BlueMonday1984
the lasting legacy of GenAI will be a elevated background level of crud and untruth, an erosion of trust in media in general, and less free quality stuff being available.
I personally anticipate this will be the lasting legacy of AI as a whole - everything that you mentioned was caused in the alleged pursuit of AGI/Superintelligence^tm^, and gen-AI has been more-or-less the "face" of AI throughout this whole bubble.
I've also got an inkling (which I turned into a lengthy post) that the AI bubble will destroy artificial intelligence as a concept - a lasting legacy of "crud and untruth" as you put it could easily birth a widespread view of AI as inherently incapable of distinguishing truth from lies.
It was a pretty good comment, and pointed out one of the possible risks this AI bubble can unleash.
I've already touched on this topic, but it seems possible (if not likely) that copyright law will be tightened in response to the large-scale theft performed by OpenAI et al. to feed their LLMs, with both of us suspecting fair use will likely take a pounding. As you pointed out, the exploitation of fair use's research exception makes it especially vulnerable to its repeal.
On a different note, I suspect FOSS licenses (Creative Commons, GPL, etcetera) will suffer a major decline in popularity thanks to the large-scale code theft this AI bubble brought - after two-ish years of the AI industry (if not tech in general) treating anything publicly available as theirs to steal (whether implicitly or explicitly), I'd expect people are gonna be a lot stingier about providing source code or contributing to FOSS.
The top comment's also pretty good, especially the final paragraph:
I guess these companies decided that strip-mining the commons was an acceptable deal because they’d soon be generating their own facts via AGI, but that hasn’t come to pass yet. Instead they’ve pissed off many of the people they were relying on to continue feeding facts and creativity into the maws of their GPUs, as well as possibly fatally crippling the concept of fair use if future court cases go against them.
In other news, a lengthy report about Richard Stallman liking kids just dropped.
Hacker News has a thread on it. Its a dumpster fire, as expected.
Quick sidenote, you cocked up the formatting on the hyperlink - you're supposed to put [text in square brackets and](the link in circle brackets) like this
Zitron's given commentary on PC Gamer's publicly pilloried pro-autoplag piece:
He's also just dropped a thorough teardown of the tech press for their role in enabling Silicon Valley's worst excesses. I don't have a fitting Kendrick Lamar reference for this, but I do know a good companion piece: Devs and the Culture of Tech, which goes into the systemic flaws in tech culture which enable this shit.
Does anyone read these things before or after they’re sent?
It sounds like spam - by my guess, they usually aren't read at all.
New pair of Tweets from Zitron just dropped:
I also put out a lengthy post about AI's future on MoreWrite - go and read it, its pretty cool
I meant it for the stubsack, didn't realise
Not a sneer, but an unsurprising development: Bluesky's seeing a surge in users: