New(ish) piece from Gary Marcus: AI has (sort of) passed the Turing Test; here’s why that hardly matters

Ended up reading it a couple times, thinking of turning my thoughts into a full-length post.

Here’s my first shot at it:

“Imagine if the stereotypical high-school nerd became a supervillain.”

New video from Jessie Gender, providing one long sneer at gen-AI: How AI is Destroying our Dreams

An AI faceswapper/nudifier’s database got leaked thanks to its nonexistent security - unsurprisingly, its loaded with explicit images, including massive amounts child porn and almost certainly some revenge porn.

WIRED tried reaching out to the company behind the “imagery”, but they nuked everything and closed their doors in response.

Gamers Nexus put out their April Fool’s joke for this year, and became the first journalistic outlet to break Betteridge’s law of headlines in the process.

Ed Zitron breaking out the anime references for April Fool’s:

This isn’t one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.

Crypto is nigh-universally hated outside of the techbrosphere (doubly so for NFTs) - they are synonymous with scams and cringe in the public eye. I’d be more shocked if you found a work which presents crypto without immediately dunking on it.

Not to mention he also didn’t write a third-rate rapey-as-shit “dark fantasy” novel, throw nonstop tantrums about people criticising/making fun of him, or jump on the anti-woke content mill grift train.

Just to make this perfectly clear, yes, I am saying that >shadman has more dignity than Shadiversity.

Ran across an animation mocking AI art on Newgrounds recently - found it a pretty good watch.

The government is backtracking on this cut. But when they said “AI,” they meant magical chatbots with costs in the fabulous future that would make them look cool. They didn’t mean medical systems that work, but cost money right now. This was always about the press releases.

In the grander scheme of things, I expect this shitshow will further reinforce notions of “AI” being utterly useless as a tech - auto-contouring was a real-life example of AI being useful, and it got thrown in the bin because it wasn’t a magical chatbot that made radiologists obsolete.

Addendum: If you wanna support the artist, she has a Tumblr and a personal portfolio.

Update on The Shadiversity Drama^tm: he’s still malding about being an utterly soulless waste of oxygen:

Now, some of you may be wondering “Monday, how is that AI-generated? That piece actually has a soul!” Well, as it turns out, it wasn’t AI - Shad quite literally stole someone’s artwork and passed it off as AI.

In other news, the Guardian landed an exclusive scoop on cuts to “AI cancer tech funding in England”. Baldur Bjarnason’s given his commentary:

Turns out rebranding even the genuinely useful Machine Learning as “AI” doesn’t help them get funding. The only beneficiaries of the bubble seem to be volatile media synthesis engines

You want my opinion, future machine learning research is probably gonna struggle to get funding once the bubble bursts, both due to the “AI” stench rubbing off on the field, and due to gen-AI sucking up all of the funding that would’ve gone towards actually useful shit. (Arguably, its already struggling even before the bubble’s burst.)

Taking a shot in the dark, journalistic incidents like Bloomberg’s failed tests with AI summaries and the BBC’s complaints about Apple AI mangling headlines probably helped with accelerating that fall to earth - for any journalists reading about or reporting on such shitshows, it likely shook their faith in AI’s supposed abilities in a way failures outside their field didn’t.

And by “more fuckable”, he means “refusing/unable to consent”.

In other news, Jazza’s AI-generated cousin is back to continue pretending to be an actual artist. This time, its by actively denigrating the works of Studio Ghibli:

Unsurprisingly, he is getting raked over the coals by basically everyone. He’s also having an utter meltdown in the replies.

In case you missed it, a couple sneers came out against AI from mainstream news outlets recently - CNN’s put out an article titled “Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown”, whilst the New York Times recently proclaimed “The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes”.

You want my take on this development, I’m with Ed Zitron on this - this is a sign of an impending sea change. Looks like the bubble’s finally nearing its end.

In other news, Elon Musk’s personal chatbot has proudly proclaimed its available on Telegram, and its proclamation got picked up by The Verge:

Right now, the integration is limited to “Grok’s available as an optional chatbot”, but going by what I’ve seen on BlueSky, people are already taking this as their cue to jump ship to Signal.

>proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by helping to justify a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses

Not to mention, the aforementioned bubble’s given us shit like some jackasses’ ghoulish (and failed) attempt to “revive” George Carlin, attempts to automate end-of-life care, “AI seances” designed to scam the grieving, and God-knows-what-else.

So, the very concept of “defeating death with technology” has probably been thoroughly discredited as impossible, inherently ghoulish, or a combo of the two.

It is technically correct to call Yud a “renowned AI researcher”, but saying someone’s renowned in a pseudoscience such as AI is hardly singing their praises.