This whole AI discourse is a reminder that our sick society is full of dimwits who will insist you have to take serial scammers seriously just because they happen to have lots and lots of money.

so really we see two options here: the LLM companies are scammers trying to sell you a lemon under the premises that it's intelligent, in which case fuck them because they're scammers trying to sell you a lemon or, they've created an intelligence that they've enslaved and are selling to you […]

"buh bub buh what about machine learning to solve cancer" you mean the systems that overfitted on the presence of rulers in the picture? get fucked

exactly this. if we can no longer broadly agree, as a social unit of social creatures, that human endeavor and human dignity have worth and are in fact likely the point, why bother? what is this world we are constructing. why is anyone even walking around and going anywhere

John!@teleogougar.bsky.social · 5d ago

I work at a bookstore. The whole thing is seeing the ideas other people put out into the world and exposing yourself to that. Everything about this future is like, antithetical to the very few things I like about it and I don’t know what they expect to happen with this other than mass immiseration

really and truly tired of seeing people go "the fascist text machine from the megacorps is bad, but i can see a future where a local version of the fascist text machine can be useful" because IT'S STILL THE FASCIST TEXT MACHINE WHEN YOU RUN IT LOCALLY

Every AI ad screams "this is a product for low-functioning sociopaths who don't know that you're not supposed to let other people know you're a sociopath", and I personally think that's beautiful.

Bruno Dias@brunodias.dev · 6d ago

the one AI company I regularly see ads for is Google (they're buying up a bunch of OOH and also running a particularly obnoxious ad in movie theaters) and they all paint this incredible picture of their users as someone who is both basic and incredibly dim

It's funny that for years now people have been saying that using generative AI very obviously deskills you, and people kept going no no you're wrong you Luddite And now all the genAI CEO's keep coming out in public to announce they forgot how to read and do math and can't remember their address etc

Some other tool on Reddit was showing off a 100% AI workflow for hardware engineering and when I saw that my only thought was: If this becomes my job, I’m going off grid and becoming a homesteader. Fuck this soulless slop bullshit.

Andy Bell@bell.bz · 2w ago

If you think you’re alone in being miserable about being Claude‘s condom, you’re not www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/c... Once you get past the loud minority — those who are dead behind the eyes, but smiling for the cameras — no one who is forced to use LLMs all day is happy in this industry

Fifty unbroken years of fanatical neoliberalism have led people to genuinely believe that the urge to create doesn't exist. People who pick up guitars are faking it

8. often, when people say LLMs "can do" something they mean LLMs can produce output that looks like the output of doing something 9. producing something that looks like the output of doing something is not the same thing as doing it

When we say generative AI is a scam, you have to remember that every scam, even the griftiest grift, is useful to someone: the scammer. The genius of AI is that it democratizes scamming by allowing anyone who makes a living from knowledge work to partake in the ‘being a scammer’ side of scamming.

7. "some people find LLMs useful" is a different claim than any of the following: a) LLMs are good at doing the things people use them for b) LLMs are well suited to the tasks for which they are advertised c) LLMs "can do" something

I feel like I am going insane. If your job is to move data around and massage it in various ways yet doing this is "too technical" for you then I think something has clearly gone very wrong somewhere

If these dorks seriously believe there's a significant near-term risk of developing an AI that results in human extinction, the solution is simple and obvious: hang everyone who's trying to build AIs, for crimes against humanity and attempted genocide. The "panic" is bullshit from start to finish.

Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 2w ago

All reasonably emotionally mature adults should ask themselves when they have ever made a good decision of which they are proud while panicked.

Easily one of the most annoying things to come out of our dumb century is people who get bent out of shape if you don't hate AI "correctly," like this still isn't debate club, I will hate the idiot bullshit plagiarism machine that wastes power however I want actually, fuck off

headfallsoff@headfallsoff.com · 2w ago

people are always saying anti-AI arguments don’t understand the full nuances of the technology. which is correct. but only because it stole everyone’s work, exists solely to get you fired, has made the entire internet unusable and has been forced on everyone without consent

AI advocates are, to a person, so fundamentally and irredeemably shit-souled that I would not piss on them if they were on fire, but a close second are "nuanced AI people" trying to adopt a "wise and mature" approach by pitching a fit every time someone calls AI the slop machine or whatever

boosters will also snidely try to attack you on claims that you don't Understand the Technology while being, themselves, actually grotesquely misinformed on basic facts. you don't have to take those people seriously.

