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Knitting bullshit

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Re: Knitting bullshit

#71

Post by Tade0 »

frereubu wrote: post #13

I wonder if (or, more accurately hope that) this kind of slop will eventually die out as people realise how little care is put into it. I am more and more convinced that if the devil existed he'd take care of the bigger stuff, but have an army of little devils that encourage people to do things like make unsupervised automated podcasts about knitting, relentlessly chipping away at the messy joys of living.

Just like Big Tobacco moved onto greener pastures in the developing world, Big Slop is not targeting specifically us, but the billions of new internet users who connected over the past decade:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS

There's this (now old) meme called "Italian brainrot" - AI generated characters with vaguely Italian-sounding names like Bombardiro Crocodilo (note the incorrect spelling of the Italian word for crocodile).

One character stands out - Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Not only does it not sound Italian at all, that last word rang a bell.

Sahur (or Suhur) is the meal eaten before dawn during Ramadan.

After some digging I discovered this whole category originated in Indonesia. The country experienced an absolute explosion in the number of internet users in recent years and is home to internet phenomena which spread globally, but few in the west seem to realise that.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#72

Post by jagged-chisel »

MITSardine wrote: post #66

Great article, thanks for sharing. I didn't know (but should have assumed) AI-generated podcasts existed. That's depressing. I imagined if mankind had the ideal machine, that could automate anything, we would get rid of dull office work and back breaking physical labor, but not the things that are actually enjoyable: sharing with each other, entertaining each other, making art. I imagined a lively world of live perfo…

The incentives are at odds. In this capitalist landscape, you create podcasts and blogs (or have them created) to attract an audience which then attracts those fat advertising dollars.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#73

Post by dsign »

tovej wrote: post #14
dsign wrote: post #10

TL;DR: there are brainrot farms with help from AI. But I saw this one coming three or four years ago. Actually, I've been listening to AI-generated brainrot music. I prefer it to some human-generated brainrot music (there's "I Hate Boys" from Christina Aguilera. Sorry if you are a fan). Brainrot serves a specific social purpose: relieving stress, incoherently winning elections. It's a kind of drug that dulls the dang…

Are you serious when you connect anti-AI sentiment to anti-science sentiment? To me, they are opposite sentiments, and my experience discussing AI with others supports this. The most pro-AI people I meet are very far removed from science, and my research colleagues are definitely more critical of AI than not.

> Are you serious when you connect anti-AI sentiment to anti-science sentiment?

I don’t believe that the current state of things represents peak-AI problems. AI is for now weak both in its capability and its impact, and also just new. Speculatively, if things go really bad, in a couple of decades there will be a huge swath of population without jobs nor high-flying education. They, perhaps rightly, will blame AI for the situation, but they’ll also, perhaps rightly, blame capital and the “snobbish elite” that is today and in the near future propping AI. That “snobbish elite” is well-paid engineers and researchers. That’s because people tend to like to have somebody to blame for their problems. But even without making it about bad guys, the heart of the thing that is pouring billions into AI is a relentless ethos of profit deriving from progress and disruption. You can’t stop AI without stabbing that heart.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#74

Post by philipallstar »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #72
MITSardine wrote: post #66

Great article, thanks for sharing. I didn't know (but should have assumed) AI-generated podcasts existed. That's depressing. I imagined if mankind had the ideal machine, that could automate anything, we would get rid of dull office work and back breaking physical labor, but not the things that are actually enjoyable: sharing with each other, entertaining each other, making art. I imagined a lively world of live perfo…

The incentives are at odds. In this capitalist landscape, you create podcasts and blogs (or have them created) to attract an audience which then attracts those fat advertising dollars.

Ironically, these are both incredibly common, LLM-able takes:

Lament: Oh why did we automate art?

Answer: Capitalism.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#75

Post by philipallstar »

kombookcha wrote: post #57
latexr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the start of Good Omens, there’s a scene where demons are sharing their recent misdeeds. A couple of them are sharing “classic” demon stuff like killing and possessing, but Crowley (the protagonist demon) shares more modern evil deeds, such as creating traffic jams. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens I’d link to a clip of it, but to your point some devil is making it frustratingly hard to find.

It's been years, but I seem to recall that Crowley specifically is very proud about making sure some motorway project got botched, because the continual drip of suffering from the accumulated jams and road rage makes him look really good in the spreadsheets even though he's not much for the classical showy stuff. Millions of little instances of suffering adding up year on year, instead of a handful of incidents of re…

I thought it was that he altered planning documents and even went and moved physical markings to make the M25 the shape of the ancient evil sigril Odegra (this is from memory; I just read it a lot as a teenager) so every angry drive round it powers that sigil.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#77

Post by cindyllm »

MITSardine wrote: post #66

Great article, thanks for sharing. I didn't know (but should have assumed) AI-generated podcasts existed. That's depressing. I imagined if mankind had the ideal machine, that could automate anything, we would get rid of dull office work and back breaking physical labor, but not the things that are actually enjoyable: sharing with each other, entertaining each other, making art. I imagined a lively world of live perfo…

[dead]

Re: Knitting bullshit

#78

Post by jrmg »

quibono wrote: post #11

Am I to believe that those 700K+ downloads are organic traffic? Who's listening to all this stuff?

My podcast app downloads way more podcast episodes than I actually listen to.

Re: Knitting bullshit

#79

Post by FrustratedMonky »

tovej wrote: post #14
dsign wrote: post #10

TL;DR: there are brainrot farms with help from AI. But I saw this one coming three or four years ago. Actually, I've been listening to AI-generated brainrot music. I prefer it to some human-generated brainrot music (there's "I Hate Boys" from Christina Aguilera. Sorry if you are a fan). Brainrot serves a specific social purpose: relieving stress, incoherently winning elections. It's a kind of drug that dulls the dang…

Are you serious when you connect anti-AI sentiment to anti-science sentiment? To me, they are opposite sentiments, and my experience discussing AI with others supports this. The most pro-AI people I meet are very far removed from science, and my research colleagues are definitely more critical of AI than not.

I think he is making the point that scientist built the AI.

The whole "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should,"

Re: Knitting bullshit

#80

Post by card_zero »

philipallstar wrote: post #74
jagged-chisel wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives are at odds. In this capitalist landscape, you create podcasts and blogs (or have them created) to attract an audience which then attracts those fat advertising dollars.

Ironically, these are both incredibly common, LLM-able takes: Lament: Oh why did we automate art? Answer: Capitalism.

It's superficially true, currently. We've had generative AI for a few years and people are using it to make a quick buck. But even if the world had been taken over by communism, or if the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea had got imperial ambitions and now we all lived in a gift economy, people would still be using generative AI to gain attention and status. This will work until it wears thin. Thinner.
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