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  • The government is backtracking on this cut. But when they said “AI,” they meant magical chatbots with costs in the fabulous future that would make them look cool. They didn’t mean medical systems that work, but cost money right now. This was always about the press releases.

    In the grander scheme of things, I expect this shitshow will further reinforce notions of "AI" being utterly useless as a tech - auto-contouring was a real-life example of AI being useful, and it got thrown in the bin because it wasn't a magical chatbot that made radiologists obsolete.

  • In other news, the Guardian landed an exclusive scoop on cuts to "AI cancer tech funding in England". Baldur Bjarnason's given his commentary:

    Turns out rebranding even the genuinely useful Machine Learning as “AI” doesn’t help them get funding. The only beneficiaries of the bubble seem to be volatile media synthesis engines

    You want my opinion, future machine learning research is probably gonna struggle to get funding once the bubble bursts, both due to the "AI" stench rubbing off on the field, and due to gen-AI sucking up all of the funding that would've gone towards actually useful shit. (Arguably, its already struggling even before the bubble's burst.)

  • In case you missed it, a couple sneers came out against AI from mainstream news outlets recently - CNN's put out an article titled "Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown", whilst the New York Times recently proclaimed "The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes".

    You want my take on this development, I'm with Ed Zitron on this - this is a sign of an impending sea change. Looks like the bubble's finally nearing its end.

  • proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by helping to justify a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses

    Not to mention, the aforementioned bubble's given us shit like some jackasses' ghoulish (and failed) attempt to "revive" George Carlin, attempts to automate end-of-life care, "AI seances" designed to scam the grieving, and God-knows-what-else.

    So, the very concept of "defeating death with technology" has probably been thoroughly discredited as impossible, inherently ghoulish, or a combo of the two.

  • Yud was right - we should bomb the shit out of AI servers!

    Not to prevent a superintelligent AI from becoming sentient and killing us all, but because this shit should not be allowed to fucking exist

    EDIT: For context, this was reacting to Erikson showing me AI-generated Ghibli memes.

  • In other news, the Open Source Intiative's publicly bristled against the EU's attempt to regulate AI, to the point of weakening said attempts.

    Tante, unsurprisingly, is not particularly impressed:

    Thank you OSI. To protect the purity of your license – which I do not consider to be open source – you are working towards making it harder for regulators to enforce certain standards within the usage of so-called “AI” systems. Quick question: Who are you actually working for? (I know, it is corporations)

    The whole Open Source/Free Software movement has run its course and has been very successful for business. But it feels like somewhere along the line we as normal human beings have been left behind.

    You want my opinion, this is a major own-goal for the FOSS movement - sure, the OSI may have been technically correct where the EU's demands conflicted with the Open Source Definition, but neutering EU regs like this means any harms caused by open-source AI will be done in FOSS's name.

    Considering FOSS's complete failure to fight corporate encirclement of their shit, this isn't particularly surprising.

  • I've already heard of this - mainly thanks to the nuclear backlash it (and basically anything related to AI) is getting. Pulling out a particular highlight, here's Ashley Lynch tearing the whole thing a new one:

    Stuff like this is perfect because it shows how utterly devoid of creativity genAI evangelists are. Great, you recreated a photo that already exists in a drawing style that only has currency because of who you're stealing it from giving the world something with absolutely no value or meaning. I can't tell you how excited I am that we're literally burning the Earth up for this garbage.

    Every genAI techbro needs to be sent to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity with how they've traded our future for this absolute bullshit. Straight up capital punishment for every one of these fucking losers responsible for cursing us with this garbage. I have zero chill on this issue anymore. They represent the end of humanity.