Doing my humble, unassisted meatsack best.

“The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.”

The problem with Schmidt’s perspective, and to some degree that of the linked article itself, is that they take an “AI” future for granted. Like it’s a given that we need to adapt to whatever the tech giants put before us.

But the thing is, the only place where (the success of) “AI” is necessary — that’s in those companies’ projected earnings. They sunk billions into a technology that could be a big deal in certain number crunching research fields, but to recoup the investment they marketed the product as an everything assistant for everybody.

The corporations pushing “AI” into personal computers, into workspaces, into public governance; they’re huge, but they’re hardly infallible. They may wish, as in “bet their savings”, that this utopian tech dream will work out better than the metaverse …but that’s all it is.

They’re just trying to talk their ROI into existence. We need to counter that talk, and that future. It’s ours to decide over.

I submitted “slop feeding”. It’s nothing to do with vibes, it’s not even coding. You’re just feeding prompts to the slop machine.

If that catches on, you heard it here first 🤣

Ugh, that’s disappointing. The screendumped list of arguments that “leftists are per definition pro-AI” is reductive and cherrypicked. I guess they can get into the sea with the rest of the “AI” bros.

To be perfectly clear, I don’t think the copyright system is anywhere near perfect, especially not the way it has been expanded to benefit corporations rather than actual creators. But it is really the only available legal protection against the gross ethical infringement on human artistry that the “AI” corpos have committed to tran their models.

I’m as black and red as they come — as well as an artist and arts teacher — and that litany of BS arguments does not represent me in the least. I would and have made art without certainty of compensation. That doesn’t make my art or anyone else’s up for grabs to create piss poor replacements for our skill and craft.

“GenAI” is not a threat to human creativity in itself— it only reproduces lowest common denominator results from the material it’s trained upon. But the fact that indiscriminate morons actually think those statistically miscalculated songs, texts or images are as good as what people make? That’s the real existential crisis.