Microsoft CEO Begs Users to Stop Calling It "Slop"
futurism.com
In a year-end writeup on the state of AI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear he'd really like us to stop saying "slop."
  • fistac0rpse@fedia.io
    12·
    4 days ago

    so, what’s the general feeling? is Nadella a worse CEO than Ballmer?

    Ballmer resulted in some good memes

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
      11·
      4 days ago

      Copy/pasting a comment I wrote the other day on a post about OneDrive stealing and deleting your files:

      I knew back when Windows 10 came out and the lead of their cloud division replaced Ballmer that Windows was gonna turn into a shit show, but in my wildest nightmares I wouldn’t have predicted what they’re doing now.

    • belated_frog_pants@beehaw.orgEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      Ballmer was an idiot capitalist who only made exclusive deals to push windows rather than software advancement people actually wanted.

      Nadella is doing the same thing but with AI and end user subscriptions.

  • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    “We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication,” Nadella wrote in a rambling post flagged by Windows Central, arguing that humanity needs to learn to accept AI as the “new equilibrium” of human nature. (As WC points out, there’s actually growing evidence that AI harms human cognitive ability.)

    Going on, Nadella said that we now know enough about “riding the exponentials of model capabilities” as well as managing AI’s “‘jagged’ edges” to allow us to “get value of AI in the real world.”

    “Ultimately, the most meaningful measure of progress is the outcomes for each of us,” the CEO concludes, in an impressive deluge of corporate-speak that may or may not itself be AI-generated. “It will be a messy process of discovery, like all technology and product development always is.”

    TLDR: That’s not what he said and rehashing the same interview in article after article with this frankly clickbait headline is getting old.

    Fuck Nadella and his AI bullshit, but could we not keep rehashing this?

    • Birch@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      4 days ago

      99.9% of emails are spam or at the very least unsolicited. 99.9% of AI content is useless, wrong or disturbing, thus, slop. And both these numbers are generous estimates, it’s probably closer to 99.99% slop and spam.

    • Janx@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      I don’t think people are calling all AI slop. But if most actual use of AI is creating slop, people will associate the two. Also, it shows the technology isn’t as groundbreaking or universally applicable as advertised…

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        11·
        4 days ago

        Some people are unambiguously calling all AI slop.

        Advertising shits in your brain, but we can’t let the obvious lies of obvious liars obscure how neural networks are a whole new kind of software. Even these stupid chatbots let anyone write the old kinds of software. There’s a guy on Youtube who built a camera to visualize the speed of a laser in flight. Halfway through the video about integrating a hilariously sensitive photodiode and a high-precision motor system, he completely hand-waves the code for everything you actually see.

        None of this is going to disappear when the bubble bursts. The dotcom bubble didn’t kill the web. We’ve demonstrated that a DVD’s worth of linear algebra can turn plain English into amateur Python, and suggesting that will soon be lost to history is absurd. Your IDE’s gonna have an autocomplete where Clippy does what you fucking tell him. It’s just not going to be the as-a-service remote computing bullshit these vultures are betting on, because remote computing has been a stupid idea for at least half a century. Spicy autocomplete will be another tool in the menu… like normal autocomplete. We can sneer at people for using either one, but rough standards and working code move the world.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        Diffusion almost lives up to its hype. It is CGI for dummies, and will produce photorealistic video with less effort than hand-drawing a stick figure. LLMs might disappear entirely, with every aspect of their design replaced, but ‘remove all the pixels that don’t look like Hatsune Miku impregnating Goku’ actually works. God help us all.

        The practical future is in “diffusion forcing,” where a human artist can draw however many frames they like, and the robot can only fill in the gaps. If the robot does something wrong… draw more frames between stuff. One frame per second and a say-what-you-see description will probably suffice.

        We can presumably also expect variations that finish sketchy animatics, but that’s always going to be less art-driven than artists would like. Absolute maniacs like James Baxter can feed in a pencil version of a camera orbiting a ballroom dance, but the robot will emit a broadly similar motion in finished quality. It’s better-off being used to turn on-fours into on-ones.