BlueMonday1984 @ BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems

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Fear: There’s a million ways people could die, but featuring ones that require the fewest jumps in practicality seem the most fitting. Perhaps microdrones equipped with bioweapons that spray urban areas. Or malicious actors sending drone swarms to destroy crops or other vital infrastructure.

I can think of some more realistic ideas. Like AI-generated foraging books leading to people being poisoned, or chatbot-induced psychosis leading to suicide, or AI falsely accusing someone and sending a lynch mob after them, or people becoming utterly reliant on AI to function, leaving them vulnerable to being controlled by whoever owns whatever chatbot they're using.

All of these require zero jumps in practicality, and as a bonus, they don't need the "exponential growth" setup LW's AI Doomsday Scenarios™ require.

EDIT: Come to think of it, if you really wanted to make an AI Doomsday™ kinda movie, you could probably do an Idiocracy-style dystopia where the general masses are utterly reliant on AI, the villains control said masses through said AI, and the heroes have to defeat them by breaking the masses' reliance on AI.

To slightly expand on that, there's also a rather well-known(?) quote by English mathematician G.H. Hardy, written in A Mathematician's Apology in 1940:

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

(Ironically, two of the theories which he claimed had no wartime use - number theory and relativity - were used to break Enigma encryption and develop nuclear weapons, respectively.)

Expanding further, Pavel has noted on Bluesky that Russia's mathematical prowess was a consequence of the artillery corps requiring it for trajectory calculations.

HUMANCENTiPAD II: LLM Boogaloo

The only way in which it may succeed as a deterrent is that it actually costs some money (film and processing cost real money and it’s not cheap) and requires actual work to do those extra steps.

I expect the "requires actual work" part will work well in deterring AI bros - they're lazy fucks by nature, anything more difficult than "press button for instant gratification" is gonna be a turn-off for them.

Stumbled across a particularly odd case of AI hype in the wild today:

I will say it certainly does look different than standard AI slop, but like AI slop, its nothing particularly impressive - I can replicate something like this pretty easily, and without boiling an ocean to do it. Anyways, here's a sidenote:

In the wake of this bubble, part of me suspects physical media (e.g. photographic film) will earn a boost in popularity, alongside digital formats which LLMs struggle to generate. In both cases, the reason will be the same - simply by knowing something came on physical media or "slop-hardened media", you already have strong reason to believe the piece is human-made.

Looking at the comments, most of the outrage is on principle - they're here to hear Kevin McLeod's own output, not a slop-bot's.

Whilst we're at it, bring back Tamagotchi - they don't ruin the planet, and also they're cute

The video is heavily euphemised and I think I got away with it

Sidenote: It would be hilarious if YouTube began demonetising videos featuring Microsoft Copilot's Cum Zone

I always had a vague outline of just how fucked up the rats are, but reading this put everything sharply into perspective for me. God damn, this was good.

Baldur Bjarnason has given his thoughts:

I mean… yeah.

Also, between this and seeing tech types link glowingly to a crazypants “colonise the light cone by exploring latent space” type of delusional bullshit and I’m staring to worry that computers, as a concept, might not be salvageable after these clowns have run the show into the ground

In other news, Kevin McLeod just received some major backlash for generating AI slop, with the track Kosmose Vaikus (which is described as made using Suno) getting the most outrage.

And just a couple paragraphs before that:

Reading HPMOR gave me a sense of crushing second-hand despair that I’ve only previously experienced when finding out things about Chris-Chan. It really is that bad.

(the real cognitohazard was the friends we made along the way)

Starting this off with a good and lengthy thread from Bret Devereaux (known online for A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry), about the likely impact of LLMs on STEM, and long-standing issues he's faced as a public-facing historian.

fuck me why did i go into computer science

That's a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with "I focused too much on trying to make easy cash". Fuck it, I'm going to write out a sidenote:

On a wider front, part of me expects the AI bubble will inflict a serious blow to computer science/programming's public image after it bursts.

On one front, there's the heavy number of promptfondlers in computer science and other related fields. which will likely give birth to a stereotype of prorammers/software engineers being all promptfondlers who need a computer to think for them.

On a related front, the heavy damage this bubble's dealt to artists, and AI's continued and uniquely severe failures in creative fields (plus promptfondlers' failures to recognise said failures), has all combined to produce the public perception that promptfondlers are artless at best and hostile to art/artists at worst - a perception I expect will colour public perception of programmers/software engineers as a consequence of the previous stereotype I mentioned above.

Picked up a sneer in the wild (through trawling David Gerard's Bluesky):

You want my take, Kathryn's on the money - future expectations on how people speak will actively shift away from anything that could be mistaken for sounding like an LLM, whether because you want to avoid being falsely accused of posting slop, or because the slop-nami has pushed your writing habits away from slop-like traits.

Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.

Finally, a slur my British ass can sling at people guilt-free

This is literally just a Tamagotchi but worse

EDIT: This was supposed to be an offhanded comment, but reading further makes me think Mustafa Suleyman has literally never heard of a Tamagotchi

I've already predicted that scraper activity would crash due to AI in my most recent MoreWrite essay, and seeing this only makes me confident in that assessment.

On a wider front, I suspect that web search in general's gonna dive in popularity - even if scraper activity remains the same during the AI winter, the bubble (with plenty of help from Google) has completely broken the web ecosystem which allowed search engines (near-exclusively Google) to thrive, through triggering a slop-nami that drowned human-made art, supercharging SEO's ability to bury quality output, and enabling AI Summary™ services which steal traffic through stealing work.

Basically. Its to explicitly prevent Xe from becoming the load-bearing peg for a massive portion of the Internet, thus ensuring this project doesn't send her health down the shitter.

You want my prediction, I suspect future FOSS projects may decide to adopt mascots of their own, to avoid the "load-bearing maintainer" issue in a similar manner.

Xe has talked a bit about the mascot in question before - by her own testimony, its there to act as a shopping cart test to see who's willing to support the project. Reportedly, she's planning to exploit it to make some more elaborate checks as well.