Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
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 Superintelligencetm), 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
slaughteranimation, 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.I think a couple of people noted it at the start, but this is truly a paradigm shift.
We’ve had so many science fiction stories, works, derivatives, musing about AI in so many ways, what if it were malevolent, what if it rebelled, what if it took all jobs… But I don’t think our collective consciousness was aware of the “what if it was just utterly stupid and incompetent” possibility.
Alan Moore wrote a comic book story about AI about 10 years ago that parodied rationalist ideas about AI and it still holds up pretty well. Sadly the whole thing isn’t behind that link - I saw it on Twitter and can’t find it now.
Its a possibility which doesn’t make for good sci-fi (unless you’re writing an outright dystopia (e.g. Paranoia)), so sci-fi writers were unlikely to touch it.
The tech industry had enjoyed a lengthy period of unvarnished success and conformist press up to this point, so Joe Public probably wasn’t gonna entertain the idea that this shiny new tech could drop the ball until they saw something like the glue pizza sprawl.
And the tech press isn’t gonna push back against AI, for obvious reasons.
So, I’m not shocked this revelation completely blindsided the public.
Yeah, this is very much a paradigm shift - I don’t know how wide-ranging the consequences will be, but I expect we’re in for one hell of a ride.
Paranoia is the only one I can think of that’s actually pretty well on the money because the dystopian elements come from the fact that the wildly incompetent friend computer has been given total power despite everyone on some level knowing that fact, even if they can’t admit it (anymore) without being terminated. The secret societies all think they can work the situation to their advantage and it provides a convenient scapegoat for terrible things they probably want to do anyways.