TechTakes

Someone shared this website with me at work and now I am sharing the horror with you all: https://www.syntheticusers.com/

Nobody likes Bryan Johnson’s breakfast at the Network School

A cafe run by immortality-obsessed multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson is reportedly struggling to attract customers with students at the crypto-funded Network School in Singapore preferring the hotel’s breakfast buffet over “bunny food.”

Not a sneer, but I saw an article that was basically an extremely goddamn long list of forum recommendations and it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.

Online art school Schoolism publicly sneers at AI art, gets standing ovation

And now, a quick sidenote:

This is gut instinct, but I'm starting to get the feeling this AI bubble's gonna destroy the concept of artificial intelligence as we know it.

Mainly because of the slop-nami and the AI industry's repeated failures to solve hallucinations - both of those, I feel, have built an image of AI as inherently incapable of humanlike intelligence/creativity (let alone Superintelligence^tm^), no matter how many server farms you build or oceans of water you boil.

Additionally, I suspect that working on/with AI, or supporting it in any capacity, is becoming increasingly viewed as a major red flag - a "tech asshole signifier" to quote Baldur Bjarnason for the bajillionth time.

For a specific example, the major controversy that swirled around "Scooby Doo, Where Are You? In... SPRINGTRAPPED!" over its use of AI voices would be my pick.

Eagan Tilghman, the man behind the ~~slaughter~~ animation, may have been a random indie animator, who made Springtrapped on a shoestring budget and with zero intention of making even a cent off it, but all those mitigating circumstances didn't save the poor bastard from getting raked over the coals anyway. If that isn't a bad sign for the future of AI as a concept, I don't know what is.

from this article

Amazon asked Chun to dismiss the case in December, saying the FTC had raised no evidence of harm to consumers.

ah yes, the company that's massively monopolized nearly all markets, destroyed choice, constantly ships bad products (whose existence is incentivised by programs of its own devising), and that has directly invested in enhanced price exploitation technologies? that one? yeah, totes no harm to consumers there

Many thanks to @blakestacey and @YourNetworkIsHaunted for your guidance with the NSF grant situation. I've sent an analysis of the two weird reviews to our project manager and we have a list of personnel to escalate with if we can't get any traction at that level. Fingers crossed that we can be the pebble that gets an avalanche rolling. I'd really rather not become a character in this story (it's much more fun to hurl rotten fruit with the rest of the groundlings), but what else can we do when the bullshit comes and finds us in real life, eh?

It WAS fun to reference Emily Bender and On Bullshit in the references of a serious work document, though.

Edit: So...the email server says that all the messages are bouncing back. DKIM failure?

Edit2: Yep, you're right, our company email provider coincidentally fell over. When it rains, it pours (lol).

Edit3: PM got back and said that he's passed it along for internal review.

I saw this over the weekend and the title itself is rather lovely, but even more hilariously it's from the atlantic

evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltman's bullshit grows

New piece from Brian Merchant: Yes, the striking dockworkers were Luddites. And they won.

Pulling out a specific paragraph here (bolding mine):

I was glad to see some in the press recognizing this, which shows something of a sea change is underfoot; outlets like the Washington Post, CNN, and even Inc. Magazine all published pieces sympathizing with the longshoremen besieged by automation—and advised workers worried about AI to pay attention. “Dockworkers are waging a battle against automation,” the CNN headline noted, “The rest of us may want to take notes.” That feeling that many more jobs might be vulnerable to automation by AI is perhaps opening up new pathways to solidarity, new alliances.

To add my thoughts, those feelings likely aren't just that many more jobs are at risk than people thought, but that AI is primarily, if not exclusively, threatening the jobs people want to do (art, poetry, that sorta shit), and leaving the dangerous/boring jobs mostly untouched - effectively the exact opposite of the future the general public wants AI to bring them.

And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?

https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-athlete-intelligence-translates-workout-data-into-simple-and

Just something I found in the wild (r/machine learning): Please point me in the right direction for further exploring my line of thinking in AI alignment

I'm not a researcher or working in AI or anything, but ...

you don't say

In other news, an AI booster got publicly humilitated after prompting complete garbage and mistaking it for 8-bit animation:

And now, another sidenote, because I really like them apparently:

This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.

Beyond the slop-nami flooding the Internet with soulless shit whose creation was directly because of tech companies like OpenAI, its also given us shit like:

• Google's unholy 'Dear Sydney' ad, and the nuclear backlash it got.

• Apple crushing human creativity for personal gain and being forced to apologise for it

• Mira Murati openly shitting on artists as gen-AI steals their artwork and destroys their livelihoods

• Gen-AI boosters producing complete shit and calling it gold (with Proper Prompter and Luma Labs providing excellent examples)

• And so much goddamn more, most of which I've likely forgotten