the MBA logic based on a very biased and small sample size from a very select timeframe in the 1980s is that advertising during a recession leads to higher payouts when the economy recovers: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...
there's also a lot of language about preying on people's insecurities by selling them an artificial sense of agency which is a fun reminder of how manipulative marketers are
Bill Hicks really did say it best when it came to marketing:
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can."
The rest of that show is great too, if I remember correctly he goes on ranting about it more and it includes him calling marketers "Satan's little helpers" and blaming them for filling the world with garbage. Basically the wet dream of the people pushing AI hard right now, so sounds like a match made in heaven.
I was recently rewatching one of Hicks routines for the first time in possibly 20 years and his content is just as relevant now, if not more so, than it was 30+ years ago when he wrote and performed it.
Helps that Hicks was borderline obsessed with hating marketing and marketers, and they're an even bigger pest today than 30 years ago. I guess that's how you make your content relevant through the ages, target the parasites :)
that means it's a bad writer. a good writer knows who their reader is and curates their style and complexity to fit. Claude writes like someone who doesn't give a single shit about whether or not you've memorized an initialism it made for some process 10 hours ago. it's the same issue that people have been having with the impenetrability of needless and performative jargon
The problem is that Anthropic and others use the text generated by LLMs also to power the AI's internal thinking loop. This means that text is used in two different ways: one as input to AI, and the other as input to humans.
They are always trying to make the LLMs more intelligent. Guess what kind of output will suffer?
It's more than disorganized - that disorganization hides a bunch of 1) horseshit assertions from nowhere and 2) contradictory statements both given as evidence for the same conclusions.
My entire day is getting praised and apologized to for "holding me to a higher standard" and "pointing out the obvious contradiction." Meanwhile, I'm stuck and can't move forward (because every suggestion is dumb but asserted with the same confidence as the last) and the tokens are draining dry.
When I hear about people converting huge projects to Rust, I'm starting to think that translation is the only thing that they're good at. If you've already entirely specified the problem they can restate the problem without making more than a couple hundred (and getting fewer every day) mistakes.
It's just making it up, and when the things that it is making up are not obvious, it bullshits, it doesn't retrace. Then it builds on that bullshit.
It's not you that's dumb, it's them that are dumb. The people evaluating its output in post-training are also too often deciding that it's they themselves that are misunderstanding, especially when it buries the topic at hand with a bunch of excess verbiage and strange assumptions that they don't have time to independently verify. The need to believe something based on expediency often results in the rationalization that some 3D chess is being played. More like 3 card monte.
> It's not you that's dumb, it's them that are dumb.
I use AI a lot in my workflow and feel like I get a lot out of it. When I first started, I kept reading code & explanations and thinking "man, I just do not understand this explanation, I guess I'm not as good at this as I thought."
Then I started digging with the AI to have it explain stuff to me and I realized, no, it's the AI that's dumb.
Now when I don't understand something that AI generated I understand it's a great sign that it's wrong.
> Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true
it's still a bad fit because there's not currently popular social convention that trusting AI without validation is a bad idea but it's better than psychosis. also it's still stigmatizing and we live in a world where a thesaurus is seconds away at any time. plus psychosis as a diagnosis is typically a cluster of symptoms that go beyond just delusion: https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294416-overview
Two - there's also an implication that there's 'harm' that this AI psychotic person inflicts on others embedded in this article. in reality, the vast majority of those suffering mental illnesses are far more likely to be harmed by others - https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...
part of the work of being a good mental health advocate is not stigmatizing specific diagnoses as negative social ills. now if you don't give a single shit about mental health I'm not going to argue to get you to care. but if you do care then you should do better
> Psychosis as a diagnosis is a serious condition. there's an implication that there's 'harm'
I just watched a company fire an entire department of people under the sincere belief a chatbot run by a middle manager could save them 10 million a year. This failed miserably and they now need to hire or re-hire people.
There is a tremendous amount of harm happening. Psychosis is a perfect term for what is happening.
it absolutely is not. when we think of harm in a diagnosis of psychotic disorders, we're talking about things like getting shot to death by the police, running out onto the highway, etc. it is not callously making a lot of people have to jobhunt
which isn't to say that layoffs don't suck (I was impacted by one very recently) but it's not psychosis that causes that to happen, it's greed and short-term shareholder-fixated thinking. that should be named instead of a mental illness that people suffer from
I agree that calling all this "psychosis" is motivated primarily by a desire to make the person in question look or sound crazy, and is plainly irresponsible on that front.
chatbots being able to evoke real manic episodes in otherwise healthy people is basically true, though - folie a deux doesn't require both participants to have some disorder, and the AI is packing all of them (and the harm is real, there has been something like 30 MDS cases already)
of course, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were case studies of this. but it's far from the usage leveraged in this article or by most, really, and that's somewhat unfortunate
I mean, it's the same sort of slippery slope that the progressive left was saying about the formation of DHS and ICE in the early 2000s that everyone poo-poo'd and said 'no way that'll happen in America' - that these depts would end up being a tools of fascistic repression of political opponents (eg NSPM-7) and a major vehicle for inflicting mass suffering on immigrants of all stripes
Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're not. But cautioning skepticism towards multi-billion dollar institutions with a lot of power and how good their intentions really are is never a wrong move, imo
plus, what do we have to lose from increasing pressure on Anthropic to not participate in a surveillance state? there's no political advantage to being their defender here unless you're super bought into the branding
>I think it's best read as a humorous piece of creative fiction and you can employ your suspension of disbelief for this ride
But what is the point of the fiction, if not that its relatable? Is it supposed to mirror some fictional reality that the author is relieved we dont live in? Or is it supposed to parody real life?
I think its supposed to parody reality, but I don’t see the resemblance.
