Hey, we’re an island nation which ruled over a globe-spanning empire, we had a damn good reason to be obsessed with boats.

Couldn’t exactly commit atrocities on a worldwide scale without 'em, after all.

In other news, a piece from Paris Marx came to my attention, titled “We need an international alliance against the US and its tech industry”. Personally gonna point to a specific paragraph which caught my eye:

The only country to effectively challenge [US] dominance is China, in large part because it rejected US assertions about the internet. The Great Firewall, often solely pegged as an act of censorship, was an important economic policy to protect local competitors until they could reach the scale and develop the technical foundations to properly compete with their American peers. In other industries, it’s long been recognized that trade barriers were an important tool — such that a declining United States is now bringing in its own with the view they’re essential to projects its tech companies and other industries.

I will say, it does strike me as telling that Paris was able to present the unofficial mascot of Chinese censorship this way without getting any backlash.

New piece from Techdirt: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

Strongly recommended reading overall, and strongly recommended you check out Techdirt - they’ve been doing some pretty damn good reporting on the current shitshow we’re living through.

New piece from Brian Merchant, focusing on Musk’s double-tapping of 18F. In lieu of going deep into the article, here’s my personal sidenote:

I’ve touched on this before, but I fully expect that the coming years will deal a massive blow to tech’s public image, expecting them to be viewed as “incompetent fools at best and unrepentant fascists at worst” - and with the wanton carnage DOGE is causing (and indirectly crediting to AI), I expect Musk’s governmental antics will deal plenty of damage on its own.

18F’s demise in particular will probably also deal a blow on its own - 18F was “a diverse team staffed by people of color and LGBTQ workers, and publicly pushed for humane and inclusive policies”, as Merchant put it, and its demise will likely be seen as another sign of tech revealing its nature as a Nazi bar.

ZITRON DROPPED

Starting things off here with a sneer thread from Baldur Bjarnason:

Keeping up a personal schtick of mine, here’s a random prediction:

If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect in the wake of the AI bubble, it will almost certainly gain that respect at the expense of STEM’s public image.

Focusing on the arts specifically, the rise of generative AI and the resultant slop-nami has likely produced an image of programmers/software engineers as inherently incapable of making or understanding art, given AI slop’s soulless nature and inhumanly poor quality, if not outright hostile to art/artists thanks to gen-AI’s use in killing artists’ jobs and livelihoods.

New opinion piece from the Guardian: AI is ‘beating’ humans at empathy and creativity. But these games are rigged

The piece is one lengthy sneer aimed at tests trying to prove humanlike qualities in AI, with a passage at the end publicly skewering techno-optimism:

Techno-optimism is more accurately described as “human pessimism” when it assumes that the quality of our character is easily reducible to code. We can acknowledge AI as a technical achievement without mistaking its narrow abilities for the richer qualities we treasure in each other.

New piece from Baldur Bjarnason: AI and Esoteric Fascism, which focuses heavily on our very good friends and their link to AI as a whole. Ending quote’s pretty solid, so I’m dropping it here:

I believe that the current “AI” bubble is an outright Neo-Nazi project that cannot be separated from the thugs and fascists that seem to be taking over the US and indivisible from the 21st century iteration of Esoteric Neo-Nazi mysticism that is the TESCREAL bundle of ideologies.

If that is true, then there is simply no scope for fair or ethical use of these systems.

Anyways, here’s my personal sidenote:

As I’ve mentioned a bajillion times before, I’ve predicted this AI bubble would kill AI as a concept, as its myriad harms and failures indelibly associate AI with glue pizzas, artists getting screwed, and other such awful things. After reading through this, its clear I’ve failed to take into account the political elements of this bubble, and how it’d affect things.

My main prediction hasn’t changed - I still expect AI as a concept to die once this bubble bursts - but I suspect that AI as a concept will be treated as an inherently fascist concept, and any attempts to revive it will face active ridicule, if not outright hostility.

In other news, Discord’s jumped on the AI bandwagon, and users are Not Happy^tm:

Sounds pretty likely to me. With how much frustration AI has given us, I expect comedians and storytellers alike will have plenty of material for that kinda shit.

Baldur’s given his thoughts on Bluesky - he suspects Zitron’s downplayed some of AI’s risks, chiefly in coding:

There’s even reason to believe that Ed’s downplaying some of the risks because they’re hard to quantify:

• The only plausible growth story today for the stock market as a whole is magical “AI” productivity growth. What happens to the market when that story fails?
• Coding isn’t the biggest “win” for LLMs but its biggest risk

Software dev has a bad habit of skipping research and design and just shipping poorly thought-out prototypes as products. These systems get increasingly harder to update over time and bugs proliferate. LLMs for coding magnify that risk.

We’re seeing companies ship software nobody in the company understands, with edge cases nobody is aware of, and a host of bugs. LLMs lead to code bases that are harder to understand, buggier, and much less secure.

