its complete bullshit that they didnt make the footballer do the same cute tiktok dances. like what is this tech even for if not that
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It’s wild how we ended up in the Ghost in the Shell timeline.
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https://twitter.com/TomAugustWrites/status/1731918716663951448
not going to bother screenshotting this bc its a long thread but basically SCMP made up a fake “specialist” with a computer generated portrait to write an op ed saying ukraine should sign a truce with russia, the instant someone called them out on it the story was just retracted
i’ve heard of other news outlets or clickbait sites doing this kind of thing (even publishing like chatgpt written articles) but it feels especially gross when used for shit like this… welcome to the future i guess
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we’ll know it’s over when there’s a 5000% increase in three item lists, redundant adjectives, and superlatives in diplomatic cables
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It’s sad to see the SCMP devolve to grayzone levels (grayzone was the first propaganda site to start using LLM generated articles for their “news”)
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tbf like, maybe we could just have bots do international politics as a sort of “RP” and we could watch them on C-SPAN and laugh eating popcorn and achieve worldwide anarchist utopia this way
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Gemini, Google’s AI:
So it’s a clip show, and with the way it’s laid out, is pretty clearly a dramatization. Meaning we don’t see all the times it fucked up. They also ‘reduced the length’ of replies so we don’t know what got cut out. None of this is real world examples without editing.
Classic tech company fraudulent tech demo shit.
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I think the website said it releases on the 13th and can be used in conjunction with their other software. I’m not entirely sure how it all is supposed to work. We’ll see how it actually works in the real world then I guess.
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“Citrus can be calming and so can the spin of a fidget toy.” Even in their embellished picture recognition demo they need to have it confidently make stupid shit up lol
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https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1741494511849578753
This was covered recently by 404 media.
Anyway, uh, well I guess everything is going to suck forever
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Not everything, just the internet. If everyone gets so bored with looking at AI bullshit we all just stop looking at our computers we’ll all be better off. Of course close knit communities (no pun intended) where no one would pull this kind of shit can still stay
It does suck for people making a living doing online art but I just gotta cross my fingers and hope someone comes up w a way to bring some of that stuff off line
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AI will eventually consume itself. There’s simply no use case for this tech, and all it does is make things worse.
Oh God, how I hope this finally pops the tech bubble.
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What I really don’t understand is why everyone started taking AI really seriously all of a sudden when the thing it’s still really great at is being a clown, just like it has been since the 1960s.
This image, from the 404 article, has had me in stitches for two minutes. It’s got so many great details 
The recent article about Sports Illustrated etc. also yielded some incredible laughs:
“Our team has taken insights from renowned finance coaches, business consultants, and leading economists and also referred to the best finance books to formulate this comprehensive guide on ‘how to improve financial status.’”
This in an article promising “the five simple and practically doable steps you can take to improve your financial status” in which each step is numbered “1,” from “a first grade teacher” for whom “[t]rue satisfaction…comes when her students demonstrate improvements due to her teaching.” 
In every medium, the bots demonstrate again and again that they can be relied on mainly to be amazingly hilarious in ways only a silly robot could, and yet for some reason everyone has randomly decided that now we should instead have them do serious, “useful” things that we already have some 4-billion-or-so competent adults for.
The thing that really gets me is that I feel like it wasn’t so long ago when people seemed to widely understand this. Does anyone here remember SmarterChild, or like, the '90s chatbot A.L.I.C.E.? I don’t recall anyone taking things like that with much weight, but plenty of levity for sure. More recently there was like DeepDream or that thing where you could randomly scribble and it would generate stately cat mountains or handbags with twenty spangled aquamarine handles covered in seashells or whatever—those too I just remember everyone taking as good-natured wacky fun. Even DALL・E mini/Craiyon used to be much funnier, I feel like, back when it started; now it seems hard to get it to generate anything too far beyond a boring stock image, which we already have like, oodles upon oodles of. What happened??
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corporations saw the opportunity to fire people so they invested billions of dollars getting the technology to be corporate safe because they know their biggest cost is labor. it’s always been about reducing labor costs and disempowering workers.
in terms of budget the ideal company employs no people, sells no products, and has no customers but somehow still makes money. this is a motion towards the first and second points.
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tendency of profit to fall, etc.
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I created thousands of images with Midjourney and DALL-E in mid-2022 and was able to get them to do some really interesting things (in my opinion). I kind of lost interest when they started getting more slick and boring, generally.
I’ve been meaning to go back and try them again to see if it’s still possible to intentionally wrench that kind of surrealism out of them. I’m guessing that only a local version of Stable Diffusion could do it now, with all the “safeguards” they’ve put on the others.
That’s where the value is for me, not so much the funny images (though I sometimes appreciate those) as the jarringly strange ones that maybe a human would never think to create. Where it approaches actual creativity, even if that’s not the right word for it.
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I think this is 100% on the money. And I think this tech came at a particularly enticing moment for capitalists, who always freak out whenever they perceive any increase in worker power. The pandemic pushing a work-from-home boom, government stimulus payouts, and a job market that favored workers, along with an increase in highly-publicized labor actions like the Starbucks and Amazon unionization efforts… I bet this has put some level of fear in the power brokers and they see this tech as a means of disciplining the labor force. “Don’t get any big ideas, we can replace you with an AI.”
When I’ve attended conference talks on AI tech, I’ve noticed they tend to differ from similar “tech futurist hype” style talks I’ve seen. With AI, they really emphasize the stick over the carrot. You get less of the usual utopian rhetoric you expect from someone introducing a purported world-changing technology. The vibe is more like, “this is coming down the pipeline whether you like it or not, and you’d better be prepared for it or you’re going to be screwed.” AI isn’t a promise, it’s a threat. And it seems like even the people pushing it think of it that way.
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