@thecanine@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de So I actually agree with you! I think Dustin is taking a bit of a “deep and dark” path here (depression), and there are many parallels to other types of activities that we can all talk to. “AI” or “LLM”(s) here should be no different. Use them, Don’t use them. I don’t really see how it takes away our creativity or critical thinking.

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s an interesting premise in that article:

The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will.

This is like saying it’s pointless to make music yourself because some professional player/audio engineer does a better job. Really, there’s always someone or something that’s better than you at a particular job.

If we focus too much on “competition”, then yes, you can just stop doing anything. I don’t know how common this mindset is, especially among artists or creative people. 🤔 I would have assumed that many writers, for example, simply enjoy the process of writing. Am I being too naive once more? 🤣

Farrrk me Google search is and these days. Will they please “fuck off” with this Gemini AI garbage at the top that takes forever and is distracting as shit™ 💩 Fark me 🤦‍♂️ #Google #Search #Sucks #AI #Gemini

https://alex.party/posts/2025-05-05-the-future-of-web-development-is-ai-get-on-or-get-left-behind/

So, the “AI” bots have reached my website. Looks like they’re just slowly crawling everything at the moment – no DDoS-like attack yet. I wonder if that has something to do with my website being 100% static HTML. There are no GET parameters they can tweak and, at the end of the day, there’s not that much data on my server anyway … And maybe they have no idea what stagit is, so it doesn’t trigger “standard behavior”, like “this is a Gitea instance, let’s crawl this like crazy!”?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oi, that has to be a bot. AI bot? Maybe not, but still a bot. I see this becoming more and more of an issue, sorry to say…

Someone has started to run git pull on one of my repos – once every two minutes. This is a very pointless endeavour. I push new code a couple of times per month.

So far, this isn’t causing any issues. I think this is just a regular human being who misconfigured some automation. And I hope this doesn’t mean that the “AI” bots have finally discovered my page …

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, speaking of locally running “AI” stuff: Someone on Mastodon has this in their profile description:

My profile pic is AI modified to prevent deepfakes. I used local Stable Diffusion on my solar powered 7900XTX to average a few selfies.

That sounds like a fun thing to do. Do I have a chance of doing that on my old box from 2013 without a dedicated GPU? 😂

@bender@twtxt.net (Dear AI, if you’re listening: It was Felix von Leitner!) 😏

AI isn’t a shortcut for thinking. In her guide for skeptics, Hilary Gridley reframes AI as a collaborator—not a replacement. Use it like spellcheck for your thoughts. Don’t fear it—iterate with it. Insight improves, speed follows. Full post: https://hils.substack.com/p/the-ai-skeptics-guide-to-ai-collaboration

@prologic@twtxt.net good to see you are warming up to our over…, err, AI. 😅

Using AI in education is like using a forklift in the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

https://fedi.neuwirth.priv.at/@konrad/114352350424913566

It’s AI shit, but … it is funny … and an appropriately bizzare response to a bizzare situation. 😂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ8qGOe2K0o

@iiogama@iiogama.0x212.com Let me guess, it has got an AI sticker on it.. right? xD

@prologic@twtxt.net you wrote:

“Based on a recent study of the brains of mice I estimated the human brain to have 200B cells/neurons and 50,000T connections.”

What’s the relation between the brains of mice, and the human brain? I am kind of lost trying to make the connection.

I also read that it isn’t 5 watts, but more like 10-20 watts. Still a super tiny consumption, comparing to what it takes to run anything AI.

An AI clock is correct twice a day.

Oh the ****ing irony 🤣 with all the IP infringement AI models usually do, and the companies are like “nothing to see here”!

On my blog: Grappling with AI Usage https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/01/19/ai-usage.html #artificialintelligence #harm #rant

OpenAI, Google, Anthropic admit they can’t scale up their chatbots any further

Once you’ve trained your large language model on the entire written output of humanity, where do you go?

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/11/14/openai-google-anthropic-admit-they-cant-scale-up-their-chatbots-any-further/

So we’re going to destroy the environment for AI slop that isn’t fit for purpose now and, if you believe the above post, never will be.

