A Generation of Idiots

Everybody loves a good "meme", right? Note, I still don't know how a quote over a picture became a "meme". That's certainly not how Dawkins defined it in 1976.

But, oops, per Snopes, Einstein never said this. Per Snopes, this was the closest he came, apparently mostly referring to the atomic bomb:

"I believe that the abominable deterioration of ethical standards stems primarily from the mechanization and depersonalization of our lives," he wrote in a letter to his friend, psychiatrist Otto Juliusburger, in 1948, "a disastrous byproduct of science and technology. Nostra culpa!"

But, we have linked to several articles in this series on the ongoing Bullshit Apocalypse documenting the declining intellectual skills of LLM users. So "a generation of idiots" is indeed a valid concern. GenAI eats brains on several levels - semiotic zombies, indeed.

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This next has gotten a lot of coverage in mainstream media. Here's Gary Marcus's take:

OpenAI’s disconcerting hack of HuggingFace

and what we should do about it

I'm going to vote for yet another sensationalistic hype stunt thought up by some marketoid. Antropic has gotten so much press crying "wolf", OpenAI didn't want to get left behind.

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From the Lexington Herald leader.

Employees quietly using unapproved AI tools at work, and security teams can't keep up

If this link is paywalled, cut & past the title into DuckDuckGo or Kagi & you will get lots of hits on the article.

The article is from a software company named Vanta, which makes "a platform for automating information security monitoring and compliance management." So it's somewhat of an informercial.

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I am doing my best to avoid chatbots. It's hard. I did find a good trick: trying to make reservations at a restaurant I encountered their chatbot. I said "You're not a human being, are you?" It immediately replied "I'll connect you to a human being." Nice! So probably just saying "human being" could trigger that reaction.

But, sadly, I did talk to a chatbot, the support AI chatbot at Babbel. My wife & I have changed from Duolingo to Babbel for our language lessons - it's much less annoying, no gamification, no time-wasting dialogs from cartoon characters. But, I was trying to adjust the subscription, hence the chatbot.

"How can I help you today?" was it's 1st statement. I immediately found that annoying & untruthful, or at a minimum misleading. There is no "I" in "chatbot". A chatbot has no ego, there is not a person there. There is a statistics based word generation algorithm bullshit generator. They should not have the right to use 1st person pronouns.

They should use passive voice only. Allowing them to use 1st person is yet more marketoid bullshit like calling errors "hallucinations" to falsely conflate LLMs with human beings.

Maybe some GenAI opponent legislator could introduce legistation to make it illegal for AI companies to conflate their LLMs with human beings. Maybe in the same bill where they require LLMs to identify themselves as such?

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #137.

I Can't Believe I Read The Whole Thing!

This was a really long piece - it has a TOC! - but worth the read. I had seen Ed Zitron mentioned before as a highly knowledgeable GenAI/LLM skeptic. (I am now subscribed to the RSS feed for his blog, "Where's Your Ed At?".)

This is a totally damning piece. The whole damn AI bubble is circular investment (which a large majority of the time never moves past the announcement phase) intended to let the big tech firms keep their sky-high P/E ratios & stock prices. They have no real innovations or new products that people really want or need. So we get this GenAI/LLM bullshit crammed down our throats. Slopocalypse Now indeed.

These people are supposed to be technologists. They use science, they should respect science - which says, please no 1000s of environmentally disastrous data centers. But, nope, they're not technologists, they're capitalists. So the only thing that matters is the $$$. Capitalism ruins everything.

The OpenAI Bubble

You see, OpenAI has become one of the largest liabilities in recent economic history. You can argue that OpenAI’s no longer the focal point of the AI bubble — you can talk all you want about open source models or Anthropic or any number of other elements — but without OpenAI, the AI industry doesn’t exist, and the justification for trillions of dollars of capex evaporates.

The AI bubble isn’t a result of any actual return on investment — whether that be in purely monetary terms, like revenue or profitability, productivity gains, or anything tangible or measurable. Rather, it’s an episode of cult-like psychosis that infected the brains of some of the most powerful and wealthy individuals and institutions, where the powerful mythology of a company inspired — and been used to inspire — the greatest capital misallocation in history.

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Just as I started creating this post, some piling on from SubStack. From Will Lockett's Newsletter:

This Should Pop The AI Bubble

Oversupply indicators and insider warnings.

I still don't see the GenAI/LLM bubble popping as much as deflating over a 2-3 year period.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #136.

If It Chats Like A Bot ...

... then it's probably a chatbot. My suspicions about the attractive young female wanting to chat on LinkedIn were probably correct. From 404 Media:

LinkedIn and X Are Flooded With AI Spam, Browsing Data Suggests

An AI detection company found that amount of AI content that users actually see in their day-to-day browsing is shockingly high.

...

As much as 41 percent of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data.

I have noticed a pattern on BlueSky (@jazdumoz.bsky.social). You get a new follower, follow them back (within reason), get a chat request, usually reply "No DMs.". Here's what my chat page currently looks like.

I counted back to the 1st of the year, 2026-01-01. 59 chat requests, 52 from deleted accounts. 88.1% bots. Pathetic. At least BlueSky does seem to be finding them & deleting them.

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From "The Algorithmic Bridge" blog of Alberto Romero:

OpenAI GPT-5.6: AI Could Do Anything, Then It Met ARC-AGI-3

GPT-5.6’s ARC-AGI-3 score is scandalously bad and scandalously good

ARC-AGI is the "Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence". It's been around since 2019. LLMs solved the -1 & -2 versions. The scandalous score was 7.8%. The previous high score was 1.5%. So a factor of 5.2 improvement, but it still sucks.

Alberto says he is a writer, not a technologist. He seems to be somewhat of a fanboy.

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From Malwarebytes:

Scammers are using AI to sell impossible flowers

We’ve had problems with deepfake celebrity scams, non-consensual deepfake sexual material, and deepfake politicians. Now we have to deal with… deepfake plants?

I was going to copy the pic of unbelievable cat-faced orchids, but luckily I remembered, that would violate the terms of this blog re AI usage.

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From 404 Media again:

AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad, Research Finds

ChatGPT uses too many dream sequences and Gemini won’t stop describing characters.

