BlueMonday1984

Ran across a short-ish thread on BlueSky which caught my attention, posting it here:

the problem with a story, essay, etc written by LLM is that i lose interest as soon as you tell me that’s how it was made. i have yet to see one that’s ‘good’ but i don’t doubt the tech will soon be advanced enough to write ‘well.’ but i’d rather see what a person thinks and how they’d phrase it

like i don’t want to see fiction in the style of cormac mccarthy. i’d rather read cormac mccarthy. and when i run out of books by him, too bad, that’s all the cormac mccarthy books there are. things should be special and human and irreplaceable

i feel the same way about using AI-type tech to recreate a dead person’s voice or a hologram of them or whatever. part of what’s special about that dead person is that they were mortal. you cheapen them by reviving them instead of letting their life speak for itself

The “legal proof” part is a different argument. His picture is a generated picture so it contains none of the original pixels, it is merely the result of prompting the model with the original picture. Considering the way AI companies have so far successfully acted like they’re shielded from copyright law, he’s not exactly wrong. I would love to see him go to court over it and become extremely wrong in the process though.

It'll probably set a very bad precedent that fucks up copyright law in various ways (because we can't have anything nice in this timeline), but I'd like to see him get his ass beaten as well. Thankfully, removing watermarks is already illegal, so the courts can likely nail him on that and call it a day.

Rare footage of a cryptobro being based (even for only 140 characters):

In other news, Ed Zitron discovered Meg Whitman's now an independent board director at CoreWeave (an AI-related financial timebomb he recently covered), giving her the opportunity to run a third multi-billion dollar company into the ground:

As an added bonus, its clear he's getting trolled for his terminal startup brain:

EDIT: Found some dipshit trying to defend the guy in the wild, rehashing the arguments used for AI art:

The most generous reading of that email I can pull is that Dr. Greg is an egotistical dipshit who tilts at windmills twenty-four-fucking-seven.

Also, this is pure gut instinct, but it feels like the FOSS community is gonna go through a major contraction/crash pretty soon. I've already predicted AI will kneecap adoption of FOSS licenses before, but the culture of FOSS being utterly rancid (not helped by Richard Stallman being the semi-literal Jeffery Epstein of tech (in multiple ways)) definitely isn't helping pre-existing FOSS projects.

Ran across a new piece on Futurism: Before Google Was Blamed for the Suicide of a Teen Chatbot User, Its Researchers Published a Paper Warning of Those Exact Dangers

I've updated my post on the Character.ai lawsuit to include this - personally, I expect this is gonna strongly help anyone suing character.ai or similar chatbot services.

You could probably do good art with an AI

Hot take: A plagiarism machine built to spew signal-shaped noise is incapable of making good art

ZITRON DROPPED

Starting things off here with a couple solid sneers of some dipshit automating copyright infringement - one from Reid Southen, and one from Ed-Newton Rex:

A human-curated search engine would likely be easy to sell as well - the obvious approach to marketing it would be to bring attention to the human-curation involved, and claim no algorithms are involved in determining search results. This is arguably bullshit - you'll need an algorithm to sort the search results at minimum - but it'd evoke the idea that the engine is giving customers what they want, and not what someone else wants.

Additionally, you can pull out the somewhat old standby of claiming the search engine to be AI-free - with LLMs and slop generators defining how the public views AI, presenting yourself as a bulwark against the slop-nami will be an easy marketing win.

(Sidenote: Between the ever-growing backlash against AI, boiling resentment against Silicon Valley, and the fact I found this an easy sell, I suspect this idea's time has indeed come.)

If good search does come back, it'll likely require heavy human curation to keep LLM noise as low as humanly possible. Automated methods can be easily SEO'd to death, but human curation's gonna be rather tough to game.