Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind cost 1 million to make in 1984. (No idea what that would be adjusted for inflation).

I checked a few random inflation calculators, and it comes out to roughly $3.1 million.

The video’s also all over Twitter, thanks to nonexistent moderation.

Wright thinks the podcasts are great:

I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites. Because there’s a lot of really good stuff out there.

Evergreen reminder that AI boosters are literally incapable of telling good work from bad work

OpenAI’s trying to make an AI-generated animated film, and claiming their Magical Slop Extruders^tm can do in nine months what allegedly would take three years, with only a $30 mil budget and the writers of Paddington in Peru for assistance.

Allegedly, they’re also planning to show it off at the Cannes Film Festival, of all places. By my guess, this was Sam Altman’s decision - he’s already fawned over AI-extruded garbage before, its clear he has zero taste in art whatsoever.

For posterity’s sake, here’s the Tweet source.

Nah, call it the PvP Tag.

These things look dorky as fuck, wearing them is a moral failing, and people (rightfully) treat it as grounds to shit on you, might as well lean into the “shithead nerd who ruined everything” vibe with some gratuitous gaming terminology, too.

maybe sunk cost fallacy is an unstated/un(der?)accounted part in his True Believer thing?

Probably. Beyond throwing a shitload of cash into the LLM money pit, Willison’s completely wrapped his public image up in being an AI booster, having spent years advocating for AI and “learning” how to use it.

If he admits he’s wrong about LLMs, he has to admit the money and time he spent on AI was all for nothing.

Found two separate AI-related links for today.

First, AI slop corpo Apiiro put out a study stating the obvious (that AI is a cybersecurity nightmare), and tried selling its slop agents as the solution. Apiiro was using their own slop-bots to do the study, too, so I’m taking all this with a major grain of salt.

Second, I came across an AI-themed Darwin Awards spinoff cataloguing various comical fuck-ups caused through the slop-bots.

That the useless programming language is literally called “cursed” is oddly fitting, because the continued existence of LLMs is a curse upon all of humanity

New Loser Lanyard (ironically called the Friend) just dropped, a “chatbot-enabled” necklace which invades everyone’s privacy and provides Internet reply “commentary” in response. As if to underline its sheer shittiness, WIRED has reported that even other promptfondlers are repulsed by it, in a scathing review that accidentally sneers its techbro shithead inventor:

If you’re looking for some quick schadenfreude, here’s the quotes on Bluesky.

“Pentafecta” works well as a name, I feel - rolls of the tongue real easily.

‘islamisation’, immodesty, being insulting to Muslims, and feeding genAI crap to kids while you are one of the biggest acts around (and can certainly afford professional artists)

Considering those AI-generated images are hitting a pentafecta(?) of ragebait, I’d be shocked if this didn’t ignite backlash.

If you like music enough to have any idea what song is playing? You’re probably too fancy for Suno just yet. Go to Bandcamp. Buy a record. Go out and see a band.

Newgrounds’ Audio Portal is also pretty solid for finding new and excellent music - AI slop is completely banned under site guidelines, there’s active (human) moderators and a dedicated cleanup thread to keep it out, and the scouting system (plus some human curation) provides some quality control, letting good work more easily rise to the top.

An impressive demo’s one thing. But when the slop machine is sold as a product, there are no unfair prompts. There is no holding it wrong.

That’s a nod to Steve Jobs’ response to the iPhone 4’s antenna problems, isn’t it?

GoToSocial recently put up a code of conduct that openly barred AI-“assisted” changes and fascist/capitalist involvement, prompting some concern trolling on the red site.

Got a promptfondler trying to paint basic human decency as ridiculous, and a Concerned Individual^tm who’s pissed at GoToSocial refusing to become a Nazi bar.

I genuinely thought therapists were gonna avoid the psychosis-inducing suicide machine after seeing it cause psychosis and suicide. Clearly, I was being too optimistic.

Starting this Stubsack off, I found a Substack post titled “Generative AI could have had a place in the arts”, which attempts to play devil’s advocate for the plagiarism-fueled slop machines.

Pointing to one particular lowlight, the author attempts to conflate AI with actually useful tech to try and make an argument:

While the idea of generative AI “democratizing” art is more or less a meme these days, there are in fact AI tools that do make certain artforms more accessible to low-budget productions. The first thing to come to mind is how computer vision-based motion capture give 3D animators access to clearer motion capture data from a live-action actor using as little as a smartphone camera and without requiring expensive mo-cap suits.

Nice and lengthy sneer against AI in academia came out a couple days ago - highly recommend reading.

CNBC Squawkbox must have had space to fill, so they invited Ed on. What’s the Saatchi vision of the future of AI in cinema? [YouTube, 3:50 on]

It’s, you know, potentially the end of human creativity.

If a villain in some children’s cartoon boasted about trying to destroy human creativity, I’d have thought they were over-the-top and unrealistic. We truly do live in the stupidest timeline

I was writing this whilst seriously mad about AI’s continued harms, so I do not blame you for finding this overdramatic. This bubble is testing my patience.

Adding mountains of insult to injury, the AI bubble has managed to threaten humanity in practically every way possible other than the sci-fi killbots Yud and co. doomsayed about.

Accelerating the climate crisis, threatening livelihoods, destroying drinkable water supplies, driving people to suicide/psychosis, empowering fascism and bigotry, destroying hard-earned skills, flooding the world with lies and falsehood, impending economic disaster, all of it has done horrendous damage to civilization as we know it, in ways that we may never recover from.

If AI does end up killing all of humanity, it will be by being the exact opposite of the superintelligent robo-Satan that Yudkowsky ranted and raved about, by being a carbon-belching water-guzzling almighty idiot built through razing the commons to dust, looting the economies of the world and stealing everything there was, everything there is, and everything there ever will be.

To huff a hefty degree of copium, the mistake of creating AI is a mistake humanity isn’t gonna repeat - if humanity manages to survive through this, its all-but certain artificial intelligence will die from the incoming AI winter, consigned to the dustbin of history as something which cannot be created, and which should not be created.