#Ai is a Scam

[shinobicyrus]

At last, a chance to use the Trash Future podcast's t-shirt: "What If Your Robot Was Just a Guy?" since they've been talking about this very problem for years.

It really is amazing to what degree so-called "AI" and "smart" technology are essentially these modern-day Mechanical Turks; hoaxes claiming to be ground-breaking automation secretly being run by humans hidden inside the machine.

Does anyone remember those cashier-less "Amazon Fresh" stores where you were able to to just...pick up items and leave the store and the "smart technology" was supposed to know what you picked up and charge you for it, no cashiers or checkouts or store employees needed?

Amazon spent hundreds of millions to develop it, and their intention was to sell that technology to other stores. It was supposed to revolutionize grocery shopping! Well as it turns out...

It was just workers in India! 1,000 paid contractors just to keep up the ruse that the stores were fully automated! And it wasn't just their grocery stores, either. If you read the article where the snippet above is from, they also mention: 'So-called “supervised learning” in AI is why Amazon had thousands of contractors listening in on commands to Alexa, for instance.

Alexa, as it turned out, isn't a "smart" speaker. It's more a dumb microphone where a human being paid a pittance had to make sure the computer was doing its job correctly. Which, considering the presence of thousands of contractors needing to babysit your Alexa, it probably wasn't.

AI is a scam and continues to be a scam. Its algorithms trained on stolen data are propped up by invisible, underpaid workers being exploited by third-party contractors so the companies that hired them like Microsoft, Amazon, or OpenAI have a layer of insulation between them and digital sweatshops being run with wage-slavery in their name.

And these people want to run the world with this shit.

[vavuska]

It's probably my imagination, but something about that narrator didn't seem quite right

Source: Simpsons Bortposting

I did a cybersecurity course that was dubbed by AI voice. It was pure torture!

Still, I don't think a faceless YouTube Channel run by AI is a solution to make more views, engagement and money. It seems quite the opposite to me: losing subscription and being avoided by everyone.

[cat-appreciator]

This may be a question better suited for Reddit but I’ve made it this far without becoming a Redditor so who knows, maybe Tumblr will help instead.

Apple’s latest iOS update, iOS 18, appears to be a collection of jangling keys attached to the side of the “AI” data-harvesting scamware fad du jour. As such, I will not be downloading it and I hope that Mr Apple falls dick-first into a juicer.

I’ve already turned off the automatic installation and download of updates so it can’t get its filthy AI fingers onto my iPad. But that doesn’t stop iOS 18 from showing up in the Systems Update page; my options are “Install Now” or “Install Tonight”, there doesn’t seem to be a button for “Install Never And Begone From My Sight! A Treasonous Machine Such As You Should Not Have The Temerity To Impose Upon Your Betters”.

I want to stop the update from showing up at all, and - failing that - I really want to stop the red notification icon from appearing on the Settings button on my taskbar. That thing is distracting, and its unwanted presence from iOS 18 could potentially cover up actually important notifications.

I’d consider replacing my iPad with a different system entirely except a) I’m poor and b) it’s not like every other big tech company isn’t also on the “AI” scam bandwagon. Windows does at least let you remove Copilot, even if you have to go into the config to do it.

I really don’t want to be stuck with this stupid notification icon forever. If anyone has any tips to remove it (that aren’t facile bullshit like “switch to Linux”) I’m all ears.

[curiosa-hypnotica]

I have depression. I don't need no stinking "AI" to tell me I'm a waste of resources and should die!*

* Also, such answers obviously come from the unacknowledged biases of their eugenics-obsessed programmers. I mean, come on.

[voltaspistol]

[priviie]

One of the low key things about this huge AI push that I truly despise are the commercials. And I’m not talking about the AI generated commercials, tho I hate those too, but the ones trying to sell AI to the layperson.

Every single one of them is awful. They either highlight scenarios that would not happen (those weird matthew mcconaughey and woody harrelson commercials) or are about the worst people on the planet dodging responsibility by using AI. They do not make me want to use AI. In fact, they make me side eye any person that does actively use AI.

Here’s an example, there’s an Apple commercial where it starts with two daughters giving their dad lovely presents for his birthday. They are thoughtful gifts related to time they spent with one another. Then it cuts to the guys wife in the kitchen and she is pouring herself a coffee and ACTIVELY SNEERING TO HERSELF ABOUT THE PRESENTS AND THE WHOLE THING. Then she realizes “oh shit I never bought my husband that I hate a present” and has her iPhone make a really shitty slideshow that she then shoved in front of her husband and daughters saying “oh yeah well I made THIS!”

Who is this marketing for? I do not wish to be like this woman, she clearly doesn’t give a shit about anyone in her family. She clearly resents the whole situation. Why would I want to be like this hateful person? What’s even the message here? “Oh forgot your beloathed spouses birthday? Pretend you care about them and continue the farce that is your marriage with AI!”?

I’m baffled as to how this commercial got greenlit. Multiple people had to sign off on this. I understand AI is hard to sell because it’s a solution looking for a problem but surely they could have done better than this?

Anyway fuck tech companies and fuck these weird commercials.

[nepalsaysrawr]

An art style guide for the AI bros and sissies, by yours truly. Perfect for bored housewives, struggling nobodies trying to pay the rent, and anyone who enjoys scamming. Have fun.

[elliottkay]

Sharing the added bit here with the caveat that I don't know the poster, so I'm not sure of verification.

