#economic bubble

[easternmind]

Wuhan-based studio Nekcom is composing a provocative love letter to Japanese Pop culture from the 80s and 90s in the form of a post-apocalyptic RPG. Showa American Story is set in an alternative history setting in which the United States territory was bought by a prosperous Japan, whose economic bubble never burst, leading to mass migration and a rapidly developing form of cultural amalgamation. Interestingly, the game itself merges elements from a variety of popular American and Japanese styles of fiction. Aside from its wild premise, I was impressed by the studio's choice of the the 1991 hit theme Sorega Daiji by the Daijiman Brothers Band, one among dozens of witty cultural references included in the trailer which I'll leave for the reader to identify.

[arlesposting]

Hey everybody! I'm back with some more fanart of @extracreditsblog and their designs for historical figures! This time I drew Walpole, very self explanatory! He's leaning on a little economic bubble of his own, it seems. Who's fault was it? Always his. Enjoy! :D

[tomorrowusa]

Crypto always was, and still is, a cross between a Ponzi scheme and an economic bubble.

Seriously, crypto’s only true value is that people think it has value. That naturally leads to a situation where some opportunists are going to try to take advantage of the inclination by many to try to get rich quick with little effort.

Sam Bankman-Fried is more a symptom than a cause. While he’s certainly a financial con artist, he did not create crypto or its cousin the NFT.

The most important rule of investment is: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Too many people ignored that and are now suffering as a result.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

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/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

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

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

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[ladsofsorrow24]

commission art for @pet-plasma-bubble

commission link -> (x)

[thewhizzyhead]

if I said eisa davis' influence in making lmm actually write something rather radically progressive has subsequently inspired me to return to my roots of actually fucking thinking of making radically progressive musicals after a 3-year long hiatus in doing so, then what-

[quasi-normalcy]

I know that people are able to care about multiple things at once, yadda yadda, but I just suddenly found myself struck by the absolute cosmic idiocy of debating the morality of fiction while the only real world is drowning in evil.

[wanderersrest]

Some (More, but Actual) Context For G Gundam

Content Warning: Casual mentions of genocide due to the fact that this is a post covering real world events that happened before and during the airing of Mobile Fighter G Gundam in Japan. Reader discretion is advised.

Also, shout outs to Secret Galaxy, whose video on G Gundam helped a bit with some of the juicy context.

So I know I said I'd be talking about G Gundam. I will, but I still need to set the scenery a bit before I actually talk about G Gundam proper. Give you some context, because it'll help when it comes time to understand what was going on with G Gundam. Think of me as Stalker, setting up the scene at the beginning of every episode of G Gundam.

So with that, Context Fight! Ready, GO!!!

Sunrise, Bandai, and Victory Gundam

(Fun fact for the Gintama heads out there: Victory Gundam protagonist Usso Ewin is voiced by Daisuke Sakaguchi. In other words, Usso shares a voice actor with a sentient pair of glasses Shinpachi)

I figure a good place to start with all of this CONTEXT is start with what is going on at Sunrise, the anime company that produces and makes the Gundam anime series. Let's just say I didn't pick this gif of Usso out of the blue. During the run of the previous Gundam series, Mobile Suit Victory Gundam, Sunrise would be bought out by toymaker Bandai. And as they are the new bosses in town, Bandai started making demands. A lot of demands. So much so that series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino left the series once Victory Gundam wrapped up its run due to the amount of meddling Bandai was causing. So now, Bandai is in control of a franchise but lacking one of the main creative forces behind this iconic franchise. They also have a new idea for a new Gundam series, and they would prefer someone who is more compliant with their changes. Fortunately for Bandai, they would tap someone who had worked with Tomino on multiple projects together.

Enter Yasuhiro Imagawa

Bandai taps Yasuhiro Imagawa to direct this new Gundam series, as a move to get someone who may be more compliant to their whims. After all, Imagawa's only major projects as a director at this point are Ajikko-san and a couple of episodes of the Giant Robo OVA (a series I plan on watching eventually). There's just one problem: Imagawa worked under Tomino on a handful of projects, namely Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. So Imagawa kinda knows what Gundam's all about, especially since his focus was on storyboarding. If anything, he was just as put off on the idea as most Gundam fans at the time were, going so far as to try and come up with some ridiculous mecha designs that would flummox the people at Bandai. Imagawa would fail, but he would learn that it might be best to work with Bandai in order to make this Gundam series. Imagawa would begin work on a series that would, on the outside, be a radical departure from what Gundam was.

