Stumbled across a piece from history YTer The Pharaoh Nerd publicly ripping into AI slop, specifically focusing on AI-generated pseudohistory found on YouTube Shorts.

Most data centre electrical equipment is only made outside the US. President Trump’s tariffs exempt electronics — but that expires 9 July. If it isn’t extended, then US data centres are screwed — no new buildouts, and huge maintenance problems for existing data centres. [Verdict]

Trump had the opportunity to do the funniest thing by setting them for the 4th of July.

At least the data centres are paid for by private companies and not bank loans. This means the bubble pop won’t cause a banking crisis too.

That’s waiting until rampant deregulation puts everything in place for another 2008 style crisis

"How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”

Its a silicon-based insult to life, it can’t be conscious

New piece from the Wall Street Journal: We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All (archive link)

The piece falls back into the standard “AI Is Inevitable™” at the end, but its still a surprisingly strong sneer IMO.

And sadly, it wasn’t somebody’s porn alt.

Wow Trannyporno really put that depraved woman in her place

That can’t be a real username. That fucking can’t.

New thread from Dan Olson about chatbots:

I want to interview Sam Altman so I can get his opinion on the fact that a lot of his power users are incredibly gullible, spending millions of tokens per day on “are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”

For the kinds of personalities that get really into Indigo Children, reality shifting, simulation theory, and the like chatbots are uncut Colombian cocaine. It’s the monkey orgasm button, and they’re just hammering it; an infinite supply of material for their apophenia to absorb.

Chatbots are basically adding a strain of techno-animism to every already cultic woo community with an internet presence, not a Jehovah that issues scripture, but more something akin to a Kami, Saint, or Lwa to appeal to, flatter, and appease in a much more transactional way.

Wellness, already mounting the line of the mystical like a pommel horse, is proving particularly vulnerable to seeing chatbots as an agent of secret knowledge, insisting that This One Prompt with your blood panel results will get ChatGPT to tell you the perfect diet to Fix Your Life

r/changemyview recently announced the University of Zurich had performed an unauthorised AI experiment on the subreddit. Unsurprisingly, there were a litany of ethical violations.

(Found the whole thing through a r/subredditdrama thread, for the record)

Drake’s a culture vulture, he doesn’t understand taste

Drake used AI to duo with Tupac in one of his songs

this is something different from what the article’s talking about, but also that sounds tacky as fuck

Also he did it in his dumbshit feud with Kendrick Lamar - you know, the one which ended with Drake getting the ass-whooping of a fucking lifetime

Programming and supporting fascism - name a more iconic duo

Against my better judgement I typed steve.ai into my browser and yep. It’s an AI product.

But is chickenjockey.ai domain parked

This sounds like the setup for a deeply fucked up comedy skit, or a Filthy Frank episode, or some shit like that, but nope, its real, its actually happened, the tech industry has invented a new and interesting form of racism.

I imagine a lotta people will be doing the same now, if not dismissing any further stuff from SciShow/Crash Course altogether.

Active distrust is a difficult thing to exorcise, after all.

Hank Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) recently made a vaguely positive post about AI on Bluesky, seemingly thinking “they can be very useful” (in what, Hank?) in spite of their massive costs:

Unsurprisingly, the Bluesky crowd’s having none of it, treating him as an outright rube at best and an unrepentant AI bro at worst. Needless to say, he’s getting dragged in the replies and QRTs - I recommend taking a look, they are giving that man zero mercy.

New piece from Tante: Forcing the world into machines, a follow-on to his previous piece about the AI bubble’s aftermath

Went to the original Tweet, and found this public execution of a reply:

Found a thread doing numbers on Bluesky, about Google’s AI summaries producing hot garbage (as usual):

Semi-OT: Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast just won a Webby:

TL;DR: They’re a boutique video game company who scam video game collectors with overpriced physical releases of video games, and dress up their entire operation in the guise of video game preservation.

Recently, their inner workings have been exposed, showing the company to be an abusive hellscape roughly on par with Activision-Blizzard (minus the rampant misogyny), with employee abuse at basically every level and widespread financial misconduct.