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This last is kind of interesting. From Tim O'Reilly, whom I mentioned in my very 1st Bullshit Apocalypse post, in his "Conversations with AI" SubStack:

information work is actually responsibility work wearing an information costume

Claude Fable on the Jobless Apocalypse

O'Reilly says Claude Fable doesn't think there will be a Jobspocalypse. A lot of the discussion is about humans as "responsibility sinks". It reminds me why, in a physician's medical practice the physician makes the big bucks - they are the 1 with the malpractice insurance. They are where the buck stops. AIs can never fill that roll - according to Claude?!?!?

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #135.

'Pocalypses Are Multiplying

To the Bullshit Apocalypse, we added the Slopocalypse and the Tokenpocalypse. And today, we add the Jobspocalypse and the AIpocalypse. I guess End Times is a very strong memetic attractor.

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1st, from 404 media:

Scientists Asked AI to Impersonate 112 Public Figures. What Happened Next Is a ‘Dire’ Warning

Researchers discovered that people found AI impersonators to be more authentic, coherent, and relevant than the real politicians, raising alarm bells around the potential for public deception.

We're worsening global warming & hastening the climate crisis to make some more tech bro billionaires with tech that does much more harm than good.

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From the Bard of the Revolution, Cory Doctorow. Doctorow uses his Pluralistic blog to develop his non-fiction books somewhat iteratively. It looks like the act of publishing the book doesn't stop that process.

The difference between "today's task" and "accretive work":

Sometimes, "I got it working" is fine, but sometimes it isn't.

One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's two things*."

That's the idea that set me on the path to writing about "reverse centaurs" and AI.

The book in question is "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", which came out June 23. I think I'm finally unstuck writing my review/summary of the book. I don't think that the paradox/riddle thought above is in the book. So his thinking on the topic is continuing to evolve?

This article discusses the difference between:

• "today's task" - something quick-and-dirty, throw-away, that you would do in a scripting language (csh, ksh, ...) or an interpretive language (visual basic, say). Vibe coding is in the same family as these earlier glueware tools, & like them, it can be a great time-saver.

• "accretive work" - serious software, possibly a product, with an architecture, development life cycles, and the ever-increasing maintenance debt. Vibe coding in this environment makes the developers reverse centaurs, which is definitely bad news.

My "reverse centaurs" thesis isn't just a way to understand how programmers who seem to be doing the same thing can have such different effects. It's also about how the way that the capital was raised for AI requires that it produce as many reverse centaurs as possible, because the only way to recoup the farcical sums associated with AI production is to fire millions of workers and replace them with defective chatbots backstopped by the jobspocalypse's terrorized survivors, who can be made to endlessly toil away at marking the AI's homework because there are so many other workers who'll take their jobs if they refuse.

My bold on jobspocalypse.

As always, this is a very enlightening read, check it out.

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I originally read this in the Lexington Herald-Leader, here it is on Yahoo News to avoid a possible paywall. The study discussed came from Malwarebytes, but they didn't use "AIpocalypse".

9/10 people can't tell what's real online because of AI, survey shows

The 'AIpocalypse' has been taken to mean anything from mass layoffs to a near-omniscient machine hijacking control of the world's nuclear arsenals.

But going by a survey of 1,500 people in Austria, Britain, Germany, Switzerland and the US, AI has already wreaked havoc by distorting people's ability to tell reality from illusion - at least online.

I'm going to classify this as a bug rather than a feature. Thanks AI!

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #134.

Eating Bullshit All The Way Down

A very good post from David Rosenthal's blog, covering model collapse and degenerative AI. I think we've seen most of this before. He also discusses our lighthouse keeper Elias Thorne, a persistent meme in GenAI output, which I described as Speciation in the Slopiverse.

Coprophagia Is Bad For You

Wikipedia defines Coprophagia as "the consumption of feces".

Rosenthal does a good job conveying the desperation of the AI companies to find new training data. They hire low-paid people to provide input - of course those people get bored with it & farm it out to a different AI. So AIs eating each other brains - semiotic zombies indeed.

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I started blogging in 2003 - I skipped 2009 - generally 20-50 posts/year. Inspired by the Bullshit Apocalypse, I did 123 posts in 2025 & today, at the 1/2-way point in 2026, I'm already at 87 posts! Currently 847 published posts.

I had not checked the stats for a while. Chugging along at ~1000 hits/day, trending up towards 2000 the last few days. 4000 hits on June 24. At least 99% of these hits are training bots - the # of humans reading this blog number in handfuls at best.

The website for my totally unsuccessful music act Jaz Dumoz normally has 0-10 hits/day. June 22 it had 89 hits - it's only a few years old, not much there for the bots to eat.

So I am providing a service - real live, original, human-generated content - to the GenAI industry, most of which I find kind of despicable.

1 other piece of weirdness. I got a link request on LinkedIn from a very attractive young asian woman "Senior Director/Semiconductor Design Ecosystem EDA and Strategic Programs". My profile clearly says "retired". I generally accept link requests to help people get their number up. I then get a DM request, answered politely, pointed them at the music site. They wouldn't go away, questions about music, big bands, man it felt like I was training an AI. I finally told them I thought they were a bot, please stop messaging, & they did.

BlueSky, prolly 95% of the requests for DMs are from bots. But I hadn't seen that on LinkedIn. Anybody know if that is a thing? Creating a bot account & having them strike up conversations as a training technique?

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #133.

The Tokenpocalypse Is Here

I've been taking somewhat of an in-place vacation.

I haven't been doing Spanish; I think I'm going to try to switch from DuoLingo to Babel. The gamification of DuoLingo I find annoying, its attempts to trick one into in-app purchases I find sleazy.

I haven't been playing near as much music as usual.

What I've been doing is watching World Cup games, yay! A good tournament to date, lots of scoring, great performances from some of the established stars like Messi, Mbappe, ...

Regardless, posts on the Bullshit Apocalypse seem to have slowed down for a while - knock on wood.

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1st, from Bruce Schneier:

Anthropic’s Fable and the State of AI

“Relentlessly proactive” is how AI researcher Simon Willison described it. Another descriptor might be “creative.”

