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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Last week's thread
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.
Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!
(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)
It's interesting that someone thought "smoothing life's complexities" is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.
Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life's complexities without smoothing out people's complexities, but it's not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that's if it actually worked, which it doesn't).
I've felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it's hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it's a shame we couldn't as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).
Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.
re: how can a chatbot help with life?
This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.
A lot less, 'Copilot make this list of bullet points into an email' and more 'Copilot, lock on to the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactor'.
I think that 'giving microsoft the power to do things in my behalf' is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenewed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!
E: I saw this image and because cursed eyeballs is the gift that keeps on giving, I will link it to yall as well, nsfw warning. This is the AI future microsoft wants
I am neutral on MSFT - to me it's a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it's not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it's really impressive how they've gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple's 1984 ad, via the "Halloween Papers" era where they were every Linux weenie's biggest boogeyman, to today's bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they're not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot's Recall feature also know they're the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?
From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.
this is why i keep hammering on how, functionally, OpenAI is a branch of MS and they're only separate so OpenAI's reputation doesn't stain MS.