#Cryptocurrency surge

[signode-blog]

CoriteCO (CO): Up over 22,000% in 24 Hours

In the tumultuous world of cryptocurrency, astronomical gains and devastating losses are not uncommon. Recently, CoriteCO (CO) made headlines by surging over 22,000% in just 24 hours. While such a meteoric rise may seem like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for investors, it’s crucial to delve deeper into the context surrounding this astonishing increase. The Phenomenon of CoriteCO…

[dencyemily]

$XAI Token Skyrockets by 60% in a Week Amid Bitcoin's Cooling Period

The recent surge in XAI Games' native token, $XAI, has garnered significant attention, especially amid Bitcoin's cooling-off period. This impressive 60% surge within a week showcases the interconnected and volatile nature of the cryptocurrency market. Exploring the driving forces behind XAI's rapid valuation growth reveals the pivotal roles played by strategic partnerships, promotional events, and the influence of sector trends.

Key Catalysts for XAI's Surge:

Binance Listing and Airdrop Event: The strategic partnership with Binance has proven instrumental in XAI's valuation growth. Being listed as Binance's 43rd launchpool project and subsequent listing on January 9 opened doors to a vast user base, fueling optimism among altcoin enthusiasts. Additionally, a recent airdrop event by XAI Games, distributing $125 million worth of $XAI tokens to NFT series holders and selected network validators, contributed to increased speculation and buying interest, propelling the token's valuation to an impressive $137 million.

GameFi and Web3 Gaming Resurgence: XAI's surge aligns with the resurgence of the GameFi and Web3 gaming sectors. After a challenging phase in 2022, these sectors are experiencing a notable comeback, driven by the rebounding NFT market and the resilience of projects that weathered the previous bear market. This sectoral revival positions $XAI as an attractive investment option, especially for those optimistic about Ethereum, its layer 2 solutions, and the potential of Web3 gaming.

Current Statistics and Future Trajectory:

While the future trajectory of $XAI remains speculative, the current statistics present a promising picture. With a value of $0.0111965, a 10.09% rise within the day, and an impressive 157.14% increase over the past 7 days, $XAI's recent success vividly illustrates the fluctuating and dynamic character of the cryptocurrency market. Investors and enthusiasts keenly observe how these factors will shape the ongoing momentum of $XAI in the evolving crypto landscape.

[bitcoinversus]

Bitcoin Could Reach $90K as M2 Money Supply Surges

Bitcoin continues to track global M2 money supply trends, and analysts are forecasting a potential surge in its price to $90,000 by the end of 2024. The M2 money supply, which measures cash and short-term bank deposits, has been a key indicator of Bitcoin’s performance in past cycles. https://twitter.com/cointelegraph/status/1845825133824352750 As liquidity accelerates, Bitcoin is poised to…

[cryptonewscentral]

🚀💥 Toncoin (TON) has just made waves in the crypto world with an impressive 18% surge following its Binance listing! 🌟📈 From $5.4 to $6.4, this coin is making headlines and catching eyes. Get ready for more excitement as Toncoin rockets to new heights! 🌕✨ 

[crypto-telegraph-news]

What Happened in Crypto Today: Kamala Harris Delves Into Digital Assets, Bitcoin Surges High, and Old Wallets Stir

On the cryptocurrency front, today was a day of great happenings with a wide range of activities, starting from the United States Vice President, Kamala Harris breaking her silence regarding the digital assets, to outstanding performances of Bitcoin for the last twelve months. It even culminated into mysterious moves of long-inactive Bitcoin wallets from 2009.

[crypto195]

CryptoIndex Nears Launch and Announces INDX Token Presale Amid Thematic Investment Boom

Discover the Power of Thematic Investing in Cryptocurrency The cryptocurrency market has evolved beyond the dominance of just one or two assets, as seen in this year’s shift toward thematic investing. In Q2 2024, meme coins, real-world assets (RWA), and artificial intelligence (AI) led in popularity, making up 35.7% of market share. In August, it was all about PolitiFi coins that spiked 782.4%, overtaking meme-inspired projects. Since these new asset classes gain traction, it’s no longer correct to assess the overall market health by simply tracking Bitcoin or Ethereum. Instead, investors are looking for ways to measure the performance of specific sectors, which ensures a more accurate benchmark. This trend is paving the way for multi-asset indexes to become one of the fastest-growing niches in crypto. Crypto indexes allow users to monitor different categories of digital assets and provide tailored insights into the general performance of the crypto market. They work much like traditional stock market indexes such as the S&P 500, NASDAQ, National Stock Exchange (NSE), and Nifty50, which track the performance of a group of stocks.

