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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    14 hours ago

    Bad feelings today. Google announced that an artist I like, Jacob Collier, has been working with them to develop an LLM based tool for music autoplag.

    A little context: Collier has like 5 grammies, and is an incredibly creative artist that is able to take ideas and influence from disparate sources and synthesise something interesting (it’s not always good though…). Likely the greatest musician of his generation!

    I don’t want to catastrophise too much here but I’m not looking forward to this being used as a cudgel from the promptfondlers.

    The only open question I think is: to what extent is the music generation autoplag? (My guess, 100%)

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      9·
      14 hours ago

      There’s been a moderate tsunami of “AI EVERYTHING” in a bunch of production tools lately too. Most I’ve seen have looked like just rebranding the further development of previously existing algorithmic tools, but there have also been a couple principally from the “we trained on everything possible!” camp

      unsurprising that someone’s fallen over themselves to integrate the llm-style synthesis into the pipeline too, although it’s still extremely exhausting

      the cultural fallout of this is going to suuuuuck. it’s going to be so much worse than receiving the dancing baby from your weird relatives in 2008

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    23 hours ago

    Character.ai is getting sued thanks to one of their users killing himself, and The New York Times is talking about it (there’s also a piece by Gary Marcus talking about a previous incident if you’re interested).

    Like the copyright situation I previously mentioned, I suspect this is also gonna make potential investors wary of investing in AI post-bubble. Even if you manage to convince investors that you won’t get DMCA’d into oblivion, they’re still gonna be wary of the potential for a Dasani-level PR nightmare.

    Of course, that’s assuming that Section 230 protects you from being held liable for what your autoplag does - if Ms. Garcia, whose son’s suicide prompted this entire mess, succeeds in court, the legal precedent set means you’re likely gonna have to worry about being sued if/when someone ends up injured/killed/defamed/otherwise fucked up because of its output…

    • FredFig@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      21 hours ago

      Skimming the reddit thread in search of general public sentiment about this, but unfortunately mostly just found a greatest hits compilation of very gross comments.

      According to these very smart people, parents should expect your teenager to die as an outcome of not being perfect people 24/7, technology can never be at fault even when it literally tells you to commit suicide in coded language, and it’s actually impossible to understand which parts of society are causing kids to be depressed, so we must take it as a given that we can’t do anything about it. I regret having done this to myself.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      24 hours ago

      Pretty good sneer there:

      BREAKING: Tim Pool announces he will be stepping back from full time content production to look after his family. He states he’s tired of being made fun of for not having a wife and kids so he will also be using the extra time to pursue acquiring that family

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      Fuck, I didn’t need to be reminded that they named the robot Optimus. Was “Bender” or “Wall-E” too much of a deep cut? Or is it just that Disney’s trademark lawyers are scarier than Hasbro and Nvidia combined?

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      My read: sounds like a teenager that knows the touted functionality of the scam tech they are referencing, but is not wise enough to the ways of the world to know they are scams.

  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    this is peak AI. you might not like it, but it’s how top of the bubble looks like

    Radio station uses AI to interview the ghost of a dead Nobel-winner with 3 quirky zoomers who don’t exist, seems baffled people don’t like it starring three bots and deepfake of Wisława Szymborska

    related notesfrompoland and onet article they probably referenced (in polish) and another. would you guess that they fired a dozen or so* people just before? (and somehow had money for whatever horseshit they were sold) small radio stations aren’t probably bringing serious money either way now

    homepage of that radio boasts about their “almost entirely created by AI” content. it looks like they tried to convince zoomers to get an FM radio and listen to it somehow. it’s gonna go great

    apparently this radio is in liquidation since january however this might be related to dislodging previous govt’s propagandists from public media

    *original report used very handy word that does not appear in english that one could translate as “fewteen” and can mean any number from 11 to 19 inclusive

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      17 hours ago

      What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don’t sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I’ve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT’s attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it’s trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.

  • Rinn@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    1 day ago

    A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI “hosts” (non-English link).

    They’re trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason they’re firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be “an experiment to appeal to Gen Z”. Fortunately, most people’s response seems to be “fuck off with this crap”.

    I just… can’t with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run “experiments” with AI media. Heads should roll for this.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      I just… can’t with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run “experiments” with AI media. Heads should roll for this.

      i think it might be code for firing these people, but technically not, because they just terminated contracts with 15 single-person companies, so they never really hired them in the first place

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      That’s kinda funny. If I’m ever in the market for a proprietary chromium-based web browser, they have my interest.

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    Kendrick Zitron dropped - its mainly focusing on Prabhakar Raghavan’s recent kicking upstairs, and Google’s bleak future.

    Main highlight was this snippet:

    I am hypothesizing here, but I think that Google is desperate, and that its earnings on October 30th are likely to make the street a little worried. The medium-to-long-term prognosis is likely even worse. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Google’s ad business is expected to dip below 50% market share in the US in the next year for the first time in more than a decade, and Google’s gratuitous monopoly over search (and likely ads) is coming to an end. It’s more than likely that Google sees AI as fundamental to its future growth and relevance.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      2 days ago

      Man, it’s almost like hollowing out the core value centers of a company in search of short-term growth will leave an empty dying husk that can neither serve in new markets nor continue to exist in their previous niche.

      If only there had been some kind of warning about the consequences of this management style. Hey, how’s GE doing these days again?

      • thesporkeffect@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        2 days ago

        It’s not that the money is unaware this kills the business. They know. They don’t care because their process is business-agnostic. By design and intent they extract value from the business like it was a capri sun pouch and when line no longer goes up, it’s discarded for the next one.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      I think this is the second or third time that either Ed or somebody on his Discord reminded me about Shingy

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      the Determinate Nix move was such an obvious next step I was convinced they had already done it; I guess they can let the mask fall off now that they’ve consolidated their control over the community. as was pointed out on mastodon, Determinate Systems previously promised this wasn’t their goal, which goes to show how much a promise from a fascist is worth.

      fortunately it seems like Lix has a NixOS fork on the horizon? I only know about it because the “just fork it or shut up” assholes are now complaining that a fork’s happening (which they seem to only know about by obsessively monitoring Lix’s git forge — I don’t think there’s been an announcement yet)

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          2 days ago

          I hope so too! I like their approach so far, and a NixOS fork by the same folks seems like something I’d switch to as soon as I reasonably could

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            1 day ago

            in other news, holy fuck nix

            notably, this weirdo seems to have only started the podcast that looks like the only thing they’re supposedly known for a couple months before the Nix open letter, and I really don’t recognize them from the Nix community otherwise. they also appear to be using their podcast to interview Steering Committee candidates, which seems like a real obvious way to influence the selection process given the kinds of questions they seem to be asking.