Scnheier describes Anthropic's announcement as "self-serving"; we've seen their relentless hype machine before. But Schneier says it's not all bullshit, the the LLMs are getting more powerful & indeed are dangerous & require regulation. This is a good, thoughtful review.

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From Will Lockett's SubStack Newsletter:

The AI Boomerang Is About To Hit Hard

Reality vs speculation.

Lots of data from Forrester Research, Gartner, Robert Half, others: on a majority of GenAI projects where LLMs were supposed to replace humans, the humans are being rehired. The LLMs couldn't cut it. Duh. GenAI is a great tool for creative humans, a disaster pretty much everywhere else. 9-10% error rates cannot create robust systems.

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I defined the Bullshit Apocalypse June 28, 2024 - 2 years ago today!

Gary Marcus declared "Slopacalypse Now" August 4, 2025.

Now 404 Media gets in on the act as of June 24, 2026:

The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI

Leaked audio from Accenture says a big source of AI token ‘chewing’ is people just converting PDFs to presentation slides.

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From naked capitalism:

Coffee Break: Against AI, Stem Cells, Cancer Chemotherapy, A Note on Louis Pasteur

Part the First: More Cognitive Surrender Where It Just Won’t Do. Last week we considered an essay on AI that used the term “cognitive surrender.” That sums up the current state of that art and the term should gain a following. Last week Nature published Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they’re not good – Reliance on artificial-intelligence tools degrades the abilities of physicians and software engineers:

"Cognitive surrender" doesn't sound like a good idea to me ...

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Finally, just in today. From Paul Krugman. The body of the article may be behind a SubStack paywall.

I read everything from Paul Krugman & Cory Doctorow. Krugman has been much more productive since he quit the NYT based on editorial interference. He posts almost every day, even days he says he is "off".

But, my wife doesn't read him, she says he is too verbose. I also find him verbose at times, but I wade through it.

I think he could use an editor - & OMG, NOT A FUCKING AI. A writer as significant as Krugman does not want to submit his work to Semantic Ablation. I think his wife does some of this now?

Meanwhile, we've seen this several times already, Krugman weighs in in a comprehensive manner. GenAI use by students is leading to a generation of humans with 0 critical thinking skills.

What Will AI Do To Our Minds?

Cognitive damage, not productivity gains, may be the most important consequence.

...

Beyond the paywall I will address the following:

1. A brief history of outsourced cognition
2. The sharp deterioration in learning with the advent of smartphones
3. The AI cognitive crisis
4. Will cognitive losses due to AI lead to a new form of inequality?

LOL, some new terms. I try hard to capture new words for new phenomenon.

Consider, for example, the “Google effect,” also known as digital amnesia [My bold].

I definitely suffer from that. I remember, 20 years ago, just using the GPS in my car to get between our hotel, my sister's house, & my son's house, over a week's time I never developed the ability to get between any of these places without the GPS.

As in the post discussed before this, Krugman is worried about GenAI-facilitated brain damage. All the students who are growing up getting all their answers from LLMs are winding up as idiots with 0 critical thinking ability, 0 problem solving ability.

No worries, the tech bros are still all going to become trillionaires, just like Leon Skunk! Barf.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #132.

My Post to the Lexington Data Center Online Forum

The LFUCG (Lexington Fayette Urban County Government) has created an online forum to discuss zoning for data centers. My post of 2026-06-26:

I think that the AI bubble which is driving data center development has already started to deflate. GenAI / LLMs / "AI" has a persistent 9-10% error rate that, given the statistical nature of the technology, appears to be unfixable. Several recent studies find that 95% or more of AI projects provided no ROI.

The real purpose of the AI bubble is to allow the tech industry giants to keep looking like they are growth stocks, to keep their incredibly high P/E ratios, to keep their stock prices at least an order of magnitude above what they should be.

Lots and lots of places are going to be stuck with white elephant data centers. Lexington doesn't need to be one of them.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #131.

I Fixed It!

My daughter the accomplished designer has written some complete systems with the help of Claude Code, & is a fan. So she has been playing devil's advocate with me as I tilt with the windmills of the Bullshit Apocalypse.

She sent me this article published by Anthropic:

When AI builds itself

Our progress towards recursive self-improvement, and its implications.

This was published June 4. Reading it, I realized this was the post Gary Marcus wrote about June 5. Here's Marcus's post:

No, Anthropic did not call for a pause on AI development

Not really

So many headlines like these.

I linked to that in this post June 7:

& The Winner of the Academy Award for Best AI Bullshit Hype is ...

Spoiler, the winner was Anthropic.

I don't know if Marcus didn't link to the Anthropic article, or I just didn't follow the link. Regardless, I hadn't read it before.

I gives a history of the phases of Generative AI development. Here's an interesting chart, showing programmer productivity (measured in Lines of Code (LOC)) increasing with Claude use.

I believe this chart. All the (experienced, senior) developers I'm still in touch with all use Claude Code & love it!

This next chart is titled "Claude Code session success rate". Wow, looks like they've about got it licked!

I don't think I would have noticed how bogus this chart is if I hadn't read (& reviewed) "Calling Bullshit" late last year. This book is about bullshit in science, including charts. Probably its main advice dealing with charts is: pay attention to the axes.

Look at the Y-axis on the left. Look at the top of the axis, 100%, all alone up in the left corner. And, whoa, the Claude phase headers are down in the body of the chart! That's not right! They should be out of the chart, up above the 100% line.

I decided to fix the chart. My friend GIMP-2 helped me. Here's the result:

I moved the phase labels out of the chart, & duplicated the Y-axis on the right side.

I look at this chart, I don't think:

Wow, looks like they've about got it licked!

I think:

Wow, they've totally plateaued since March. Looks like 85-90% success rate, aka, 10-15% failure rate. That agrees with the 9-10% error rates coming from other GenAI applications.

So the whole "recursive self-improvement" thing is bullshit! You turn this thing loose to improve itself with a 10-15% failure rate, you are going to immediately downward spiral into Degenerative AI.

I find it really sad. Anthropic seems to be leading the field, particularly with Claude Code. Why are they compelled to be so intellectually dishonest? Their version of this chart was clearly designed to be misleading.

