TechTakes

New eugenics conference just dropped

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8ZExgaGnvLevkZxR5/attend-the-2025-reproductive-frontiers-summit-june-10-12

"Chatham House rules" so they can happily be racist without anyone pointing fingers at them.

Road rage victim 'speaks' via AI at his killer's sentencing [Archive]

I fucking can't right now.

[Judge] Lang allowed Pelkey's loved ones to play an AI-generated version of the victim — his face and body and a lifelike voice that appeared to ask the judge for leniency.

“To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me: It is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances," the artificial version of Pelkey said. "In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness."

Edit: 404Media article on the story that's much better

In other news, SoundCloud's become the latest victim of the AI scourge - artists have recently discovered the TOS allows their work to be stolen for AI training since early 2024.

SoundCloud's already tried to quell the backlash, but they're getting accused of lying in the replies and the QRTs, so its safe to say its not working.

Found a sneer in the wild, made in response to another piece of Deportee Slop™:

Searching through the quotes, I also found someone openly accusing AI of contributing to fascism:

OT: Estonia (and Helsinki) were very nice, but I did not see a single delivery robot running around. Stayed across from the MalwareBytes HQ tho, I thought that was cool.

Polymarket on the new pope skeet

Also there already is a bsky user with the username leoxiv, who makes from what I can tell final fantasy poses, some nsfw. Lol.

Apparently MIT is teaching a vibe coding class:

How will this year’s class differ from last year’s? There will be some major changes this year:

• Units down from 18 to 15, to reflect reduced load
• Grading that emphasizes mastery over volume
• More emphasis on design creativity (and less on ethics)
• Not just permission but encouragement to use LLMs
• A framework for exploiting LLMs in code generation

Ran across a Bluesky thread which caught my attention - its nothing major, its just about how gen-AI painted one rando's views of the droids of Star Wars:

Generative AI has helped me to understand why, in Star Wars, the droids seem to have personalities but are generally bad at whatever they're supposed to be programmed to do, and everyone is tired of their shit and constantly tells them to shut up

Threepio: Sir, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3720 to one!

Han Solo (knowing that Threepio just pulls these numbers out of Reddit memes about Emperor Palpatine's odds of getting laid): SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!

"Why do the heroes of Star Wars never do anything to help the droids? They're clearly sentient, living things, yet they're treated as slaves!" Thanks for doing propaganda for Big Droid, you credulous ass!

With that out the way, here's my personal sidenote:

There's already been plenty of ink spilled on the myriad effects AI will have on society, but it seems one of the more subtle effects will be on the fiction we write and consume.

Right off the bat, one thing I'm anticipating (which I've already talked about before) is that AI will see a sharp decline in usage as a plot device - whatever sci-fi pizzazz AI had as a concept is thoroughly gone at this point, replaced with the same all-consuming cringe that surrounds NFTs and the metaverse, two other failed technologies turned pop-cultural punchlines.

If there are any attempts at using "superintelligent AI" as a plot point, I expect they'll be lambasted for shattering willing suspension of disbelief, at least for a while. If AI appears at all, my money's on it being presented as an annoyance/inconvenience (as someone else has predicted).

Another thing I expect is audiences becoming a lot less receptive towards AI in general - any notion that AI behaves like a human, let alone thinks like one, has been thoroughly undermined by the hallucination-ridden LLMs powering this bubble, and thanks to said bubble's wide-spread harms (environmental damage, widespread theft, AI slop, misinformation, etcetera) any notion of AI being value-neutral as a tech/concept has been equally undermined.

With both of those in mind, I expect any positive depiction of AI is gonna face some backlash, at least for a good while.

(As a semi-related aside, I found a couple of people openly siding with the Mos Eisley Cantina owner who refused to serve R2 and 3PO [Exhibit A, Exhibit B])

Update on my comment from yesterday: it seems I fell for satire (?). (I don't know the people involved, so no idea, but it seems plausible.)

A Reddit uses Grok to solve Baseball

https://old.reddit.com/r/HypotheticalPhysics/comments/1k9tfg2/what_if_this_physics_theory_could_solve_all_of

Edit: I am reliably informed that I have missed the joke!

People might not be aware but places like FT seem to really dislike the techbro people

Found a rando making a very safe prediction on Bluesky:

And by "very safe", I mean "its technically already happened". Personally, I expect marketing things as AI-Free™ will explode after the bubble bursts - the hype will die alongside the bubble, but the hatred will live on for quite a while, and hate is real easy to exploit.

Got a nice and lengthy sneer from film blog That Final Scene: the uncanny valet is not your friend (and other AI stories)

Beyond being an utter castigation of AI bros' "attempts" at aping art, its also wonderfully written from start to finish. Go check it out.