A story in two Skeets - one from a TV writer, one from a software dev:
On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects the AI bubble is gonna turn tech as a whole into a pop-culture punchline - the bubble's all-consuming nature and wide-ranging harms, plus the industry's relentless hype campaign, have already built a heavy amount of resentment against the industry, and the general public is gonna experience a colossal amount of schadenfreude once it bursts,
Hucksters can and will reinvent themselves as quantum-computing consultants on LinkedIn, but is the raw material for the grift really there? I’m doubtful.
By my guess, no. AI earned its investor/VC dollars by providing bosses and CEOs alike a cudgel to use against labour, either by deskilling workers, degrading their work conditions, or killing their jobs outright.
Quantum doesn't really have that - the only Big Claim™ I know it has going for it is its supposed ability to break pre-existing encryption clean in half, but that's near-certainly gonna be useless for hypebuilding.
On top of that, there's clear signs that we've grown quite an audience from dunking on AI. Ed Zitron reached 70k subscribers just a couple weeks ago, and Pivot to AI is at nearly 9k on YouTube.
If and when the next Big Dumb Thing comes along, chances are we're gonna have a headstart against the hucksters.
Y'know, I was predicting at least a few years without a tech bubble, but I guess I was dead wrong on that. Part of me suspects the hucksters are gonna fail to inflate a quantum bubble this time around, though.
8BF’s site has been taken over by bots, and I can’t be bothered to find an alternate source.
You can find it directly on Brian Clevinger's blog, Nuklear Power. Here's a direct link to the archive.
Plus, there's the hefty amount of AI slop that's been shat onto the Internet over the years, plus active attempts to sabotage LLM datasets through tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes, and media-poisoning tools like Glaze and Nightshade.
So, if and when model collapse fully sets in, its gonna hit all of them at once. Given that freshly trained LLMs are gonna be effectively stillborn, if ChatGPT et al. collapse, it'll likely kill LLMs as a tech for at least the next ten years.
In other news, bodhidave reported a case of Google AI and ChatGPT making identical citation fuck-ups:
I imagine it'll be a pretty lucrative pivot - the public's ravenous to see AI bros and hypesters get humiliated, and Zitron can provide that in spades.
Plus, he'll have a major headstart on whatever bubble the hucksters attempt to inflate next.
New Atlantic article regarding AI, titled "AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event". Its primarily about the author's feelings of confusion and anxiety about the general clusterfuck that is the bubble.
they were also more media savvy in that they didn’t pollute info space with their ideas only using blog posts, they had entire radio station rented time from a major radio station within russia, broadcasting both within freshly former soviet union and into japan from vladivostok (which was much bigger deal in 90s than today)
Its pretty telling about Our Good Friends' media savviness that it took an all-consuming AI bubble and plenty of help from friends in high places to break into the mainstream.
I looked through the quotes, and found someone openly hoping human-made work will be more highly valued in the bubble's wake:
You want my suspicion, I suspect she's gonna get her wish - with the slop-nami flooding the Internet, human-made work in general is gonna be valued all the more.