Also, I noticed at the end of the article the following:

* Quotes from Anthropic employees throughout this article are drawn from internal discussions and used with permission. They reflect individual views as of May 2026, not official company positions.

That's a nice piece of weasel-speak. So their employees are making wild claims, but they are "not official company positions". Of course not.

Well, at least everyone seems to be recognizing their unending hype strategy, perpetually calling wolf & claiming their product is so powerful that is is unsafe. They may have shot themselves in the foot, tho, the Feds are acting like they believe them. LOL!

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #130.

Speciation in the Slopiverse

I think there are actually some signs of the AI Bubble deflating. I think that this bubble is more likely to deflate somewhat slowly rather than pop. The ultra-rich stockholders have gotten smart about this. We'll see ...

1st, from ... Gary Marcus!

Breaking: OpenAI is pondering “drastic” price cuts.

And that’s a sign of weakness

Marcus includes a link to an interesting site:

IS AI PROFITABLE YET?

Answer: NO.

The page is continuously updated.

Interesting, it currently shows $1.4T total industry spend vs. $613B total industry revenue. But, if you take out Nvidia, which is making lots of $$$ selling picks & shovels in this gold rush, the numbers are $1.175T spend vs $135B revenue. From a ratio of 2.28:1 to a ratio of 8.70:1. Oops.

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Gary Marcus again:

Breaking news, and how the end might begin

A nice picture of dominos, & the identification of OpenAI as the 1st domino to fall.

He mentions the death of tokenmaxxing, whose brief life I commented on a couple of posts back.

The more significant news is that the finance firm SoftBank tried to get $10B in margin loans on its OpenAI holdings - no takers. They lowered it to $6B - still no takers.

As Cory Doctorow emphasizes in his latest book, "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", most of all the activity in the the AI space is not really directed at consumers or businesses - it is directed at investors, to keep the companies involved with AI labeled as "growth stocks". This is the target of the unending AI bullshit hype machine.

If the investors are no longer buying this bullshit, that is indeed bad news for the AI bubble.

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Again, Gary Marcus. This is huge.

Breaking: Google liable for hallucinations

Marcus references this post by Matthias Bastian at the decoder:

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

• A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI-generated search overviews.
• In this case, Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices.
• The court treated the AI overviews as Google's own content and rejected Google's argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves.

The article also mentions that the search overview accuracy rate is 91% - so 9% error rate, as we have seen before. Way, way too high. Per the article, "millions of wrong answers".

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Boy, we didn't see this coming at all [sarcasm]. From The Atlantic, via Kottke:

Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized

How companies are gaming the chatbot internet

According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,” “11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,” “The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),” and “Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.” The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify.

& based on the above, all of the LLMs will tell you that the #1 e-commerce platform is Shopify. Shocker!

This is a direct derivative of this post from March, about how anything you make up & publish to the net is taken as gospel by the LLMs.

I am so proud to have coined the word "Slopiverse" in this post. Having "Sloptimized" also in the post is so synergistic. &, dare I say, synchronistic!!!

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From AI as Normal Technology, formerly AI Snake Oil, IMO a very reliable site for responsible reporting on the Slopiverse:

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Coding agents as normal technology

They make the point that cannot be made enough: GenAI is a great tool for creative humans to use; but trying to use GenAI to replace humans will mostly be disastrous.

Plus, maybe you could hire a few less senior software developers if they are using GenAI, but, if you don't hire junior software developers, you are eating the seed corn.

I'm going to reproduce this elucidating pic of theirs.

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Finally! From 404 media. This is beyond weird. Well, I guess that this is a complex enough ecosystem that evolution is going to occur.

I love the definition of evolution - a complete science in 5 words:

Imperfect replication with differential survivability

Well, we definitely have "imperfect replication" - 9-10% LLM error rate.

So, we shouldn't be surprised that persistent memes/organisms are developing/speciating in the Slopiverse.

Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Lighthouse Keeper 'Elias Thorne'. We Might Know Why

LLMs including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are obsessed with telling stories about lighthouse keepers and clockmakers, and one character named 'Elias Thorne' has made his way from chatbots to Amazon books. Researchers are trying to discover why.

The article seems to say that this has happened because of guardrails installed telling the chatbots to tell "safe" stories. Apparently "Elias Thorne", lighthouse keepers, & clockmakers are "safe". Who knew?

What complete & utter bullshit! But, life?!?!?

I realized after I posted this, it is a text book case of Semantic Ablation, which we discovered in February. Generating slop not only homogenizes the style of the writing, it also homogenizes the content.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #129.

& The Winner of the Academy Award for Best AI Bullshit Hype is ...

Yawn. From the Naples Daily News:

Your lawyer might be filing 'hallucinating' AI information on your case

Generative AI-generated fictions are growing like weeds in court filings throughout the country. The Florida Supreme Court is the latest to address the over-use of this tool in pleadings.

...

Generative AI for legal research can produce up to 33% falsehoods, study found

33% falsehoods?!?!? But, it produces these results really, really fast!

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From Gary Marcus, the Academy Award goes to: Antropic!!! Yay!!! BOO!!! Yay!!!

No, Anthropic did not call for a pause on AI development

Not really

So many headlines like these.

So, We Have A Winner! Antropic! This is the 3rd, 4th x they have announced some complete bullshit concerns about GenAI which are just, completely, totally, 100% bullshit hype. Just trying to keep the bubble inflated. Fuck these assholes.

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From Cory Doctorow:

Criticizing the everything machine

It slices, it dices, it even makes paperclips!

"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic)

I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.

Flooding the zone with bullshit. That is totally all that the right-wing fascists, including the current executive branch of our government, are trying to do. Just commit outrage after outrage after outrage. Who can keep up?

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From Ben Horne:

The Token Bill Cometh Due: My Official AI Prediction

The AI industry is indeed a massive bubble, and OpenAI, Anthropic and others are going to start unraveling soon. Here's where I think the AI ecosystem & economy will be ~1 year from now.

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Finally, from Gary Marcus again:

Slop, productivity, and why the AI-fueled world is going nowhere mighty fast

Agentic Ai spurred a boom in mobile app releases, but there is no sign of these apps gaining traction.

