ai

Earlier today, the FBI shared two blurry photos on X of a person of interest in the shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Numerous users replied with AI-upscaled, “enhanced” versions of the pictures almost immediately, turning the pixelated surveillance shots into sharp, high-resolution images. But AI tools aren’t uncovering secret details in a fuzzy picture, they’re inferring what might be there — and they have a track record of showing things that don’t exist.

The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.

We’re drowning in this nothingness.

Unhinged script, mannerisms that don’t reflect the words, and the usual AI artefacts. The fuck did I just watch?

Edit: I’m not even sure what this was trying to scam. Linked through to a website with a loooong video of “celebrities” talking about erections. No links.

Generally, AI chatbots are not supposed to do things like call you names or tell you how to make controlled substances. But, just like a person, with the right psychological tactics, it seems like at least some LLMs can be convinced to break their own rules.

So if these fans aren’t AI-generated fakes, what’s going on here?

The video features real performances and real audiences, but I believe they were manipulated on two levels:

• Will Smith’s team generated several short AI image-to-video clips from professionally-shot audience photos
• YouTube post-processed the resulting Shorts montage, making everything look so much worse

“LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. “There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”

In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:”

Rather than block web scrapers, Cloudflare invites them to trawl a web of useless ‘AI-generated nonsense.’

Not all borrowing is the same. From public domain illustrations on book covers to AI’s data hoarding, who really owns culture – and who gets away with taking it?

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.