most of his feed’s just him retweeting AI garbage or fash garbage.
Tante has a couple of questions for Anthropic:
ED ZITRON
FROM THE TOP ROPE
New piece from Iris Meredith: Keeping up appearances, about the cultural forces that gave us LLMs and how best to defeat them
If you get the call, charge as much as you can. Then charge more.
Words to live by.
So, he’s essentially Drake if he got into AI doom
Tried to read it, ended up glazing over after the first or second paragraph, so I’ll fire off a hot take and call it a day:
Artificial intelligence is a pseudoscience, and it should be treated as such.
Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:
Found a Bluesky thread you might be interested in:
On a Sci Fi authors’ panel at Comicon today, every writer asked about AI (as in LLM / algorithmic modern gen AI) gave it a kicking, drawing a spontaneous round of applause.
A few years ago, I don’t think that would have happened. People would have said “it’s an interesting tool”, or something.
Bearing in mind these are exactly the people who would be expected to engage with the idea, I think the tech turds have massively underestimated the propaganda faux pas they made by stealing writers’ hard work and then being cunts about it.
Tying this to a previous post of mine, I’m expecting their open and public disdain for gen-AI to end up bleeding into their writing. The obvious route would be AI systems/characters exhibiting the hallmarks of LLMs - hallucinations/confabulations, “AI slop” output, easily bypassable safeguards, that sort of thing.
Calling it a police cam for techbros seems like an obvious dunk. You can also make a gratuitous Simpsons reference and quip “Remember Humane? Its back, in OpenAI form!”
Hey, look on the bright side - humans are no longer the weakest links in cybersecurity.
Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.
My money’s on OpenAI’s Gadgettm getting immediately compared to both of them as well, either by reviewers giving their (presumably negative) opinions on the product, or from people looking to dunk on OpenAI, if not AI as a whole.
The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?
On the one hand, OpenAI’s reality distortion field has managed to hold strong up until now, and its difficult to see the tech press recognising OpenAI’s Gadgettm to be just the Rabbit R1/Humane Pin with a fresh coat of paint.
On the other hand, the Rabbit R1 and Humane Pin are industry laughingstocks whose names are synonymous with “godawful AI product” in the public consciousness, and who basically killed the concept of such an AI Gadgettm in its crib - OpenAI could very well set themselves up to get relentlessly mocked for believing people wanted an AI Gadgettm at all.
New piece from Tante: On “Vibe Coding” - take a wild guess what its about.
The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.
If Duolingo still had their userbase’s goodwill, it would’ve probably worked. They’ve been pulling that shit since their mascot Duo turned into a meme, and its worked out for them up until now.
Mainly checked the YouTube comments and the like/dislike ratio - at the time of writing, he’s got 7.3k likes to 147 dislikes, and the top comments are universally praising the guy. One particular comment quipped about how “everyone shilled for Honey except Markiplier”.
Conover’s video avoiding the hallmarks of a standard YouTuber Apologytm is likely helping him out here - the public expects a lot of things from these kinds of videos, but “doing the bare minimum for an actual apology” is not one of them.
Adam Conover’s put out an apology on YouTube regarding his milkshake duck-ing himself with Worldcoin, after his public apology on Bluesky. Seems his reputation’s gonna make a full recovery.
EDIT: Found a banger comment after taking a quick peek:
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 other news, the ghost of Dorian has haunted an autoplag system:
New piece from Gary Marcus: AI may have just influenced Argentina’s election
He’s not 100% certain that the AI deepfake a reader sent him ultimately influenced the election results, but the mere possibility that AI screwed someone out of getting elected is gonna be a major topic in Argentine politics for a good while, and I expect AI’s effects on democracy will come under pretty heavy scrutiny as a result.
Okay, quick sidenote: I wouldn’t be shocked if people looked at the Terminator in a different light after this bubble.
On the one hand, the basic idea of “AI turns sentient and kills us all” is pretty laughable in a cultural zeitgeist where “AI” means “plagiarism-fueled lying machine” or “plagiarism-fueled mediocrity generator” or “plagiarism-fueled atrocity machine” (okay, maybe not that last one). The general themes of “man vs machine” will likely shine through all the brighter, though - especially given how the AI systems involved in this bubble function explicitly through stealing the work of human authors, artists, and other such creatives, and exclusively through stealing said human creatives’ work (ingesting AI slop slowly destroys AI systems, and everyone who works in AI rejects giving artists a fair shake out of principle).
On the other hand, the fact that AI has nonetheless still caused unimaginable damage to humanity (the environmental damage, the slop-nami, the fully-automatic worker abuse and enshittification, et cetera) might make the films feel oddly prescient, as it (plus the last 20-ish years of corporate malevolence) have made it clear that there are a lot of businessmen out there who would actively and willingly ruin the entire fucking world and potentially kill all of humanity if the alternative was “I, and I specifically, don’t make all of the money ever”.
And on the gripping hand, the likes of OpenAI and friends actively pushing AI Doomtm to criti-hype their way into raising more money could paint Cyberdyne’s existence in a much different light - with the breathless hype about AGI/superintelligence that Altman and Friends have put out, the general message they’ve been putting out is basically “We are actively trying to create the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus, because, uh, reasons. Please give us all of the money and ruin the world for our benefit and our benefit alone, otherwise we won’t be able to make the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus”.