Ed Zitron you are my effing hero: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-doesnt-have-roi/

No one says it better. (Or less profanely.)

#theAIcon #AInsanity #congame #aididntworkinthe1990sanditisntworkingnow

File under: AI Resistance

I'm reading – and enjoying immensely – @emilymbender and @alex's book #TheAICon.

I've been learning a lot of things and something that really stood out recently is the need to be careful about the language we use to describe these systems. Bender and Hanna helpfully explain:

"It matters what words we use when we talk about these technologies. For instance, in our writing, we don’t use the term “hallucination” to discuss the errors of LLMs, for two reasons. First, if it’s used tongue-in-cheek, it is making light of what can be symptoms of serious mental illness. Second,
“hallucination” refers to the experience of perceiving things that aren’t there. But LLMs actually don’t have perceptions, and suggesting that they do is yet more unhelpful anthropomorphization. That means we also avoid assigning thought processes to these systems, or saying that they can
“think”. Metaphors have power, they structure the frames of discourse, and they can subtly and insidiously encourage certain ways of understanding technology and the social systems it is embedded in."

Antropomorphizing AI contributes to AI hype. Thanks Emily and Alex for helping me see things this way!

#AIcritique #AIhype #NoAI #AIresistance #AI #books

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.

#AtPol #TheAiCon #LLMs #Politics

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/

#ai #aihype #theaicon #n8n

[...] “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

#quitgpt https://quitgpt.org #llm #theaicon #aihype