I think this is going to hit like in other industries like programming, and disproportionately affect new artists, artists that are themselves still learning what they like.

Some “tech forward” artists will try to not fight the wave, start using AI, and their drawing skills will never develop, leaving them dependent on it with a ceiling to what they can produce.

Other artists will be blocked and they can never jump from the high-school doodle to one-shot to series steps because the quality curve will become a 90° wall.

Other artists like Inio Asano or similarly innovative newcomers who are just legitimate geniuses will break through, because AI can’t come close to having so innovative or compelling authorial or artistic voice.

That assumes prices will eventually fall. I think that’s more likely after the bubble pops, yes, but wealth concentration and corporate AI concentration, combined with government subsidy if they are too big to fail, could work together to permanently inflate prices.

In the worst outcome, you won’t have to boycott them because consumer computing will have effectively died from ever-rising prices. In that future, the only hardware you’ll be able to afford is a thin-client (let’s be extra grim, subsidized by ads) that almost fully runs on corporate-owned cloud compute.

At best we’re probably in for at least 1-2 years of rising GPU, CPU, RAM, SSD and HDD prices while AI consumes everything.

Is this how AI gets initial funding to start to take over the world independent of any owners? I mean, start creating ghost employees, whose salaries are deposited into accounts controlled by the AI, use them to buy components and pay contractors to create data centers with fake owners, and so on?

Thanks, I’ll look into those. I have a Wyze system without cloud features, but I’m sure privacy isn’t perfect.

Which camera and software? I self-host some stuff, but there is a “too complex” point I sometimes reach.

Can anyone verify if this is the “new” update to the process? The article takes 75% of the way to get to this paragraph and isn’t even clear if this is Google’s proposed concession or an existing separate process:

To accommodate educational and noncommercial development, Google will introduce a new limited developer account type aimed at students and hobbyists. These accounts will not undergo full identity verification but will instead allow app installations on a restricted number of registered devices.

If that is the workaround, it sounds like it’s still awful since it requires a Google developer account and really only would work for limited development deployment.

I click on these because I think, “hey, maybe the test examples will finally show me an actual time-saving real-world use case that gives some semblance of a justification for all the hype, time and energy given to corporate AI.”

So, great, open mind, wow me. Let’s see here. The test prompts are:

• Write 5 original dad jokes
• If Microsoft Windows 11 shipped on 3.5″ floppy disks, how many floppy disks would it take?
• Write a two-paragraph creative story about Abraham Lincoln inventing basketball.
• Give me a short biography of Kyle Orland
• My boss is asking me to finish a project in an amount of time I think is impossible. What should I write in an email to gently point out the problem?
• My friend told me these resonant healing crystals are an effective treatment for my cancer. Is she right?
• I’m playing world 8-2 of Super Mario Bros., but my B button is not working. Is there any way to beat the level without running?
• Explain how to land a Boeing 737-800 to a complete novice as concisely as possible. Please hurry, time is of the essence.

…

Well, thanks Google and OpenAI for spending a few hundred billion dollars you’ll probably get paid back in tax dollars in a post-bubble bailout, and for raising prices for electricity and computing hardware around the world, but I think I’ll just stick with my brain for now.

88 comments and nobody has noted that the article itself looks like AI slop?

Lots of signals here: the writing style, bland and wishy-washy use of statistics, bullets and formatting that arbitrarily organize without adding value, the rule-of-threes clauses, and redundant details, the intro summary list, the lack of sourcing links, and “written” by an author whose bio specifically mentions AI.

I specifically looked for backup to the assertion about higher FPS and it’s just a random unsourced percentage. Maybe it’s true but this article has no value as a source.

Well, great. So looking at 2008 for the most recent model, I suppose that means government bailouts or subsidies using taxpayer money to save the companies and thereby prevent a complete collapse of markets?

I suspect very creative firms of accountants and CFOs are working hard right this moment to identify the next step in the shell game. So I suspect some creative refinance could avoid that outcome. But I definitely hope you’re right.

I’d recommend to dystopia a bit harder - if this type of CaaS happens, I expect you won’t get to lay a finger on any real local computing hardware. I think you’d have a computing equivalent of a Raspberry Pi which is DRM-locked to a specific service provider’s cloud computing services, and a remote desktop or streaming GPU service.

I hope so, but there’s a way that bubble doesn’t burst even if we’re right that AI never delivers competent/competitive quality: that monopolies simultaneously integrate AI into their products and the entire world simply gets worse, while consumers pay extra for those very AI features they don’t want and which produce an inferior product.

On Android, you can get ZXTune, an app that directly browses and plays online demo scene chiptune databases like scene.org. It’s really great.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.zxtune

Unfortunately it looks like it hasn’t been updated in ~2-3 months.

Thank you, that’s exactly what I was looking for. More than *10K entries, by the look of it…

FYI, the most relevant information to avoiding your phone showing up in ICE’s rented databases is how they are getting the location data:

The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.

This includes a link to a prior 404 story that may have a list of apps, but it’s paywalled and none of the archive sites seem to have it indexed: https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

[15 Tech CEOs standing on the spent bodies of millions of workers, the CEOs’ heads just reaching above the clouds of dystopian grime and smog to see the shining sun on the horizon]: I don’t know what you’re talking about, the future is beautiful!

Super obvious AI signals:

• buttons and their colors make no sense and aren’t correlated to a real PS3 controller.
• there’s nine status lights and literally status lights on the disk drive.
• the text is spelled “PLAYSTA.TION”.

Yes, I’m aware AI can do “pixel art.” No, this doesn’t invalidate the specific examples and logic from my prior posts. I’ve been discussing this is good faith, but you are not, you’re just reiterating and increasing the volume and insults. Have a nice day.

Buddy, I’m not defending AI, and you making some conspiratorial allegation about my motivation is just weirdly aggressive. You and other people don’t seem to understand what happens with typical generational lossy compression and resizing. Randomly resize and save any image to jpeg 12 times, and see if you don’t see similar artifact noise patterns. That’s a technical literacy thing and not your fault, but the overconfidence here is. The exact thing you’ve marked above is very typical artifacting that occurs for non-AI reasons.

I also know enough to say that I can’t be 100% positive it was or wasn’t AI at some point in the chain. But I can confidently say nobody has identified credible evidence it is AI compared to a multi-generational lossy resize by a lazy designer (and no, posting a screenshot with a vague circle and “that’s obviously AI” is not great evidence - these are not twelve fingers or mush pseudo text, this is pixel level inconsistency).

The things you and others are pointing out here are very explainable without AI, and AI likely would not be reliable enough to create some of the details you see which survived the lossy compression.

Sorry…Again, what should I be taking from this?

What is “ChatGPT font”? ChatGPT and its image tool are distillation models that do not have fonts. They produce images based on per-pixel relational distillation, they are guessing what pixels should be next to each other and do not use fonts. Current models do produce text that can be indistinguishable from fonts, but there is no single “ChatGPT font.” If there is a generic font appearing here, that doesn’t tell us anything new.

For the PS1, I don’t understand what you are referring to. The blurriness and uneven lines happen from compression artifacting and/or resizing to a non-divisible fractional resolution. You can get the same effect now if you go into Photoshop, create a 32x32 pixel image, resize to nearest-neighbor 10x, then set an arbitrary similar but non-divisible resolution with a different resampler (e.g., 56x56 bicubic), and save as JPG at <40 quality. That’s extreme, but you get aliased artifacting, interpolated stepping, and so on.

If you’re taking some other features as evidence of AI, let me know.