Also -ai isn't a magic token to remove AI. The minus sign tells search to exclude the following term in results, so "washington -george" will mostly exclude the first president. It just happens to also turn off Gemini because it doesn't do the same kind of processing original search does.

Carpe carp.

If you need pictures to go with the story, I recommend Ralph Steadman.

www.alibris.com/search/books...

Haha. Copyediting, too.

I get it. I’m not saying all copyrighting has no value, just that I see why they’re first under the gun.

Unlike clothing, though, which is a necessity, I suspect a lot of ad copy isn't necessary. Not to dis those who worked hard, but a lot of it is nearly indistinguishable. There's a reason so much of this stuff just gets called "content."

cheaper and faster, and deemed "good enough" -- that's exactly what happened in the cotton industry in the industrial revolution, too, as you documented.

Of course, rather than dumping the software, they'll just make it a crime to fool the AI. 🙄

I can't claim any moral high ground. I was planning to return to tech after my MFA, but I just wanted to keep living like a grad student. 😐

I was just telling people Wednesday night how weird it feels now to tell people I used to work there. Dropping "don't be evil" was ominous, but I'm sure there were signs well before that. The "UrsQuake" seemed like a real change, too, but maybe that's just because I was personally affected.

One of the weird things about laugh tracks was you could sometimes hear the same person in different shows. A really distinctive voice would tell you it was all faked.

It's hilariously ironic that LLMs, the great venture capitalist wet dream, are being tarred with the brush of the great American boogeyman, communism.

Quite literally the running dogs of American capitalism. 🤣

Nice essay! The "selling" part is important, too. Dick's version of capitalism is sort of nickel and diming you constantly. I think the cyberpunk books got the power-hungry global-corporation part of our world a little better. That wasn't as obvious in the 60s the way it was in the 80s.

The only thing they're "reassessing" is the amount of money that can be made by ignoring people's health. Actual reassessment would require, you know, science.

He's awfully opaque about what "the AI" was. There are lots of tools based on machine learning that are useful: OCR, Google translate. But was this just an LLM, or was it augmented with a medical database? He doesn't say.