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)

  • @BlueMonday1984OP
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    151 month ago

    The top comment’s also pretty good, especially the final paragraph:

    I guess these companies decided that strip-mining the commons was an acceptable deal because they’d soon be generating their own facts via AGI, but that hasn’t come to pass yet. Instead they’ve pissed off many of the people they were relying on to continue feeding facts and creativity into the maws of their GPUs, as well as possibly fatally crippling the concept of fair use if future court cases go against them.

    • @gerikson
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      131 month ago

      oh hey that would be my comment 😁

      • @BlueMonday1984OP
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        111 month ago

        It was a pretty good comment, and pointed out one of the possible risks this AI bubble can unleash.

        I’ve already touched on this topic, but it seems possible (if not likely) that copyright law will be tightened in response to the large-scale theft performed by OpenAI et al. to feed their LLMs, with both of us suspecting fair use will likely take a pounding. As you pointed out, the exploitation of fair use’s research exception makes it especially vulnerable to its repeal.

        On a different note, I suspect FOSS licenses (Creative Commons, GPL, etcetera) will suffer a major decline in popularity thanks to the large-scale code theft this AI bubble brought - after two-ish years of the AI industry (if not tech in general) treating anything publicly available as theirs to steal (whether implicitly or explicitly), I’d expect people are gonna be a lot stingier about providing source code or contributing to FOSS.

        • @gerikson
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          121 month ago

          Yeah, I’m no longer worried that LLMs will take my job (nor ofc that AGI will kill us all) Instead the lasting legacy of GenAI will be a elevated background level of crud and untruth, an erosion of trust in media in general, and less free quality stuff being available. It’s a bit like draining the Aral Sea, a vibrant ecosystem will be permanently destroyed in the short-sighted pursuit of “development”.

          • @BlueMonday1984OP
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            101 month ago

            the lasting legacy of GenAI will be a elevated background level of crud and untruth, an erosion of trust in media in general, and less free quality stuff being available.

            I personally anticipate this will be the lasting legacy of AI as a whole - everything that you mentioned was caused in the alleged pursuit of AGI/Superintelligencetm, and gen-AI has been more-or-less the “face” of AI throughout this whole bubble.

            I’ve also got an inkling (which I turned into a lengthy post) that the AI bubble will destroy artificial intelligence as a concept - a lasting legacy of “crud and untruth” as you put it could easily birth a widespread view of AI as inherently incapable of distinguishing truth from lies.