Wacky Times for AI
Been a wacky month or two for AI news! Open AI is reorganizing! Apple declined to invest! Whatsisname decided he wanted equity after all! The Governor of CA vetoed an AI safety bill! Microsoft is rebooting Three Mile Island, which feels like a particularly lazy piece of satire from the late 90s that escaped into reality! Study after study keeps showing no measurable benefit to AI deployment! The web is drowning in AI slop that no one likes!
I don’t know what any of that means, but it’s starting to feel like we’re getting real close to the part of The Sting where Kid Twist tells Quint from Jaws something confusing on purpose.
But, in our quest here at Icecano to bring you the best sentences from around the web, I’d like to point you at The Subprime AI Crisis because it includes this truly excellent sentence:
Generative AI must seem kind of magical when your entire life is either being in a meeting or reading an email
Oh Snap!
Elsewhere in that piece it covers the absolutely eye-watering amounts of money being spent on the plagiarism machine. There are bigger problems than the cost; the slop itself, the degraded information environment, the toll on the actual environment. But man, that is a hell of a lot of money to just set on fire to get a bunch of bad pictures no one likes. The opportunity cost is hard to fathom; imagine what that money could have been spent on! Imagine how many actually cool startups that would have launched! Imagine how much real art that would have bought!
But that’s actually not what I’m interested in today, what I am interested in are statements like these:
State of Play: Kobold Press Issues the No AI Pledge
Legendary Mario creator on AI: Nintendo is “going the opposite direction”
I stand by my metaphor that AI is like asbestos, but increasingly it’s also the digital equivalent of High Fructose Corn Syrup. Everyone has accepted that AI stuff is “not as good”, and it’s increasingly treated as low-quality filler, even by the people who are pushing it.
What’s intriguing to me is that companies whose reputation or brand centers around creativity or uniqueness are working hard to openly distance themselves. There’s a real “organic farm” energy, or maybe more of a “restaurant with real food, not fast food.”
Beyond the moral & ethical angle, it gives me hope that “NO AI” is emerging as a viable advertising strategy, in a way that “Made with AI” absolutely isn’t.