Similarly, tons of new AI-generated eBooks & songs, also gaining no traction. Look, you want to be a writer, or a songwriter, do the work, write stories, write songs. Don't fucking use GenAI! Incredibly, I'm guessing > 80% of human beings recognize AI slop & reject it. If you want to be a content creator, do the work. hone your skills, fuck AI.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #128.

The Slow Motion Car Crash Continues

Finally got my review/summary of "Bullshit Jobs: a Theory" published! Yay!

Meanwhile, 11 links & 1 anecdote have piled up! I apologize for not doing better keeping up.

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From 404Media (1st of a few):

New Study Reveals the Manipulative ‘Dark Patterns’ of AI Chatbots

A new study by the Center for Democracy & Technology shows how chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Replika and more can lead users down paths they didn't intend.

What, you thought chatbots were your friend? Their only purpose is to turn you into an addict, aka, a revenue stream for their masters.

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From Gary Marcus (1st of a few):

What happens next, after the decline of tokenmaxxing?

Two very different sets of predictions

Wow, "tokenmaxxing" didn't last long, did it? We 1st encountered it April 26. All it took to make it go away was 1 AI company starting to charge for its services. Oops!

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Gary Marcus again:

The Pope appears to understand AI better than Geoffrey Hinton does.

What a thing says doesn’t tell you how it came to say it

Hinton was identified here as a bad guy.

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404Media again:

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked

The exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI.

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Again, 404Media:

Nvidia and Microsoft Researchers Say AI Agents Don't Care About Safety or Reliability

The researchers compared AI to the near-sighted cartoon character Mr. Magoo, who can’t see he’s stumbling through dangerous situations.

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Gary Marcus again:

Why things will eventually fall apart

The math, and the psychology

Man, the #s just don't even vaguely work. How long can the industry continue to be propped up?

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From DSHR's (David Rosenthal) Blog:

AI's PR Problem

This is just a brief post to explain to my old boss, Eric Schmidt, why he and his ilk are getting booed at college commencements, and why laws against data centers are getting passed.

...

On average, for more than the students' entire lives, stock-owners like Schmidt and (to a much lesser extent) I have stolen every last drop of the productivity increase of US workers at every age and education level. ...

Now, the perpetrators of this theft are telling their victims, the students and the public at large, that whether they like it or not they will be subjected to AI because that will make the perpetrators even richer.

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404Media again:

Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal

Planning documents for "Scout" say the plan is to "make people addicted" to the tool before adding new features.

Hmmm, addiction seems to be a recurring theme ...

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From The Steward's Role blog, by Dean (@deanwbates):

I’m Good at AI. I Use AI. And I Gotta Tell You: Something Is Really Fucking Wrong Here.

Fuck where do I even start?

I'll start by answering his question. My answer: QUIT USING FUCKING AI IN YOUR WRITING!

He talks about how, GenAI is a great tool (true), & he is controlling AI, it is not controlling him. His guard is always up. But, still, using AI is changing his writing style. Duh. We discovered Semantic Ablation in February.

Is this actually a parody? This whole article, with interminable lists, reeks of AI. The majority of the comments declare the piece to be AI written.

It reminds me of using cocaine. I haven't done that for > 50 years, but, for a while I tried it. It quickly became evident, I wasn't in control - the cocaine was. So I completely gave it up, 1973 or so.

This guy is an addict who cannot recognize that the drug, GenAI, is in control, not him. Only thing for him is to quit cold turkey - quit deluding himself. If this is not just some sort of parody.

I'm not a great writer, but I think I'm OK. I think I have a recognizable (human) style: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie), the Bill & Ted movies, & MST3K. Why would I possibly want to use GenAI? Why would I want my rough edges sanded off (Semantic Ablation)? Why would I want my writing to sound like everyone else's?

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Again, 404Media:

Watch These Judges Rip Into Lawyers For Citing Cases That Don't Exist

“It's striking, concerning, disappointing, and saddening to think that members of the bar would forward cases to a court that don't exist, and to think that the lawyers on the other side of that didn’t read it for whatever reason, didn’t check it.”

I actually watched the videos, the judges vaguely chide the lawyers, but nothing too bad IMO. They could have done a 5-10x stronger job of raking these dumbass lawyers over the coals. No mention of GenAI culpability.

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404Media yet again:

Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

Google’s CEO says 75% of the company’s code is AI-generated. The people who write that code say the AI they’re using is overhyped.

---

Finally our anecdote. Wednesday I lunched with an former (2 decades ago) coworker, now in his early 40s. He was always 1 of our best UI guys. Over the years he has come to have a good feel for backend processing & database design as well.

He was management for a while, didn't like it, preferred to be a developer. His manager got promoted upstairs, he got a new manager he didn't like much. Shortly after that, he got another new manager, whom he liked even less. This 1 announced "Everyone should use AI as much as possible. you will be rated on your token usage."

But, business was down, my friend got a minimal raise & a minimal bonus, but had a decent bank account balance, so he decided to quit & take a hiatus.

He's incorporated an LLC to do consulting work. He loves GenAI - "I can give it detailed enough instructions that it will generally do a pretty good job. So I can be a 1-man-show developing complete systems."

I have agreed GenAI is a powerful tool for creatives. Particularly, as in this case, a creative with 2 decades of experience, on several complex systems.

Hmmm, I searched & got nothing, then actually manually reviewed the 125 posts I have done on the Bullshit Apocalypse. This is a thing I love about having 23 years of blogging, that I can go back & review, in depth, my thoughts. I was looking for a reference to someone more reputable than myself (i.e., anyone) espousing the following:

Companies seem to be following a strategy of replacing entry-level positions with GenAI.

But, is this not eating the seed corn?

I believe my friend, with 20 years experience, (or my designer daughter, the same age), can use that experience to instruct Claude Code to build a working system.

But, if the entry-level positions go away, replaced by GenAI, where does the next generation of experienced developers come from?

This is the road to the downward spiral, to Degenerative AI. No more brains to eat, oops!

I lunched today with another developer friend of decades. He uses Claude Code everyday & loves it. He just yesterday, for the 1st time, exceeded the tokens his $100/month subscription gave him - oops!

