When it seemed like cryptocurrency was gonna be the thing to break the grid, Generative AI was like Hold My Beer:

(several articles about this in recent days)

https://jacobin.com/2024/06/ai-data-cen ... 6d7c8fabbc

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to disable the horseshit AI search feature Google tacked on a few months ago (that consumes 10x as much power), but ending queries with before:2023 seems to work well.

penningtron wrote: Mon Jun 24, 2024 7:25 pm There doesn't seem to be an easy way to disable the horseshit AI search feature Google tacked on a few months ago (that consumes 10x as much power), but ending queries with before:2023 seems to work well.

Might not meet your definition of "easy way", but: https://udm14.com/

Also: DuckDuckGo.

There are a few, and I mean vanishingly few, legitimately useful applications for the family of technologies our media / discourse refer to as "AI", and almost none of them are visible to the average (media) consumer. Things like generating different shapes for fabricating concrete that satisfy material cost and strength parameters. Upscaling digital video is maybe one of the few that is visible. None of these are an excuse for jamming chatbots and dumbass LLM responses into every goddamn thing under the sun. I found this article, "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again", extremely funny and relatable from the perspective of someone who knows this shit well, but is still incredibly skeptical of the way we're using it.

brephophagist wrote: Mon Jun 24, 2024 8:26 pm I found this article, "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again", extremely funny and relatable from the perspective of someone who knows this shit well, but is still incredibly skeptical of the way we're using it.

I clicked and found it very relatable.

It also led me to an older essay titled "I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again", which I also found relatable.

Yeah that was great, though I wish there was a non-profane equivalent I could share to all the Linkedin fools who obsess about How AI Will Transform Your Team. If You're Reading This You're Already Behind horseshit.

I was talking to a friend who works freelance in animation and he fucking hates AI. His main points were that for people who create in his field and related ones, AI is basically ripping off and copying all of their work. To add insult to injury the Adobe suite keeps charging more and adding AI tools to their software. It's discouraging to be marketed a bunch of fancy new tools that are also ripping off the content creators who are supposed to implement them.

AI is the new Cloud

losthighway wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2024 7:32 am I was talking to a friend who works freelance in animation and he fucking hates AI. His main points were that for people who create in his field and related ones, AI is basically ripping off and copying all of their work. To add insult to injury the Adobe suite keeps charging more and adding AI tools to their software. It's discouraging to be marketed a bunch of fancy new tools that are also ripping off the content creators who are supposed to implement them.

Here’s a useful proposal for AI: use it to develop a tool that scans YouTube and other platforms for AI-generated content that shares a melody or visual with copyrighted, non-AI material, so that the people who did the work can sue.

I know it ain't right but I'm a sucker for certain AI horror content.

Shit is freaky.

andyman wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2024 8:14 am AI is the new Cloud

Maybe regarding hype? But otherwise I don't see much in common. Cloud computing is actually useful (it's pretty awesome being able to upload a multitrack session to an engineer thousands of miles away without having to send a hard drive in the mail) and as far as energy consumption I don't see why remote servers would be worse than On Prem ones. Perhaps it has lead to an out of sight, out of mind effect as far as mindless media and energy consumption goes but that seems like another issue..

Same with Agile. Maybe it's annoying to hear about but I don't see how it's actively harming the world like AI.

penningtron wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2024 3:35 pm

andyman wrote: Tue Jun 25, 2024 8:14 am AI is the new Cloud

Maybe regarding hype? But otherwise I don't see much in common. Cloud computing is actually useful (it's pretty awesome being able to upload a multitrack session to an engineer thousands of miles away without having to send a hard drive in the mail) and as far as energy consumption I don't see why remote servers would be worse than On Prem ones. Perhaps it has lead to an out of sight, out of mind effect as far as mindless media and energy consumption goes but that seems like another issue..

Same with Agile. Maybe it's annoying to hear about but I don't see how it's actively harming the world like AI.

You're right, in practice they're nothing alike.

But this whole "shove AI in every product" reminds me of how when the cloud became accessible every company wanted to migrate to it just because. They didn't understand it nor could they derive much benefit from it. It was just shit leadership falling for the latest buzz tech to seem forward.

(Also, I wouldn't associate file transfer - which you can do with Soulseek - with the cloud; the cloud was/is about scalability, redundancy, and geographic optimisation which not every company needed....)