The AI lawsuit’s going to discovery - I expect things are about to heat up massively for the AI industry:

ZITRON DROPPED

Robinhood’s about to make a whole new generation of apes:

Crypto NG+ AI% Speedrun (no skips)

Thinking about it, the public and spectacular failure of NFTs probably helped AI with speedrunning its rise and fall (mainly its fall), for two reasons.

First, it crippled technological determinism (which Unserious Academic interrogated in depth BTW) as a concept. Before that, it was generally assumed whatever new crap the tech industry came up with with would inevitably become a part of daily life, for better or for worse.

The NFT craze, by publicly and spectacularly failing despite a heavy push from Silicon Valley, showed the public that it was possible to beat Silicon Valley and prevent the future it wants from coming to pass, that resistance against them is anything but futile.

Second, the NFT craze’s failure publicly humiliated the tech industry, as NFTs became a pop-culture punchline and supporting NFTs became a public mark of shame for anyone involved. If crippling technological determinism made it cool to resist Silicon Valley, then the public humiliation of NFTs helped make it uncool to support SV, a trend which I feel has helped amplify emnity against AI.

eigen “Breeding Stock for Me, Unwilling Abortions for Thee” robot

Raytheon can at least claim they’re helping kill terrorists or some shit like that, Artisan’s just going out and saying “We ruin good people’s lives for money, and we can help you do that too”

Jingna Zhang found an AI corp saying the quiet part out loud:

In a previous post of mine, I noted how the public generally feels that the jobs people want to do (mainly creative jobs) are the ones being chiefly threatened by AI, with the dangerous, boring and generally garbage jobs being left relatively untouched.

Looking at this, I suspect the public views anyone working on/boosting AI as someone who knows full well their actions are threatening people’s livelihoods/dream jobs, and is actively, willingly and intentionally threatening them, either out of jealousy for those who took the time to develop the skills, or out of simple capitalist greed.

Goodness kids need some better role models because sometimes it seems 90% of people on the social networks are morally bankrupt.

The world needs another Mister Rogers, but I’m not sure if the world wants another Mister Rogers.

Amazon used an AI-generated image as a cover for 1922’s Nosferatu, and it got publicly torn apart on Twitter:

On a personal note, it feels to me like any use of AI, regardless of context, is gonna be treated as a public slight against artists, if not art as a concept going forward. Arguably, it already has been treated that way for a while.

You want me to point to a high-profile example of this kinda thing, I’d say Eagan Tilghman provided a textbook example a year ago, after his Scooby Doo/FNAF fan crossover (a VA redub came out a year later BTW) accidentally ignited a major controversy over AI and nearly got him blacklisted from animation.

I specifically bring this up because Tilghman wasn’t some random CEO or big-name animator - he was just some random college student making a non-profit passion project with basically zero budget or connections. It speaks volumes about how artists view AI that even someone like him got raked over the coals for using it.

Beast’s been reported to the FBI after a litany of horrific shit got found in leaked chat logs - logs which have also been released to the public.

Between that, Lunchly turning out moldy and getting memed on, and a litany of controversies shredding his public image, chances are his empire’s gonna go down in flames pretty soon, and you’re gonna be able to forget about him pretty quick.

Related Tweet:

[1] I’d like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it “iSlop”

Its simple, its catchy, and it turns Apple’s own naming scheme against them, I’m fully in support of this.

Brian Merchant put out a “complete guide to luddite horror films”, which focuses on horror films which directly critique tech in one way or another.

On a personal note, I suspect “luddite horror” (alternatively called “techno-horror”) is probably gonna blow up in popularity pretty soon - between boiling resentment against tech in general, and the impending burst of the AI bubble, I suspect audiences are gonna be hungry as hell for that kinda stuff.

Additionally, I suspect AI as a whole (and likely its supporters) will find itself becoming a pop-culture punchline much the same way NFTs/crypto did. Beyond getting pushed into everyone’s faces whether they liked it or not, public embarrassments like Google’s glue pizza debacle and ChatGPT’s fake cases have already given comedians plenty of material to use, whilst the ongoing slop-nami turned “AI” as a term into a pretty scathing pejorative within the context of creative arts.

I pasted your comment into chatGPT

Delete your account.

Adobe execs say artists need to embrace AI or get left behind [Jess Weatherbed, The Verge]

Adobe is going all in on generative AI models and tools, even if that means turning away creators who dislike the technology. Artists who refuse to embrace AI in their work are “not going to be successful in this new world without using it,” says Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.

Personally, I think this is gonna backfire pretty damn hard on Adobe - artists’ already distrust and hate them as it is, and Procreate, their chief competition, earned a lot of artists’ goodwill by publicly rejecting gen-AI some time ago. All this will likely do is push artists to jump ship, viewing Adobe as actively hostile to their continued existence.

On a wider note, it seems pretty clear to me Alexandru Costin’s drank the technological determinist Kool-Aid and has come to believe autoplag’s dominance is inevitable. He’s not the first person I’ve seen drink that particular Kool-Aid, he’s almost certainly not the last, and I suspect that the mass-drinking of that Kool-Aid’s fueling the tech industry’s relentless doubling-down on gen-AI. A doubling-down I expect will bite them in the ass quite spectacularly.

Okay, quick prediction/sidenote time:

• Melodio and Mureka are gonna get whacked with lawsuits like Suno and Udio did - Mureka’s “reference clip” model sounds like a goldmine of uncleared samples, whilst Melodio is almost certainly gonna “accidentally” recreate a copyrighted track at some point.

• This is gonna produce another wave of musical slop that people are gonna have to wade through to find the good stuff, though with how thoroughly mediocre it is, people should hopefully recognise it quickly and tune it out (alongside anyone who tries passing it off as their own work)

• This is probably also gonna give more stock to a public notion of creativity being an inherently human thing - even in the “mashing existing stuff together” sense of art, so far only humans have managed to mash existing stuff together and make it sound/look good.

This is a malpractice lawsuit waiting to happen. And probably a product liability lawsuit, if this LLM’s hallucinations lead to someone getting hurt.

I’ve already talked about the indirect damage AI’s causing to open source in this thread, but this hyper-stretched definition’s probably doing some direct damage as well.

Considering that this “Open Source AI” definition is (almost certainly by design) going to openwash the shit out of blatant large-scale theft, I expect it’ll heavily tar the public image of open-source, especially when these “Open Source AIs” start getting sued for copyright infringement.

You did a damn good job spreading the Word of Ed.

The guy seems shrewd enough to know publicly supporting anything AI will shred his reputation - I suspect he might have been duped.