Matthew
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Matthew
@matthewmck.bsky.social
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Reposted by Matthew
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But this. This new reality we have created, in all its deadening sprawl and intellect-devouring insipidity, is to be detested. Where each new day brings a dozen clear examples of Big AI’s philosophical bankruptcy, societal danger, and financial fraudulence, alongside a dozen more articles offering breathless. descriptions of its magical brilliance. We have elevated to sentience a technology that almost never works as well as what it replaces, and is still intellectually, morally, and creatively redundant when it does. Cobbled together from guesswork and plagiarised material, via processes that scorch the environment as they enrich the worst people on this quickly dying planet, the craven psychopaths making billions of dollars on false claims of its future viability, borne by distinctly bubble-shaped bluster about its current, constant, ever-increasing profitability. It is this, AI’s main swizz, that irks me the most. Because its packaging as a cure-all for everything is the surface flash of a cruise ship magician; its real function is being a limitless cash trap for credulous investors, and a replacement for labour in companies – and, yes, newspapers – who worry less about the quality of their product than the costs of paying humans to deliver it. If what we’re left with is slop, who cares? The pigs will drink it down. It’s an abhorrence, based on a lie, rapidly remaking the world in its own tedious image.
May 24, 2025 at 9:32 AM
Reposted by Matthew
seamas.bsky.social
On what every single day is like now.
It’s been two months since I wrote about AI which, as someone who detests having to write about AI, feels like not much time at all. A quick look at recent headlines, however, suggests that there is little else to talk about. Consider that the CEO of language-learning app Duolingo claimed AI was a better teacher than humans but schools will still remain open in future “because you still need childcare”; a Finnish man was sentenced in Scottish court for using AI to create images of young girls being abused; Google unveiled Project Astra, an AI client that will sit inside your phone listening to everything you say so it can provide unprompted advice at any time; the United Nations’ International Labour Organization said that AI poses a bigger threat to jobs traditionally held by women than those of men; Silicon Valley Bank reported that 40% of cash raised by venture funds last year was for companies focusing on artificial intelligence; Reuters reported that data centre plans in the US are far outpacing expected demand; and Italian researchers found that, despite all their aforementioned hallucinations, errors, and contradictions, AI chatbots were more persuasive in online debates than their human counterparts 64% of the time. If that sounds like a lot of news for two months, well, I wish this were true. Every one of those headlines is from Tuesday, May 20, the same day the Chicago Sun-Times’ reading list became a major story, and the day I began writing this column. With a trickling sense of dread I realise that I could, therefore, write an article just like this one every single day, each filled with brand-new examples of AI’s constant enshittification of the media we consume, factless posturing from its creators, marketing overhype from its torch-bearers, and bovine vapidity now normalised among those who use it.
May 24, 2025 at 1:30 PM