I can see that working.

The basic conceit of Idiocracy is that its a dystopia run by complete and utter morons, and with AI’s brain-rotting effects being quite well known, swapping the original plotline’s eugenicist “dumb outbreeding the smart” setup with an overtly anti-AI “AI turned humanity dumb” setup should be a cakewalk. Given public sentiment regarding AI is pretty strongly negative, it should also be easy to sell to the public.

An actual Kendrick in this case would be Ed Zitron - pointing to just one example, Ed brutally torched Prabhakar Raghavan for ruining Google Search, then danced on his grave after he stepped down to a ceremonial role.

Quick update on the Conover Catastrophe: the man’s making an attempt to recover his dignity:

In somewhat lighter news, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the game, and gave him a “conversational AI” to let him talk to players in the voice of James Earl Jones (who I just discovered died last year).

To nobody’s surprise, gamers have already gotten the AI Vader swearing and yelling slurs.

New piece from Brian Merchant: De-democratizing AI, which is primarily about the GOP’s attempt to ban regulations on AI, but also touches on the naked greed and lust for power at the core of the AI bubble.

EDIT: Also, that title’s pretty clever

The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. I’ll let Dr. Abeba Birhane’s horrified reaction do the talking:

this just started and i’m already losing my mind and screaming

Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan”

just fucking shoot me

Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.

It was me, I stole all the sexy robots

Okay, two separate thoughts here:

1. Paul G is so fucking close to getting it, Christ on a bike
2. How the fuck do you get burned by someone as soulless as Sam Altman

Musk says: “At times, I think Grok-3 is kind of scary smart.” Grok is just remixing its training data — but a stochastic parrot is still more reality-based than Elon Musk. [Bloomberg, archive]

If someone roasted me such such surgical precision like that, I’d delete my entire Internet presence out of shame. God damn.

I’m mentally filing this next to that clip of a black guy telling someone to just call him the N-word.

That opens you up to getting accused of click fraud, as AdNauseam found out the hard way but its worth it if you can squeeze some cash out of them before that happens.

Sentiment analysis surrounding AI suggests sneers are gonna moon pretty soon. Good news for us, since we’ve been stacking sneers for a while.

Recently stumbled upon an anti-AI mutual aid/activism group that’s being set up, I suspect some of you will be interested.

xAI has applied for permits for the first set of turbines. But it won’t install pollution controls unless and until its permits are approved. At that point, xAI will be “the lowest-emitting facility in the country,” allegedly.

Musk probably sees gassing black people as a free bonus for installing the turbines, I strongly doubt he’s installing pollution controls.

As a famous swindler once said, there’s a sucker born every minute.

New article from Jared White: Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill, aimed at sneering the shit out of one of Simon Willson’s latest blogposts. Here’s a personal highlight of mine:

Generative AI is tied at the hip to fascism (do the research if you don’t believe me), and it pains me to see pointless arguments over what constitutes “vibe coding” overshadow the reality that all genAI usage is anti-craft and anti-humanist and in fact represents an extreme position.

Baldur Bjarnason’s given his thoughts on Bluesky:

My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.

I’ve heard so many examples of closed source projects that get shipped but don’t actually work for the business. And too many examples of broken closed source projects that are replacing legacy code that was both working just fine and genuinely secure. Pure novelty-seeking

Personal rule of thumb: all autoplag is serious until proven satire.

Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.

I doubt it’ll be anything that good for them. By my guess, those who currently code are at risk of suffering some guilt-by-association problems, as the AI bubble paints them as AI bros by proxy.

Fuuuuuuuuuck. I used to watch that guy.