“i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don’t know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers”

Personally, focusing on their whacko beliefs around the Impending AI Apocalypse^tm seems like a good place to start.

Brian Merchant’s given his thoughts on the situation, focusing mainly on the situation as a case of Trump’s administration falling for the AGI hype.

You want my off-the-cuff thoughts on these tariffs, I’m putting them down as another nail in the coffin for AI as a concept, and a possible blow to “AI doom” narratives as a whole.

For AI as a concept, this entire debacle is a very public and very high-profile example of AI failing to live up to the “AGI/Superintelligence” hype that OpenAI and pals have been cranking out - and failing in a manner which suggests their AI systems (rightfully so, IMO) to be worse than useless.

For “AI Doom” narratives, whilst this economic clusterfuck is an example of AI dealing a nasty blow to humanity, said blow was dealt through a combo of unambiguous incompetence on the AI’s part, and the Trump administration overestimating the AI’s own competence. No diamonoid bacteria, no Skynet-style Terminator apocalypse, just sheer unfiltered stupidity on a government-wide level.

There’s now a lot of cheap GPU [sic] in China.

Sure doesn’t feel like it, what with graphics cards being ball-bustingly expensive everywhere else :P

New(ish) piece from Gary Marcus: AI has (sort of) passed the Turing Test; here’s why that hardly matters

Ended up reading it a couple times, thinking of turning my thoughts into a full-length post.

Here’s my first shot at it:

“Imagine if the stereotypical high-school nerd became a supervillain.”

New video from Jessie Gender, providing one long sneer at gen-AI: How AI is Destroying our Dreams

An AI faceswapper/nudifier’s database got leaked thanks to its nonexistent security - unsurprisingly, its loaded with explicit images, including massive amounts child porn and almost certainly some revenge porn.

WIRED tried reaching out to the company behind the “imagery”, but they nuked everything and closed their doors in response.

Gamers Nexus put out their April Fool’s joke for this year, and became the first journalistic outlet to break Betteridge’s law of headlines in the process.

Ed Zitron breaking out the anime references for April Fool’s:

This isn’t one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.

Crypto is nigh-universally hated outside of the techbrosphere (doubly so for NFTs) - they are synonymous with scams and cringe in the public eye. I’d be more shocked if you found a work which presents crypto without immediately dunking on it.

Not to mention he also didn’t write a third-rate rapey-as-shit “dark fantasy” novel, throw nonstop tantrums about people criticising/making fun of him, or jump on the anti-woke content mill grift train.

Just to make this perfectly clear, yes, I am saying that >shadman has more dignity than Shadiversity.

Ran across an animation mocking AI art on Newgrounds recently - found it a pretty good watch.

The government is backtracking on this cut. But when they said “AI,” they meant magical chatbots with costs in the fabulous future that would make them look cool. They didn’t mean medical systems that work, but cost money right now. This was always about the press releases.

In the grander scheme of things, I expect this shitshow will further reinforce notions of “AI” being utterly useless as a tech - auto-contouring was a real-life example of AI being useful, and it got thrown in the bin because it wasn’t a magical chatbot that made radiologists obsolete.

Addendum: If you wanna support the artist, she has a Tumblr and a personal portfolio.

Update on The Shadiversity Drama^tm: he’s still malding about being an utterly soulless waste of oxygen:

Now, some of you may be wondering “Monday, how is that AI-generated? That piece actually has a soul!” Well, as it turns out, it wasn’t AI - Shad quite literally stole someone’s artwork and passed it off as AI.

In other news, the Guardian landed an exclusive scoop on cuts to “AI cancer tech funding in England”. Baldur Bjarnason’s given his commentary:

Turns out rebranding even the genuinely useful Machine Learning as “AI” doesn’t help them get funding. The only beneficiaries of the bubble seem to be volatile media synthesis engines

You want my opinion, future machine learning research is probably gonna struggle to get funding once the bubble bursts, both due to the “AI” stench rubbing off on the field, and due to gen-AI sucking up all of the funding that would’ve gone towards actually useful shit. (Arguably, its already struggling even before the bubble’s burst.)

Taking a shot in the dark, journalistic incidents like Bloomberg’s failed tests with AI summaries and the BBC’s complaints about Apple AI mangling headlines probably helped with accelerating that fall to earth - for any journalists reading about or reporting on such shitshows, it likely shook their faith in AI’s supposed abilities in a way failures outside their field didn’t.

And by “more fuckable”, he means “refusing/unable to consent”.

In other news, Jazza’s AI-generated cousin is back to continue pretending to be an actual artist. This time, its by actively denigrating the works of Studio Ghibli:

Unsurprisingly, he is getting raked over the coals by basically everyone. He’s also having an utter meltdown in the replies.

In case you missed it, a couple sneers came out against AI from mainstream news outlets recently - CNN’s put out an article titled “Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown”, whilst the New York Times recently proclaimed “The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes”.

You want my take on this development, I’m with Ed Zitron on this - this is a sign of an impending sea change. Looks like the bubble’s finally nearing its end.