Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting thisā¦)
Serious question: what are peopleās specific predictions for the coming VC bubble popping/crash/AI winter? (Iāve seen that prediction here before, and overall I agree, but Iām not sure about specificsā¦)
For exampleā¦ Iāve seen speculation that giving up on the massive training runs could free up compute and cause costs to drop which the more streamlined and pragmatic GenAI companies could use to pivot to providing their āservicesā at sustainable rates (and the price of GPUs would drop to the relief of gamers everywhere). Alternatively, maybe the bubble bursting screws up the GPU producers and cloud service providers as well and the costs on compute and GPUs donāt actually drop that much if any?
Maybe the bubble bursting makes management stop pushing stuff like vibe codingā¦ but maybe enough programmers have gotten into the habit of using LLMs for boilerplate that it doesnāt go away, and LLM tools and plugins persist to make code shittery.
Iāve repeated this prediction a bajillion times, but I suspect this bubbleās discredited the idea of artificial intelligence, and expect it to quickly die once this bubble bursts.
Between the terabytes upon terabytes of digital mediocrity the slop-namiās given us, LLMsā countless and relentless failures in logic and reason, the large-scale enshittification of daily life their mere existence has enabled, and their power consumption singlehandedly accelerating the climate crisis, I feel that the publicās come to view computers as inherently incapable of humanlike cognition/creativity, no matter how many gigawatts they consume or oceans they boil.
Expanding on this somewhat, I suspect AI as a concept will likely also come to be seen as an inherently fascist concept.
With the current bubbleās link to esoteric fascism, the far-rightās open adoration of slop, basically everything about OpenAIās Studio Ghibli slopgen, and God-knows-what-else, the publicās got plenty of reason to treat use or support of AI as a severe indictment of someoneās character in and of itself - a ātech asshole signifierā, to quote Baldur Bjarnason.
And, of course, AI as a concept will probably come to be viewed as inherently anti-art/anti-artist as well - considering how badly the AI bubbleās shafted artists, and artists specifically, that kinda goes without saying.
I think you are much more optimistic than me about the general publicās ability to intellectually understand fascism or think about copyright or give artists their appropriate credit. To most people that know about image gen, itās a fun toy: throw in some words and rapidly get pictures. The most I hope for is that AI image generation becomes unacceptable to use in professional or serious settings and it is relegated to a similar status as clip art.
I think weāre going to see an ongoing level of AI-enabled crapification for coding and especially for spam. Iām guessing thereās going to be enough money from the spam markets to support a level of continued development to keep up to date with new languages and whatever paradigms are in vogue, so vibe coding is probably going to stick around on some level, but I doubt weāre going to see major pushes.
One thing that this has shown is how much of internet content ācreationā and ācommunicationā is done entirely for its own sake or to satisfy some kind of algorithm or metric. If nobody cares whether it actually gets read then it makes economic sense to automate the writing as much as possible, and apparently LLMs represent a āgood enoughā ability to do that for plausible deniability and staving off existential dread in the email mines.
Yeah I also worry the slop and spam is here to stay, itās easy enough to make, of as passable quality for the garbage uses people want from it, and if GPUs/compute go down in price, affordable enough for the spammers and account boosters and karma farmers and such to keep using it.