AI

BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN

…everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why. They think this is a marketing problem. OpenAI just spent $200 million on the TBPN podcast because the company thinks it will help make people like AI more.

AI doesn’t have a marketing problem. People experience these tools every single day! ChatGPT has 900 million weekly users, trending to a billion, and everyone has seen AI Overviews in Google Search and massive amounts of slop on their feeds.

You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.

Internet detectives are misusing AI to find Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter

theverge.com

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 Last Days Of Social Media

noemamag.com

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.

Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing

en.wikipedia.org

YouTube Ads At Their Best

youtube.com

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.

Chatbots can be manipulated through flattery and peer pressure

theverge.com

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.

Will Smith’s concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines

waxy.org

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

Pro-AI Subreddit Bans ‘Uptick’ of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions

404media.co

“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.”

Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels

404media.co

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:”

Cloudflare is luring web-scraping bots into an ‘AI Labyrinth’

theverge.com

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

Elizabeth Goodspeed on what happens when we treat the past like a stock library

itsnicethat.com

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?

OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us

404media.co

AI-Generated Book Grifters Threaten The Future of Lace-Making

404media.co

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.

I understand Spotify AI now

Screenshot of a Spotify AI prompt telling it to behave like iTunes Genius

Ask it to be iTunes Genius and it is perfect 🤌

AI used by Tasmanian government to validate Chambroad’s Kangaroo Bay hotel job claims

abc.net.au

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.