Yes, that's true. Indirectly it costs them all dearly with ransomware. Likewise, I think the overall damage that AI will do to society as a whole will be much, much greater than just rotting some tech companies from the inside (most of which I wouldn't be sad anyway if they went away...).

What I meant is that with blockchain the big tech companies at least didn't willingly destroy their products, their processes, their decision making etc. I.e. they didn't put blockchain into absolutely everything, all the way to MS Notepad. What I find staggering about this hype is the depth of the delusion, the willingness to not just experiment with it but really go all-in.

That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)... ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And I've had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).

Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.

But "AI"... it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldn't. There's nothing to learn from resulting failure, except "don't use AI".

In this case, given shopify's general behaviour, I won't be sad at all though if they crash and fail.

This shows the US is falling behind China, so you gotta give OpenAI more money!

Fear of a "bullshit gap", I guess.

Oh, and: simply perfect choice of header image on that article.

PSA: the domain shown in a google search result is not necessarily the domain it will actually link you to.

Maybe this is common knowledge, but I had no idea before. What an absolutely horrible decision from google to allow this. What are they thinking?? This is great for phishing and malware, but I don't know what else. (Yeah ok, the reason has probably something to do with "line must go up".)

So much wrong with this...

In a way, it reminds me of the wave of entirely fixed/premade loop-based music making tools from years ago. Where you just drag and drop a number of pre-made loops from a library onto some tracks, and then the software automatically makes them fit together musically and that's it, no further skill or effort required. I always found that fun to play around with for an evening or two, but then it quickly got boring. Because the more you optimize away the creative process, the less interesting it becomes.

Now the AI bros have made it even more streamlined, which means it's even more boring. Great. Also, they appear to think that they are the first people to ever have the idea "let's make music making simple". Not surprising they believe that, because a fundamental tech bro belief is that history is never interesting and can never teach anything, so they never even look at it.

Another exciting one: Spicerr, the AI-powered spice dispenser. One could think it's satire, but apparently it can be seen at CES (article in german).

Oh and as a bonus, they seem to also go for a juicero-like business model where you should buy their spice capsules.

Maybe I was naive, but I didn't expect all this to go that fast and that blatant...

Or they’ll be “AGI” — A Guy Instead.

Lol. This is perfect. Can we please adopt this everywhere.

As for the OpenAI statement... it's interesting how it starts with "We are now confident [...]" to make people think "ooh now comes the real stuff"... but then it quickly makes a sharp turn towards weasel words: "We believe that [...] we may see [...]" . I guess the idea is that the confidence from the first part is supposed to carry over to the second, while retaining a way to later say "look, we didn't promise anything for 2025". But then again, maybe I'm ascribing too much thoughtfulness here, when actually they just throw out random bullshit, just like their "AI".

With your choice of words you are anthropomorphizing LLMs. No valid reasoning can occur when starting from a false point of origin.

Or to put it differently: to me this is similarly ridiculous as if you were arguing that bubble sort may somehow "gain new abilites" and do "horrifying things".

Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it said... this description text was generated by AI.

AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.

Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!

Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop... blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs... noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these "AI" generators can't leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don't know for sure, and maybe I'm doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff...

Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with "art things made by actual humans", but I guess that certainty is outdated now.

This sucks so much. I don't want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know... How can trust be restored?

I wonder if this signals being at peak hype soon. I mean, how much more outlandish can they get without destroying the hype bubble's foundation, i.e. the suspension of disbelief that all this would somehow become possible in the near future. We're on the level of "arrival of an alien intelligence" now, how much further can they escalate that rhetoric without popping the bubble?