i’m not going to accuse Hank Green or Taylor Lorenz or others of a similar ilk of being “schills for AI” —because they aren’t.
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@futurebird So much pro-AI propaganda has been force fed into culture that I think it's hard for people who haven't totally kept up on the issues around it.
Some of the board members at our theater think it's near-miraculous. They're not being paid by anyone to promote it. They just keep hearing again and again how amazing it is and how it can do so many things for us.
Did you see today's 404media story about a backlash to AI generated posters?
https://www.404media.co/we-are-living-in-a-chatgpt-flyer-pandemic/
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@nirak
Massive oof.@futurebird @nirak hank greene is constantly blundering into situations he knows almost nothing about and speaking as if he does to a massive audience. he is a goofy and cute on-ramp to scientism with his self-satisfying arrogance. his problem is that he's not on your side, but he really, really thinks he is. i hold out hope that one day he will have a come-to-jesus moment and turn it around. his heart's in the right place for it. -
@skyfaller @futurebird She's still on Substack too.
I don’t get why people like substack so much.
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@futurebird So much pro-AI propaganda has been force fed into culture that I think it's hard for people who haven't totally kept up on the issues around it.
Some of the board members at our theater think it's near-miraculous. They're not being paid by anyone to promote it. They just keep hearing again and again how amazing it is and how it can do so many things for us.
@MLE_online @futurebird Oh yeah, I see this as well... lots of the radio people I hear have been brainwashed into the Pro-AI camp.
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i’m not going to accuse Hank Green or Taylor Lorenz or others of a similar ilk of being “schills for AI” —because they aren’t. I think they’re honestly trying to process the new technology *however* it is clear that they spend a lot of time talking to people whose heads are chock block full nonsense, and sometimes things pass by their lips that betray the company that they’ve been keeping.
I mean
The facts are in and the case is closed:
"AI" is a planet destroying pile of garbage that removes accountability from the powerful and deskills people while harming them cognitively. The models are built on lies and theft.
There *are* no "benefits" that can escape the damning gravity of its externalities.
Hank and Taylor and Cory Doctorow and all the other "open to AI" people are giving their credibility to some of the worst tech and people around today.
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i’m not going to accuse Hank Green or Taylor Lorenz or others of a similar ilk of being “schills for AI” —because they aren’t. I think they’re honestly trying to process the new technology *however* it is clear that they spend a lot of time talking to people whose heads are chock block full nonsense, and sometimes things pass by their lips that betray the company that they’ve been keeping.
@futurebird There's a deep cultural fallacy that the people making money on a thing are automatically considered experts on the thing.
I think that's a big part of what's on display here.
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@futurebird So much pro-AI propaganda has been force fed into culture that I think it's hard for people who haven't totally kept up on the issues around it.
Some of the board members at our theater think it's near-miraculous. They're not being paid by anyone to promote it. They just keep hearing again and again how amazing it is and how it can do so many things for us.
@MLE_online @ai6yr @futurebird Hmmm, what if we could eliminate the environmental impacts & the billionaire ownership? What then?
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@futurebird he recently said in a video "every single programmer I know uses AI" and I was like... you need to vary your network if you are going to "report" on this stuff
(Also being forced to use it isn't the same as using it voluntarily)
@nirak @futurebird Yeah, what a ridiculous statement. I know *tons* of programmers who don't use AI. I don't use AI. And it's objectively not ubiquitous if you look at any polling data.
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@MLE_online @futurebird It's amazing what billions in PR do to distort reality.
My dad was commenting the other day on spacex - he had got the impression that the AI stuff must be the profitable part of the business... Normal people really don't know what's real right now.@toerror @MLE_online @futurebird
Some realities have this super inconvenient way of showing up at your house, burning it down, beating you to a pulp and dancing a round the fire.
This is one of those realities.
So even if they don't know it right now, in a year or two they will.
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i’m not going to accuse Hank Green or Taylor Lorenz or others of a similar ilk of being “schills for AI” —because they aren’t. I think they’re honestly trying to process the new technology *however* it is clear that they spend a lot of time talking to people whose heads are chock block full nonsense, and sometimes things pass by their lips that betray the company that they’ve been keeping.
@futurebird I would love to talk with them, but since they only talk with people who pay them, I don’t think I’ve got a chance. Also, I’m an autistic human with no acronyms except for the ones associated with chronic illness so again they tend not to listen to me even though I’m accurate and I bring solid data.