To Know More- INDX token presale

[trader-sg112]

Bitcoin and Altcoins Update: Market Movements and Key Developments

The cryptocurrency market has experienced some intriguing shifts recently, with Bitcoin and various altcoins demonstrating varying levels of performance. Here’s a detailed overview of the latest market movements and notable developments.

Bitcoin: A Modest Decline with Strong Weekly Gains

Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency, has seen a slight decline of 0.9%, bringing its current price to $64,166.3. Despite this recent dip, Bitcoin has shown significant strength over the past week, trading up by 8.5%. This positive weekly performance highlights Bitcoin's resilience and continued appeal as an investment asset, even amidst short-term fluctuations.

Ether: A Small Drop Amid Anticipated ETF Approval

Ether has fallen by 0.2%, settling at $3,444.58. The drop comes as market participants await potential regulatory news. Recent reports suggest that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) might approve a spot Ether ETF as early as next week. Such approval could have substantial implications for Ether's market dynamics, potentially driving up its value as institutional investment opportunities become more accessible.

SOL: Noteworthy Surge with ETF News

In contrast to Ether’s slight decline, Solana (SOL) has surged by 3.8%. This increase follows reports indicating that a spot SOL ETF is also in the pipeline. The anticipated approval of such an ETF could enhance Solana's visibility and attract new investment, contributing to its recent upward momentum.

ADA and XRP: Downturns Amid Market Volatility

Both Cardano (ADA) and Ripple (XRP) have experienced notable declines. ADA fell by 2.3%, while XRP saw a more substantial drop of 4.7%. These downturns reflect broader market volatility and may be influenced by various factors, including regulatory uncertainties and shifting investor sentiments.

Meme Tokens: DOGE and SHIB Face Declines

Among meme tokens, Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) have also faced declines. DOGE fell by 1.1%, while SHIB saw a more significant slide of 6.2%. The fluctuations in these tokens underscore the volatility often seen in the meme coin sector, where price movements can be heavily influenced by social media trends and speculative trading.

Conclusion

The cryptocurrency market continues to demonstrate its dynamic nature, with Bitcoin maintaining a strong weekly performance despite recent declines. Ether’s minor drop is tempered by the potential approval of a spot ETF, which could bolster its market position. Meanwhile, Solana’s recent rise reflects optimism around its forthcoming ETF, while ADA and XRP, along with meme tokens like DOGE and SHIB, face varying degrees of market pressure. As always, staying informed about these developments is crucial for investors navigating the ever-evolving crypto landscape.

[cryptoinfowatch]

Michael Saylor's Bitcoin Holdings Surge by $700 Million in a Week

MicroStrategy’s chairman and bitcoin evangelist, Michael Saylor, has seen a significant surge in his wealth this week, as his company’s shares jumped by 40% amidst bitcoin’s rally to its highest level since November 2021. Saylor’s strategy, built around bitcoin, has proven to be highly lucrative, with MicroStrategy’s stock prices soaring. Built Around Bitcoin MicroStrategy’s chairman and…

[enforts]

Cryptocurrency Executives Anticipate Bullish Trends and Potential Bitcoin Surge in 2024 – Blockchain News, Opinion, TV and Jobs

In the dynamic world of cryptocurrency, industry leaders are optimistic about the start of a new bullish phase, with growing anticipation for Bitcoin to reach fresh all-time highs above $100,000 in 2024. Bitcoin has experienced a remarkable rally, surpassing a 120% increase this year alone, leading many enthusiasts to believe that this upward momentum will persist into the coming year. Last week,…

[digitalcreationsllc]

TikTok Flooded by 'Elon Musk' Cryptocurrency Giveaway Scams

TikTok is flooded by a surge of fake cryptocurrency giveaways posted to the video-sharing platform, with almost all of the videos pretending to be themes based on Elon Musk, Tesla, or SpaceX.

