Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I donāt disagree about the massive costs necessarily associated with thia industry. Even the smaller and lighter models she mentions only exist because of the massive fuckers. At the same time, I think those arguments are for the realm of public policy more than individual choice to use chatbots or not. Weāve talked at length here over the last year or so about how the economics of the bubble are driven largely by a broken B2B SaaS pipeline that separates purchasing decisions from actually having to use the products and by an investment capital sector desperately trying to recapture the glory days of the pre-2008 omnibubble and throwing obscene amounts of money at anything with the right narrative regardless of the numbers. I feel like that keeps happening regardless of how many individual users fall for the hype and make it part of their normal workflows.
I feel like the analogy to the drug trade is still pretty relevant given the violence and predation that the black market pretty much inevitably attracts and sustains. Like, maybe you know a guy who has his own grow op or whatever, but cocaine and heroin money is going through the cartels at some point in the chain and theyāre going to use some portion of it for bullets that end up in some journalistās kids or something. The downstream harms are massive even if the drug industry could theoretically avoid them in ways the AI industry canāt, but any given individual userās contribution to them is incredibly minor and given the addictive and self-destructive nature of the product itās both more humane and more effective to treat them as a victim of a broken world that (falsely) offered this as a step up. While I donāt think we should allow slop to invest every forum any more than addicts should be allowed to shoot up on every corner, I think that if shaming makes people less likely to acknowledge that theyāre going down a dead-end road and reach out to their communities and support networks for help addressing the root of what drove them to these maladaptive antisolutions in the first place then shaming is making things worse, not better.
Also as the father of a small child I can unfortunately say from recent personal experience that shaming, be it public or private, is far less effective as a means of motivating behavioral change than we want it to be, even for things as basic as not shitting on the goddamn lawn.
I lost something in my brevity but my point was the question of how practical stopping a practice is. Alcohol is a ruinous force for bad at every level of society from homeless to Hegseth but a ban wonāt work because it literally cannot be enforced, we tried, it failed. Itās made by yeast! AI on the other hand is only sustained at great expense by a delicate chain of high tech, high energy systems. Itās a choice.
The pendulum is so far on the other side that I canāt even entertain the analogy of AI users being poor harried addicts hiding their use. My boss tells me to use more AI every day. I hate it and I want everyone to hate it. The emotion I want people to associate with it is disgust. Disgust is a powerful emotion, and it dehumanizes those it is associated with.