'Breaking Bad' Creator Hates AI, Promises New Show 'Pluribus' Was 'Made By Humans' (variety.com) 82
The new series from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, Pluribus, was emphatically made by humans, not AI, reports TechCrunch:
If you watched all the way to the end of the new Apple TV show "Pluribus," you may have noticed an unusual disclaimer in the credits: "This show was made by humans." That terse message — placed right below a note that "animal wranglers were on set to ensure animal safety" — could potentially provide a model for other filmmakers seeking to highlight that their work was made without the use of generative AI.
In fact, yesterday the former X-Files writer told Variety "I hate AI. AI is the world's most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine...." He goes on, about how AI-generated content is "like a cow chewing its cud — an endlessly regurgitated loop of nonsense," and how the U.S. will fail to regulate the technology because of an arms race with China. He works himself up until he's laughing again, proclaiming: "Thank you, Silicon Valley! Yet again, you've fucked up the world."
He also says "there's a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit," according to the article. "It's basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world's first trillionaires. I think they're selling a bag of vapor."
And earlier this week he told Polygon that he hasn't used ChatGPT "because, as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it." (Adding "I will never use it.")
Time magazine called Thursday's two-episode premiere "bonkers." Though ironically, that premiere hit its own dystopian glitch. "After months of buildup and an omnipresent advertising campaign, Apple's much-anticipated new show Pluribus made its debut..." reports Macworld. "And the service promptly suffered a major outage across the U.S. and Canada." As reported by Bloomberg and others, users started to report that the service had crashed at around 10:30 p.m. ET, shortly after Apple made the first two episodes of the show available to stream. There were almost 13,000 reports on Downdetector before Apple acknowledged the problem on its System Status page. Reports say the outage was brief, lasting less than an hour...
[T]here remains a Resolved Outage note on Apple TV (simply saying "Some users were affected; users experienced a problem with Apple TV" between 10:29 and 11.38 p.m.), as well as on Apple Music and Apple Arcade, which also went down at the same time. Social media reports indicated that the outage was widespread.
In fact, yesterday the former X-Files writer told Variety "I hate AI. AI is the world's most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine...." He goes on, about how AI-generated content is "like a cow chewing its cud — an endlessly regurgitated loop of nonsense," and how the U.S. will fail to regulate the technology because of an arms race with China. He works himself up until he's laughing again, proclaiming: "Thank you, Silicon Valley! Yet again, you've fucked up the world."
He also says "there's a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit," according to the article. "It's basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world's first trillionaires. I think they're selling a bag of vapor."
And earlier this week he told Polygon that he hasn't used ChatGPT "because, as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it." (Adding "I will never use it.")
Time magazine called Thursday's two-episode premiere "bonkers." Though ironically, that premiere hit its own dystopian glitch. "After months of buildup and an omnipresent advertising campaign, Apple's much-anticipated new show Pluribus made its debut..." reports Macworld. "And the service promptly suffered a major outage across the U.S. and Canada." As reported by Bloomberg and others, users started to report that the service had crashed at around 10:30 p.m. ET, shortly after Apple made the first two episodes of the show available to stream. There were almost 13,000 reports on Downdetector before Apple acknowledged the problem on its System Status page. Reports say the outage was brief, lasting less than an hour...
[T]here remains a Resolved Outage note on Apple TV (simply saying "Some users were affected; users experienced a problem with Apple TV" between 10:29 and 11.38 p.m.), as well as on Apple Music and Apple Arcade, which also went down at the same time. Social media reports indicated that the outage was widespread.
au contraire (Score:5, Insightful)
"Thank you, Silicon Valley! Yet again, you've fucked up the world."
It wasn't Silicon Valley that fucked things up, Silicon Valley just builds stuff. It was the New York bankers who come and try to squeeze the maximum profit out of everything, even at the cost of quality (or anything else).
That is when things get enshittified.
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whynotboth.jpg
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Historically, people have specialized into blacksmith, shepherds, farmers, etc. By and large this is a good thing, because by dividing and conquering, we can accomplish more together. (Of course, there can be problems, but by and large it's a good thing). Silicon Valley engineers are by analogy one of t
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Trump is severely limited in what he can do compared to King George (and every modern country's leader is the same).
Are you joking? The highest court rubber stamps nearly everything he does. They use the shadow docket to say yes without having to come up with an argument and then many months later they give the final approval. Just yesterday they said it was fine to NOT pay food stamps when several other judges ordered him.
Who knew Biden could have forgiven student loans all this time?
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Who knew Biden could have forgiven student loans all this time?
He couldn't though.
