AI Wasteland

Countdown until inaccurate AI images start appearing in American school textbooks because some shits in Texas wanted to save a few bucks on stock art

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41363156
Everything old is new again
- Mhmm... Good relations with the Saudis, I have
- [The Artist] said he included Yoda in the photo of King Faisal - who was then serving as his father Ibn Saud's foreign envoy - because they were both "wise, strong and always calm".
- Still more accurate than US textbooks
In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book. Soon, people will find it incredible that for several decades all our art was obsessed with digital computers: all those novels and films and exhibitions about tin cans that make beeping noises, handy if you need to multiply two big numbers together, but so lifeless, so sexless, so grey synthetic glassy bugeyed spreadsheet plastic drab. And all your smug chortling over the people who failed to predict our internetty present—if anyone remembers it, it’ll be with exactly the same laugh.
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

the future is where you won't ever be able to afford the jetpacks
This is what makes me sad. Like take the Apple vision pro for instance, there are potentially many great use cases for such a technology, such as real life ad blocking, assistance with various tasks, etc. Yet we get this obnoxious looking, expensive, obtrusive headset that uses cameras to view the real world for some reason, with dystopian avatars and completely locked down Apple software. The thing won't even let users watch VR porn by default, you have to turn on a special setting lol, that's how locked down it is. That the web browser does not allow VR content by default.
I feel like it was maybe a decade ago when things started to get worse faster than they got better.

Capitalism decided to run the "million monkeys banging on a million typewriters you eventually get Shakespeare" experiment except with AI and now we are flooding the internet with dogshit instead of a million pages of gibberish and the occasional haiku dedicated to bananas.

Best take I've heard so far on AI is to compare to Jurassic Park and the old "you were to focused on whether or not you could and not whether or not you should" quote. Scientists in real life don't do that, they don't just think of the craziest shit they could dream up and then do it and just see what happens. But apparently fucking computer engineers do.
- This is because a lot of software engineers aren't actually engineers. I know it's a controversial opinion to state online, but it's true. Think about how many IT students or professionals complain about taking an ethics class. That would not be tolerated in other engineering fields. Software in general is still in the wild west phase, and it doesn't help that almost every attempt to regulate the field has been a blatantly obvious corporate power grab or an attempt to create a monopoly, which will obviously not go down well.
- Ianist-Malcolmist vanguard deploying elite locker-shoving units to suppress the techbros.
- There are absolutely scientists and mathematicians and physicists involved in all of this. Software engineers don't have the math background to make this stuff happen by themselves. Software engineers are the ones plumbing things together. Being a scientist doesn't shield you from OpenAI holding a fat 7-figure check in front of your face and you saying "yes daddy"
While drinking ungodly amounts of water. Would prefer to burn the world than pay artists
- 700K litres for 3 days of calculations so that some troglodyte can undress pictures of women he harasses online

We're about a year away from people just abandoning the Internet as useless. Usenet Redux

- Just think of how much worse things have gotten in the last few months, and project it out on an exponential curve
I'm not sure what really stops AI spam from following people into something like Usenet, at least in a way that's not NSA-friendly or making self-doxxing a prerequisite for write access.
- Usenet was an example of a previous service that got so choked with bullshit that it effectively died, not a positive suggestion
The thing I can't decide is whether the exodus will start from people most plugged in and who can see how shitty the Internet really is or from people least plugged in and who have nothing to lose from quitting.
- the 'net junkies will hang on until the bitter end. can't even properly quit twitter
- i imagine some combo of both. since i deleted myself off of all the big social media platforms, the only people who don't regard me as a total weirdo are the crunchies who hate screens and the people with very high IT competency. these people, at the tails of the bell curve, are like, "that's smart." it's the people in the middle who are irritated they can't like my likes or see where i went to high school.

IMO AI should just get banned. It doesn't do anything well.

all the marketing pricks who called it AI should be shot. "AI" doesn't exist yet, these generative models are not intelligent.
- Yes thank you. I hate these tech bro words. This isn't "AI" it's just a tool for corpochuds to skip out on paying for labor.
  I also really hated when zuckerfuck said their shitty VR Chat was called "metaverse". That word was coined in snowcrash, a quite obvious anti-capitalist book where the "meta" in metaverse meant no single person owned the net.
- Idk, I'm not yet convinced they're not just hiding their power level and hastening the collapse of the last empire.
- Yes, everything is AI now. It used to be that AI meant a digital consciousness or something like that. Then several years ago they were calling advanced pattern recognition machines AI (IBM Watson). This watered down colloquial definition has now been applied to advanced chatbots and even retroactively to machine translation! Crazy.
- "AI" never really referred to anything specific. The best definition has always been "AI is whatever hasnt been done yet"
  "AI" doesn't exist yet
  If you're talking about science fiction sentient AI, that stuff will probably never exist.
The technology is out there already and has already infected the entire cyberspace. The only option left is to throw away the internet and create Internet 2.
- I think they call that Kwangmyong
- I think the Chinese internet behind the great firewall has avoided the worst pitfalls of "AI", though I could be wrong about that.
- internet2... that's just for universities since like the early 2000s or something
I like the pictures of little dogs in plate armor it makes me
It will die with the west. Along with crypto.