(Read in Susumu Chiba's voice) Stand up, Boy! Stand up and FIGHT!!!!

So you've probably gotten to this point and asked: "Why a tournament arc though?" And I will preface my answer with this: I'm not super-certain if the timeline lines up as well in my head, so if anyone can correct me on this, feel free to comment or message me on this if I'm wrong.

My answer is that there are two series responsible for this: Dragon Ball and Street Fighter. See, Dragon Ball Z would also be airing around this time, and if I'm thinking correctly, it should be airing around the time of the Cell Games arc (I think; Again, please correct me if I'm wrong). And remember, Dragon Ball is one of, if not the, most influential shounen battle series of all time. Add onto that the sudden success of Capcom's Street Fighter with the release of Street Fighter II and its colorful cast of characters from various nations with colorful attacks, and you can definitely see why Bandai would want to get in on the trend.

Would it surprise you if I told you that one of the more influential series for G Gundam was also Saint Seiya (or Knights of the Zodiac for those more familiar with its western name), specifically when it comes to the concept of the golden super mode. I also would not be surprised if Saint Seiya was also the reason for the majority of the Shuffle Alliance members being HOT MEN. Then again, Gundam's success was kickstarted thanks to women, so it may also be a treat for the ladies.

What's Going On in the World (1994 Edition)

So enough about Shonen Jump series and Street Fighter. What about the rest of the world? As we all know, media is informed by the world events that unfold as it's being made, and G Gundam is no exception. And while not all of these events happen before the series starts to air, they do, in my opinion, help to either inform or reinforce the ideas and themes present in Mobile Fighter G Gundam. I won't say what those themes and ideas are in this video, but here's an incomplete list of what is going on in the world before and during G Gundam's run:

The Japanese economic bubble bursts in 1992.

To reflect that, Patlabor 2 releases in theaters in 1993, best exemplifying the more pessimistic tones of post-bubble Japan by giving us a much colder and more cynical version of Patlabor that contrasts heavily to the more optimistic tone the series had prior to Patlabor 2.

Furthermore, a lot of western countries would be suffering from recessions at this point in the 90's. To put things into context for Americans, the economy is a large part of why Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush in the '92 Election.

In terms of entertainment, two extremely iconic series are still being worked on during G Gundam's airing: Pokemon and Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The general public is more aware of the climate than ever before, especially since it had been about 9-10 years since scientists discovered a hole in the ozone layer directly above Antarctica.

A week after G Gundam begins airing, the Rwandan Genocide begins in earnest.

Before their infamous Tokyo Subway Sarin attack, the cult Aum Shinrikyo would pull off a smaller scale Sarin attack in Matsumoto.

Just for fun: Magic Knight Rayearth airs in October of '94. In my mind, Rayearth acts as a sort of distaff counterpart to G Gundam due to their primary audiences.

And that's a wrap. I hope this more scattershot dive into some Context TM was interesting. This is going to be on the exam, as next time I will finally be talking about Mobile Fighter G Gundam

[vilevexedvixen]

Economics is a social science.

The worst social science.

Mathmatically justified palm reading.

"I see wealth and prosperity in your future" - an economist

*Economy crashes*

[bitchesgetriches]

Booms, Busts, Bubbles, and Beanie Babies: How Economic Cycles Work

If you liked this article, join our Patreon!

[zenosanalytic]

I was just driving home, saw some newly renovated homes on the way, and something occurred to me(may be explicit idk I dont actl watch this stuff):

The HGTV aesthetic, Whites, Greys, and Blacks, those aren't just neutral colors: They're PRIMING Colors. They're colors you paint Other, BETTER Colors that you like MORE on top of.

Property Brothers, all these other assholes; they want you to live in a house painted to sell.