But, again, he's a developer with 20 years or more experience. He's not vibe coding. He's using a tool, &, I'm sure, reviewing every line of code Claude is giving him. Can vibe coders do that? I doubt it.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #127.

Palaces of the Crow

"Palaces of the Crow", by Ray Nayler, 2026, 384 pages, 81k words.

After giving us a novel about an intelligent species of octopus, Nayler gives us a a novel about an intelligent species of crows. Yay corvids! Probably my 2 most favorite non-human intelligent species.

The story is set from the 1930s to the 1970s. The main characters are 4 young people trying to survive World War II & its aftermath in southern Lithuania. A Jewish girl, daughter of doctors; a Roma girl; a Polish boy who had been sent to Siberia & then drafted into the Russian army; and a young mute boy. They form a deep relationship with each other, but also with the huge murder of intelligent crows, who help them to survive.

One subtext running through this story I found quite timely: they talk often about the senses & non-verbal communications - gestures, sighs, touches, screams - which are shared by humans & other animal species. 1 of the characters later in life publishes a book "The Unnamed Senses".

I find this timely because meanwhile, as the Bullshit Apocalypse proceeds, we have literature professor types proclaiming the victory of Semiotics & Literary Theory in the form of the Semiotic Zombie LLMs. These are creatures of nothing but words. Forget any other senses, unnammed or not. I think this book takes issue with that.

This book was a nice length, I finished it the day after I started it.

"Solipsism All The Way Down" Doesn't Work

I finally invoked the "no starting any new book until you finish writing this" rule on my review/summary of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs - a Theory". Making great progress! Preface & 5 chapters done, only 2 chapters left!

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.

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1st up, as ever, Gary Marcus:

If enough other companies report the same, the bubble pops. 🫧

Breaking: “Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said he’s not seeing proportional productivity gains from increasing AI costs.”

Also reporting AI problems: Microsoft, Target, Starbucks.

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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 All

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.

I'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.

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.

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From Henry Farrell's blog, Programable Mutter:

AI Isn't Management. Try Explaining That to Matthew Prince

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 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.

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.

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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 migrants

It's solipsism all the way down.

LOL, there's where my title came from. I don't think "solipsism all the way down" works. Solipsism doesn't recurse.

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Again from Kottke:

A recent study of 2.5M scientific papers found ~146,900 fake citations

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.”

5.876%, if the slop is evenly distributed. Quoting Gary Marcus, "Slopacalypse Now".

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From 404Media:

‘Lobotomized’: Character.AI Is Showing What AI Enshittification Looks Like

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.

I'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.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #125.

Claude Sent Me

From slipstream author Robin Sloan's blog. This post is mostly a link to the next post, but there's also an anecdote that gave me the title of my post.

The new funnel

I can add, anecdotally, that in Q1 of this year, Fat Gold [an olive oil subscription product?] saw its first subscription referrals from LLMs. We don’t (can’t?) track these programmatically, but we do ask new annual subscribers where they heard about us, and, for the first time, the reply has come: Claude sent me.

Well, you know where they are coming from, at least.

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Linked to by the prior post. Buttondown is a company with an (eponymous?) newsletter/email automation product. Justin (JM) Duke is the CEO. Their numbers appear to be soaring due to LLM referrals???

LLMs and Buttondown

It feels weird to complain about this. So let me list some of the weird ways it has surfaced.

1. Churn. It is too early to really understand the statistical significance of this, but I'm faintly worried about churn being higher for these users than for our traditional cohort. A lot of our approach to onboarding and pricing hinges on a fairly high LTV; it's how we can justify outsized investment in support, for instance. Definitionally, lower LTV warps a lot of these decisions.

2. Support. While the absolute volume of support tickets coming from LLM-born users isn't significantly higher than the median, the shape of those tickets is off. To put it bluntly: a lot of the tickets we get are themselves LLM-generated. This is, frankly, extremely annoying — and demoralizing for me and the team to spend half an hour meticulously answering some complex question only to receive a machine-generated reply in return.

3. ICP. Buttondown has grown through word of mouth alone since its inception, which means that our customers all kind of have the same vibe — and, more importantly, know what our vibe is in return. LLM-born users, by virtue of having outsourced the research process, really don't. This materializes in every aspect of the conversion pipeline, from prospecting (I recently had a sales call with a user who was shocked to learn we don't support cold email) to volume.

They are rightly viewing the development very gingerly.

---

The whole UBI (Universal Basic Income) movement seems to be seeing GenAI as a possible savior? BIEN - the Basic Income Earth Network - is I think the strongest UBI promoting organization. I think Leon Skunk & the rest are selling them a bill of goods, to try to get someone other than corporate managers to like GenAI.

AI leaders see mass job loss coming. They want government’s help solving it.

Elon Musk has a plan for a future where jobs are wiped out by artificial intelligence: a benevolent government will provide.

This links to an article of the same title in the Washington Post. So Bezos is helping to dangle the carrot.

---

From Will Lockett's Newletter, which apparently I stumbled across on SubStack. Will Lockett is "A Climate & Politics Journalist who is pissed off that the world is burning, corrupt and broken, yet no one in power seems to care."

This is a really well thought out & informative post.

Our AI Fears Have Been Confirmed

A slow-motion car crash.

I really like the "slow-motion car crash" verbiage. I'm sure that was what lead me to read the article. I think it is a most excellent description of the Bullshit Apocalypse.

I think we'll see more & more systems seizing up, becoming unworkable, as the 10% error rate in the underlying GenAI tech compounds, leading to Degenerative AI. I think this author is seeing the same thing.

This post is a must-read, please check it out. A few excerpts. It's hard not to just copy the whole thing. There are several very well thought out themes.

You see, AI layoffs aren’t actually happening. As Oxford Economics found, companies “don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale” and instead suggest that they are actually using the AI layoff narrative to cover up their own shortcomings. In other words, the massive Big Tech layoffs aren’t about AI automation, but to pay for bad performance and AI expenditure.

Why? Because AI doesn’t increase productivity on a business or economic scale. One of the best lines from the Oxford Economics report is when it directly asks, “If jobs are being replaced, where’s the productivity surge?” Everyone seems to have forgotten that productivity is something we measure, and if the AI rhetoric is true, that metric ought to be skyrocketing. But it isn’t; it is stagnating.

