Pandora’s Monsters

This has turned out to be the year when AI usage has truly exploded, and alongside it the number of articles and posts railing against AI. That was especially evident last month, when AI insiders warned yet again that AI has a chance of killing us all, and their bosses argued that this is why we need to pay them even more money to develop it. The quantity of confused reportage and thinkpiecery around AI is growing exponentially, and threatens to overwhelm us in an AI Take Singularity. I’ve said my piece about most of it, so I’ll mostly just link to other pieces now. But first, a couple of AI encounters of note. Metafilter discussed AI-generated videos a month ago, a trend I discussed earlier this year after encountering a YouTube channel about medieval food that was all just AI slop. Since then I’ve seen something even more ghastly, while doing DIY over the summer. It used to be that you could search on a few key terms, the name of a tool or the job you were trying to achieve, and get…