Ed Zitron’s planning a follow-up to “The Subprime AI Crisis”:

(Its gonna be a premium column, BTW)

EDIT: Swapped the image for one that’s easier-to-read

This is pure speculation, but I get the feeling Microsoft’s gonna significantly downsize, if not collapse, by the decade’s end.

This recent move’s gonna kneecap Microsoft’s ability to function as a company, and their heavy investment into AI mean they’ll likely take the brunt of the impact when the bubble bursts.

New blogpost from Iris Meredith: Vulgar, horny and threatening, a how-to guide on opposing the tech industry

New thread from Baldur Bjarnason publicly sneering at his fellow programmers:

Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel it’s giving them a moderate advantage

That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery (“nuts”, “shove your concern up your ass”) and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects

Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists

But, sure, feeling discouraged by the state of the industry is “like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw”

Whatever

Artificial intelligence and cheating/lying: two great tastes that go together

New thread from Ed Zitron, gonna focus on just the starter:

You want my opinion, Zitron’s on the money - once the AI bubble finally bursts, I expect a massive outpouring of schadenfreude aimed at the tech execs behind the bubble, and anyone who worked on or heavily used AI during the bubble.

For AI supporters specifically, I expect a triple whammy of mockery:

• On one front, they’re gonna be publicly mocked for believing tech billionaires’ bullshit claims about AI, and publicly lambasted for actively assisting tech billionaires’ attempts to destroy labour once and for all.

• On another front, their past/present support for AI will be used as grounds to flip the bozo bit on them, dismissing whatever they have to say as coming from someone incapable of thinking for themselves.

• On a third front, I expect their future art/writing will be immediately assumed to be AI slop and either dismissed as not worth looking at or mocked as soulless garbage made by someone who, quoting David Gerard, “literally cannot tell good from bad”.

Dr. Abeba Birhane got an AI True Believer^tm email recently, and shared it on Bluesky:

You want my opinion, I fully support acausal robot deicide, and think AI rights advocates can go fuck themselves.

Alright that’s it: anime streaming needs to return to fansubbing

Fansubs are openly doing it for the love of the anime, so chances are they’d avoid AI slop like the plague (though the CHUDs would be okay with ChatGPT subs if it meant avoiding The Woke^tm)

(note: this link contains a skintight anime bosom so don’t open it in front of your boss unless your boss is chill)

Good thing I’m a fucking NEET, then

…Lotus, you clever bastard.

In other news, someone tried selling a vibe-coded ytp-dl wrapper and got publicly called out for it:

Not to mention, these discussions partially enabled the rise of technofascism, making Yudkowsky and friends outright complicit in this shit.

Found a piece which caught my attention: Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing?

You want my personal opinion, the basic idea of “decomputing” that author Dan McQuillan is putting forward is likely gonna gain plenty of traction. The Trump administration more generally and DOGE more specifically have thoroughly undermined any notion of tech being an apolitical force, so arguing against the politics inherent to AI is gonna be an easier sell.

the model was supposed to be trained solely on his own art and thus I didn’t have any ethical issues with it.

Personally, I consider training any slop-generator model to be unethical on principle. Gen-AI is built to abuse workers for corporate gain - any use or support of it is morally equivalent to being a scab.

Fast-forward to shortly after release and the game’s AI model has been pumping out Elsa and Superman.

Given plagiarism machines are designed to commit plagiarism (preferably with enough plausible deniability to claim fair use), I’m not shocked.

(Sidenote: This is just personal instinct, but I suspect fair use will be gutted as a consequence of the slop-nami.)

Definitely a feature.

That would require them to care about people other than themselves.

I almost feel like now that Chatgpt is everywhere and has been billed as man’s savior, perhaps some logic should be built into these models that “detect” people trying to become friends with them, and have the bot explain it has no real thoughts and is giving you just the horse shit you want to hear. And if the user continues, it should erase its memory and restart with the explanation again that it’s dumb and will tell you whatever you want to hear.

Personally, I’d prefer deleting such models and banning them altogether. Chatbots are designed to tell people what they want to hear, and to make people become friends with them - the mental health crises we are seeing are completely by design.

Thanks for the work you do on Newgrounds!

Appreciate it - keeping one of the last bastions of creativity free of slop is a thankless task.

This sentence stuck out to me

No more worrying about lack of content or fickle UGC creators

Oh they’re just publically advertising their company to be anti-union. Bold.

What is AI if not a tool built to abuse the proletariat?

Gotta love how the website isn’t even functional.

Its probably been vibe coded by the fucks behind the LLM, I’d be shocked if it was genuinely functional.

I was originally going to ask why anyone would bother throwing their slop on Newgrounds of all sites, but given the business model here I think we can be pretty confident they were hoping to use it to advertise.

Considering that AI bros are

1. utterly malicious scumbags who hate anything which doesn’t let them, and them alone, make all the money ever

2. exceedingly stupid and shameless dipshits with a complete inability to recognise or learn from mistakes

I can absolutely see them looking at someplace like NG and thinking “hey, this place which stands for everything we want wiped off the Internet will totally accept our fucking slop”.

(Personal sidenote: Part of me says this story would probably make a good Pivot to AI.)

Minor bit of personal news: Newgrounds got hit with a wave of AI slop games recently.

I caught onto it back on Wednesday, but didn’t get official confirmation until yesterday, when another user investigated the games and discovered the exact slop-generator used to shit them out - VIDEOGAME.ai.