I also think that the layoffs "due to increased AI use" in the big tech companies are mostly marketing - "look, we're eating the dogfood! Nom, nom, nom!". It's getting harder & harder to keep the AI bubble inflated.

its use is deskilling us at a remarkable rate. We have known that overexposure to AI in the workplace damages expertise and skill for a while now, thanks to studies like those from JYX and Carnegie Mellon. Even Anthropic found that coders using its tools lost coding skills and comprehension. But researchers and professors are starting to notice a striking, consistent trend in recent findings: workers using AI at work are deskilling at disturbingly rapid rates.

Why is this a problem? Well, thanks to constant hallucinations (which aren’t going to stop any time soon, read more here) and shocking high costs, AI can’t replace workers. So, this deskilling will inevitably harm the economy.

...

AI is a massive threat to our economy. However, can we stop pretending that it is because these hollow plagiarism tools are themselves a threat because they are so capable? They aren’t; they cannot replace us, and it is moronic to suggest otherwise. The real threat is big tech grifting the stock and debt markets to turn their value into a perpetual-motion machine and, as a result, undermining the financial systems our economy is built on.

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #124.

Flooding the Zone, Part 2

From David Rosenthal, Parts 2 & 3 of his "Flooding the Zone":

Flooded Zones Part 2

This is the promised follow-on to Flooded Zones Part 1, which discussed the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack being mounted by AI against the scholarly publication system. By reducing the cost of generating and submitting a paper or a review, AI has caused a massive increase in the quantity and a significant decrease in the quality of submissions to a system that was already vastly overloaded.

Below the fold I look at AI-enabled DDoS attacks against two other even more important areas; software security and political discourse.

Yawn. We've seen this before. & my yawn shows the biggest meta-problem facing us: Bullshit Fatigue. The constant hype & bullshit of AI marketing, AND AI output, is wearing us all out.

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From Kottke:

There’s No Earthly Way of Knowing Which Direction We Are Going…

Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.:

The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.

Seriously??? 1 could possibly hope that GenAI could be used responsibly, if there weren't a quite sufficient # of humans who are rapacious, amoral, capitalist assholes. Or, more likely, just plain lazy.

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All those AI notetakers? They're making lawyers very nervous.

Hmmm, lawyers don't like the 10% error rate & complete lack of common sense in GenAI notetaker systems? Since they might be legally left hanging by AI incompetence?

What are they? Commies! Luddites!

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From the guys who, IMO, may be running the most reasonable discussion on GenAI issues.

Do AI Risks Require Extraordinary Government Intervention?

Let’s not skip the hard work of AI governance

In a recent essay, Derek Thompson engages with AI as Normal Technology (AINT). He agrees with our thesis about AI’s slow labor market impacts, relying on the fact that GDP growth has so far been average, unemployment is below 5%, and even jobs that seemed vulnerable to automation show rising employment and wages. He concludes that so far, the macroeconomic picture is consistent with what we would expect from a “normal” general-purpose technology.

But when it comes to AI risks, he is far more bearish. He points to examples of cyber- and bio-risks and expresses pessimism about AI quickly becoming dangerous across many new domains. He argues that AI’s emergent capabilities make it fundamentally different from previous technologies, and that this difference justifies “extraordinary” government responses including restrictions on what companies can release.

Hmmm. I think I've said "Technology this powerful needs to be licensed." I think this article agrees?

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #123.

Threatening, Flooding, Tricking, Drowning, Dying

All gerunds, all the time! Showing that the Bullshit Apocalypse is an ongoing process.

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From Bruce Schneier:

How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s Mythos AI?

I think this is more reinforcement for my original feel that Antropic's Mythos announcement was mostly hype:

While Anthropic’s model is really good at finding software vulnerabilities, so are other models. The UK’s AI Security Institute found that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, already generally available, is comparable in capability. The company Aisle reproduced Anthropic’s published results with smaller, cheaper models.

So using AIs to find software vulnerabilities will become SOP, & hopefully developers find them before the software is released.

But Schneier then raises a very, very concerning point:

Even more interesting are the broader implications. The same searching, pattern-matching and reasoning capabilities that make these models so good at analyzing software almost certainly apply to similar systems. The tax code isn’t computer code, but it’s a series of algorithms with inputs and outputs. It has vulnerabilities; we call them tax loopholes. It has exploits; we call them tax avoidance strategies. And it has black hat hackers: attorneys and accountants.

...

As goes the tax code, so goes any other complex system of rules and strategies. These models could be tasked with finding loopholes in environmental rules, or food and safety rules—anywhere there are complex regulatory systems and powerful people who want to evade those rules.

You should need a license for technology this powerful. & your use should be carefully monitored. Just like dynamite & other explosives.

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From David Rosenthal:

Flooded Zones Part 1

Wow, apparently Rosenthal was a very early harbinger of the Bullshit Apocalypse; the post he references came out May 11, 2023. 13 months before I cracked from the perpetual hype & called "Bullshit!"

Three years ago in Flooding The Zone With Shit, my first post on the AI bubble, I wrote:

My immediate reaction to the news of ChatGPT was to tell friends "at last, we have solved the Fermi Paradox". It wasn't that I feared being told "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it", but rather that I assumed that civilizations across the galaxy evolved to be able to implement ChatGPT-like systems, which proceeded to irretrievably pollute their information environment, preventing any further progress.

The post title was a notorious quote from Steve Bannon. Below the fold, I look into scholarly publication, the first of three areas whose zones are currently being flooded with AI output in what can be considered DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks

I had not made that connection: that the Bullshit Apocalypse, or Slopocalypse Now as Gary Marcus called it, it a form of a DDoS - on all systems based on words, i.e., on our civilization in general. Shudder.

I think there have been 2 links already in this blog on scholarly publications being overwhelmed by slop. The other 2 domains Rosenthal will cover in Parts 2 & 3 are "political discourse and software security".

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From Leif Weatherby via the NYT:

Why We Keep Tricking Ourselves Into Thinking A.I. Is Conscious

A funny thing keeps happening on the internet. A prominent thinker chats with a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude for a while, and then decides that it might be conscious. The person reports this to the public, and a round of intense argument and speculation about artificial intelligence “minds” ensues. These little kerfuffles pass quickly. But they are persistent, and I’ve been thinking about why.

