the writer Nina Illingworth, whose work has been a constant source of inspiration, posted this excellent analysis of the reality of the AI bubble on Mastodon (featuring a shout-out to the recent articles on the subject from Amy Castor and @dgerard@awful.systems):
Naw, I figured it out; they absolutely don’t care if AI doesn’t work.
They really don’t. They’re pot-committed; these dudes aren’t tech pioneers, they’re money muppets playing the bubble game. They are invested in increasing the valuation of their investments and cashing out, it’s literally a massive scam. Reading a bunch of stuff by Amy Castor and David Gerard finally got me there in terms of understanding it’s not real and they don’t care. From there it was pretty easy to apply a historical analysis of the last 10 bubbles, who profited, at which point in the cycle, and where the real money was made.
The plan is more or less to foist AI on establishment actors who don’t know their ass from their elbow, causing investment valuations to soar, and then cash the fuck out before anyone really realizes it’s total gibberish and unlikely to get better at the rate and speed they were promised.
Particularly in the media, it’s all about adoption and cashing out, not actually replacing media. Nobody making decisions and investments here, particularly wants an informed populace, after all.
the linked mastodon thread also has a very interesting post from an AI skeptic who used to work at Microsoft and seems to have gotten laid off for their skepticism
as an open source federated protocol, ActivityPub and all the apps built on top of it are required to have a layer of jank hiding just under the surface
ActivityPub is a protocol for software to fail to talk to each other
@self has tapped Lemmy with carefully aimed hammers in a few places so that we federate both ways with Mastodon, which has been pretty cool actually
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seems to be on circumstances.run, which i’m on. that’s treehouse/glitch with authfetch
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this reminds me, since nobody has actually documented if lemmy supports authfetch or not, I should dig into the code and find out for myself
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sorry yes, i’m not using awful from there but from a local login :-)
i meant that i can read posts from here on there, e.g. https://circumstances.run/@self@awful.systems/111082328987803716
EDIT: maybe I’m wrong, my test comment over there hasn’t shown up back here yet
@dgerard @self Oh interesting, so is this Lemmy instance special in this regard?
so not very? If your Mastodon has authfetch enabled then it doesn’t work properly. If it does then it does. I’m on circumstances.run which has authfetch on - it receives comments from awful.systems but doesn’t seem to pass them back.