Misandry as a vague cultural meme about men being terrible and the friction that this causes, particularly for men struggling to find a healthy way to exist under patriarchal masculinity as discussed above?
Looking back, that's definitely the kind of thing I was expecting to spike. I was just too deeply peeved about vaguely gestures at everything to see that clearly.
Brian Merchant put out a "complete guide to luddite horror films", which focuses on horror films which directly critique tech in one way or another.
On a personal note, I suspect "luddite horror" (alternatively called "techno-horror") is probably gonna blow up in popularity pretty soon - between boiling resentment against tech in general, and the impending burst of the AI bubble, I suspect audiences are gonna be hungry as hell for that kinda stuff.
Additionally, I suspect AI as a whole (and likely its supporters) will find itself becoming a pop-culture punchline much the same way NFTs/crypto did. Beyond getting pushed into everyone's faces whether they liked it or not, public embarrassments like Google's glue pizza debacle and ChatGPT's fake cases have already given comedians plenty of material to use, whilst the ongoing slop-nami turned "AI" as a term into a pretty scathing pejorative within the context of creative arts.
Update: As a matter of fact, I did. Here's some Python code to prove it:
# Counts how many times a particular letter appears in a string.
# Very basic code, made it just to clown on the AI bubble.
appearances = int(0) # Counts how many times the selected char appears.
sentence = input("Write some shit: ")
sentence_length = len(sentence) # We need to know how long the sentence is for later
character_select = input("Select a character: ") # Your input can be as long as you wish, but only the first char will be taken
chosen_char = chr(ord(character_select[0]))
# Three-line version
for i in range (0, sentence_length):
if chosen_char in sentence[i]:
appearances = appearances + 1
# Two-line version (doesn't work - not sure why)
# for chosen_char in sentence:
# appearances = appearances + 1
# (Tested using "strawberry" as sentence and "r" as character_select. Ended up getting a result of 10 ("strawberry" is 10 chars long BTW))
# Finally, print the fucking result
print("Your input contains "+str(appearances)+" appearances of the character ("+character_select+").")
There's probably a bug or two in this I missed, but hey, it still proves I'm more of a programmer than Sam Altman ever will be.
(I really should get to this toxic productivity write-up I’ve been meaning to do for a year now,)
Go for it, Mii - I'd be happy to read it.
I don’t think our collective consciousness was aware of the “what if it was just utterly stupid and incompetent” possibility.
Its a possibility which doesn't make for good sci-fi (unless you're writing an outright dystopia (e.g. Paranoia)), so sci-fi writers were unlikely to touch it.
The tech industry had enjoyed a lengthy period of unvarnished success and conformist press up to this point, so Joe Public probably wasn't gonna entertain the idea that this shiny new tech could drop the ball until they saw something like the glue pizza sprawl.
And the tech press isn't gonna push back against AI, for obvious reasons.
So, I'm not shocked this revelation completely blindsided the public.
I think a couple of people noted it at the start, but this is truly a paradigm shift.
Yeah, this is very much a paradigm shift - I don't know how wide-ranging the consequences will be, but I expect we're in for one hell of a ride.
Every AI spring brings an even harsher AI winter.
Oh, I expect a real harsh AI winter once this spring comes to a close - the public isn't just overtly disappointed about AI's failure to deliver, but outright angry at the nasty shit AI's unleashed upon them.
Continuing a line of thought I had previously, part of me suspects that SB 1047's existence is a consequence of the "AI safety" criti-hype turning out to be a double-edged sword.
The industry's sold these things as potentially capable of unleashing Terminator-style doomsday scenarios orders of magnitude worse than the various ways they're already hurting everyone, its no shock that it might spur some regulation to try and keep it in check.
Opposing the bill also does a good job of making e/acc bros look bad to everyone around them, since it paints them as actively opposing attempts to prevent a potential AI apocalypse - an apocalypse that, by their own myths, they will be complicit in causing.
I dunno, I know that legally we don’t know which way this is going to go, because the ai people presumably have very good lawyers
You're not wrong on the AI corps having good lawyers, but I suspect those lawyers don't have much to work with:
Pretty much every AI corp has been caught stealing from basically everyone (with basically everyone caught scraping without people's knowledge or consent, and OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic all caught scraping against people's explicit wishes)
Said data was used to create products which, either implicitly or [explicitly]((https://archive.is/jNhpN), produce counterfeits of the stolen artists' work
Said counterfeits are, in turn, destroying the artists' ability to profit from their original work and discouraging them from sharing it freely
And to cap things off, there's solid evidence pointing to the defendants being completely unrepentant in their actions, whether that be Microsoft's AI boss treating such theft as entirely acceptable or Mira Murati treating the job losses as an afterthought
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on the trial being a bloodbath in the artists' favour, and the resulting legal precedent being one which will likely kill generative AI as we know it.
Its a surprisingly good complement to OP Chris Paxton's Tweet about "normie opinion on AI", given it shows why said "normie opinion" is so resoundingly negative.
I've made some brief nods to how the AI bubble is rapidly souring public perception of tech (here and here), but it really feels like AI has, to quote @datarama, "made tech synonymous with “monstrous assholes” in a non-trivial chunk of public consciousness".
I feel like I should collect my thoughts on that front - I could probably make an interesting post out of it.
Not a sneer, but still a damn good piece on AI from Brian Merchant:
The great and justified rage over using AI to automate the arts
(Personal sidenote: Tech's public image is almost certainly gonna take a nosedive as a result of this AI bubble. "We made a machine with the express purpose of putting artists out of business" isn't a business case, its the setup for a shitty teen dystopian novel.)
(Fuck, now I wanna try and predict how the AI bubble bursting will play out...)
I do not expect the judge to go lenient on SBF.
The evidence proving his fraud was overwhelming, the scale of it was colossal, and all signs point to SBF being utterly unapologetic for the fraud he's done and entirely unwilling to change.
He's getting at least a decade, mark my words.
On a wider note, it feels the "geek/nerd" moniker's lost a whole lot of cultural cachet since its peak in the mid-'10s. It is a topic Sarah Z has touched on, but I could probably make a full goodpost about it.