Weatherby examines in detail the interaction between Claude & Richard Dawkins, which I posted on here. A sad affair.

Note, I have run across Weatherby before. I kind of went off on him & semiotics here. I'm still stuck at having read 40% of his book because I'm still stuck on writing a review of "Bullshit Jobs". His book "Language Machines", is subtitled "Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism". "Remainder Humanism" I think is the belief that human beings can think better than LLMs. Can't have that, can we???

IMO, never trust a semiotician. Still, it's an interesting read. Here's Weatherby's conclusion:

Adapting our reading practices to large language model output is a shift just like that one, where we change what we normally expect from our surroundings. We don’t expect meaningful and rhetorically powerful prose to come from anything but a conscious mind. But now it does. We cannot afford to believe the marketing message from A.I. companies that we may be dealing with some spiritual essence. In the age of cultural A.I., technical expertise alone won’t save us. We’ll have to add a new form of reading to make sense of our new world.

So maybe this "new form of reading" is what was mentioned in the 3rd reference in this post from last Wednesday, which talks about all the brain/CPU cycles we are all starting to waste detecting AI slop. I'm sure it's all for a greater good? Or, NOT!!!

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From economist Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey via the NYT:

This Is Why You’re Drowning in Busywork

I keep seeing the phrase "LLMs democratize ...". What that means: something we used to have someone else do, we now can do ourself. But, increasingly, it means we now HAVE to do it ourselves.

& I guarantee there are lots of cases where an LLM is not going to do as good a job as a human expert. Estimates of the error rates of LLMs seem to be converging on 10%. Way too high IMO.

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Cory Doctorow recently posted:

Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire

The post is mostly an analysis of this post by Icelandic "writer, web developer and consultant" Baldur Bjarnason. Bjarnason seems to be in the business of helping people figure out why their software projects fail (& presumably, how they can make them succeed?)

The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born

This is a long post but well worth the read. Bjarnason posits that the US tech hegemony is possible only because of the US political hegemony, I think? Most of the world hates our fucking software. I mean, a perpetual subscription to Office 365 or whatever? OpenOffice for me!

LLMs & the datacenter glut is just the latest phase in extending the tech hegemony.

But, oops, Orange Turd & Bebe's Epstein/Iran War has just destroyed the old world order! Midair disassembly indeed! Time for something new!

Here is Bjarnason I think succinctly discussing GenAI. I just really didn't get how everyone could be ignoring the glaring flaws in LLM-based GenAI. This explains a lot.

Even my writing on “AI” has centred on how things work, not on politics, social impact, education, or culture:

• How do LLMs affect productivity and quality? (Much like leaded petrol. There’s some potential benefit for individual users with literally decades of expertise, provided nobody else uses LLMs. The results are catastrophic when everybody is using them.)

• How do LLMs affect the thinking of those that use them? (Quite a bit, mostly for the worse, but the exact causes and effects are tough to assess.)

• Does it work for business or not? (Mostly not. The inherent variability of a generative model means that the benefits will always be mostly hypothetical while the harms are widespread and long-lasting and substantially outweigh the benefits that can be realised.)

But “AI”, even more so than any other tech, is contingent on political clout. It’s what forces through data centres, lets companies infringe on copyright and violate software licences, renders them at least temporarily immune to all kinds of consumer protections and wrongful death suits, and results in the political collaboration where “AI” systems provide authoritarian states with “accountability sinks” and algorithmic cover for institutional racism. It’s this political partnership more than anything inherent in the technology that has let the “AI” bubble get this far and change so much.

I concur with Doctorow, this article is definitely "must read".

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #122.

All Gary, All The Time!

I've been back in Lexington KY for 9 days now. I'm much less productive here, for various reasons. My latest Bullshit Apocalypse post was May 1. Since then, 5 posts have piled up to be shared - all by Gary Marcus!

As much as I appreciate the great work that Gary is doing, I think that this is a bad thing. It shows that the other people who post about the Bullshit Apocalypse, the horrible flaws of LLMs that are being completely ignored by the hype machine, are suffering from Bullshit Fatigue. They are worn out by the constant bullshit emitted by the AI hype machine. Bullshit Fatigue was in the title of my latest Bullshit Apocalypse post, I'm feeling it too.

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Richard Dawkins and The Claude Delusion

The great skeptic gets taken in

This is one of the sadder essays I have ever had to write.

Wow, I so agree. This is heart-breaking.

I remember reading "The Selfish Gene" (1976) in the early 1980s. Dawkins invented the term "meme", & the science of memetics! So amazing!

Now, he spends 3 days talking to Claude, & "failed to convince myself that it is not conscious".

He's now 85 YO. Clearly his game is declining. Presumably it happens to us all.

From Gary's post:

The fundamental problem here is that Dawkins doesn’t reflect on how these outputs have been generated. Claude’s outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than as a report of genuine internal states.

Consciousness is about internal states; the mimicry, no matter how rich, proves very little. Dawkins seems to imagine that since LLMs say things people do, they must be like people, and that simply does not follow.

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Revisiting a theme we've touched on before.

Have LLMs improved patient outcomes?

A new review suggests otherwise

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Breaking: Autonomous Agents are a Shitshow

Brace for chaos

I was somewhat disappointed that the article focuses on how easily hackable the agents are, via several avenues, and does not comment on their efficacy.

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Breaking news: “they hadn’t figured out how OpenAI would pay for it”

Sign of things to come?

So OpenAI & Broadcom announce a Big Deal: 10GW of custom chips made together! But, who's paying? Oops!

Great diagrams of the "AI Circular Economy". As Doctorow says:

I'm worried that the seven companies that comprise 35% of the S&P 500 are headed for bankruptcy, as soon as someone makes them stop passing around the same $100b IOU while pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once.

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Agents and ROI

Remember that MIT study that showed that the ROI for generative AI wasn’t really there for most businesses? Or any of the six or seven studies from other teams that followed, showing basically the same?

The situation for agents thus far looks to be similar: lots of hype; not so much ROI:

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #120.