Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    speaking of the Godot engine, here’s a layered sneer from the Cruelty Squad developer (via Mastodon):

    image description

    a post from Consumer Softproducts, the studio behind Cruelty Squad:

    weve read the room and have now successfully removed AI from cruelty squad. each enemy is now controlled in almost real time by an employee in a low labor cost country

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      First-ever criminal charges against financial services firms for market manipulation and “wash trading” in the cryptocurrency industry

      Cryptocurrency is a 15-year old industry built mostly on market manipulation and wash trading and now we’re seeing the first charges for it? Man, back in the day they told me doing crime was illegal.

      Deflationary

      With every transaction supply shrinks by burning a percentage of reflections to the burn wallet

      Turns out libertarians actually love taxes, but only if instead of spending the tax money on anything, it’s burned to waste.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Further proof that at least some of these people don’t have a problem with losing money, they have a problem with other people receiving it.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      Fraudster: “the “objective on the secondary markets” is to find “other buyers from the community, people you don’t know about or don’t care about” because “we have to make [the other buyers] lose money in order to make profit.””

  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Don’t know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed).

    Anyway, Wikipedia moderators are now realizing that LLMs are causing problems for them, but they are very careful to not smack the beehive:

    The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.

    I just… don’t have words for how bad this is going to go. How much work this will inevitably be. At least we’ll get a real world example of just how many guardrails are actually needed to make LLM text “work” for this sort of use case, where neutrality, truth, and cited sources are important (at least on paper).

    I hope some people watch this closely, I’m sure there’s going to be some gold in this mess.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Today’s entry in the wordpress saga: seizing plugins from devs. The author of this one appears to be affiliated with wpengine, which possibly signals more events like this in the future.

    We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.

    A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.

    More details here: https://furry.engineer/@cendyne/113296240801713427

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    neil turkewitz coming in with a wry comment about AI’s legal issues:

    And, because this is becoming so common, another sidenote from me:

    With the large-scale art theft that gen-AI has become thoroughly known for, how the AI slop it generates has frequently directly competed with its original work (Exhibit A), the solid legal case for treating the AI industry’s Biblical-scale theft as copyright infringement and the bevvy of lawsuits that can and will end in legal bloodbaths, I fully expect this bubble will end up strengthening copyright law a fair bit, as artists and megacorps alike endeavor to prevent something like this ever happening again.

    Precisely how, I’m not sure, but to take a shot in the dark I suspect that fair use is probably gonna take a pounding.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    PC Gamer put out a pro-AI piece recently - unsurprisingly, Twitter tore it apart pretty publicly:

    I could only find one positive response in the replies, and that one is getting torn to shreds as well:

    I did also find a quote-tweet calling the current AI bubble an “anti-art period of time”, which has been doing pretty damn well:

    Against my better judgment, I’m whipping out another sidenote:

    With the general flood of AI slop on the Internet (a slop-nami as I’ve taken to calling it), and the quasi-realistic style most of it takes, I expect we’re gonna see photorealistic art/visuals take a major decline in popularity/cultural cachet, with an attendant boom in abstract/surreal/stylised visuals

    On the popularity front, any artist producing something photorealistic will struggle to avoid blending in with the slop-nami, whilst more overtly stylised pieces stand out all the more starkly.

    On the “cultural cachet” front, I can see photorealistic visuals becoming seen as a form of “techno-kitsch” - a form of “anti-art” which suggests a lack of artistic vision/direction on its creators’ part, if not a total lack of artistic merit.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Online art school Schoolism publicly sneers at AI art, gets standing ovation

    Schoolism sneer

    And now, a quick sidenote:

    This is gut instinct, but I’m starting to get the feeling this AI bubble’s gonna destroy the concept of artificial intelligence as we know it.

    Mainly because of the slop-nami and the AI industry’s repeated failures to solve hallucinations - both of those, I feel, have built an image of AI as inherently incapable of humanlike intelligence/creativity (let alone Superintelligencetm), no matter how many server farms you build or oceans of water you boil.

    Additionally, I suspect that working on/with AI, or supporting it in any capacity, is becoming increasingly viewed as a major red flag - a “tech asshole signifier” to quote Baldur Bjarnason for the bajillionth time.

    For a specific example, the major controversy that swirled around “Scooby Doo, Where Are You? In… SPRINGTRAPPED!” over its use of AI voices would be my pick.

    Eagan Tilghman, the man behind the slaughter animation, may have been a random indie animator, who made Springtrapped on a shoestring budget and with zero intention of making even a cent off it, but all those mitigating circumstances didn’t save the poor bastard from getting raked over the coals anyway. If that isn’t a bad sign for the future of AI as a concept, I don’t know what is.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    In other news, an AI booster got publicly humilitated after prompting complete garbage and mistaking it for 8-bit animation:

    prompt ratio

    And now, another sidenote, because I really like them apparently:

    This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.

    Beyond the slop-nami flooding the Internet with soulless shit whose creation was directly because of tech companies like OpenAI, its also given us shit like:

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.

      As a programmer who likes to see himself more adjacent to artists (and not only because I only draw stuff — badly — and write stuff — terribly — as a hobby, but also because I hold the belief that creating something with code can be seen as artistic too) this whole attitude which has been plaguing the tech industry for — let’s be real here — the last 15 years at least but probably much longer makes me irrationally angry. Even the parts of the industry where creativity and artistry should play a larger role, like game dev, have been completely fucked over by this idea that everything is about efficiency and productivity. You wanna be successful? You need to be productive all the time, 24/7, and now there’s tools that help you with that, and these tools are now fucking AI-powered! Because everything is a tool for out lord and savior productivity.

      (I really should get to this toxic productivity write-up I’ve been meaning to do for a year now,)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    New piece from Brian Merchant: Yes, the striking dockworkers were Luddites. And they won.

    Pulling out a specific paragraph here (bolding mine):

    I was glad to see some in the press recognizing this, which shows something of a sea change is underfoot; outlets like the Washington Post, CNN, and even Inc. Magazine all published pieces sympathizing with the longshoremen besieged by automation—and advised workers worried about AI to pay attention. “Dockworkers are waging a battle against automation,” the CNN headline noted, “The rest of us may want to take notes.” That feeling that many more jobs might be vulnerable to automation by AI is perhaps opening up new pathways to solidarity, new alliances.

    To add my thoughts, those feelings likely aren’t just that many more jobs are at risk than people thought, but that AI is primarily, if not exclusively, threatening the jobs people want to do (art, poetry, that sorta shit), and leaving the dangerous/boring jobs mostly untouched - effectively the exact opposite of the future the general public wants AI to bring them.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      AI is primarily, if not exclusively, threatening the jobs people want to do (art, poetry, that sorta shit)

      Jobs people want to do, but which also take a lot of effort to learn to do well. I think there exists a certain envy of people who have put in the time and effort to learn something, which motivates the AI hype.

      Visual arts, writing, translation, music, video production, programming, sex. The common thread is that these are things most people wish they could be good at, and they’re also the most popular uses for generative AI.