[thepowerisyouth]

Eh mental health is annoying. Buying & cooking cheap low-FODMAP diet is annoying. My best top note for now is I'm using this blog to practice writing. I need more practice in it. I only know business, accounting & economics stuff. Its stupid stuff. Theres too much actual fraud everywhere that its annoying

Also I use mobile so formatting sucks cause Nvidia GPUs, or Arch dont like tumblr site. Or tumblr site dont like tumbkr site

Also also I 100,000% support all my fellow ones-and-zeros and their identity. Everyone is welcome here.

Except transphobes/zionist/long list of others but you get it. I'll help harrass any of those types endlessly if someone wants to tag me, and bring me in on an argument like that friend you call for backup with fights

Im unhinged so who's to say exactly what will end up here but this is also a completely public blog to me friends, family, hell, even acquaintances i dont give a fuc.

Blog should be expected to be roughly as child-friendly as simpsons or bobs burgers. But also boring like a civics/economics lesson sometimes. Yay

--------

I (and my husband) am ex mormon. Its a weird thing. Look into it if you havent recently. Realllllyyyy look into. Takes time to figure it all out in this fuckin fucked up world.

I just moved a year ago. Didnt watch the US stock market as much as I normally do. Had my first snowstorm 10 weeks ago, that was.. fun to handle while ill prepared. About 6 weeks ago I was hopping back on the market and notice its a huge tech bubble about to pop and all the conditions Ive been warned about my whole career imply this is not good. Just took a little more thinking & digging and I'm a little too confident to stop talking about it now.

(Oh I'm also care-free as fuc so I dont really read or desire to change past posts more than lil-nitpicks. More informative for the reader & myself-in-the-future-reading that way)

And I'm not kidding I do love feedback & questions. Its a very public blog tho so I get that part for sure.

If you search "life story" in my tags I had that pinned for a min Im just moving shit around rn

Being poor sucks. Will write more on that later.

---------------

First of all-- the exact timeline of an "economic shock" is literal insanity. Dont worry about the exact timing of any of this-- just know its doomed to happen soon.

Here are some effects I predict of this upcoming economic downturn

If anyone comes across any sources for these events that support my arguments please feel free to add in comments, reblogs, etc.

This concise list is mainly for my own reference, but it would be great to add to it if any one has something to add!

0.5. US Stock market collapse-- I have no desire to try and predict this one exactly. Too many conspiracies are actually correct about this big guy. Lets just say 7 US Tech stocks are worth 25% of the entire worlds market, roughly. "Too big to fail"-- I believe is the phrase

1. Corporate (slightly later will be residential by extension) real estate crisis: currently way too overvalued. Most of the houses, land, & urban corporate property we see could stand to decrease by about 60-90% from its current price.

2. Bankruptcy crisis: similar to the after-effects of the 70s inflation-- we can expect to see a huge wave of bankruptcies affecting a variety of business: from the micro-self employed; to the small business with leased buildings; to the largest corporations who commit massive accounting fraud & hope to escape accountability in time

3. Bank runs-- there is an extremely high overreliance on the Federal Reserve, who does not have good control over this situation. Once it becomes clear that there is a crisis (we call this a catalyst event)-- bank runs for physical cash are a surety. Hard to say how long a crisis like this might last. I should ask my siblings who lived near the SVB bank crisis hotspot (but those were rich fucks they do their "bank runs" over the phone)

3.5. Global currency collapse, which takes effect in every single local, state, & national economy at slightly different times. This means prices lower. Much lower. But takes time

4. Whatever the fuck the geopolitics is gonna do???. Its weird. You got Russia wanting to invade Europe? (Look at global economic forum 2024) Trump wants to let them. Biden wants to be an establishment corporate ass. North Korea has changed its #1 public enemy to South Korea (dont remember my source but it was a couple months ago). USA is stationing more troops in Taiwan, but probably only because of semiconductor technology?