[dencyemily]

Bitcoin's Charge to $60K: Analyst Envisions Breakthrough Before Halving in a Bold Prediction

In a surprising turn of events, Bitcoin has surged towards the highly coveted $60,000 milestone, leaving analysts astounded by its unprecedented momentum. The renowned crypto analyst, Michaël van de Poppe, recently shared his insights, expressing surprise at the strength exhibited by Bitcoin in its recent surge.

Van de Poppe's assessment resonates with the sentiments of many observers, as Bitcoin's upward momentum seemed to catch even seasoned analysts off guard. Reflecting on the remarkable pace of Bitcoin's ascent, he admitted, "Got me by surprise with the recent strength."

Despite the remarkable rally, uncertainty looms over the cryptocurrency's trajectory, prompting investors and analysts to ponder its next move. Van de Poppe identified the $58,000 threshold as the final hurdle in Bitcoin’s current trajectory, acknowledging the ambiguity surrounding whether the rally would stall at this juncture.

Nevertheless, Van de Poppe maintained an optimistic outlook, suggesting that Bitcoin could surpass the $60,000 milestone before the anticipated halving event. Speculating on the massive strength displayed by Bitcoin, he stated, "The strength is massive, and there is a chance that we break $60K pre-halving."

Amidst the euphoria surrounding Bitcoin’s surge, market data has revealed significant milestones. A recent report from a leading market intelligence platform disclosed that an impressive 95% of Bitcoin addresses are currently profitable. This statistic mirrors levels witnessed during the peak of the 2021 bull market when Bitcoin’s price soared to unprecedented heights exceeding $60,000.

Additionally, the renowned analytical platform Glassnode shed light on Bitcoin’s remarkable performance in a recent post. With the spot price reaching $57,000, Glassnode highlighted that only 1.65% of trading days, specifically 82 out of 4,972, have seen a higher daily closing price for Bitcoin.

These revelations underscore the prevailing bullish sentiment within the cryptocurrency market. Investors are closely monitoring Bitcoin’s trajectory as it approaches significant milestones, and as Bitcoin continues to captivate the attention of seasoned traders and newcomers alike, the market remains poised for further developments in the unfolding journey toward $60,000.

[bitcoinversus]

Blockware Explains How Bitcoin Price Drives Mining Profit Multiple

Bitcoin miners are poised to gain as price increases drive higher profit margins.

According to Blockware, A 150% increase in the price of Bitcoin can significantly boost the profit margins of Bitcoin miners, particularly those using the Antminer S19 XP. This dramatic rise in Bitcoin’s price would result in what is known as the “mining profit multiple.” 🚨A 150% increase in the price of BTC would result in the profit margins of an Antminer S19 XP increasing by 900%😮This is a…

[cryptonewscentral]

🚀🔥 Memecoin Mania is Back! PEPE, DOGE, and SHIB are leading the charge with wild price surges and excitement. Buckle up for a wild ride in the memecoin market! 🌟💸 What’s next for these meme-tastic coins? Read on to find out! 📈📉

[nekomanager]

YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBOR ♡

- ONE of THREE -

you caught your neighbor and crush KENMA streaming more than just his games {1k+ words} a repost from my old blog; belated happy bday kenma kitty! dedicated to @suosteacup

🔖neighbors, masturbation, voyeurism, exhibitionism // comment on the reply section to be tagged in the next part 🫶

It was raining hard and you’re on your way home. Just like the usual, you paused in front of your neighbor’s house—a sneaky attempt to get a glance at him. 

Your cheeky smile was replaced by curiosity when you saw that his gate was left open. You weren’t really planning to go inside, but you noticed that a box was resting in front of his house and was being drenched by the rain. It was a package for him. Concerned, you went through the open gate.

“Kenma?” You called out as you entered his home. It was dark and you were nervous. It was your first time to set afoot in his abode. “I think you left your gate open and you also have an important parcel left outside.” You definitely didn’t want him to accuse you of burglary or trespassing. 