LLMs for coding isn’t a productivity boon but the birth of a major Y2K-style crisis. Fixing Y2K cost the world’s economy over $500 billion USD (corrected for inflation), most of it borne by US institutions and companies.

And Y2K wasn’t promising magical growth on the order of trillions so the perceived loss of a failed AI Bubble in the eyes of the stock market would be much higher

On a related note, I suspect programming/software engineering’s public image is going to spectacularly tank in the coming years - between the impending Y2K-style crisis Baldur points out, Silicon Valley going all-in on sucking up to Trump, and the myriad ways the slop-nami has hurt artists and non-artists alike, the pieces are in place to paint an image of programmers as incompetent fools at best and unrepentant fascists at worst.

Ran across a piece of AI hype titled “Is AI really thinking and reasoning — or just pretending to?”.

In lieu of sneering the thing, here’s some unrelated thoughts:

The AI bubble has done plenty to broach the question of “Can machines think?” that Alan Turing first asked in 1950. From the myriad failures and embarrassments its given us, its given plenty of evidence to suggest they can’t - to repeat an old prediction of mine, I expect this bubble is going to kill AI as a concept, utterly discrediting it in the public eye.

On another unrelated note, I expect we’re gonna see a sharp change in how AI gets depicted in fiction.

With AI’s public image being redefined by glue pizzas and gen-AI slop on one end, and by ethical contraventions and Geneva Recommendations on another end, the bubble’s already done plenty to turn AI into a pop-culture punchline, and support of AI into a digital “Kick Me” sign - a trend I expect to continue for a while after the bubble bursts.

For an actual prediction, I predict AI is gonna pop up a lot less in science fiction going forward. Even assuming this bubble hasn’t turned audiences and writers alike off of AI as a concept, the bubble’s likely gonna make it a lot harder to use AI as a plot device or somesuch without shattering willing suspension of disbelief.

New piece from Brian Merchant: ‘AI is in its empire era’

Recently finished it, here’s a personal sidenote:

This AI bubble’s done a pretty good job of destroying the “apolitical” image that tech’s done so much to build up (Silicon Valley jumping into bed with Trump definitely helped, too) - as a matter of fact, it’s provided plenty of material to build an image of tech as a Nazi bar writ large (once again, SV’s relationship with Trump did wonders here).

By the time this decade ends, I anticipate tech’s public image will be firmly in the toilet, viewed as an unmitigated blight on all our daily lives at best and as an unofficial arm of the Fourth Reich at worst.

As for AI itself, I expect it’s image will go into the shitter as well - assuming the bubble burst doesn’t destroy AI as a concept like I anticipate, it’ll probably be viewed as a tech with no ethical use, as a tech built first and foremost to enable/perpetrate atrocities to its wielder’s content.

On a semi-related note, I suspect we’re gonna see a pushback against automation in general at some point, especially in places where “shitty automation” has taken root.

In other news, Brian Merchant’s going full-time on Blood in the Machine.

Did notice a passage in the annoucement which caught my eye:

Meanwhile, the Valley has doubled down on a grow-at-all-costs approach to AI, sinking hundreds of billions into a technology that will automate millions of jobs if it works, might kneecap the economy if it doesn’t, and will coat the internet in slop and misinformation either way.

I’m not sure if its just me, but it strikes me as telling about how AI’s changed the cultural zeitgeist that Merchant’s happily presenting automation as a bad thing without getting backlash (at least in this context).

With the wide-ranging theft that AI bros have perpetrated, AI corps’ abuse of the research exception, AI’s ability to directly compete with original work (Exhibit A) and the myriad other things autoplag has unleashed on us, I suspect we’re gonna see a significant weakening of fair use.

Giving a concrete prediction, the research exception’s gonna be at high risk of being repealed. OpenAI et al crossed the Rubicon when they abused it to launder their “research data” into making their autoplags - any future research case will have to contend with allegations of being a for-profit operation in disguise.

On a more cultural front, if BlueSky’s partnering with ROOST and the shitshow it kicked off is any indication, any use (if not mention) of AI is gonna lead to immediate accusations of theft. Additionally, to pull up an old comment of mine, FOSS licenses are likely gonna dive in popularity as people come to view any form of open-source as asking for AI bros to steal your code.

To my knowledge, its standard ML. I doubt that’ll help ROOST (the nonprofit in question), considering a lot of the AI stench has rubbed off on ML as well.

ZITRON DROPPED

In other news, all hell’s broken loose at BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3lhv35la2pk2h

The “AI company” in question is a nonprofit that focuses on open-source safety tools which recently launched at the Paris AI Action Summit, but that was enough to cause things to go nuclear, especially given people initially flocked to BSky to get away from AI.

Thinking I should make this into a full post.

To reference a previous sidenote, DeepSeek gives corps and randos a means to shove an LLM into their shit for dirt-cheap, so I expect they’re gonna blow up in popularity.