Countdown until inaccurate AI images start appearing in American school textbooks because some shits in Texas wanted to save a few bucks on stock art
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41363156
Everything old is new again
Mmmm... a 40, I drank. With hatred for the Amerikkkan empire, I was filled. Bad decisions that year, I made
Yoda getting blackout drunk off a single mixed drink and blowing up the death star while wearing a tie on his head like a ninja turtle and continuing to fight even after being thrown into the paddywagon.
[The Artist] said he included Yoda in the photo of King Faisal - who was then serving as his father Ibn Saud's foreign envoy - because they were both "wise, strong and always calm".
Bro had to pull out some his bullshit to survive the black GMC like some 10th century Arab poet
Saudi secret police drive them, basically if you see one outside your home you gotta watch your tone before you watch your life.
In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book. Soon, people will find it incredible that for several decades all our art was obsessed with digital computers: all those novels and films and exhibitions about tin cans that make beeping noises, handy if you need to multiply two big numbers together, but so lifeless, so sexless, so grey synthetic glassy bugeyed spreadsheet plastic drab. And all your smug chortling over the people who failed to predict our internetty present—if anyone remembers it, it’ll be with exactly the same laugh.
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
the future is where you won't ever be able to afford the jetpacks
This is what makes me sad. Like take the Apple vision pro for instance, there are potentially many great use cases for such a technology, such as real life ad blocking, assistance with various tasks, etc. Yet we get this obnoxious looking, expensive, obtrusive headset that uses cameras to view the real world for some reason, with dystopian avatars and completely locked down Apple software. The thing won't even let users watch VR porn by default, you have to turn on a special setting lol, that's how locked down it is. That the web browser does not allow VR content by default.
I feel like it was maybe a decade ago when things started to get worse faster than they got better.
Capitalism decided to run the "million monkeys banging on a million typewriters you eventually get Shakespeare" experiment except with AI and now we are flooding the internet with dogshit instead of a million pages of gibberish and the occasional haiku dedicated to bananas.
Best take I've heard so far on AI is to compare to Jurassic Park and the old "you were to focused on whether or not you could and not whether or not you should" quote. Scientists in real life don't do that, they don't just think of the craziest shit they could dream up and then do it and just see what happens. But apparently fucking computer engineers do.
This is because a lot of software engineers aren't actually engineers. I know it's a controversial opinion to state online, but it's true. Think about how many IT students or professionals complain about taking an ethics class. That would not be tolerated in other engineering fields. Software in general is still in the wild west phase, and it doesn't help that almost every attempt to regulate the field has been a blatantly obvious corporate power grab or an attempt to create a monopoly, which will obviously not go down well.
wdym software engineers aren't actually engineers, do you have any idea how hard it is to use a JavaScript library to make a button do something slightly different than it already does?
We did at mine, but 90% of the job is jamming arbitrary bits of code together to get something that sorta works maybe
Ianist-Malcolmist vanguard deploying elite locker-shoving units to suppress the techbros.
There are absolutely scientists and mathematicians and physicists involved in all of this. Software engineers don't have the math background to make this stuff happen by themselves. Software engineers are the ones plumbing things together. Being a scientist doesn't shield you from OpenAI holding a fat 7-figure check in front of your face and you saying "yes daddy"
Software engineers don’t have the math background
Not all "engineers" are self-taught/bootcamp webdevs. Some of us CS nerds still exist, who took a reasonable route to learn discrete maths, calculus, networking, and selling-your-soul-1010.
Where I work I'm the only one who doesn't have a degree much less a masters or phd in math at a minimum
While drinking ungodly amounts of water. Would prefer to burn the world than pay artists
700K litres for 3 days of calculations so that some troglodyte can undress pictures of women he harasses online
We're about a year away from people just abandoning the Internet as useless. Usenet Redux
Just think of how much worse things have gotten in the last few months, and project it out on an exponential curve
I'm not sure what really stops AI spam from following people into something like Usenet, at least in a way that's not NSA-friendly or making self-doxxing a prerequisite for write access.
Usenet was an example of a previous service that got so choked with bullshit that it effectively died, not a positive suggestion
The thing I can't decide is whether the exodus will start from people most plugged in and who can see how shitty the Internet really is or from people least plugged in and who have nothing to lose from quitting.
the 'net junkies will hang on until the bitter end. can't even properly quit twitter
Good point. I think a better question would be whether the exodus will start from:
-
normal people quitting because they have too much real life bullshit on their plate and don't want more bullshit to deal with
-
some subculture centered around how much the Internet sucks putting their subculture's ethos into practice by quitting
-
i imagine some combo of both. since i deleted myself off of all the big social media platforms, the only people who don't regard me as a total weirdo are the crunchies who hate screens and the people with very high IT competency. these people, at the tails of the bell curve, are like, "that's smart." it's the people in the middle who are irritated they can't like my likes or see where i went to high school.
all the marketing pricks who called it AI should be shot. "AI" doesn't exist yet, these generative models are not intelligent.
Yes thank you. I hate these tech bro words. This isn't "AI" it's just a tool for corpochuds to skip out on paying for labor.
I also really hated when zuckerfuck said their shitty VR Chat was called "metaverse". That word was coined in snowcrash, a quite obvious anti-capitalist book where the "meta" in metaverse meant no single person owned the net.
Idk, I'm not yet convinced they're not just hiding their power level and hastening the collapse of the last empire.
Sure, sure, but I say we still shoot all the bazinga marketing dorks.
