In “Aquarium” by Farah Al Qasimi, a man gazes at his pet cockatoo and fish as he tries to understand their needs with the help of AI.
Okay?
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Google: "Hey creatives, please write propaganda about how this technology that is directly disrupting your livelihoods is good, actually! Not enough people hate you enough for us to stop paying you!!!"
I hope those creatives tell Google to fuck off.
I mean you'd think if the tools lived up to the hype they'd be able to advertise themselves more effectively.
Hey, me too, but there are plenty of low-scruple* production companies that will happily beat their understaff into penning this slop. That’s hollywood, baby!
*“It’s just, like, really hard to have high scruples under capitalism, y’know?” - Karl Marx
Google is very upset that a lot of the public don’t really like AI. You might think this was because of AI slop and explicit threats to their jobs, but Google is pretty sure it’s because people saw the Terminator films.
Okay, quick sidenote: I wouldn't be shocked if people looked at the Terminator in a different light after this bubble.
On the one hand, the basic idea of "AI turns sentient and kills us all" is pretty laughable in a cultural zeitgeist where "AI" means "plagiarism-fueled lying machine" or "plagiarism-fueled mediocrity generator" or "plagiarism-fueled atrocity machine" (okay, maybe not that last one). The general themes of "man vs machine" will likely shine through all the brighter, though - especially given how the AI systems involved in this bubble function explicitly through stealing the work of human authors, artists, and other such creatives, and exclusively through stealing said human creatives' work (ingesting AI slop slowly destroys AI systems, and everyone who works in AI rejects giving artists a fair shake out of principle).
On the other hand, the fact that AI has nonetheless still caused unimaginable damage to humanity (the environmental damage, the slop-nami, the fully-automatic worker abuse and enshittification, et cetera) might make the films feel oddly prescient, as it (plus the last 20-ish years of corporate malevolence) have made it clear that there are a lot of businessmen out there who would actively and willingly ruin the entire fucking world and potentially kill all of humanity if the alternative was "I, and I specifically, don't make all of the money ever".
And on the gripping hand, the likes of OpenAI and friends actively pushing AI Doom^tm^ to criti-hype their way into raising more money could paint Cyberdyne's existence in a much different light - with the breathless hype about AGI/superintelligence that Altman and Friends have put out, the general message they've been putting out is basically "We are actively trying to create the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus, because, uh, reasons. Please give us all of the money and ruin the world for our benefit and our benefit alone, otherwise we won't be able to make the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus".
Are we sure that the doom stuff from the big companies is cynical hyping? Altman and co genuinely off their rocker feels fairly possible given what's come out about the internal structure of openai with burning ai effigys and shit
The rest of OpenAI probably far more than Altman, given they at one point tried to oust him to bring in a more dyed in the wool rat ideologue while bemoaning how all interactions with him were lacking in candor.
The Terminator TV show feels the most prescient. They took a chess playing computer and said “This seems to play chess like a human would and that means it’s basically the same as human consciousness. Let’s try to teach it morality by talking to it and then have it run the military.”
Then it spent the rest of the series more interested in Lego Bionicles than Jesus and nobody on the project ever said “You know, maybe this thing that wasn’t at all designed to run the military is a bad fit for running the military.” They were just chilled by its indifference to their values and really hoped they could reason it into being something it’s not by the time they give it the power to kill everyone.
Should have trained it on Ninjago
Reject Terminator; Embrace WarGames.
Under the YouTube video, somebody just commented that they believe that in the end, the majority of people is going to accept AI slop anyway, because that's just how people are. Maybe they're right, but to me it seems that sometimes, the most privileged people are the ones who are the most impressed by form over substance, and this seems to be the case with AI at the moment. I don't think this necessarily applies to the population as a whole, though. The possibility that oligopolistic providers such as Google might eventually leave them with no other choice by making reliable search results almost unreachable is another matter.
I'm not even surprised. It's the kids who are wrong etc.
If it's not too rude to ask, @dgerard, can you edit the verb "photoshop" to start with a lowercase p to make it just a tiny bit more genericized?
I could, but why? It's almost certainly actual Adobe(tm) Creative Suite(tm) Photoshop(tm) Subscription Edition.
Oo that might be even better from artistic standpoint!