lol, that’s too charitable to them, nukes at least work
And Oppie realised the gravity of their invention. And he was trying to end the Second World War with them, not make money by causing untold suffering.
Nukes and AI both represented a new and unique threat capable of causing worldwide devastation, so I'd say the analogy works pretty well.
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason:
Keep hearing reports of guys trusting ChatGPT’s output over experts or even actual documentation. Honestly feels like the AI Bubble’s hold over society has strengthened considerably over the past three months
This also highlights my annoyance with everybody who’s claiming that this tech will be great if every uses it responsibly. Nobody’s using it responsibly. Even the people who think they are, already trust the tech much more than it warrants
Also constantly annoyed by analysis that assumes the tech works as promised or will work as promised. The fact that it is unreliable and nondeterministic needs to be factored into any analysis you do. But people don’t do that because the resulting conclusion is GRIM as hell
LLMs add volatility and unpredictability to every system they touch, which makes those systems impossible to manage. An economy with pervasive LLM automation is an economy in constant chaos
On a semi-related note, I expect the people who are currently making heavy use of AI will find themselves completely helpless without it if/when the bubble finally bursts, and will probably struggle to find sympathy from others thanks to AI indelibly staining their public image.
(The latter part is assuming heavy AI users weren't general shitheels before - if they were, AI's stain on their image likely won't affect things either way. Of course, "AI bro" is synonymous with "trashfire human being", so I'm probably being too kind to them :P)
from someone who helped build their LLM
Nice to get a look on the inside from one of the 21st-century Oppenheimers.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation fills its tabloid papers across Australia with right-wing slop. Now the slop will come from a chatbot — and not a human slop churner.
The quality of its tabloids will remain exactly the same, I presume.
r/cursor is the gift that keeps on giving:
Don't Date Robots!
Kill them instead
In other news, IETF 127 (which is being held in November) is facing a boycott months in advance. The reason? Its being held in the United States.
This likely applies to a lot of things, but that would have been unthinkable before the election.
At this point, using AI in any sort of creative context is probably gonna prompt major backlash, and the idea of AI having artistic capabilities is firmly dead in the water.
On a wider front (and to repeat an earlier prediction), I suspect that the arts/humanities are gonna gain some begrudging respect in the aftermath of this bubble, whilst tech/STEM loses a significant chunk.
For arts, the slop-nami has made "AI" synonymous with "creative sterility" and likely painted the field as, to copy-paste a previous comment, "all style, no subtance, and zero understanding of art, humanities, or how to be useful to society"
For humanities specifically, the slop-nami has also given us a nonstop parade of hallucination-induced mishaps and relentless claims of AGI too numerous to count - which, combined with the increasing notoriety of TESCREAL, could help the humanities look grounded and reasonable by comparison.
(Not sure if this makes sense - it was 1AM where I am when I wrote this)
We can add that to the list of things threatening to bring FOSS as a whole crashing down.
Plus the culture being utterly rancid, the large-scale AI plagiarism, the declining industry surplus FOSS has taken for granted, having Richard Stallman taint the whole movement by association, the likely-tanking popularity of FOSS licenses, AI being a general cancer on open-source and probably a bunch of other things I've failed to recognise or make note of.
FOSS culture being a dumpster fire is probably the biggest long-term issue - fixing that requires enough people within the FOSS community to recognise they're in a dumpster fire, and care about developing the distinctly non-technical skills necessary to un-fuck the dumpster fire.
AI's gonna be the more immediately pressing issue, of course - its damaging the commons by merely existing.
Update on the Vibe Coder Catastrophe^tm^: he's killed his current app and seems intent to vibe code again:
Personally, I expect this case won't be the last "vibe coded" app/website/fuck-knows-what to get hacked to death - security is virtually nonexistent, and the business/techbros who'd be attracted to it are unlikely to learn from their mistakes.
Court documents regarding Facebook's plagiarism lawsuit just started getting unsealed, and ho-lee shit is this a treasure trove:
This confirms basically everything I said a week ago - AI violates copyright by design, and a single copyright suit going through means its open fucking season on the AI industry. Wonder who's gonna blink first.