Tamagotchi didn’t die for this

Hank Green is a popular science YouTuber who’s been pushing AI doomsday harder and harder for about the past year. The Washington Post article details some of the sponsorships that paid Green to shill for the AI doomsday cult — even as Green says in the article that he thinks AI doomsday is silly.

Green has personal experience of AI doom — when it came out last week just how much of his stuff was written with ChatGPT and Claude. [Mashable]

Hank stood too close to the circus, and caught a stray as a result. You love to see it.

I found the song - was a fun listen all around.

Somehow managed to find a sneer on LinkedIn, of all fucking places:

“It’s open source, so anyone can verify” – unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.

Also, most of the would-be verifiers are frying their brains with AI

Gamers Nexus has announced plans to poison the LLMs scraping them, alongside updates to the megacharts on their website.

The Silicon Valley set’s also shown a complete inability to tell good work from slop, as their relentless glazing of AI slop has demonstrated, so I can easily believe that.

You hide your prompt in a document, which can even be completely outside the target’s Copilot organisation. That infected document gets used as a source by Copilot for Word. If Copilot sees your prompt and uses it as instructions, it may manipulate the document the user is editing — change financial numbers, send company data out to the attacker, and so on.

The new document may in turn become a carrier and spread the infection — even without the original infected document being present. You now have an AI worm.

Oh, joy, we’ve been overdue for another ILOVEYOU-level incident.

A new way to fuck with AI scrapers just dropped!

Aaaaaand its fucking with screen readers, making protected text inaccessible to blind readers. File this next to the alt-text drama in the “AI bros set back accessibility” bucket.

(from the youtube comments)

shot:

One of the lesser discussed issues with the generative AI hype is that it put every single deep learning application under scrutiny. They tend to hide behind the positive uses of deep learning whenever generative AI is criticized, as if medicine research and the misinformation generator cannot be separated. “Nuclear power is impossible unless we are allowed to use nukes” type of argument

chaser:

Alphafold was a really interest project. It was not magic but had some utility. Now all remaining AI projects are lying plagiarism machines.

AI is officially a pseudoscience now.

LLM bros actively force themselves everywhere, part infinity:

Newgrounds moderation had to deal with someone (probably a scammer) posting slop “art advice” recently - exactly why, nobody fuckin’ knows:

A lot of annoying people in technical areas view the world in terms of an intelligence hierarchy: the smartest people do math and physics, the slightly less smart people do coding, and the dumb people do everything else. So if AI can do math then it can do anything else. But, as an example, it is abundantly obvious now that AI is not replacing filmmaking.

Going by those annoying peoples’ logic, filmmakers are smarter than coders, because LLMs can (allegedly) program, but they can’t make a good film. I have no wider point to this, I just find this really, really funny

I tested this with the Navy Seal Copypasta (well, the first 400 letters of it, the demo’s got a limit) - using just Cryllic characters got me a 3.01x increase, and turning on all four control types got a 4.53x increase.

Testing your own recent comment, Cryllic only got 3.38x, and all four controls got 5.11x.

Going from those two, the boost from homoglyphs alone is likely higher than you think - 3x to 3.5x, by my guess - pretty good for human readable text.

Tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes can easily sacrifice readability for token burn, so they can easily go higher.

Adversarial tokenmaxxing could probably be done by using non-English character sets in lieu of English letters (e.g. faux Cryllic) - for two examples from the Greek alphabet, alpha and omicron alone can easily substitute for A and O, respectively.

As a bonus, this would likely make the text look like complete gibberish to LLMs, potentially leaving them unable to process the document altogether. This would probably shaft anyone using screen readers, though.

EDIT: Turns out the demonstration’s already caught on to this idea, didn’t notice beforehand:

The Butlerian Jihad grows closer and closer by the day. Maybe its already arrived.

Oh, boy, Rapist Glasses

There’s a UK Parliament petition to “Introduce an immediate ban on the sale and promotion of smart glasses”. If you’re in the UK, you might want to sign it. [UK Parliament]

Given Parliament’s track record, they’ll probably respond by banning glasses that don’t have cameras, but I still endorse this

Another “AI fucked compsci grads” post has hit my eyeballs - this time, it got recommended to me by LinkedIn’s algorithm) (because I’m still on that site for some fucking reason):

This one’s attributing the decline to “unique human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning becoming premium assets”, and her graph comes from The Economist’s Instagram page AFAICT. That one of the Economist’s sources is Anthropic is giving me some hope this is bullshit, but its not much.

The main thing I knew him for is his failed attempt to hijack the Hugo Awards back in 2015.

(There’s a r/HobbyDrama post about the whole debacle, which I recommend checking out)

“Okay, so it starts with a doomsday cult which formed around GameStop…”