The scope of our global financial woes are larger than can be explained in any of our lifetimes. Its much, much closer to pre-revolution France or the late 1920s. Big change is coming. Itll be soon

5. More to come

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Tumblr really is about the haves and the have nots. Every poll I've seen has tens of thousands of votes because they're novel and rare, but the second they roll out for everyone, no one will give a shit anymore. The poll bubble will burst, they'll be worthless, you'll be lucky if even a handful of your closest mutuals bother to click on it, much less have it breach containment and go viral. I just want to know how @staff chose which lucky bastards got to have the polls at their fullest potential? This is the peak, enjoy is while it lasts.

[quarra]

Housing Crash (maybe)

I just saw a post that was a whole lot of people SUPER excited about a news article covering a potential crash in the housing market.

And, listen, thats fair. Housing prices are fucking stupid high, for a bunch of reasons. So i get the excitement.

Just. Keep in mind that a sudden real estate crash is not all wine and roses.

Back during the first year of covid, the US had a surge of people buying homes. Lots of folks suddenly were working remotely and loving it and deciding that they didnt need to live in a place they hated. They moved out of the big city and spread out. Which was cool! This, predictably, made housing prices go way, way high up (one of the many reasons).

Meanwhile, small businesses failed in droves while huge mega businesses consolidated their forces (aka they have more power and control in their markets).

(Another thing that these big corporations did was they went all in to an ol' Lex Luthor classic and invested in real estate. Huge corporations bought up homes to rent out at a premium, coincidentally contributing to the high housing costs as they priced out individual people looking to buy.)

Then two years went by and employers, by and large, decided it was much harder to keep drones under their thumbs when the drones are out of the office, and there was a mass shift to drag people back into the office at least part of the time.

Now lets match that up with the fact that many people bought homes in locations not ideal for their line of work, and for a potentially much, much higher price than the home is worth.

With the housing market looking at a crash, all of those people are now fucked, paying for a mortgage thats far more than their house is worth in an area they likely will have trouble finding or maintaining work in.

So, like, yay. Lower housing costs. But dont forget that a swift change in the market will absolutely screw a number of folks, and given the sheer finanical vulnerability of most of the people in the US, a crash in housing costs is gonna cause just as many problems as it solves.

[awkward-teabag]

Can't even mention that a store near me is clearly using abusing the TFW program because they refuse to pay little more than minimum wage in a high cost of living area (also you won't get benefits and you'll only be part-time) because the fascists and right-wingers will jump in to say it's about immigration and white replacement.

No, it's because rich white people want to hoard even more money and found an intentional loophole to both make more money (via paying employees less) and also have more power over employees, employees who may or may not know Canadian employment laws (or safety laws) and even if they do, don't have the ability or support to try to hold the company accountable.

You can absolutely criticize the federal government for keeping the loophole open but it predates Trudeau by decades and it was Harper who both expanded the program and added a way for companies to fast-track TFWs. It was also under Harper that companies started firing Canadians (or not hiring them) and then requesting permission to mass-hire TFWs instead.

But the way the right wing talks, you would think Trudeau started this whole thing and the poor multi-million and multi-billion dollar companies are being taken advantage of. Also that housing prices, lack of new developments, and zoning issues started with Trudeau and are the fault of mass-immigration he has a boner for instead of being an issue for decades and experts warning this would happen if governments didn't act ASAP.

Instead the neolibs and cons kept cutting back and kicking that can down the road, a can that started being kicked by Mulroney and the Conservative Party.

[melancholia-ennui]

Every time I see people worrying about students using chatGPT to cheat assignments I despair a little more at the state of modern academia because like.

Chat GPT essays suck. They're so bad. They get basic facts wrong, they make up references that don't exist, they jump from one argument to the next without any throughline or coherence or objective. They are very bad essays.

So if your students are "coasting" through your course using chatGPT, if you're not failing every essay that chatGPT produces, that is a real indictment of how abysmally low the standards on that course are.

Like yeah, I get it, the idea that there could be nurses and engineers and other people in specialist roles where human lives are on the line who didn't engage with their training at all because they used generative AI to write their essays is really scary but like. If they were able to pass their courses using chatGPT that just shows that those courses were also going to pass someone who made shit up, had no real grasp of the subject matter, and failed to critically engage with the set material at all and at that point it's just like. I mean is machine assisted incompetence really that much scarier than entirely human incompetence? Surely the problem here is that incompetence is being let through at all???