New piece from Gary Marcus: AI may have just influenced Argentina’s election

He’s not 100% certain that the AI deepfake a reader sent him ultimately influenced the election results, but the mere possibility that AI screwed someone out of getting elected is gonna be a major topic in Argentine politics for a good while, and I expect AI’s effects on democracy will come under pretty heavy scrutiny as a result.

Got a pair of notable things I ran across recently.

Firstly, an update on Grok’s White Genocide Disaster: the person responsible has seemingly revealed themselves, and shown off how they derailed Grok’s prompt.. The pull request that initiated this debacle has been preserved on the Internet Archive.

Second, I ran across a Bluesky post which caught my attention:

You want my opinion on the “scab” comment, its another textbook example of the all-consuming AI backlash, one that suggests any usage of AI will be viewed as an open show of hostility towards labour.

TBF, Zitron has “wrap[ped] together everything I’ve written going back to [his] remote work coverage from 2021” with this piece - it was naturally gonna be long as hell.

Making an MCU comparison is deeply cliche at this point, but Zitron basically penned his personal equivalent to Avengers: Endgame with this - the impressive length is completely warranted.

ZITRON DROPPED

DomoAI just publicly partnered with Discord - W H Y

Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population

AI’s already destroying people’s cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldn’t be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue it’ll fuck up human’s capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.

(and leading to me having to read slop all the time)

Thankfully, I’ve managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:

1. AI slop was banned from being uploaded back in 2022 (very early into the bubble), making it loud and clear that AI slop is unwelcome there. (Sidenote: A dedicated AI flag option was added in 2024)
2. The site primarily (if not near-exclusively) attracts artists, animators, musicians, and creatives in general - all groups who (for obvious reasons) are strongly opposed to gen-AI in all its forms, and who will avoid anything involving AI like the fucking plague.
3. The site is (practically) ad-free, meaning ad revenue is effectively zero - as such, setting up an AI slop farm (or a regular content mill) is utterly impractical, since you’d have zero shot of turning a profit.

(That I’m a NEET also helps (can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)

Update on the Artificial Darth Debacle: SAG-AFTRA just sued Epic for using AI for Darth Vader in the first place:

You want my take, this is gonna be a tough case for SAG - Jones signed off on AI recreations of Vader before his death in 2024, so arguing a lack of consent’s off the table right from the get-go.

If SAG do succeed, the legal precedent set would likely lead to a de facto ban on recreating voices using AI. Given SAG-AFTRA’s essentially saying that what Epic did is unethical on principle, I suspect that’s their goal here.

Semi-OT: GamersNexus just put out a scathing expose of NVidia

That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.

That goes some way to explaining why programmers don’t have a moral compass.

When there’s a balanced incentive to point out hallucinations, they (hopefully) won’t get that far.

That I can see. Unlike software “engineering”, law is a field which has high and exacting standards - and faltering even slightly can lead to immediate and serious consequences.

I can see that working.

The basic conceit of Idiocracy is that its a dystopia run by complete and utter morons, and with AI’s brain-rotting effects being quite well known, swapping the original plotline’s eugenicist “dumb outbreeding the smart” setup with an overtly anti-AI “AI turned humanity dumb” setup should be a cakewalk. Given public sentiment regarding AI is pretty strongly negative, it should also be easy to sell to the public.

An actual Kendrick in this case would be Ed Zitron - pointing to just one example, Ed brutally torched Prabhakar Raghavan for ruining Google Search, then danced on his grave after he stepped down to a ceremonial role.

Quick update on the Conover Catastrophe: the man’s making an attempt to recover his dignity:

In somewhat lighter news, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the game, and gave him a “conversational AI” to let him talk to players in the voice of James Earl Jones (who I just discovered died last year).

To nobody’s surprise, gamers have already gotten the AI Vader swearing and yelling slurs.

New piece from Brian Merchant: De-democratizing AI, which is primarily about the GOP’s attempt to ban regulations on AI, but also touches on the naked greed and lust for power at the core of the AI bubble.

EDIT: Also, that title’s pretty clever

The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. I’ll let Dr. Abeba Birhane’s horrified reaction do the talking:

this just started and i’m already losing my mind and screaming

Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan”

just fucking shoot me

Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.

It was me, I stole all the sexy robots

Okay, two separate thoughts here:

1. Paul G is so fucking close to getting it, Christ on a bike
2. How the fuck do you get burned by someone as soulless as Sam Altman

Musk says: “At times, I think Grok-3 is kind of scary smart.” Grok is just remixing its training data — but a stochastic parrot is still more reality-based than Elon Musk. [Bloomberg, archive]

If someone roasted me such such surgical precision like that, I’d delete my entire Internet presence out of shame. God damn.

I’m mentally filing this next to that clip of a black guy telling someone to just call him the N-word.