BecomeMe

And so far, major A.I. companies are refusing to pursue advanced ways to identify A.I.’s handiwork — which they could do by adding subtle statistical patterns hidden in word use or in the pixels of images.

This, coupled with the noted worry a few paragraphs higher of these same companies of poisoning their future models with the tsunami of their own AI’s previous garbage output, highlights perfectly the Problems inherent in capitalism:

Companies know they’re on the short track to destruction (or, more accurately, humanity’s short path to demise). They discuss this behind closed doors and try to plan as best they can for this inevitable outcome. But the other side of that is their shareholders and executives demanding infinite and expanding growth. And time and again, the desire for exponentially increasing profits wins out. And this is in practice across every industry. AI, fossil fuels, manufacturers, data—everything is getting squeezed tighter and tighter. And AI came along and actually hastened that decline. With its massive energy consumption, it’s jolting climate change into high gear; with its “streamlining” capabilities for businesses its booting employees out of the market in favor of lower quality, higher margin AI bullshit (and worsening inequality); its garbage output of AI dream slop (a phrase I really liked from that article), they are diminishing the quality of everything and destroying what precious little time we have left to halt the most disastrous effects of climate change.

And, time and again, I come to the same conclusion myself. We cannot wait for these vampires to give up their quest for increasing profits. We need to act right now, en masse, to halt their machine that runs on us. Strike. General strike, across the board, crashing the global economy and wielding the power to start it back up. We have this power! We’ve always had it. It’s well past time we use it. Because if we don’t do it now, there won’t be anything left to fight for. The billionaires and millionaires will be holed up in whatever bunkers and private islands they’ve quietly been building. Which is actually happening and is genuinely terrifying. This shit has gone on way too fuckin long. And it makes me sick.