Yes, everything is AI now. It used to be that AI meant a digital consciousness or something like that. Then several years ago they were calling advanced pattern recognition machines AI (IBM Watson). This watered down colloquial definition has now been applied to advanced chatbots and even retroactively to machine translation! Crazy.
The technology is out there already and has already infected the entire cyberspace. The only option left is to throw away the internet and create Internet 2.
I think the Chinese internet behind the great firewall has avoided the worst pitfalls of "AI", though I could be wrong about that.
internet2... that's just for universities since like the early 2000s or something
Yeah this is a massive problem for us 3D artists. Finding references has become a big problem...
But keep pumping out takes that AI is necessary to express yourself or that we're stupid luddites for hating this stuff!
I normally avoid struggle sessions on this topic since practically no one involved seems to A) use AI in any way or B) feels the squeeze of these things but I'm going to start getting a bit more involved now that this is affecting more people, and I'm sorry but if I see more takes like "AI is helping me deal with my aphantasia and ur a bigot for dismissing it" (a real fucking take ive seen on here btw), I will reply guy you to death.
I don't mean to be rude but it literally is luddism. Image generative AI and LLM's are only a problem because people release them onto the web in whatever harebrained manner they see fit. Under a different form of production, where the development and implementation of such materials is directed by central planning which could account for this foreseeable issues, this tool could be limited to quarantined zones where people can mess around with it, but it's not leaking out into databases that are generally a storage of human thought. Thus this problem of digital kessler syndrome wouldn't happen. I don't think you're stupid luddites. You're right in that this manifestation of the tech does in fact need to be smashed. However, in the way you've said it here, it seems like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater and condemning a technology which does not bring itself into existence.
Luddism was a rational reaction to something used to crush a very early form of working class, the luddites weren't the stupid assholes theyre commonly portrayed at, you might want to self crit on using an ancient cliché whipped up by factory owners and capitalists because yikes.
Its amusing to get this kind of accusation because I do unfortunately use AI, ive used it for years before it exploded like it did back in 2022-23, yet i always thought of it as yet another stupid grift, used only to bypass artistic process and come up with the most boring slop with the widest appeal.
I can see how my comment implied that I think Luddites are idiots but that wasn't my intention. "I don't think you're stupid luddites" as in I don't think your qualms are stupid. Furthermore, I don't think Luddites were either. That being said, I will critique them as Marx did. Early Luddism did explicitely destroy factory equipment. I will note that when I say that it is based merely on Marx's comments in capital in reference to the movement. I'm not a historian and my knowledge of them ends there. If you have new information to contradict his account then please pass it along.
The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the work people learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used. (pg 287 on marxists.org)
Getting your way of life destroyed and being pissed off at the means in which it is done is understandable. However, to my understanding of this part of Capital, the Luddites did make this mistake. That's not stupid. It's understandable if not misguided. So when I say "it literally is Luddism" I meant that it seemed like you're saying the technology is necessarily evil. Technology on it's own literally cannot be evil. It is inanimate and its application is brought about by people. When I read your comment it seemed to me as though you were overlooking this.
It's amusing to get this kind of accusation
First off, don't write like a redditor. Don't be a pompous ass who writes for the audience and just talk with me.
I'm not accusing you of any thing. In fact, my language usage explicitly acknowledges my own fallibility. I specifically used a word like "seems" to show this. That is to show that there may be a breakdown in communication rather than disagreement.
Yeah but that old picture of the uncle is totally a glow up.
Based
Show
I remember back when I used 4chan, there was a guy on the art board who liked drawing birds. He was asking if anyone knew how to get into contact with academic/scientific publishers because he wanted to provide drawings for bird researchers. I still think about him sometimes
Man. We didn’t even get the cool cyberpunk, we got the half-assed Walmart version
At least with the former my financial demise would be entertaining 🙄
You got the same cyberpunk, you're just outside of the price range to be a main character.
We got a half assed Walmart version with agitated fascists and melting ecosystems.
A truly boring dystopia
need to start getting a better collection of encyclopedias
real. Books are so back
Wait until pictures and text in books will be AI-generated too to save on costs.
Just wait until dates are AI generated so you won't know when was what
That last one horrifes me. The restoration looks nothing like the guy. They've just erased the dude's image from history like a particularly disliked Pharaoh.
This is extremely cool actually, introducing a bunch of noise and inaccuracies into the AI models that might compound over time.
Best twist in the AI progression I've seen in years.
The problem is that AI image models aren't dynamic like that. The AI groups already successfully pulled off the heist of the internet and went home with their image data sets with billions of images. The infinitely expanding google images AI slop isn't getting fed back into the model the same way Chat GPT is auto-lobotimizing itself by looking up autogenerated articles on the web.
In fact, at the moment newer AI image models are being refined not by being fed more images but by going back and adding more refined captions to their existing hoard, since the more descriptive the captions the more capable the resulting model tends to be. But hey, they're generating most of the captions with Chat GPT and at least that's fucking them over a bit I guess
heist
hexbear don't uphold capitalist IP concepts challenge: impossible
Fine, they pulled off the enclosure of the century. Collecting all of digital culture, privatizing it, and mostly making us all worse off.
OK so my analogy isn't good either. It's enshittification of the entire Internet (and soon nearly all aspects of life) based off of the free labor and collective cultural output of humanity without any democratic oversight.
yes.
the best comparison is some kind of pollution, which is fun because they also do a bunch of gratuitous regular pollution. The problem, as usual, isn't the tech or that they used muh intellectual property as inputs, it's the private ownership and disenfranchisement of the worker.
Been saying it for a while, Digital Kessler Syndrome is upon us
can save us all