It's hasn't always been true of all conservatives; even at the end of the last Trump term a bunch of conservative judges showed that they valued the US Constitution over party loyalty. The American supreme court is now demonstrating this principle perfectly though. Biden failed to understand
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Uh.... no?
It's clearly megalomaniacs like Zuckerberg, Schmidt, Ellison, Andreessen, Jobs, Gates, Altman, Musk, Bezos, etc.
These people are West Coast Tech people, they learned what to do and how to do it in Silicon Valley, and honed their skills in that area.
Bankers have nothing to do with it, they exist all around the world and deal with everyone.
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Bankers have nothing to do with it,
How to say you know nothing about Silicon Valley without saying you know nothing about Silicon Valley.
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It wasn't Silicon Valley that fucked things up, Silicon Valley just builds stuff.
They used to just build stuff, not anymore.
It was the New York bankers who come and try to squeeze the maximum profit out of everything, even at the cost of quality (or anything else).
Are you sure it wasn't the North Carolina bankers?
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Are you sure it wasn't the North Carolina bankers?
Probably not majorly, their capitalization is too low.
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Or, California wankers?
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The fact is, human beings cannot control their greed in the presence of surplus. So, it's just as bad to build things that are exceptionally good and stimulating that greed as it is to take advantage of them. Silicon Valley building stuff is a mistake that should be rectified. It is akin to allowing a toddler to play with a gun. All those who contribute to AI are just as guilty as such a person and are enemies of humanity.
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The fact is, human beings cannot control their greed in the presence of surplus. So, it's just as bad to build things that are exceptionally good and stimulating that greed as it is to take advantage of them. Silicon Valley building stuff is a mistake that should be rectified. It is akin to allowing a toddler to play with a gun. All those who contribute to AI are just as guilty as such a person and are enemies of humanity.
Because you are so much better at knowing what people should be allowed to buy than any individual out there, O lord and master.
There's a cushy municipal government job waiting for you in New York City.
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The fact is, human beings cannot control their greed in the presence of surplus.
OK, this is an interesting topic.
If money is just on the ground, or gold found in the earth, most of us would pick it up.
If you had $10k in your wallet, most of us would not take it from you, and especially wouldn't take it by physically harming you. A few people would.
An even smaller percentage of the population would actively kill you to take the $10k from you.
'Greed' isn't a problem if it doesn't cause harm. There is a small percentage of the population (griefers) who will happily enshittify t
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While it is correct that only a small number are "bad people" , but what difference does it make it it's not the third but the 100th person that steals my unlocked car.
Humans are logical in their self-interest (Score:2)
Is it greed, or just availability? Another way to put this: who doesn't want to become wealthier, and therefore safer from risk?
Let us look at the tragedy of the commons [garretthardinsociety.org]:
Re: Humans are logical in their self-interest (Score:2)
Why do private farmers grow more corn than is demanded? Does the logic behind tragedy of the commons apply to privatization too? Have you ever seen private lots filled with garbage (having just driven through the Vesuvius part of Wayne National Forest in Ohio, an I attest to the high number of junked cars on privatized commons?)?
"The most "rational" approach for powerful and unscrupulous actors is not to accrue vast herds of increasingly decrepit animals; it is to persuade everybody else that common owners
The Commons (Score:2)
Mostly because they do not know the price until the sale. If you produce corn and the price goes up, you screwed yourself by not growing more corn; however, that price depends on market conditions at the time. For example, if at the end of the season when the corn is sold, it turns out that the Argentinian crop failed, your crop becomes more valuable and you can sell the excess. You are betting against things going well for everybody else, but even then
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The problem is in the solution. Rationally, those Herdsmen need to hash out an agreementfor the fair use of that land to keep it just below it's carrying capacity.
But what really happens that some 'nobleman' declares the entire commons to belong to him and sends a goon squad to wipe out any herdsman who disagrees. He then 'allows' the herdsmen to use the land in exchange for a painfully large share of their productivity. For some reason he expects gratitude for that arrangement.
Alas, we've moved beyond even
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> If you find that unbelievable as an analogy, explain why there are entire blocks in NYC that haven't seen any space rented in over 10 years, yet the asking price hasn't budged even as the neighborhood has been given over to rats and junkies.
Libertarians point to rent control as a big part of the problem. The landlords end up with a negative incentive to clean up, or fix things up enough to rent out more space. Another aspect in NYC is that putting more than a few apartments in a brownstone, or more tha
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BZZZT!
I was talking about commercial space, not residential. The residential space tends to get rented.
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> The residential space tends to get rented.
At a high price, due to artificial scarcity, despite the junkies.
