I was hoping I could let Bullshit Apocalypse posts slide for just another couple of days & power through to the end, but, in only 2 days, 7 new posts to link to. On it.
1st up, as ever, Gary Marcus:
If enough other companies report the same, the bubble pops. 🫧Also reporting AI problems: Microsoft, Target, Starbucks.Breaking: “Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said he’s not seeing proportional productivity gains from increasing AI costs.”
Next, from Doc Searls, a very insightful preview of where the big web companies want to go with AI - it's not good.
From Losing the Web to Saving Us AllI've been blogging since 2003, I've always enjoyed including lots & lots of hyperlinks, to give readers avenues to explore & learn more. It really sucks that they are trying to kill that.Big AI subverts everything, including hyperlinks, which are what make the Web a web.
With Big AI, you no longer surf from searches to sources across an ocean of links. You ask questions and get answers from the world’s largest Magic 8-Balls. They top the new hierarchy, which subverts and subordinates the Web.
Go to any of the Big AI chatbots—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta, whatever—and ask a question. If it pauses for a moment, there’s a good chance it’ll say “Searching the Web.”
But it’s not. It’s composing an answer synthesized from what it has harvested from the Web, plus a vast amount of other forms of ingested human expression. It may or may not point back to sources on the Web. And if it does, it’s only providing footnotes.
If they kill the web like this, it means the LLMs are stuck. No new brains to eat. A steady downward spiral into Degenerative AI. As I really liked from 1 of the links in my prior post, "A slow-motion car crash."
This is a really, really informative article. Definitely a must-read.
From Henry Farrell's blog, Programable Mutter:
AI Isn't Management. Try Explaining That to Matthew PrinceThe long & the short of it, Drucker felt middle managers were a critical part of any company. He would want AI to support middle managers, to help them help everyone do their job better.At last we have created the Corporation That Eliminates Middle Managers from classic management text Don't Eliminate the Middle Managers!
...
Last Saturday, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare wrote a self-congratulatory op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, suggesting his company was the only one in recorded business history to grow by 30% while laying off more than 20% of its employees. His message was that everyone needed to follow his example, by using AI to implement the True Wisdom of Revered Management Guru Peter Drucker.
The aptly named asshole "Prince" thinks that the role of middle managers is to inform the CEO, so he can decide who to fire. Wow, now he can use AI for that, & fire all the middle managers!
I guess we'll see how that goes. I predict systems whose performance continuously worsen, with no one able to put their finger on why.
This is a long article, but it is worth the read.
From Kottke - 1 of many good reviews of the pope's encyclical on AI. The Bishop of Rome is getting universally rave reviews.
Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence
From Doctorow. Billionaires seem to be almost avatars of capitalism. They both want to get rid of those pesky workers. Billionaires want to live in a world where their god-like visions of the future can be implemented without involving those annoying human workers - particularly those from other countries with, gasp, darker skin colors!
This is why AI is getting crammed down our throats.
The world really, really doesn't need billionaires.
AI and a world without migrantsLOL, there's where my title came from. I don't think "solipsism all the way down" works. Solipsism doesn't recurse.It's solipsism all the way down.
Again from Kottke:
A recent study of 2.5M scientific papers found ~146,900 fake citations5.876%, if the slop is evenly distributed. Quoting Gary Marcus, "Slopacalypse Now".A recent study of 2.5M scientific papers found ~146,900 fake citations, presumably hallucinated by AI. The fake citations “were not limited to a handful of bad apples but appeared across many papers, each containing a small number of fake references.”
From 404Media:
‘Lobotomized’: Character.AI Is Showing What AI Enshittification Looks LikeI'm not sure this is the standard enshittification cycle. None of the AI companies have a viable business model. They are being forced to start enshittifying way before they'd probably like to because the goddam GenAIs are just way, way too expensive for toy uses like Character.AI.Ads everywhere. Usage limits. Frustrating guardrails. Less model choice. Users of the Character.AI chatbot app are revolting after a series of changes they say have made the app worse.
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #125.
No comments:
Post a Comment