…Lotus, you clever bastard.

In other news, someone tried selling a vibe-coded ytp-dl wrapper and got publicly called out for it:

Found a piece which caught my attention: Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing?

You want my personal opinion, the basic idea of “decomputing” that author Dan McQuillan is putting forward is likely gonna gain plenty of traction. The Trump administration more generally and DOGE more specifically have thoroughly undermined any notion of tech being an apolitical force, so arguing against the politics inherent to AI is gonna be an easier sell.

the model was supposed to be trained solely on his own art and thus I didn’t have any ethical issues with it.

Personally, I consider training any slop-generator model to be unethical on principle. Gen-AI is built to abuse workers for corporate gain - any use or support of it is morally equivalent to being a scab.

Fast-forward to shortly after release and the game’s AI model has been pumping out Elsa and Superman.

Given plagiarism machines are designed to commit plagiarism (preferably with enough plausible deniability to claim fair use), I’m not shocked.

(Sidenote: This is just personal instinct, but I suspect fair use will be gutted as a consequence of the slop-nami.)

Definitely a feature.

That would require them to care about people other than themselves.

I almost feel like now that Chatgpt is everywhere and has been billed as man’s savior, perhaps some logic should be built into these models that “detect” people trying to become friends with them, and have the bot explain it has no real thoughts and is giving you just the horse shit you want to hear. And if the user continues, it should erase its memory and restart with the explanation again that it’s dumb and will tell you whatever you want to hear.

Personally, I’d prefer deleting such models and banning them altogether. Chatbots are designed to tell people what they want to hear, and to make people become friends with them - the mental health crises we are seeing are completely by design.

Thanks for the work you do on Newgrounds!

Appreciate it - keeping one of the last bastions of creativity free of slop is a thankless task.

This sentence stuck out to me

No more worrying about lack of content or fickle UGC creators

Oh they’re just publically advertising their company to be anti-union. Bold.

What is AI if not a tool built to abuse the proletariat?

Gotta love how the website isn’t even functional.

Its probably been vibe coded by the fucks behind the LLM, I’d be shocked if it was genuinely functional.

I was originally going to ask why anyone would bother throwing their slop on Newgrounds of all sites, but given the business model here I think we can be pretty confident they were hoping to use it to advertise.

Considering that AI bros are

1. utterly malicious scumbags who hate anything which doesn’t let them, and them alone, make all the money ever

2. exceedingly stupid and shameless dipshits with a complete inability to recognise or learn from mistakes

I can absolutely see them looking at someplace like NG and thinking “hey, this place which stands for everything we want wiped off the Internet will totally accept our fucking slop”.

(Personal sidenote: Part of me says this story would probably make a good Pivot to AI.)

Minor bit of personal news: Newgrounds got hit with a wave of AI slop games recently.

I caught onto it back on Wednesday, but didn’t get official confirmation until yesterday, when another user investigated the games and discovered the exact slop-generator used to shit them out - VIDEOGAME.ai.

ChatGPT connects your brain to a quality '50s-era psychiatrist, who can then lobotomise you non-invasively and turn you into a perfect office worker for our billionaire overlords

All connection technology is a force for homogeneity. Television was the death of the regional accent, for example.

Listen to a Geordie for five minutes and say that to me with a straight face. I fucking dare you. (Not you, the orange site member)

If a human customer service rep [added charges without telling people and lied to them], it’d just be fraud. But being able to blame the computer, that’s the use case for AI!

Potential hot take: In situations where the company attempts to diffuse responsbility, the CEO should take the blame automatically.

Update from Brian Merchant: The first edition of AI Killed My Job has just dropped

It’s all gotta be in the models by now, but it’s gonna be a cool resource for something, right?

It’ll also be helpful for helping the 'Net recover from the slop-nami once AI finally dies.

For once, I’m hoping a megacorp actively squeezes the infringer for everything they’re worth. The looming threat of getting drained dry is the only thing keeping AI fucks from stealing anything they fucking want.

Dan McQuillian just dropped the text of a seminar he gave: The role of the University is to resist AI

Starting this off with Baldur Bjarnason sneering at his fellow techies for their “reading” of Dante’s Inferno:

Reading through my feed reader and seeing tech dilettantes “doing” Dante in a week and change, I’m reminded of the time in university when we spent half a semester discussing Dante’s Divine Comedy, followed by tracing it’s impact and influence over the centuries

I don’t think these assholes even bother to read their footnotes, and their writing all sounds like it comes from ChatGPT. Naturally so, because I believe them when they claim they don’t use it for writing. They’re just genuinely that dull

At least read the footnotes FFS

If they were reading Dante for pleasure, that’d be different—genuinely awesome, even. But all of this is framed as doing the entirety of “humanities” in the space of a few weeks.