Junkies make a lot of people quite wealthy (Score:2)
When you think about it, if most of the rentals in your town get overrun by junkies, you can charge more for junkie-free apartments. If I were a conniving narcissistic landlord (like the porcine capitalist of Monopoly fame) I would do whatever I could to scatter junkies around the properties of my competition, then double my prices.
Organic (Score:2)
Markets are organic: they respond to local conditions. Laws are centralized but even more, are symbolic, meaning that they are designed to categorize behaviors and control them. This ignores local conditions and does not accept feedback from what people actually do. It is like the difference between a "desire path" and the paved routes
Rationality versus rationalism (Score:2)
The good news is that then you still have a commons, which is particularly useful if you want to preserve natural spaces. The story "Robin Hood" was essentially about how noblemen kept large tracts of forest intact for themselves, which prevented it from being exploited by humanity. If some nobleman owned half of the land on Earth, the natural world would be
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Now explain how the noblemen is doing the herdsmen a kindness by charging them rent.
Also, in NYC, explain the chronically vacant commercial space (hint, no rent control).
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It prevents the tragedy of the commons, so each herd owner is safe from having some other guy stealing what they need.
One interesting take on the commercial space glut [slate.com]:
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That smells a LOT like BS. I'm just going to eat all this food in your pantry to make sure you don't get food poisoning, and such.
Compare, instead of the nobleman charging rent, the herdsmen do get together and own the commons in common, working out a fair deal between them for sustainability.
As for the NYC situation, if there's a glut, why don't prices fall? Where are the buildings for sale cheap to someone who wants to do a residential conversion?
Using an economic lens (Score:2)
I think they are holding out to sell the buildings at full price.
Probably a lack of people looking to invest, especially now. Same problem Minneapolis has, and Detroit had. Houston has it even worse but I think they are hiding the scale of the problem.
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I think they are holding out to sell the buildings at full price.
Never gonna happen. Full price was before 10 years of decay and rodent infestation + neighborhood gone to shit. Nevertheless, high supply, low demand is supposed to result in low prices.
What a nice idea! But then the commons are not only not commons, but they become properties and whatever herdsman gets the biggest herd will buy it all up and you get a monopoly.
One, how so if the agreement is ownership in common. And two, how is it worse than it all being owned by a (land)lord who rakes in the better part of the profit while considering herding animals to be beneath him?
Sounds like you drank the cool aid.
Regulatory control (Score:2)
Markets do better at pricing than central controls, generally. In the case of NYC, both commercial and residential properties suffer from over-regulation [reason.com]:
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I would say under-regulation, or more to the point, mal-regulation. Unregulated markets inevitably settle into a worst case scenario given time.
In the case of residential property (which is what your link refers to), I agree that some of the regulations there are bad and need to be revised or eliminated. But they have nothing to do with the commercial space falling into squalor.
Mostly agree (Score:2)
In my experience, there is a sweet spot that manages incentives rather than writing rules. Regulations tend to be lots of rules implemented at the cost of the owner, which creates an adversarial situation that leads to exploitation. I would not object however to the architectural preservation rules that they have in England for example, or the French environmental rules.
However, the problem with regulation is the old saw: who enforc
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I do agree that incentives (and dis-incentives) are typically superior to other forms of regulation.
For example, a higher property tax for unoccupied buildings (or a tax break based on occupancy) might help get things moving.
Though, in the case of commercial property, that might not be enough. A root cause is Bank officers handing out loans like candy and basing the value of the collateral property on "anticipated rent". The owners are now afraid lowering the rent will trigger a re-valuation and the bank de
This has legs (Score:2)
Good thinking. Instead of subsidizing slumlords, discount rentals. Yes, I like this. Big hug
So wait... (Score:3)
it's just as bad to build things that are exceptionally good and stimulating that greed as it is to take advantage of them.
So, when coin-money was invented it made bartering a whole lot easier, but also enabled greed at a whole new level. Are the people who invented coin money enemies of humanity?
And when fiat money was invented, it averted a global economic crash that would have impoverished the entire developed world. It also took greed-enablement to the next level. Are those people enemies of humanity
Re:au contraire (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless of whether its the west coast or the east coast thats to blame for this mess, the reality is;- its a fucken mess.
And yes, theres a particular cohort of SF zillionares, Musk, Thiel, that weird psycho who loves to rant about killing people at Palantir, Zuck, Larry Elison, and the Nvidia dude, who are very clearly of the opinion that there is no cost too high, including the errosion of civil liberties, democracy, and public sanity to achieve AI supremacy while the rest of us are left wondering "Who actually gives a shit if China gets there first? Is it worth burning down the planet and causing massive poverty to avoid that?!"