Yeah this is a massive problem for us 3D artists. Finding references has become a big problem...

But keep pumping out takes that AI is necessary to express yourself or that we're stupid luddites for hating this stuff!

I normally avoid struggle sessions on this topic since practically no one involved seems to A) use AI in any way or B) feels the squeeze of these things but I'm going to start getting a bit more involved now that this is affecting more people, and I'm sorry but if I see more takes like "AI is helping me deal with my aphantasia and ur a bigot for dismissing it" (a real fucking take ive seen on here btw), I will reply guy you to death.

I don't mean to be rude but it literally is luddism. Image generative AI and LLM's are only a problem because people release them onto the web in whatever harebrained manner they see fit. Under a different form of production, where the development and implementation of such materials is directed by central planning which could account for this foreseeable issues, this tool could be limited to quarantined zones where people can mess around with it, but it's not leaking out into databases that are generally a storage of human thought. Thus this problem of digital kessler syndrome wouldn't happen. I don't think you're stupid luddites. You're right in that this manifestation of the tech does in fact need to be smashed. However, in the way you've said it here, it seems like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater and condemning a technology which does not bring itself into existence.
- Luddism was a rational reaction to something used to crush a very early form of working class, the luddites weren't the stupid assholes theyre commonly portrayed at, you might want to self crit on using an ancient cliché whipped up by factory owners and capitalists because yikes.
  Its amusing to get this kind of accusation because I do unfortunately use AI, ive used it for years before it exploded like it did back in 2022-23, yet i always thought of it as yet another stupid grift, used only to bypass artistic process and come up with the most boring slop with the widest appeal.

Yeah but that old picture of the uncle is totally a glow up.

Based

I remember back when I used 4chan, there was a guy on the art board who liked drawing birds. He was asking if anyone knew how to get into contact with academic/scientific publishers because he wanted to provide drawings for bird researchers. I still think about him sometimes

Man. We didn’t even get the cool cyberpunk, we got the half-assed Walmart version

At least with the former my financial demise would be entertaining 🙄

You got the same cyberpunk, you're just outside of the price range to be a main character.
Are you not entertained‽
We got a half assed Walmart version with agitated fascists and melting ecosystems.
A truly boring dystopia

need to start getting a better collection of encyclopedias

real. Books are so back

Wait until pictures and text in books will be AI-generated too to save on costs.
- Don't worry that's already happening. Just gotta find pre-2022 books
Get library-pilled

That last one horrifes me. The restoration looks nothing like the guy. They've just erased the dude's image from history like a particularly disliked Pharaoh.

Got some big ol' honkers though.
- Nah that's canon

This is extremely cool actually, introducing a bunch of noise and inaccuracies into the AI models that might compound over time.

Best twist in the AI progression I've seen in years.

The problem is that AI image models aren't dynamic like that. The AI groups already successfully pulled off the heist of the internet and went home with their image data sets with billions of images. The infinitely expanding google images AI slop isn't getting fed back into the model the same way Chat GPT is auto-lobotimizing itself by looking up autogenerated articles on the web.
In fact, at the moment newer AI image models are being refined not by being fed more images but by going back and adding more refined captions to their existing hoard, since the more descriptive the captions the more capable the resulting model tends to be. But hey, they're generating most of the captions with Chat GPT and at least that's fucking them over a bit I guess
- heist
  hexbear don't uphold capitalist IP concepts challenge: impossible

Been saying it for a while, Digital Kessler Syndrome is upon us

Don't cry, don't raise your eye, it's only AI Wasteland

This is a declaration of war against soggas and all of their allies

oh damn "-ai" actually seems to work on google, thank fuck

Would be weird if someone were to smash the computers used by AI companies

Embrace Luddite thought

OK that last one is a win for humanity tho

Oh nice so Google knows which ones are which and it chooses to show that fucking shit

Time to invest in paper encyclopedia stocks

Thanks to AI, it's now impossible to look up a comparison between any two things.

Fascism? Liberalism?

I used to find the dead internet theory pretty uncompelling. What does it matter if most Youtube comments are bots, who reads those anyway? But I didn't really think that tech moguls would empower the bots to actively destroy actual useful parts of the internet.

I wish that bottom photo was slightly wider so I could use it for my Steam PFP. Can someone with the Adobe thing please extend it to square or 3:5?

Real talk: The US should make a law that ANY "AI" generated images are clearly marked. It won't stop the flood of bullshit online but at least more legitimate publications would be better, and it would probably make a healthy information consumption habit.

I believe it's legal. Not sure.

Piracy sites will be the most reliable sources of information on the internet soon. Archival nerds will crack down hard on spammers.