ai

It’s already come for the crochet community, and researchers have tried to teach machines to knit. But lace-making—a craft that even Renaissance artists struggled to master, and in which there are a literal infinite number of patterns to be created—is now having its AI slop moment.

Ask it to be iTunes Genius and it is perfect 🤌

In response, the Department of Premier and Cabinet’s State Planning Office said in the report that it had deemed the job numbers “reasonable” after using Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant.

Jesus fucking christ.

Spotify AI can now read your music history… but I’ve listened to nearly all of these songs.

…not that functional though.

FINALLY. This is the only AI feature that was inevitable in any app, and I’ve been waiting soooooo long.

Record labels are increasingly opting for AI-generated visuals over collaborating with creatives – and it’s dividing opinion among artists and listeners.

…Cal Newport argues that we need to recognize the harms that technology has on us and our minds, and that it might be time to more aggressively curate the tools we allow in our lives.

Scott Nesbitt

A vague dread grips you. Why is everything a little bit different now? The smallest details are wrong. Your favorite posters have vanished from all platforms. There haven’t been any new memes for some time, only recycled iterations of old ones. Influencers are coordinated in their talking points like puppets being pulled by the same strings. Your favorite niche YouTuber has only recently been posting new content with any regularity. Is this a message? Is this what schizophrenia is like?

We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.

Yet what’s happening to the web is far more sinister than simple greed, but the destruction of the user-generated internet, where executives think they’ve found a way to replace human beings making cool things with generative monstrosities trained on datasets controlled and monetized by trillion-dollar firms.

Their ideal situation isn’t one where you visit distinct websites with content created by human beings, but a return to the dark ages of the internet where most traffic ran through a series of heavily-curated portals operated by a few select companies, with results generated based on datasets that are increasingly poisoned by generative content built to fill space rather than be consumed by a customer.

Powered by a ‘Large Action Model,’ the $199 R1 isn’t just a chatbot — it’s a device for doing almost anything. Potentially.