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who are very clearly of the opinion that there is no cost too high, including the errosion of civil liberties, democracy, and public sanity to achieve AI supremacy
If full AGI AI supremacy was honestly at stake and they were working at full speed for it, I think I could actually respect that opinion. My feeling, though, is that there's lots of beating a dead horse of LLM style simplistic (in terms of synapse behavior) new neural networks which are aiming at replacing workings in repetitive tasks that don't really require intelligence. I'm sure that several companies have real AI researchers actually working on new approaches some of which might pan out at some point i
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But why does it matter. Why not let China get there first and buy it from them?
Why should any of us give a shit which set of worthless billionaires get there first?
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Bankers just loan money. These days they don't give a shit who they loan it to as long as the loan is big and they can justify the loan to shareholders and the government. Which of course is remarkably easy because we don't regulate things properly anymore.
The banks don't care about the quality of the loans because they have set themselves up so that if they go down t
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Bankers in America at least don't really do that. What you're thinking of are large investors. People with net worth over 500 million.
I should have said "the financial industry."
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Much faster if you just fucked off instead of everyone else.
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Wait a little bit and let the mods do their job. Now sometimes the mods failed to do their job and sometimes sock puppets mod things up anyway. If that
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please, share with us these great pantheons of anti woke culture from days gone by, why are you guys always so fucking vague about everything its so transparent
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Go watch something like "Masters of the Air" and then come back and tell us that your statement applies to that show and all shows.
It confess that your statement is not correct.
We will wait.
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Jim Eadon who is english and has a website of eadon.com is just a troll. He does nothing but post things that include 'anti-woke' and hate filled extremist propaganda shit. It seems he was already extreme before this, but COVID literally broke his brain. Ignoring him, or better getting mod points and -1 his posts, is the best you can do since the editors here don't give a shit about hate speech or troll accounts.
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"Cancel your subs, and enjoy torrents on Pirate Bay for shows made 20 years ago. When TV shows had heart,"
There wasn't any time TV shows had heart, but definitely not in 2005.
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That was a fantastic show! They really should have made the one episode about the Tuskegee Airmen into its own show rather than crudely sandwiching it in for one episode and then forgetting about all those characters though.
Produced by the avid Lefty Tom Hanks as well.
So, I watched its first episode... (Score:2)
... First half was slow, but the second episode got weird and cool. I am on its second episode. I think I will like it.
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Err, second half got weird and cool. Second episode was decent, but not good as the first.
It's expensive, but not as we know it, Jim (Score:4, Interesting)
You may think of A.I. as slop.
You may even think of A.I. as cheating.
But most of the people in this world know nothing of the layers behind the training.
Not to mention all those people who discovers this new technology and just enters silly words and gets silly results, and think they are incredible artists with zero effort.
Nope, that's not how it works, at all.
I'm an artist, I've been doing art since the 80s, I'm an animator too, and an electronics enthusiast on top of it all, create my music, models, animations - everything from scratch, it has taken me years to master, and yet I'm a jack of all trades, master of none.
The thing is, A.i. here, is a stochastic sampler, it collects connections rather than images or creative stories, it can do noone of those things, it would take a database the size of a small planet to do so, so no - it won't create art or creativity for you, but it can do some basic stuff like make up connections to the words you use.
It's also terribly time consuming, you will have to experiment endlessly with ComfyUI models, words, sentences, LoRA's, concepts, compositions and whatnot in order to get anything closely consistent, you can - but it takes a TON of time to do so - and no, it does not copy your art directly, doesn't even use snippets of it, what it does is like if you knew shapes and colors, and you had 100 colored pens in your hands, and you dotted randomly onto a latent space, call it a piece of paper if you wish, and your memories consist of mere concepts and shapes, until the shape takes place out of your clouded stochastic images to match the words in your head.
That's the simplest way I can explain how it works so a regular person understand the technology behind it, so no - it does not copy your or my art in any way or shape.
However, you can, if you're absolutely AWESOME at creativity and prompting, if you excel at story writing, layout and composition and can describe it incredibly well, you can create art - and it's yours, not A.i.
The "Slop" you see, is a result of bad art, and total lack of creativity, it's the "wow" phase of people playing with the technology.
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duh, my modpoints expired. i was going to play on the "made by humans" thing saying "ai content is made by humans too", but you put it way better.
it will take a long time, and much nonsense, overblown lawsuits and rage before people genrally understand this.
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besides missing the point completely (quod erat demostrandum), that's an artifact. you mistake "artist using other art as material" for "copying". unless intentionally placed there by the human artist using ai to make a point, that's just the human artist being sloppy at using ai. there are sloppy artists without ai too.
now, ofc if you insist in preventing artists from using other art i guess we would have very little art around, if any at all.
