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)
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 Superintelligence^tm^), 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 ~~slaughter~~ animation, 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.