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)
sammy boi is giving up on the pretense that any of this was about enriching lives, and is now only focusing on the eyegrab (archive)
anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu we'll see
I suspect we'll see a fair amount. Giving some specifics:
I suspect we'll see Sammy accused of endangering all of humanity for a quick buck - taking Altman at his word, OpenAI is attempting to create something which they themselves believe could wipe out humanity if they screw things up.
I expect calls to regulate the AI industry will louden in response to this - what Sammy's doing here is giving the true believers more ammo to argue Silicon Valley may potentially trigger the robot apocalypse that Silicon Valley themselves have claimed AI is capable of unleashing.
perhaps saltman will have enough audacity to promote this as a way to ensure that some account is owned by a human, after flooding every corner of internet with ai slop and fake accounts
that’s almost certainly the plan — I remember there was some horrific “proof of humanity” shit tied in with this, supposedly so that you could tell if you’re interacting with a human rather than a chatbot. there’s so many problems with that technically of course, not least of which is the chatbot guy also owning the proof of not-bot, but there’s deeper horrifying implications: this is the technology conservatives have been begging for to block access to “adult sites” (see: LGBTQ+ spaces and associates) and “protect voting” (see: purge voter registries). that the technology is fucking stupid and doesn’t work doesn’t matter to them — as always with technofascism, that’s a feature.
Create the problem and sell the solution.
Did Sam anticipate the easily foreseeable avalanche of AI slop, decide that proof of humanity was a worthwhile investment, and only then notice that all the suggested search completions for "proof of" were crypto?
Worldcoin has been around for longer than OpenAI. Sama is the OG pivot-from-crypto-to-AI.
Kinda surprised World(Coin) was still ongoing, thought saltman would have quietly buried the project now he's busy shilling ChatGPT
The 0.000001% chance that this thing morphs into the new global reserve currency is enough for a proper rationalist to keep it trundling along, don't you think?
Also don't underestimate the value of having someplace to park useful cronies you don't currently have any other job for