Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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It's happening.
Today Anthropic announced new weekly usage limits for their existing Pro plan subscribers. The chatbot makers are getting worried about the VC-supplied free lunch finally running out. Ed Zitron called this.
Naturally the orange site vibe coders are whinging.
i am an android user, but in the us not having an iphone can be tedious, so i set up openbubbles
did y'all know that apple lets its users create emojis with "AI" and these things come through as images to non-iphones?
thought i was past the "apple users incidentally harass non-apple users through imessage" thing, but this shit makes me want to just tell everyone that i will only answer messages on signal messenger
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.
Here are his own words on the matter. From what I can find, it doesn't seem he acknowledges/understands the issue of the training data being stolen from non-consenting musicians.
Some related personal thoughts (and feel free to disregard them, they're probably ignorant): As someone without much of an ear for music, this stuff sounds like the same generic instrumental songs that computers were generating even before the current hype bubble.
I remember watching the CGP Grey video Humans Need Not Apply back in the day, and it was using AI background music even then (2015), albeit only to prove a point. The only real differences between then and now is that 1) modern models can generate songs in more genres and also generate (bad) vocals, and only because it's been fed the entirety of humanity's musical history rather than being trained only on licensed data, and 2) the hype bubble is releasing countless music generators and getting tons of non-musical people posting their generated stuff online, often with the intention of making a quick buck.
Would I have been able to tell that these songs were made my a machine? Probably not. But as I said, I don't have an ear for music and would've just figured they were made by a mediocre composer. I'd say that's the biggest difference for all creative things nowadays. Back before LLMs, I would've assumed it was a sloppy writer, artist, musician, etc. rather than a slop machine.
It's also funny how, given enough generations, slop machines can sometimes churn out something passable or even half-decent. Gives major infinite monkey typewriter energy. It would've been an interesting phenomenon to study if it wasn't so energy-wasteful, trained on stolen data, and used by executives to oppress workers. Alas, in a better timeline.
Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, the CGP Grey video ain't great, though it is interesting to look back at and see how AI hype looked in the mid-2010s compared to now.
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.
this is great, but now I'm sad