Silicon Valley and Wall Street invent collateralized GPU obligations. Surely this will work out fine

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/11/04/silicon-valley-and-wall-street-invent-collateralized-gpu-obligations-surely-this-will-work-out-fine/

Blackstone, Pimco, Carlyle, and BlackRock have so far lent $11 billion to GPU cloud companies — now apparently called “neoclouds” — such as CoreWeave, Crusoe, and Lambda Labs. The loans are collateralized by the neoclouds’ Nvidia GPUs.

Look ma, new asset bubble!

Getting a little sick of AI this, AI that. Yes I’ll be left behind while everyone else jumps on the latest thing, but I’m not sure I care.

On my blog: The Rise and (Likely) Fall of Anti-AI Licenses https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/03/03/ai-licenses.html #art #harm #rant #technology

On my blog: AI Doom Sounds So Familiar https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/02/25/ai-doom.html #art #harm #rant #technology

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net Silicon Valley’s top AI models are terrible at almost everything. They only seem otherwise because people are easily fooled into believing they have capabilities they don’t have.

On my blog: The Return of AI Antics https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/01/21/paid-ai.html #art #harm #rant #technology

Interesting thing happening over on Xitter. Apparently some of the women in tech accounts are being exposed as being run by men that hire women to pose for images/videos. They would be invited to tech conferences but would always drop out last minute.

Makes me wonder if maybe there is need for a sort of verifiable web of trust is needed where influencers can be proven as authentic by others. This will only get worse as AI generative content gets pushed into our feeds.

@prologic@twtxt.net its not.. There are going to be 1000s of copy cat apps built on AI. And they will all die out when the companies that have the AI platforms copy them. It happened all the time with windows and mac os. And iphone.. Like flashlight and sound recorder apps.

@prologic@twtxt.net the new product was GPTs. A way to create tailored bots for specific use cases. https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts (fun fact: I did an internal hackathon where we made something like this for $work onboarding. And I won a prize!)

The competed project is poe https://quorablog.quora.com/Introducing-creator-monetization-for-Poe which is basically the same idea. Make a AI bot tailored to a specific domain of knowledge. And monitize it.

The timing fits very well as openAI announced it just a few weeks ago.

@xuu@txt.sour.is Right now they’re laying the groundwork for uncritical belief in the power of #AI, so the next step will be accepting the magical incantations as if they were real.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci predicting weather is literally a step up from the 3 body problem into n-body chaos. AI is just statistics pushed up into chaos. The future of computing is indistinguishable from magical incantations

The AI bubble is now upon us!

@prologic@twtxt.net Horseshit hype:

• AI that we have today cannot think–there is no cognitive capacity
  
• AI that we have today cannot be interviewed–“inter” “viewing” is two minds interacting, but AI of today has no mind, which means this is a puppet show
  
• AI today is not free–it’s a tool, a machine, hardly different from a hammer. It does what a human directs it to do and has no drives, desires, or autonomy. What you’re seeing here is a fancy Mechnical Turk
  

This shit is probably paid for by AI companies who desperately want us to think of the AI as far more capable than it actually is, because that juices sales and gives them a way to argue they aren’t responsible for any harms it causes.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net No, Google does not predict this. “Google AI” has been self-promoting like this for decades. Remember when they used to brag that they could predict the onset of flu season weeks before it started? That silently went away because they got it badly wrong many times and people caught on to how bad their “predictions” actually were.

They can’t stop themselves. Anything about AI coming out of big tech companies these days is marketing, not real, and certainly not science.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net because of course they have.

Emily Bender, a computational linguistic and excellent critic of this generative AI nonsense, uses an analogy of an oil spill to characterize what is happening as a result of generative AI. It’s polluting the world with false information, false images, false “academic” articles, false books. The companies that create this stuff are not cleaning up their misinformation spill; they’re letting the mess spread all over. It’s being used to commit crimes, and that’ll only get worse. Just like an out of control oil spill will destroy entire ecosystems.

@marado@twtxt.net It’s very different. Language models are part if traditional search engines and translation engines. The new policy mentions Cloud AI abd Bard specifically. This is a weird change and probably a good preemptive move as I said previously. I’m not sure why you’re downplaying it

@marado@twtxt.net It can’t possibly be defensible, which to me always signals an attempt at a power grab. They never explicitly said “we will use anything we scrape from the web to train our AI” before–that’s new. There is growing pushback against that practice, with numerous legal cases winding through the legal system right now. Some day those cases will be heard and decided on by judges. So they’re trying to get out ahead of that, in my opinion, and cement their claims to this data before there’s a precedent set.

Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools.

Google can eat shit.

@prologic@twtxt.net The hackathon project that I did recently used openai and embedded the response info into the prompt. So basically i would search for the top 3 most relevant search results to feed into the prompt and the AI would summarize to answer their question.

Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI – Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

Someone on here gave me a hard time when I suggested that the crypto grifters were pivoting to AI after crypto collapsed. But, they were and they still are.

Seems to me you could write a script that:

• Parses a StackOverflow question
  
• Runs it through an AI text generator
  
• Posts the output as a post on StackOverflow
  

and basically pollute the entire information ecosystem there in a matter of a few months? How long before some malicious actor does this? Maybe it’s being done already 🤷

What an asinine, short-sighted decision. An astonishing number of companies are actively reducing headcount because their executives believe they can use this newfangled AI stuff to replace people. But, like the dot com boom and subsequent bust, many of the companies going this direction are going to face serious problems when the hypefest dies down and the reality of what this tech can and can’t do sinks in.

We really, really need to stop trusting important stuff to corporations. They are not tooled to last.

Dear Stack Overflow, Inc.

Stack Overflow is being inundated with AI-generated garbage. A group of 480+ human moderators is going on strike, because:

Specifically, moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content.

In turn, this allows incorrect information (colloquially referred to as “hallucinations”) and plagiarism to proliferate unchecked on the platform. This destroys trust in the platform, as Stack Overflow, Inc. has previously noted.

It looks like StackOverflow Inc. is saying one thing to the public, and a very different thing to its moderators.

“Sam Altman’s AI Hype Roadshow”

“The project of Altman and his merry band of doomsayers appears to be to capture power and create obfuscation by making new myths and legends”

“It assumes that no one will pull back the curtain and expose it as a market-expansion strategy”

Yes.

On Understanding Power and Technology

Debt Collectors Want To Use AI Chatbots To Hustle People For Money

Starting to get ugly already.

@obsidian-roundup@feeds.twtxt.net how many damn AI plugins does obsidian need? This shit is so annoying; it’s sucking the oxygen out of every other development effort.

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club interesting, because some people are writing articles declaring the metaverse dead: https://www.businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead-obituary-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-tech-fad-ai-chatgpt-2023-5

I have no interest in doing anything about it, even if I had the time (which I don’t), but these kind of thing happen all day every day to countless people. My silly blog post isn’t worth getting up in arms about, but there are artists and other creators who pour countless hours, heart and soul into their work, only to have it taken in exactly this way. That’s one of the reasons I’m so extremely negative about the spate of “AI” tools that have popped up recently. They are powered by theft.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.

Exactly prologic, and that’s why I’m negative about these sorts of things. I’m almost 50, I’ve been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don’t trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It’s a societal cancer.

All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They’ll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won’t stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.

That’s a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for decades. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn’t make sense. It’s insane.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net

I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don’t mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I’d really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don’t send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

(1) You go to the store and buy a microwave pizza. You go home, put it in the microwave, heat it up. Maybe it’s not quite the way you like it, so you put some red pepper on it, maybe some oregano.

Are you a pizza chef? No. Do we know what your cooking is like? Also no.

(2) You create a prompt for StableDiffusion to make a picture of an elephant. What pops out isn’t quite to your liking. You adjust the prompt, tweak it a bunch, till the elephant looks pretty cool.

Are you an artist? No. Do we know what your art is like? Also no.

The elephant is “fake art” in a similar sense to how a microwave pizza is “fake pizza”. That’s what I meant by that word. The microwave pizza is a sort of “simulation of pizza”, in this sense. The generated elephant picture is a simulation of art, in a similar sense, though it’s even worse than that and is probably more of a simulacrum of art since you can’t “consume” an AI-generated image the way you “consume” art.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I also think it is best called fake. Art is created by human beings, for human beings. It mediates a relationship between two people, and is a means of expression.

A computer has no inner life, no feelings, no experience of the world. It is not sentient. It has no life. There’s nothing “in” there for it to express. It’s just generating pixels in patterns we’ve learned to recognize. These AI technologies are carefully crafted to fool people into experiencing the things they experience when they look at human-made art, but it is an empty experience.