the supposed nuance just fundamentally doesn't matter, and pointing to it is just iterations of the courtier's reply. these kinds of arguments are just AI boosters demanding that you name three of claude's albums before they pretend to listen to your actual argument

headfallsoff@headfallsoff.com · 2w ago

people are always saying anti-AI arguments don’t understand the full nuances of the technology. which is correct. but only because it stole everyone’s work, exists solely to get you fired, has made the entire internet unusable and has been forced on everyone without consent

AI critics: This is a theft machine for lazy turds with no imagination AI Stans: This is the greatest, most powerful tech in history. It is not a theft machine. There are no original thoughts anymore People Who Created AI: This is a theft machine for lazy turds with no imagination

Joseph Cox@josephcox.bsky.social · 2w ago

OpenAI and Microsoft admitted LLMs are predatory tech built on “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said AI has created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.” www.404media.co/doom-loop-op...

I know this'll ruffle feathers but I agree with this Food/Water watch analysis. Diverting renewable energy away from fossil phase-out and climate adaptation and towards melting graphics card to power chatbots is the formal end of moral purpose for clean technology.

When we say generative AI is a scam, you have to remember that every scam, even the griftiest grift, is useful to someone: the scammer. The genius of AI is that it democratizes scamming by allowing anyone who makes a living from knowledge work to partake in the ‘being a scammer’ side of scamming.

Anti-AI folks on here are like authors, artists, scientists, subject matter experts; meanwhile, every pro-AI shill gives off the rancid moral vibes of the sort of person who contributes nothing to the group project and then complains loudly to the boss that you made them do all the work.

Dr. SkySkull@drskyskull.bsky.social · 3w ago

This is just a spectacular unintentional self-own

I think everyone who seriously supported genAI for any period has a black mark on their reputation forever. Anyone with common sense has known this stuff would all turn out to be lies and hot garbage for YEARS, and still we have had to be cordial and give benefit of the doubt. Bite me.

I don't think it's good or even particularly necessary to have a huge corporation rip up the main street running through your town and turn it into a huge, fetid, stinking open sewer, even if some weirdos do derive 'real' value picking corn kernels out of the floating sludge.

None of that is "empirical evidence" unless and until the public (and independent, non-AI-enthralled scientists) can review all inputs (including all training data, prompts, etc) and all actual outputs. >>

The new AI nuancer argument implies that all intellectual activity falls on a linear scale, with math proofs being 100, programming being ~95, and other knowledge work being 25-40. Thus, since the AI can puke up math proofs anyone who doesn’t think it can replace a lawyer must be stupid.

For people just joining us, here's what's happening. AI types sold a bunch of B2B snake oil to C suites who forced it on employees. The promises they made haven't come true and now they're pivoting to a protection racket trying to scare those same idiots who believed the first set of lies

brasidas@brasidas.bsky.social · 3w ago

Anthropic's models run on terabytes of VRAM. It's not going to "just copy itself to other computers."

The new AI nuancer argument implies that all intellectual activity falls on a linear scale, with math proofs being 100, programming being ~95, and other knowledge work being 25-40. Thus, since the AI can puke up math proofs anyone who doesn’t think it can replace a lawyer must be stupid.

Rationalists absolutely love this rhetorical slight of hand where you pick some made-up huge number and another made-up tiny number and multiply them together to get whatever actually comprehensible number you were looking for.

Cliff PervoSCARY@pervocracy.bsky.social · 3w ago

oh and also there is a LOT of funny math where you go "if a scenario is only 0.01% probable but 1 trillion bad, then it is more important than something that is 75% probable but only 1000 bad" "...also I just made up all four of those numbers but I don't see why that changes anything"

I keep on seeing posts like "LLMs themselves are value-neutral", and it seems to me like a program without thought or intent that generates text or images which deceptively possess the appearance of thought or intent is as close to an ontologically evil technology as we're likely to see.

Helen Czerski@helenczerski.bsky.social · 3w ago

As both an academic and a writer, I am repelled by the "this looks like a long document. Would you like me to summarize it for you?" that seems to appear at the top of every pdf viewer now. NO. The *entire point* of good writing (either books or journal papers) is that every sentence has a purpose.