But then, we never know the truth of these situations until after the company in question has been caught doing the bad thing they weren't supposed to do, so...

its official: tumblr is selling our data to Midjourney

we'd been hearing rumors about this for a bit but now its open and out there. some details from this article

it goes without saying, but if @staff goes through with this its going to be an utter shitshow and im all but certain the website will not survive it.

[king-nyx]

"AI makes your story better!"

Does AI do what confused emotions, a sleepless night and energy drinks do? Does it? Didn't think so.

[cozylittleartblog]

cant tell you how bad it feels to constantly tell other artists to come to tumblr, because its the last good website that isn't fucked up by spoonfeeding algorithms and AI bullshit and isn't based around meaningless likes

just to watch that all fall apart in the last year or so and especially the last two weeks

there's nowhere good to go anymore for artists.

edit - a lot of people are saying the tags are important so actually, you'll look at my tags.

#please dont delete your accounts because of the AI crap. your art deserves more than being lost like that #if you have a good PC please glaze or nightshade it. if you dont or it doesnt work with your style (like mine) please start watermarking #use a plain-ish font. make it your username. if people can't google what your watermark says and find ur account its not a good watermark #it needs to be central in the image - NOT on the canvas edges - and put it in multiple places if you are compelled #please dont stop posting your art because of this shit. we just have to hope regulations will come slamming down on these shitheads#in the next year or two and you want to have accounts to come back to. the world Needs real art #if we all leave that just makes more room for these scam artists to fill in with their soulless recycled garbage #improvise adapt overcome. it sucks but it is what it is for the moment. safeguard yourself as best you can without making #years of art from thousands of artists lost media. the digital world and art is too temporary to hastily click a Delete button out of spite

[softwaring]

we’re really out here living in an AI dystopian hellscape and this shit has just begun… the future is grim…

[andthegeekshallinherit]

More AI fakery bollocks.

Looks pretty but ultimately fake, yet some will believe.

Öyle güzelsin ki

kuş koysunlar yoluna...

Nilgün Marmara...

[meanya]

I saw a post before about how hackers are now feeding Google false phone numbers for major companies so that the AI Overview will suggest scam phone numbers, but in case you haven't heard,

PLEASE don't call ANY phone number recommended by AI Overview

unless you can follow a link back to the OFFICIAL website and verify that that number comes from the OFFICIAL domain.

My friend just got scammed by calling a phone number that was SUPPOSED to be a number for Microsoft tech support according to the AI Overview

It was not, in fact, Microsoft. It was a scammer. Don't fall victim to these scams. Don't trust AI generated phone numbers ever.

[sixthrock]

the Fun Gang visits the Willy Wonka Experience ™️

[cat-appreciator]

I remember when everything was “nanotechnology”. Which was as far from sci-fi nanotech as machine learning algorithms are from sci-fi AI.

GENERATIVE TELE-AI 2000

so funny seeing companies scrambling to claim whatever goofball thing they were already doing is actually 'ai' now. NEW AI MICROWAVE WILL GENERATE A TEMPERATURE BASED ON YOUR SETTINGS. NEW AI GROCERY STORE SETS PRICES BASED ON WHAT PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO PAY. PLEASE INVEST IN ME

has been happening forever. the fender telecaster guitar was named that because TELEVISION was the cool new tech at the time. clearly did not have anything to do with TV itself and now this guitar just has a weird name. that being said at least telecasters are super dang cool

another fun one is how every product coming out around and before the millennium just slapped '2000' on their name for no practical reason other than that date represented 'the future'. 2000 WHAT? WHAT DOES IT DO? WHAT DOES THE NUMBER 2000 HAVE TO DO WITH SIM CITY MAXIS?

[river-taxbird]

There is no such thing as AI.

How to help the non technical and less online people in your life navigate the latest techbro grift.

I've seen other people say stuff to this effect but it's worth reiterating. Today in class, my professor was talking about a news article where a celebrity's likeness was used in an ai image without their permission. Then she mentioned a guest lecture about how AI is going to help finance professionals. Then I pointed out, those two things aren't really related.

The term AI is being used to obfuscate details about multiple semi-related technologies.

Traditionally in sci-fi, AI means artificial general intelligence like Data from star trek, or the terminator. This, I shouldn't need to say, doesn't exist. Techbros use the term AI to trick investors into funding their projects. It's largely a grift.

What is the term AI being used to obfuscate?

If you want to help the less online and less tech literate people in your life navigate the hype around AI, the best way to do it is to encourage them to change their language around AI topics.

By calling these technologies what they really are, and encouraging the people around us to know the real names, we can help lift the veil, kill the hype, and keep people safe from scams. Here are some starting points, which I am just pulling from Wikipedia. I'd highly encourage you to do your own research.

Machine learning (ML): is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines "discover" their "own" algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. (This is the basis of most technologically people call AI)

Language model: (LM or LLM) is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. (This would be your ChatGPT.)

Generative adversarial network (GAN): is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. (This is the source of some AI images and deepfakes.)

Diffusion Models: Models that generate the probability distribution of a given dataset. In image generation, a neural network is trained to denoise images with added gaussian noise by learning to remove the noise. After the training is complete, it can then be used for image generation by starting with a random noise image and denoise that. (This is the more common technology behind AI images, including Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. I added this one to the post after as it was brought to my attention it is now more common than GANs.)

I know these terms are more technical, but they are also more accurate, and they can easily be explained in a way non-technical people can understand. The grifters are using language to give this technology its power, so we can use language to take it's power away and let people see it for what it really is.