[-] mii@awful.systems 19 points 3 days ago

Oh no! But what happened to We’re not doing it for the money but the good of humanity, and If anybody approaches AGI before us we will shut down and use all our resources to help them instead?

It’s almost as if all of that has been nothing but a load of bullshit from the beginning.

[-] mii@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago

Saw it posted on Reddit. It's apparently from clickworker.com which is a weird-ass website by itself at first glance, with great pitches like this:

People are happier if they are more financially independent. We can help you achieve this.

[-] mii@awful.systems 29 points 4 days ago

AI is deepening the previously parasocial relationships we had with our favorite anime characters from passive linear media, into powerful new, interactive relationships.

I think this is legitimately the first time that I've seen someone speak about parasocial relationships not only positively, but also suggesting that, hey, we should remove the human element even more from it because it's not creepy enough as it is.

[-] mii@awful.systems 16 points 4 days ago

I am sure this is totally not sketchy in the slightest and the people behind it have no nefarious agenda whatsoever.

[-] mii@awful.systems 63 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I swear if I hear "being against AI is ableist" one more time I'm gonna lose my shit. Disabled artists have existed for as long as art itself, and the only ableism here is AI-brained fuckwits using disabled people as an escape goat by suggesting they are unable to create things from their own effort and need spicy autocomplete to do so.

Edit: fuck it, I’m keeping the escape goat!

[-] mii@awful.systems 31 points 1 month ago

I’m still waiting for even one argument for the usefulness of AI image generation that isn’t fucked up. Just one.

Grok seems so support nudity and deepfakes too according to some news articles I’ve seen because of course nothing screams more free speech than plastering the face of your favorite actor or political opponent into a porn scene, so now let’s see how long it takes the first bluecheck fucker to try and create CSAM with it, because I suppose that’ll be the point when it gets too hot even for Elon.

[-] mii@awful.systems 32 points 2 months ago

Same, tbh. I went on their subreddit expecting a shitstorm but the announcement sits at like 85% upvotes with mostly positive replies.

What kind of bizarro world have I stumbled into?

At least the top-level comments seem to be split.

[-] mii@awful.systems 31 points 3 months ago

As someone who’s doing a ton of frontend and backend, and I can’t stress this enough, fuck the asinine attitude that somehow everything that’s even remotely web-adjacent needs to be written or rewritten in pure JS.

Also Node is an abomination and literally every other language I’ve tried is better for the backend. People love to shit on Ruby, but JS has every flaw that Ruby is criticized for and then some, and at least Ruby makes an effort to take some great design paradigms from Lisp.

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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by mii@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.

Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.

Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.

“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”

I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.

[-] mii@awful.systems 38 points 5 months ago

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 [...]

Christ on a stick, the fucking lore I'm learning today. I had never heard the name Prabhakar Raghavan before, but it seems like this dude has been the man behind the curtain in my life for a while. I used to use Yahoo before Google in the early 2000s before it became shit, and then I used Google until it became shit. I hope he doesn't end up applying at DuckDuckGo next season.

[-] mii@awful.systems 49 points 5 months ago

I stand by my opinion that SEO basically ruined the internet. First keyword optimization made me scroll through seventeen paragraphs of someone's life story before getting to a recipe for boiled eggs, and now this.

Why would someone go to the trouble of making a law firm out of NameCheap, stock art, and AI images (and seemingly copy) to send quasi-legal demands to site owners? Backlinks, that's why.

Oof, back in the day all we had to do was write a nice email to get someone to put a backlink to our page into the sidebar of their Geocities page.

36
submitted 5 months ago by mii@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

It was honestly only a matter of time before someone thought we could try that thing where they identify a license plate from a reflection in some dude’s pupil for realsies.

Puloka’s lawyers reportedly used an “expert” in creative video production who’d never worked on a criminal case before to “enhance” the video. The AI tool this unnamed expert used was developed by Texas-based Topaz Labs, which is available to anyone with an internet connection.

You wouldn’t know this expert though. He goes to a different school.

Large language models like ChatGPT have convinced otherwise intelligent people that these chatbots are capable of complex reasoning when that’s simply not what’s happening under the hood.

And at least the judge here had more than five brain cells and shut that circus down. Let’s hope this sets a precedent.

[-] mii@awful.systems 34 points 6 months ago

I swear, OpenAI is just a bunch of clowns LARPing as a company from Shadowrun and somehow it works and no one questions it.

[-] mii@awful.systems 30 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This is the next level of “I put my symptoms into Google and WebMD told me I have cancer”.

My compassion goes out to any doctors who now not only have to explain to several idiots every day that a slight pain in their pinky finger does not, in fact, mean they probably have ball cancer, but also that some vaguely professional sounding fluff disguised as a diagnosis generated by a chatbot also doesn’t mean they probably have ball cancer.

87
submitted 6 months ago by mii@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places.

“I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.”

I think it makes us more brain damaged, with this guy being exhibit A, but I guess you could argue that’s a fundamental human property (unless you count hallucinating LLMs).

Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount — many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI — decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.

Stop resisting the tech utopia they’re trying to build for you, or you’re literally doomers. Never mind that the people building said tech utopia are also doomers, but that’s different, because they worry about the real dangers like acausal robot basilisks torturing them for all eternity and not about petty shit like unemployment and poverty.

Speaking of stopping resisting, another, more critical article about this conference has some real bangers they left out in the other one -- I wonder why. It has some sneers, too.

[…] tech journo Kara Swisher—saying stuff like “you need to stop resisting and starting learning” about AI […].

Yep, that's an actual quote. I'm filing that one under examples of being completely tone-deaf alongside "Do you guys not have phones?".

[…] every company will use AI to “figure out how” to become “more efficient.”

I’m sure the toxic productivity community on YouTube will gobble that shit up. It reminds me of that clown who made a video on how to consume media more efficiently by watching anime on 2x speed and skipping the "boring parts". I guess when we eliminate all human value from entertainment products, that might become a valid strategy.

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mii

joined 6 months ago