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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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago

OpenAI's trying to make an AI-generated animated film, and claiming their Magical Slop Extruders^tm^ can do in nine months what allegedly would take three years, with only a $30 mil budget and the writers of Paddington in Peru for assistance.

Allegedly, they're also planning to show it off at the Cannes Film Festival, of all places. By my guess, this was Sam Altman's decision - he's already fawned over AI-extruded garbage before, its clear he has zero taste in art whatsoever.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

$30 mil budget

From what I heard that is twice the budget of a Studio Ghibli movie. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind cost 1 million to make in 1984. (No idea what that would be adjusted for inflation).

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind cost 1 million to make in 1984. (No idea what that would be adjusted for inflation).

I checked a few random inflation calculators, and it comes out to roughly $3.1 million.

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[-] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 4 points 3 weeks ago

OpenAI’s tools also lower the cost of entry, allowing more people to make creative content, he said.

So, even working under the assumption that this somehow works, they still needed two animation studios, professional writers, and 30 million to get this film off the ground.

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[-] JFranek@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago

Was jumpscared on my YouTube recommendations page by a video from AI safety peddler Rob Miles and decided to take a look.

It talked about how it's almost impossible to detect whether a model was deliberately trained to output some "bad" output (like vulnerable code) for some specific set of inputs.

Pretty mild as cult stuff goes, mostly anthropomorphizing and referring to such LLM as a "sleeper agent". But maybe some of y'all will find it interesting.

link

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

This isn't the first time I've heard about this - Baldur Bjarnason's talked about how text extruders can be poisoned to alter their outputs before, noting its potential for manipulating search results and/or serving propaganda.

Funnily enough, calling a poisoned LLM as a "sleeper agent" wouldn't be entirely inaccurate - spicy autocomplete, by definition, cannot be aware that their word-prediction attempts are being manipulated to produce specific output. Its still treating these spicy autocompletes with more sentience than they actually have, though

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

I was wondering about the origins of sneerclub and discovered something kinda fun: “r/SneerClub” pre-dates “r/BlogSnark”, the first example of a “snark subreddit” listed on the wiki page! The vibe of snark subreddits seem to be very different to that of sneerclub etc. (read: toxic!!!) but I wouldn’t know the specifics as I’m not a snark participant.

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

Saw an AI-extruded "art" "timelapse" in the wild recently - the "timelapse" in question isn't gonna fool anyone who actually cares about art, but it's Good Enough^tm^ to pass muster on someone mindlessly scrolling, and its creation serves only to attack artists' ability to prove their work was human made.

This isn't the first time AI bros have pulled this shit (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), by the way.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

The dingus who got ejected from dragoncon pulled the same shit

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

Heard about the below last night; apparently survivors are forced into arbitration, so only the dead can sue. IANAL but thats pretty messed up.

https://techjusticelaw.org/2025/08/30/from-homework-help-to-suicide-planning-family-sues-openai-and-samuel-altman-alleging-chatgpt-coached-teen-son-to-suicide/

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

In more low-key news, French voice actor Françoise Cadol has accused Aspyr Media of making an AI replica of her voice for the latest Tomb Raider remaster (the French one specifically, though its probably not the only one with AI slop voices).

Examples of the AI-generated voicelines have popped up on social media.

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago
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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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