technology

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41363156

Everything old is new again

In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book. Soon, people will find it incredible that for several decades all our art was obsessed with digital computers: all those novels and films and exhibitions about tin cans that make beeping noises, handy if you need to multiply two big numbers together, but so lifeless, so sexless, so grey synthetic glassy bugeyed spreadsheet plastic drab. And all your smug chortling over the people who failed to predict our internetty present—if anyone remembers it, it’ll be with exactly the same laugh.

https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

Best take I've heard so far on AI is to compare to Jurassic Park and the old "you were to focused on whether or not you could and not whether or not you should" quote. Scientists in real life don't do that, they don't just think of the craziest shit they could dream up and then do it and just see what happens. But apparently fucking computer engineers do.

all the marketing pricks who called it AI should be shot. "AI" doesn't exist yet, these generative models are not intelligent.

The technology is out there already and has already infected the entire cyberspace. The only option left is to throw away the internet and create Internet 2.

I like the pictures of little dogs in plate armor it makes me

Wait until pictures and text in books will be AI-generated too to save on costs.

Get library-pilled

You got the same cyberpunk, you're just outside of the price range to be a main character.

Are you not entertained‽

Got some big ol' honkers though.

The problem is that AI image models aren't dynamic like that. The AI groups already successfully pulled off the heist of the internet and went home with their image data sets with billions of images. The infinitely expanding google images AI slop isn't getting fed back into the model the same way Chat GPT is auto-lobotimizing itself by looking up autogenerated articles on the web.

In fact, at the moment newer AI image models are being refined not by being fed more images but by going back and adding more refined captions to their existing hoard, since the more descriptive the captions the more capable the resulting model tends to be. But hey, they're generating most of the captions with Chat GPT and at least that's fucking them over a bit I guess