Of course they will tell you that it’s not what I say. It’s the way I say it. But that’s just holistic, Neuronormative bias…. So yeah, another reason.
I still talk. 🪔
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but then it starts to sound like a nice software update for spellcheck. i’m all for that.
@futurebird @clayfoot this framing may be what the future eventually holds, but:
a) no, we are not getting close to that,
b) if we were, the energy story would likely be even worse, because although the power use is distributed it lacks economies of scale, and,
c) people only *say* this to justify their use of the big, harmful, hosted models, imagining that they will be able to replace this use with something less ethically compromised, any minute now. -
@AngelaCarstensen @futurebird Eh, he just thinks that AI will have a place in the future after the bubble bursts.
From what I've observed--which isn't comprehensive--the problem he's fallen into, the trap deliberate set by AI marketing, is that "AI" isn't a thing, and so a ton of different things (LLMs, Stable Diffusion, a billion different machine learning systems) all get lumped into "AI", and tons of people can't tell the difference between them.
This lets AI boosters point at not-LLMs and go, "See? Look how useful it is, and it's not eating a Sun's worth of electricity!" anytime someone criticizes "AI" in general, without actually addressing the problems caused by LLMs and other resource-heavy, exponentially costly generative "AI" systems.
So, yeah, "AI" will survive the bubble because different "AI" technologies have been chugging along for decades under different (often better) names, and all that stuff will keep going even when the LLMs mostly crash and burn just like Sora.
Unfortunately, I think AI coding is here to stay (even though it's about to get super expensive), so I'll still need to find a new career because UUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHH I fuckin hate it.
@Azuaron @AngelaCarstensen @futurebird
Nah. Every SWE I know who works for any company that isn't FAANG has been sent explicit instructions to dramatically reduce/limit their use of tokens. Basically, they deskilled their entire workforce (except the smart ones that didn't listen or comply) and now they're trapped between the rentier techlords they wanted to become (oh, irony) and staff that have to be remediated from the damage LLM reliance wrought on their skillsets.
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@futurebird I would love to talk with them, but since they only talk with people who pay them, I don’t think I’ve got a chance. Also, I’m an autistic human with no acronyms except for the ones associated with chronic illness so again they tend not to listen to me even though I’m accurate and I bring solid data.
Of course they will tell you that it’s not what I say. It’s the way I say it. But that’s just holistic, Neuronormative bias…. So yeah, another reason.
I still talk. 🪔
@futurebird but on the other side of the fence, I have people who are knee-jerk reactive to AI because of the water issues and because of the oligarchy and all of those reasons and they’re no more able to see the ethical use cases that I’m trying to talk about than anyone else.
So eventually, I wrote that item & pinned it. It is possible to ethically use LLM and that is the future, which is why I’m focused on it. Even if the oligarchs won’t.
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@Azuaron @AngelaCarstensen @futurebird
Nah. Every SWE I know who works for any company that isn't FAANG has been sent explicit instructions to dramatically reduce/limit their use of tokens. Basically, they deskilled their entire workforce (except the smart ones that didn't listen or comply) and now they're trapped between the rentier techlords they wanted to become (oh, irony) and staff that have to be remediated from the damage LLM reliance wrought on their skillsets.
@Azuaron @AngelaCarstensen @futurebird
Also, all the software being "created" by vibecoding legitimately sucks, and as skilled SWEs concentrate in companies that don't use LLMs or at least require use, the shakiness of vibecoded shit is going to accelerate and eventually turn into critical bugs that nobody knows how to find, let alone fix.
All while the companies spend through the nose to pay models to piss out bad advice and worse code that won't help them out of the ditch they're digging.
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@futurebird but on the other side of the fence, I have people who are knee-jerk reactive to AI because of the water issues and because of the oligarchy and all of those reasons and they’re no more able to see the ethical use cases that I’m trying to talk about than anyone else.
So eventually, I wrote that item & pinned it. It is possible to ethically use LLM and that is the future, which is why I’m focused on it. Even if the oligarchs won’t.
I have my own concerns about LLM and they have to do with the flattening of our lexicon and the possibility of manipulating via changing of attention and focus in weights within these black boxes.
It’s less possible now than it will be in the future, which is why I’m saying it needs to be addressed now.
Also that this activity is unspooling the linguistic encoder in humans and that speech therapist and teachers are already screaming about it.
No one is listening.
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