Seems like the jig might be up for the Gen AI in everything scam these silicon valley looters are running.

According to the Better Offline podcast, Microsoft is pulling back investment in the power needed to run gen ai. By a lot. They were about to invest in more than enough power to run the cities of London or Tokyo, but decided not to. Microsoft is heavily invested in OpenAi.

The AI they've been trying to sell us is bullshit, y'all. All is does is shit you already know how to do. Sure, this can be useful, but really, it's just making everything look the same and it's yet another thing in the culture to make us all dumber and lazier. It's another layer of modern convenience. We have an abundance of convenience here in America and it's lulled us to sleep because as long as we can get anything we want delivered to our door, we're happy enough. Unless you pay attention to politics, but most people don't pay attention to politics, or so it's said. We've become too reliant on convenience and at the same time it's become harder to opt out of contributing to companies that are collaborating in the downfall of society, because only a few very rich white men own everything. Right down to how credit cards are processed on my little website slinging project bags for crafters.

Not gonna lie. I've used chatgpt. There were things I found helpful about it — like the time I asked it how I could become a textile design legend, there was some good stuff there. But when it got down to it, I know I can read biographies of textile design legends to see how they did it and follow that up with books about marketing to learn from experts. And how much more meaningful would that be. How many more lessons might I takeaway that the AI missed in its summaries.

I've used AI to ideate and generate ideas for textile designs. The results were often laughable but sometimes there would be a nugget in there that would give me something to riff on and get me working if I was feeling creatively blocked. Usually though, the results were so bad that I would laugh and tell myself I could do better than that and then I'd get to work.

Above is the result of me asking the ai to generate some ideas for a pearl necklace based on Kamala Harris that I could then use in a textile design. There is nothing useful here and I could have spent time refining my prompt, but I'd need to buy a subscription for that and this experiment with Ai didn't leave me thinking I'd get the result I wanted any faster than if I just did the work myself. A subscription seemed like a waste of money, so I got to work without the help of AI. The result was the We Are Not Going Back scarf, which was a best seller for me.

AI is like the consultant you hire because you're too busy to do your own work or because it's work you really don't want to do yourself. But it doesn't care about the quality of your work and it never can because it's just bits and bytes. At some point, if you really care about your work, you gotta bring it in-house.

The writing is on the wall. The stuff isn't all that useful and it's getting pushed into everything, including law enforcement, which doesn't bode well for civil liberties. This is technology that hallucinates, makes mistakes, has bias coded in, and misses things in summaries. It's not accurate.

Human intelligence has value. Human life has value. Human creativity is boundless. The people developing these technologies could be using it to make something that helps humanity but instead they seem to be using it to con people, steal people's work, generate and disseminate misinformation and propaganda, make it easier for scammers to do their work, and make a huge profit from it before moving on to their next con because these people are allowed to spin up new companies making huge promises that never come to fruition, without consequence. They're often seen as visionaries, when really they're just good salesmen. It's a living, I guess.

But that's tech, right. The more I learn about companies like Open Ai, the more I'm reminded of when I used to work in IT and I was responsible for evaluating software that we'd use inhouse to do various things for us. I would sit through these demos and sometimes the software would seem so great but when I really sat down to think about it, they weren't selling me anything I needed a whole ass expensive program to do for me. These Ai tech bros are just selling software. And some really rich people with big platforms and deep pockets fell for the sales pitch, then pitched it to all of us and now they are realizing it's all been a bunch of bullshit. I really wish they'd say it louder, though. But everything's all about making profits for shareholders, so on goes the con.