“I…I guess I’ll just leave it here.” You said as nervousness ate you up and maybe he wasn’t even able to hear you as it’s heavily raining outside. 

You were about to leave when you heard a faint noise coming from one of the rooms. Your head immediately turned to the direction of the sound. “A…Are you okay?” You asked.

Worried, you walked with light steps, approaching were you thought the sound originated. You turned right and saw a light that seemed to be coming from a computer screen. You came closer just right before the door and what you saw shocked you. Your heart felt like it stopped momentarily. 

Your eyes were wide and so was the way your mouth hung open. Kenma...

In his screen, appeared what it seemed to be a chatroom. You saw hearts and dollar signs popping as it rang. 

Everybody knew that he was streaming his games and was into cryptocurrency, but you never thought he’d be masturbating on-screen and gain profit from it.

His pants pooled on his feet, while his eyes were trained on his lap with one of his hands wrapped around his cock. All of this was being captured by his webcam. 

You knew it was wrong to stay here but your feet were glued to the ground. You couldn’t take your eyes off the way he pumped himself. The way his chest rose and fell made you heave in return and so were his long fingers and the intricate veins in his hand. Add to that, the smooth skin of his dick and the little blush on the tip with a bead of pre-cum almost spilling out. 

You gulped. 

He moaned. The way his sweet voice melodiously hummed was making you feel things you’re not supposed to. 

“Aaaah…aaah…mhmmnn…” He kept on breathing and moaning that your face heated up at the sound of him.

Another ringing came from his computer and he briefly looked at it. 

Kenma’s eyes became darker as he moved his hand faster along his cock. His head leaned down, eyes ferociously focused on his dick and cheeks bright red. Beads of sweat now started crawling down at the side of his face.  

Attempting to muffle the sounds, he bit his lip hard. 

You squeezed your thighs together. 

A surge of heat and want began bothering you in between your legs. It was pulsating down there completely in sync with the way your heart was beating in your ears. 

Reflexively, you ran your tongue in between your lips as the sight of him masturbating in front of you and eliciting those crazy sounds was making you so dry and thirsty for him. Your head was swimming in the thought of sweeping your tongue across his length, swallowing him whole and making him lose his mind as you took a taste of him.

Yes, you had a crush on him but you never thought of him in this way until now. You thought Kenma was cute since the very first day he transferred in your neighborhood. His dirty-dyed long hair, mysterious aura and piercing gaze caught your breath the very first time he locked eyes with you. All about him rendered you smitten and weak for his charms and now he also had you fucking wet for him.

“Aah, aaah, fuck…” Kenma moaned.

You whimpered. Your hand immediately flew to your mouth, trying cover any sound that would involuntarily come out from it. 

You weren’t supposed to watch this. You weren’t supposed to be here. This was so wrong. This was so dangerous yet you wanted it. You wanted it all. You wanted all of him and all that he could show.  

A lot of ringing sounds came to his computer and his movements became more and more intense. 

“Mhmnnn….aah aaah…What? More? More? More?” He chanted as he pumped faster and now not only was he moving his hand, but he’s also grinding his hips briskly and aggressively against it. 

You felt your knees melting. Your pussy throbbed as you imagined yourself sliding up and down that pretty cock of his and him fucking you so damn hard like that instead of his hand. 

“Fuck! I’m close…I’m close!” He raked a hand through his hair, stopping at the top as his head snapped to lean backward, his mouth surrendered open in that sexy ‘O’ and eyes tightly shut. Hazy fog clouded your eyes as he breathed deeply through his lips. “Aughhh! I’m coming! I’m co-“ 

You’re sure you came to just by watching him as you felt liquid wetting your panties and perhaps leaking across your thighs. His cum richly overflowed through the tip of cock and how you wanted to feel that spilling so hot inside you. 

You caught up with you breathing and so did Kenma. With his head still tilted backward and eyes closed, he rested his hand on his forehead then let it slump down as he inhaled and exhaled. You wondered who could be the person behind his thoughts as he did that. With a performance like that, there must be someone behind it. You couldn’t help but feel a slight pang of jealousy.

His eyes opened and you started to feel nervous. He stared off to the ceiling, until his feral gaze slid over to your direction. You froze in place certain that he found you out.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]