RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116098129762953036
Professor Emily M. Bender's replies are always so on point—huge recommendation if you want to know about the problems with #AI
#noAI #artificialIntelligence #LLMs #LargeLanguageModels #genAI #ChatBots #vibeCoding #TheAICon #ComputationalLinguistics #AgentsOfTech #DataWorkers #AI2027 #AGI #artificialGeneralIntelligence #GeoffreyHinton #AIReasoning #NeuralNetworks #EmilyBender #ReinforcementLearning #AIHype
RE: https://chaos.social/@epicenter_works/116492792687041985
This is exactly the scenario that @emilymbender and @alex have warned us about in their excellent book "The AI Con" (https://thecon.ai).
The book contains several examples where using stochastic parrots to "make" decisions has severely backfired.
Imho this book should be mandatory reading for anyone holding a public office.
In #technofeudalism and #antihumanism:
The narrative of #AI's “inevitability” is a tactic used by tech companies to discourage resistance and encourage compliance.
[…] When tech boosters want to demonise resistance, they invoke the luddites. By their telling, the luddites were primitive idiots, who smashed machines they were too stupid to understand. History though, tells a different story. As recounted by Brian Merchant’s sublime work Blood in the Machine, luddites were skilled artisans, fighting for their way of life against the “satanic mills” – textile sweatshops powered by child semi-slaves. Forbidden from unionising, luddites smashed machines as a protest tactic. And they did not lose to the inevitable march of progress. They lost to physical force. The government called in troops, and the luddites were either executed or shipped to penal colonies in Australia.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/apr/12/is-ai-the-greatest-art-heist-in-history
#technofeudalism #antihumanism #ai #promptingwithhitler #nerdreich #llm #theaicon #aihype #histodons
The AI Great Leap Forward
Similar to the #Chinese Great Leap Forward's inflated grain production reports, companies are fabricating or exaggerating #AI adoption and productivity gains to please leadership, leading to increased investment based on made up numbers. The focus seem to have shifted from genuine AI development to "demoware" – impressive-looking prototypes and interfaces with little underlying validation, data infrastructure, or maintenance plans, creating future tech debt.
[…] Entire departments are stitching together n8n workflows and calling it AI — dozens of automated chains firing prompts into models, zero evaluation on any of them. These tools are merchants of complexity: they sell visual simplicity while generating spaghetti underneath. A drag-and-drop canvas makes it trivially easy to chain ten LLM calls together and impossibly hard to debug why the eighth one hallucinates on Tuesdays. The people building these workflows have never designed an evaluation pipeline, never measured model drift, never A/B tested a prompt. They don’t need to — the canvas looks clean, the arrows point forward, the green checkmarks fire. The complexity isn’t avoided. It’s hidden behind a GUI where nobody with ML expertise will ever look.
https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/
[...] “I think there’s a small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”
Senior executive at #Microsoft about #OpenAI's Sam Altman.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted or https://archive.ph/9jqJ7
[…] Even if the accuracy problems were solved, and AI-generated summaries reliably captured all the essential points of a text, it would still be a bad idea to use them. Creating your own summaries is a crucial step in any literature study. When you read and summarize a text, you create the neural connections necessary to memorize and apply the information well in an exam, experiment, or research paper. Generating it with a click is a harmful form of cognitive offloading and will erode these skills. Writing it yourself will reveal the nuances of an academic text and allow you to register those elements that you deem essential to whatever you are working on.
Despite didactic, ethical, and environmental concerns, the use of GenAI is on the rise in academia. For most applications, the jury is still out on whether and how they will benefit education and research in the long term. But it’s already safe to conclude that one popular use case is, in fact, a bad one: AI-generated summaries.
[…] That’s why they are doing everything they can to convince you that you actually do not have the ability to think those thoughts, and that none of the ideas you might have about your own future are ideas that can actually be realized. It’s a big win for them, in their quest to persuade you of your powerlessness, that they have gotten your university to adapt their marketing language for its official statements, to shape its academic programming around the presumption of their indefinite economic primacy, and to pay for you to have free access to technologies that will make it harder — the more you use them — to know yourself to be a free intellectual, creative and moral agent.
[…] Rewarding confidence over actual competence is a bug humanity has always had. It has produced disasters throughout history, it is producing disasters now, and not only in the tech world.
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2026/03/20/enshittifaication/
Integrating AI into customer service is as dumb as you’d expect. The enshittification of services, where companies replace human expertise with AI, will lead to confusion, wasted time, and a decline in reliability. All of this is driven by a misplaced trust in AI's assertive but often incorrect pronouncements. Anyone who used these tools for a while learned to live with the disappointment. AI is not even close to delivering most of what these companies claim it will.
[…] #OpenAI, which will likely never be profitable, is now valued higher than some of the most established tech companies on the planet. A company that burns through cash faster than it can generate revenue, and yet investors keep lining up. It’s not a market anymore, it’s a collective delusion backed by hype and #FOMO.
Zuri (he/him) ❌️👑 | 🕐 CET
Andreas Grois
oatmeal
Josh