If H5N1 does turn into a full-blown outbreak, part of me expects it'll rack up a heavier deathtoll than COVID.

In other news, there's been a statement on AI training that's racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:

Now, I'm way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so I'll whip one out:

Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artists' work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghman's run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.

New piece from The Atlantic: The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date

The full piece is worth a read, but the conclusion's pretty damn good, so I'm copy-pasting it here:

All of this financial and technological speculation has, however, created something a bit more solid: self-imposed deadlines. In 2026, 2030, or a few thousand days, it will be time to check in with all the AI messiahs. Generative AI—boom or bubble—finally has an expiration date.

the lasting legacy of GenAI will be a elevated background level of crud and untruth, an erosion of trust in media in general, and less free quality stuff being available.

I personally anticipate this will be the lasting legacy of AI as a whole - everything that you mentioned was caused in the alleged pursuit of AGI/Superintelligence^tm^, and gen-AI has been more-or-less the "face" of AI throughout this whole bubble.

I've also got an inkling (which I turned into a lengthy post) that the AI bubble will destroy artificial intelligence as a concept - a lasting legacy of "crud and untruth" as you put it could easily birth a widespread view of AI as inherently incapable of distinguishing truth from lies.

Update: Whilst the the story's veracity remains unconfirmed as of this writing, it has gone on to become a shitshow for the AI industry anyways - turns out the story got posted on Twitter and proceeded to go viral.

Assuming its fabricated, I suspect OP took their cues from this 404 Media report made a year ago, which warned about the flood of ChatGPT-generated mycology books and their potentially fatal effects.

As for people believing it, I'm not shocked - the AI bubble has caused widespread harm to basically every aspect of society, and the AI industry is viewed (rightfully so, I'd say) as having willingly caused said harm by developing and releasing AI systems, and as utterly unrepentant about it.

Additionally, those who use AI are viewed (once again, rightfully so) as unrepentant scumbags of the highest order, entirely willing to defraud and hurt others to make a quick buck.

With both those in mind, I wouldn't blame anyone for immediately believing it.

Google’s Search Dominance Leaves Sites Little Choice on AI Scraping (no archive - archive.ph appears to have died)

Because Google literally can't stop being evil even when the world's eyes are on it

Rare Airbnb W

Microsoft added AI to MS Paint. W H Y ?

It'd be the sole silver lining of this entire two-year bubble.

The proposal itself does still assume that AI scrapers are being run by decent human beings with functioning moral compasses, which is why I feel its inadequate.

This take might be overly harsh on AI/tech as a whole, but at this point I've run out of patience regarding this bubble and see no reason to believe anyone in the AI space is a decent human being, at least for the time being.

Not a sneer, but a mildly interesting open letter:

A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.

The basic idea is effectively an extension of robots.txt which attempts to resolve the issue by providing a means to politely ask AI crawlers not to scrape your stuff.

Personally, I don't expect this to ever get off the ground or see much usage - this proposal is entirely reliant on trusting that AI bros/companies will respect people's wishes and avoid scraping shit without people's permission.

Between OpenAI publicly wiping their asses with robots.txt, Perplexity lying about user agents to steal people's work, and the fact a lot of people's work got stolen before anyone even had the opportunity to say "no", the trust necessary for this shit to see any public use is entirely gone, and likely has been for a while.

An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use;

Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one (“appropriate respirator”), it’s your job to figure out what it is

Po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh, still better than an LLM directly endangering you with bad advice