it’s so fucking funny that bill gates had basically successfully laundered his reputation from “the demonic sociopath from the antitrust hearings” to “the One Good Billionaire,” but it’s been entirely undone again by the epstein stuff. i bet he does believe the doomer shit because they all do because it’s also like, yeah bill, this’ll definitely be the train that pulls you back into public good graces. definitely

my sense is that AI winter as a term is mainly useful for thinking about, like, academic funding and really basic levels of breathless press coverage and rhetoric. so like after this all blows up maybe people chugging along researching symbolic AI will be in something they could meaningfully call an AI winter again, and it was useful in terms of comparatively analyzing the news rhetoric around this stuff from a couple of years ago, at least before the ascension of madness of doomer-pilled silicon valley rhetoric.

but in terms of raw finances LLMs have occasioned a world-historically overleveraged global economy in a way that so far exceeds “hmm i guess we’re not getting grants like we used to” that for all practical purposes we’re in an entirely new domain. like instead of a balmy ai summer we’ve found ourselves on the surface of venus

glad to see the sick puppies’s paradigm shifting culture war movement continuing to thrive

not suboptimal management of my home lab…anything but that…

i agree that this is, minimally, a ludicrous time to come out swinging in fucking reason mag for this lol

but i’d love to read something fleshing out the pro-copyright? anti-anti-copyright? argument. is transformative use the hinge here? like, since an LLM can produce copyright infringing material, etc.? is it marketing and using these products as replacements for creators? both of those are prob compelling to me but i’ve been wondering about this all for a while

this isn’t really a sneer. and maybe it’s in the wrong place tbh. idk.

i have a long-time internet friend / “mutual” who is the only person i’m regularly in contact with that i think might be fully Seduced by the Chatbot. (i have a really good friend and long-time collaborator who’s all in on Agentic Coding, which is a real bummer, but he’s a strictly “I use this for computer stuff and do not ever talk to it like a human being” type of guy, plus the company he works for is all in and he’s sick of writing shopify websites for bullshit brands blah blah blah – anyway that’s a whole other genre of thing.)

anyway friend A is an incredibly kind person who’s been unbelievably supportive of me over the years. we’ve disagreed a number of times, i think we are good at doing so reasonably. and even though his arguments sometimes resemble those of more nefarious figures, i think he’s motivated by an earnest optimism about technology’s capacity to change the world for good – one i find very naive, but believe is coming from the right place

anyway i posted a link on mastodon to a long piece i wrote, he, like, read it a bunch of times, paraphrased my argument back to me to make sure he had it right, and then kindly said he disagreed. well and good enough. except it feels a little more personal than disagreements we’ve had before, because one of the implications of the piece would be that he himself is probably experiencing low-grade psychosis lol and is therefore not necessarily a reliable narrator of his own experience

idk. it’ll come as no surprise to anyone on this particular website that i feel very strongly that i’m right here – if not about this guy’s particular mental experience, i minimally feel that i’m adequately representing the interests of the constituency my piece represents. (it’s a newsletter i maintain as part of organizing i’m doing.) it’s also a genuine expression of my belief, which is that this bullshit article i was writing about was fucking bullshit

but not only does it go against all my Late Millennial Woke instincts to stake a claim that people’s Lived Experiences are not valid lol – it’s just kind of a bummer to ultimately genuinely believe that my friend has been ELIZA’d or whatever. he’s said i’m really helping him think through this moment but i also just kind of, idk. it’s just not a good feeling

lmao this is a great bit