You want my take, this probably isn’t gonna injure Disney all that much - they’re one of the largest megacorps on the entire planet, and they’ve got damning evidence of infringement against Midjourney.

How much damage Midjourney’s gonna take (at least in the immediate term), I’m not sure. If they settle ASAP, they can probably limit the damage, but if they try and fight, they’ll probably be bankrupted by the case.

I expect they think they can get a precedent here.

That’s true - the case is pretty clear-cut thanks to how much damning evidence they’ve managed to pull out. The old trend of using AI to make offensive shit in the Pixar style likely helped as well, but that’s speculation on my end.

Midjourney is also odd in that it didn’t take money from outside investors and it’s actually profitable selling monthly subscriptions. This is an AI company that is not a venture capital money bonfire, it’s an actual business.

I suspect Disney isn’t out to just shut Midjourney down. Disney’s goal is to gouge Midjourney for a settlement and a license.

In practice, I doubt Disney’s gonna get to shake much out of Midjourney before they end up going under - given that gen-AI is built to facilitate plagiarism and copyright infringement, a win for Disney here would lead to a de facto ban on generative AI.

Eric “Slophand” Slopton: He’s like Eric Clapton, but somehow more racist

Got a hilarious story for today: ChatGPT Lost a Chess Game to an Atari 2600

New Blood in the Machine: The weaponization of Waymo, about protesters torching Waymos in a repeat of last year’s Waymo Warm-Overs.

Rare TERF Island W

…okay in retrospect “AI is gambling” does explain a lot about why people are going completely fucking bonkers for autoplag

Cocaine doesn’t make you a business genius — it just makes you think you’re a business genius. Same for AI.

This is completely unrelated, but I once saw a dude snort a line of cocaine straight off a Nintendo Switch. Its kinda funny to think about.

New piece which caught my attention: Against AI literacy: have we actually found a way to reverse learning?

Why do they think people buy newspapers in 2025?

To be fair to WaPo, The Onion returned to print in 2024 and reportedly did pretty well from the move.

Granted, this is a bit of an apples-and-oranges situation - for one thing, the Onion is a serious journalistic outlet, whilst WaPo is not.

ETA: If you’ve had your interest piqued, you can grab the print versions through their membership program - minimum cost is a pretty hefty $99 a year, though.

Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo’s jumping headfirst into it.

Edit: But also - why do AI scrapers request pages that show differences between versions of wiki pages (or perform other similarly complex requests)? What’s the point of that anyway?

Gonna take a shot in the dark here and guess that the people behind these AI scrapers are incredibly stupid, and think Scrape More = More Data = More Growth = More Good^TM. Given this bubble’s already given us the goddamn scourge that is “vibe coding”, and is headed by growth-obsessed fuckwits and True Believers^TM, chances are I’m completely correct on this.

Found a damn-good sneering of AI art on Newgrounds recently - highly recommend checking it out.

New Blood In The Machine: The “AI jobs apocalypse” is for the bosses

Remember Stephen Elop of Nokia’s “burning platform” memo in 2011?

I was entering high school in 2011, so no.

Nokia adopted Windows Mobile as their phone operating system — which failed in the market. Nokia used to own the phone market.

The only real experience I have with Nokia is my dad’s Nokia 3310 (which he exclusively uses as an alarm clock these days) and nonstop memes about the 3310’s supposed indestructibility. Kinda wild to me that Nokia once ruled the entire goddamn phone market.

Nadella going AI is going to be Facebook going Metaverse at the best.

And at worst…well, by my guess, its gonna be “Microsoft accidentally brings forth the Year of the Linux Desktop”

Got two major pieces to show which caught my attention:

• The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine, a rare moment of genuine criticism popping up in the mainstream press (CNN, to be specific)
• AI model collapse is not what we paid for, an opinion piece from the Register where Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (who previously boosted Perplexity) complains about the declining quality of AI search

The only LLM-Based Experience^tm I’ve had so far (and probably ever) was a brief session of Death by AI I had with friends, and that game boils down to “give the chatbot a prompt and your response, and maybe try to not die horribly”.

Pretty much all the fun of that game comes from giving the chatbot manmade horrors beyond its comprehension and seeing it struggle to keep up.

Novelty value is basically the only thing LLMs have going for them, and that isn’t changing any time soon.

What, I’m going to play TLoU 2 without playing 1 or GoW 4 without playing 1-3?

Part I and Part II are both on Steam, so you can get the full Last of Us experience without a console, and GoW 2018 is a soft reboot, so playing the original trilogy isn’t strictly necessary.

As for GOW 1-3…there’s no PC port, so you’ve got two options: sail the high seas and emulate them via PCSX2 and/or RPCS3, or get the games and a used PS3 off of eBay.

And, given I’ve already mentioned emulation:

My entire experience with Sony is that I loved Patapon on the PSP (I would sell my fucking soul to get it to play on a smartphone god)

If you’re looking for Patapon on your phone, the only course I know of is to grab PSP emulator PPSSPP and find the ISOs online. If you’re fine playing them on your PC, a remaster of the first two games is coming to Steam on June 10th.

(I am deep in the weeds on this shit, I’ll admit)

I unfortunately know jack shit about quantum computing, so I can’t really weigh in, but I am rooting for them to pull it off, because PsiQuantum getting all the VC money ever means AI stops getting all the VC money ever

They also needed to rapidly rein it in after gamers got it to pull a Tay AI and start spamming slurs.

New artcle from Brian Merchant: An ‘always on’ OpenAI device is a massive backlash waiting to happen

Giving my personal thoughts on the upcoming OpenAI Device^tm, I think Merchant’s correct to expect mass-scale backlash against the Device^tm and public shaming/ostracisation of anyone who decides to use it - especially considering its an explicit repeat of the widely clowned on Humane AI Pin.

headlines of Device^tm wearers getting their asses beaten in the street to follow soon afterwards. As Brian’s noted, a lot of people would see wearing an OpenAI Device^tm as an open show of contempt for others, and between AI’s public image becoming utterly fouled by the bubble and Silicon Valley’s reputation going into the toilet, I can see someone seeing a Device^tm wearer as an opportunity to take their well-justified anger at tech corps out on someone who openly and willingly bootlicks for them.