I live in a city and I cannot tell you how often I see dogshit on the sidewalk, like just in the middle of the sidewalk
the only neighborhoods where I don't see this are the ones where there's some nice retired older person who diligently cleans the shit up. but it's not like they bleach the spot, they just pick up most of the poop. so yeah, there's feces everywhere
Sad to here. I lively in a quiet remote place in the mountains and I usually only find fox shit, or occasional cat shit if anything. People here in Switzerland do usually care. And I got the same impression from _most_ our neighbour countries.
I walk my dog twice a day every day rain or shine. I've picked up his poop 100% of the time - as do most other members of my suburban community. Our parks and sidewalks are mostly dog poop free.
Having said that, I've observed four cases where dog poop is more likely left behind.
1. Small dogs - owners of small dogs seem far more likely to leave dog poop behind. Perhaps because they think the poop is itself small?
2. Older owners (often owners of small dogs, but not always) - seem to care less.
3. Off leash dogs in parks - will often poop at the far edges of parks while their owners chat. Edges of parks and near bushes are minefields.
4. Rainy days - people just want to get home, clean off their dog and be done. So they seem more likely leave poop behind.
it's not a person issue, it's a systems problem in the same way that desire paths reflect bad design. regular garbage receptacles maintained by the city with poop bags would solve this issue but there's not one for miles in my neighborhood. similarly, human waste would be similarly reduced if there were more public restrooms that are maintained as part of the public good
problem is that it requires municipalities and counties to take ownership and they don't give a shit and thus we get the shit we deserve
>but there's not one for miles in my neighborhood.
Pet owners should know to bring bags with them, as they are taking the pet out for it to shit somewhere other than their yard.
It's 100% an asshole pet owner problem. Owning a pet that is shitting somewhere other than your own yard means bringing bags on walks and being prepared to hold that shit filled bag in your hand for the rest of the walk until you can throw it away at home.
It can be partially mitigated by having trashcans and poop bag dispensers, but I've stepped in dog shit next to a poop bag dispenser. Because having trashcans and bags be available doesn't change asshole pet owner habits.
that seems to be the same problem that most product people in tech have - ie they don't use their own app anywhere close to as much as their average user. all the features they champion happen in walled-garden microcosms loosely backed by heavily p-hacked 'voice of the customer' stats
it's like someone who has a personal chauffeur designing the driving experience of a car - you get educated guesses at best and just total crud at worst. actual epiphanies that happen over repeated use and idle thoughts just don't happen
>Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car. In contrast, the least carbon-intensive text generation model they examined was responsible for as much CO2 as driving 0.0006 miles in a similar vehicle
But 3 billion pictures per week is equivalent to 12.4 million miles or 639.6 million miles extra per year.*
It's not about you. There are no 3 billion people each creating one picture per week. Its probably more like 10.000 assholes creating 2.5 billion pictures per week to satisfy some stupid online feed and the other users creating a picture per month on average.
It equals around 0.004% of actual driven miles if my estimates are right.
That is with an estimated ~270 billion miles vehicle miles every week (I put commercial in there.. about ~200 billion miles if you only include passenger vehicles.)
That study is from 2023 when the cost to produce 1000 images was 2.91 Wh per image. More recent numbers for Stable Diffusion's 2025 models that puts it at 1.3 Wh per image and that number continues to decrease.
For context that means a days worth of image generation emits about the same amount of carbon dioxide as a single transatlantic flight (New York to London). There are approximately 1500 transatlantic flights per day.
So every day the people of Vermont emit more CO2 just commuting than all image generation through OpenAI per week. Nice. That does put it in perspective. It’s really efficient.
yep, what our climate really needs is another carbon emitter similar to an entire state's worth of vehicles just so people can not pay artists or make dumb images of themselves ripping off some artistic style like Studio Ghibli. that is so much more of a social good than people being able to make it to work and earn a living
Oh I think paying people to make 3 billion images would result in far more carbon emissions. Just think about how much CO2 a human emits while painting. The paint, the food. Just for the sake of the climate I would never pay an artist for something like this.
for sure, because every one of those 3 billion images rendered by human hand and not automated with a tool would exist. we wouldn't have a magnitude smaller number of focused designs, of course, that's definitely not how art and design processes happen
This is an embarrassingly idiotic article. They're comparing against the least intensive text model, ie some million parameter model nobody uses. Stable Diffusion is a 3.5 billion parameter model, while the GPT models a billion people are using for text generation are over 10 trillion parameters. To say nothing of the differences in average context size usage. The actual ratio of SDXL to text generation pollution is probably literally reversed from what the article claims by lying with statistics.
(Note, however, that OpenAI's image model is much much larger than SDXL; however, we don't have precise numbers for it. Nonetheless, misinformation is misinformation.)
Ours cars are atrocious. We can have the most powerful artificial minds imagine 1000 images from simple prompts, and that takes as much energy as moving a human being 4 miles.
And that will get more energy efficient. Gas cars have barely budged.
in the communities where I am, there are small 'hacker' collectives where people are working on combating surveillance, providing alternative non-surveilled software solutions, and helping other movement folks set-up and adopt less-worse platforms (eg moving off Google to CryptPad)
I think its worthwhile for those of us who are involved in this kind of work to be aware of further descent into fascistic tendencies (ie no policing accountability for repressive violence). the stakes are high and always rising and, accordingly, our risk assessments and threat modeling should stay updated to match
and for people who may disagree with the current regime's politics, it's also healthy to stay apprised of the erosion of your own civil liberties, and the potential downstream effects it might have on your life
there's also a lot of language about preying on people's insecurities by selling them an artificial sense of agency which is a fun reminder of how manipulative marketers are
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