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It seems to me you have never made any art yourself? If you did and tried to sell it with somebody else's signature on it, you would be rightly accused of forgery and fraud. This is basic knowledge you should be aware of, because it is incompatible with your naive idea that artists simply use othe
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Artifact you say? No. It's merely a proof that AI is stealing stuff, or as the adults say, infringing copyright. The fact that this shows up when an AI using "artist" is being sloppy doesn't invalidate the proof.
it's proof that some information was pulled into numerical vectors and was produced out of a query, in a different context. it would be debatable if that constitutes "copying" although you'd have to go into specifics, as a general case i would say that's a stretch; then again you'll have a hard time making the case that that's "stealing". you might "drop the mike" all you want for effect, but that still isn't a rational argument.
It seems to me you have never made any art yourself? If you did and tried to sell it with somebody else's signature on it,
i have, and no, i wouldn't. how does that change anything? empathy and understa
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Well described. I have yet to encounter properly good and enjoyable music made by AI. I guess it will be by a person with some clever ideas and vision that knows how to steer AI into producing what he wants without needing to do down to the detail engineering effort in DAWs. Possibly mixed with some real instruments and voice.
Re: It's expensive, but not as we know it, Jim (Score:2)
Have you heard the AI boogie-woogie on youtube? Why should I even perform jazz when the AI can play much better?
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Re: It's expensive, but not as we know it, Jim (Score:2)
If AI can do context-sensitive language, what makes you think it can't swing hard enough that you can't tell if a human is playing?
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IT can provide a tremendous amount of slop.
I'm assuming this post was written by AI (Score:3)
AI looks like slop because it's just grabbing a bunch of shit and stuffing it all together without any actual creative work.
The prompts have nothing to do with that. You can have the best prompts in the world and the technology is still going to produce slop because it's just slapping together something based on a large data set. There isn't going to be any individual creativity because there isn't any individual creativity it's just
How many people care if it's made by humans? (Score:3)
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That is exactly it.
I don't care. I just want to be entertained. I don't care if a show is made by AI or humans any. Ore than I care if it is fiction or non-fiction.
Unless, of course, if you label it as one thing or the other. Now an expectation has been created and it has better be fulfilled.
I don't know what the expectation is if you tell me a show was AI generated or human generated. What is that supposed to mean to me. Anything? Or is it supposed to just generate a warm and fuzzy feeling if something is
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"Oww - My Balls" will be a big hit for those looking for entertainment.
Not the only one (Score:3, Interesting)
So it begins (Score:3)
The "we didn't use CGI, this was all practical" advertising campaigns. While I hope it is less bullshit than the no-CGI movement, it is worth noting that NO ONE CARES.
The main issue with AI (Score:3)
The main issue with AI is who the main driving interests are.
On top of the usual empty wallstr suits full of biblical greed that every new technology is haunted by, we also got useless managers who think they can replace allllll employees but actually they themselves will also get replaced; and if that was not enough of a death sentence, there is also a very strong geopolitical / military / nation-security aspect and power fantasies in the mix.
Who controls the microchips and AI controls the next century, so every insane bubble financing is supposedly totally worth it.
So this whole hype insanity will definitely only get worse.
This is so confusing (Score:1, Offtopic)
I assume those were tools made by humans.
Every so often humans make revolutionary tools for their era and there's "new tool hate". Hate for GUI, hate for flat screens, hate for genetic modification, hate for electric cars...
Let him not use AI. Some people care about this... I'm far more interested in the show being good. If it's good I don't care how they made it. With AI. With matchsticks or with tears of
Regarding the show (Score:2)
I watched the first two episodes yesterday (which are the only two released so far), and I have to say it's some of the best sci-fi I've seen in a while. Now how much they'll stick to the sci-fi type premise is yet to be seen. They have set this up so open-ended that they can go in so many directions with it.
The beginning absolutely invoked Contact (an awesome sci-fi movie based on the book by Carl Sagan), complete with the radio telescope array and so on. My concern is that now that they've established the
Cows love it (Score:2)
"about how AI-generated content is "like a cow chewing its cud — an endlessly regurgitated loop of nonsense"
Cows seem to love it.
GIGO and mirrors (Score:1)
Definitely seems true, but how is this any different from the echo chamber of social media? Using polls to predict elections? Focus groups?
Humanity is a giant mirror held up to itself. No wonder we have gone neurotic.
Good for Vince (Score:2)
The thing about Vince Pelican is... (Score:2)
When he tells you to zig, he wants you to zag [youtube.com]