This is pure gut instinct, but I suspect this is gonna prompt an uptick in Google crawlers getting blocked. Mainly because Google just removed any real reason for people not to block them.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Put this up about 20 minutes late, so I'm starting off by saying Honey got exposed

Starting things off with a fresh post from Brian Merchant: Tech under Trump, part 1

‘They wish this technology didn’t exist’: Perplexity responds to News Corp’s lawsuit

“There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist,” said the Perplexity team in the blog. “They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”

I wish the AI bros at Perplexity and elsewhere a very cope and fucking seethe.

Okay, quick personal sidenote:

With how much misinformation, manipulation, outright theft and other horrific shit this AI bubble has caused, I suspect we're gonna see some attempts at an outright ban on AI. How successful they're gonna be, I don't know, but at the bare minimum it'll enjoy some popularity on the political fringe.

Have you considered

In other news, https://creative.ai/ was put up for purchase because the original owner considers AI's reputation a lost cause.

(In other other news, its my 24th birthday.)

Ran across an impressively strong sneer whilst looking through Baldur Bjarnason's link list for the week:

A JUST TRANSITION MEANS RESISTING A.I. (from Scottish Left Review)

Gonna copy-paste the quote Baldur used because god damn:

AI isn’t simply a problematic technology but an apparatus that is shaped by the injustices of our existing social relations and which, in turn, reshapes and intensifies them.

Also got an interesting Tweet from Ed Zitron:

This is entirely my gut instinct, but there is boiling resentment against big tech. Something is shifting, and it's shifting violently, both in the general public and the media. Blood in the water. People are ready for a change.

I've had that same gut instinct before - I've kinda had it since Baldur noted tech's disconnect from the public a month ago. Feels like we're entering an era where working in tech is treated as a red flag, a sign you're a money-hungry asshole willing to hurt innocent people to make a quick buck.

In other news, Procreate put out a damn good sneer aimed at AI art:

Creativity is made, not generated.

Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future. We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us.

We're here for the humans. We're not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity. In this technological rush, this might make us an exception or seem at risk of being left behind. But we see this road less travelled as the more exciting and fruitful one for our community.

Unsurprisingly, they're getting a standing ovation from artists for doing the right thing.

If this turns out to be real, I suspect its gonna be a major shitshow - not only for the publisher, but for the AI industry as a whole.

For the publisher, they're gonna be lambasted for endangering people's lives for a quick AI-printed buck.

For AI, its gonna be yet another indictment of an industry that's seen fit to put technology, profits, basically everything over human lives - whether in the "AI Safety" criti-hype which implicitly suggests culpability for bringing about an apocalypse straight out of sci-fi, or in the myriad ways they are making the world worse right now.

https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1796096718250950660