Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Ran across a piece of AI hype titled āIs AI really thinking and reasoning ā or just pretending to?ā.
In lieu of sneering the thing, hereās some unrelated thoughts:
The AI bubble has done plenty to broach the question of āCan machines think?ā that Alan Turing first asked in 1950. From the myriad failures and embarrassments its given us, its given plenty of evidence to suggest they canāt - to repeat an old prediction of mine, I expect this bubble is going to kill AI as a concept, utterly discrediting it in the public eye.
On another unrelated note, I expect weāre gonna see a sharp change in how AI gets depicted in fiction.
With AIās public image being redefined by glue pizzas and gen-AI slop on one end, and by ethical contraventions and Geneva Recommendations on another end, the bubbleās already done plenty to turn AI into a pop-culture punchline, and support of AI into a digital āKick Meā sign - a trend I expect to continue for a while after the bubble bursts.
For an actual prediction, I predict AI is gonna pop up a lot less in science fiction going forward. Even assuming this bubble hasnāt turned audiences and writers alike off of AI as a concept, the bubbleās likely gonna make it a lot harder to use AI as a plot device or somesuch without shattering willing suspension of disbelief.
Iām thinking stupid and frustrating AI will become a plot device.
āBut if I donāt get the supplies I canāt save the town!ā
āYeah, sorry, the AI still says noā
Sounds pretty likely to me. With how much frustration AI has given us, I expect comedians and storytellers alike will have plenty of material for that kinda shit.
I do love a good middle ground fallacy.
EDIT:
I do abhor a āBecause the curtains were blueā take.
EDIT^2:
Of course āJagged intelligenceā is alsoāstealthily?ābelieving in the āg-factorā.
OK I sped read that thing earlier today, and am now reading it proper.
Hereās how they describe this term, about 2000 words in:
So basically, this term is just pure hype, designed to play up the āintelligenceā part of it, to suggest that āAI can be greatā. The article just boils down to āuse AI for the things that we think itās good at, and donāt use it for the things we think itās bad at!ā As they say on the internet, completely unserious.
Demonstrably no.
Fuck right off.
Ah, yes, as we all know, the burden of proof lies on skeptics.
Again, fuck off.
Moving onā¦
vs
A LW-level analysis shows that the article spends 650 words on the skepticās case and 889 on the believerās case. BIAS!!! /s.
Anyway, here are the skeptics quoted:
Great, now the believers:
You will never guess which two of these four are regular wrongers.
Note that the article only really has examples of the dumbass-nature of LLMs. All the smart things it reportedly does is anecdotal, i.e. the author just says shit like āAI can do solve some really complex problems!ā Yet, it still has the gall to both-sides this and suggest weāve boiled the oceans for something more than a simulated idiot.
Humans have bouba intelligence, computers have kiki intelligence. This is makes so much more sense than considering how a chatbot actually works.
But if Bouba is supposed to be better why is āsmooth brainedā used as an insult? Checkmate Inbasilifidelists!
you canāt make me do anything
my brain is too smooth, smoothest there is
your prompt injection slides right off
people knotting themselves into a pretzel to avoid recognising that theyāve been deeply and thoroughly conned for years
I love how thoroughly inconcrete that suggestion is. supes a great answer for this thing weāre supposed to be putting all of society on
itās also a hell of a trip to frame it as ābelieversā vs āskepticsā. I get itās vox and itās basically a captured mouthpiece and that itās probably wildly insane to expect even scientism (much less so an acknowledgement of science/evidence), but fucking hell
Does vox do anything other than vomit hot garbage?
Ian Millhiserās reports on Supreme Court cases have been consistently good (unlike the Supreme Court itself). But Vox reporting on anything touching TESCREAL seems pretty much captured.