BlueMonday1984

Recommending a piece I ran across: I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

This is pure gut instinct, but I suspect this is gonna prompt an uptick in Google crawlers getting blocked. Mainly because Google just removed any real reason for people not to block them.

New thread from Ed Zitron, focusing on the general trashfire that is CoreWeave. Jumping straight to the money-shot, he noted how the company is losing money selling shovels in the gold rush:

You want my off-the-cuff prediction, CoreWeave will probably be treated as the Leyman Brothers of the 2020s, an unofficial mascot of everything wrong with Wall Street (if not the world) during the AI bubble.

Hey, we're an island nation which ruled over a globe-spanning empire, we had a damn good reason to be obsessed with boats.

Couldn't exactly commit atrocities on a worldwide scale without 'em, after all.

In other news, a piece from Paris Marx came to my attention, titled "We need an international alliance against the US and its tech industry". Personally gonna point to a specific paragraph which caught my eye:

The only country to effectively challenge [US] dominance is China, in large part because it rejected US assertions about the internet. The Great Firewall, often solely pegged as an act of censorship, was an important economic policy to protect local competitors until they could reach the scale and develop the technical foundations to properly compete with their American peers. In other industries, it’s long been recognized that trade barriers were an important tool — such that a declining United States is now bringing in its own with the view they’re essential to projects its tech companies and other industries.

I will say, it does strike me as telling that Paris was able to present the unofficial mascot of Chinese censorship this way without getting any backlash.

New piece from Techdirt: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

Strongly recommended reading overall, and strongly recommended you check out Techdirt - they've been doing some pretty damn good reporting on the current shitshow we're living through.

New piece from Brian Merchant, focusing on Musk's double-tapping of 18F. In lieu of going deep into the article, here's my personal sidenote:

I've touched on this before, but I fully expect that the coming years will deal a massive blow to tech's public image, expecting them to be viewed as "incompetent fools at best and unrepentant fascists at worst" - and with the wanton carnage DOGE is causing (and indirectly crediting to AI), I expect Musk's governmental antics will deal plenty of damage on its own.

18F's demise in particular will probably also deal a blow on its own - 18F was "a diverse team staffed by people of color and LGBTQ workers, and publicly pushed for humane and inclusive policies", as Merchant put it, and its demise will likely be seen as another sign of tech revealing its nature as a Nazi bar.

ZITRON DROPPED

Starting things off here with a sneer thread from Baldur Bjarnason:

Keeping up a personal schtick of mine, here's a random prediction:

If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect in the wake of the AI bubble, it will almost certainly gain that respect at the expense of STEM's public image.

Focusing on the arts specifically, the rise of generative AI and the resultant slop-nami has likely produced an image of programmers/software engineers as inherently incapable of making or understanding art, given AI slop's soulless nature and inhumanly poor quality, if not outright hostile to art/artists thanks to gen-AI's use in killing artists' jobs and livelihoods.

New opinion piece from the Guardian: AI is ‘beating’ humans at empathy and creativity. But these games are rigged

The piece is one lengthy sneer aimed at tests trying to prove humanlike qualities in AI, with a passage at the end publicly skewering techno-optimism:

Techno-optimism is more accurately described as “human pessimism” when it assumes that the quality of our character is easily reducible to code. We can acknowledge AI as a technical achievement without mistaking its narrow abilities for the richer qualities we treasure in each other.

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.