ZITRON DROPPED

Best case scenario here is that this is how one department of Google get money out of the other bits of Google, because the internal bean counters cannot control their fiscal sphincters when someone says “ai” to them.

That’s my hope either - every dollar spent on the technological dead-end of quantum is a dollar not spent on the planet-killing Torment Nexus of AI.

I wouldn’t be shocked about it - the general throughline of “AI rots your brain”, plus the ongoing discussion of AI in education, would give any shrewd politician an easy way to pull a Think Of The Children^tm on the AI industry, with minimal risk of getting pushback.

Found a primo response in the replies:

Hot take: Dropping a single nuclear bomb over Silicon Valley would solve most of the world’s issues

Damn, seems everything from the Y2K era’s coming back - even email viruses. Calling it right now, we’re gonna have the next ILOVEYOU within a year.

Least fascist programmer

AI is a pseudoscience that conflates a plagiarism-fueled lying machine with a thinking, living human mind. Fuck off.

In other news, reports of AI images turning everything yellow have made it to Know Your Meme.

Hot take: A lying machine that destroys your intelligence and mental health is unsafe for everyone, mentally ill or no

You want my take, this probably isn’t gonna injure Disney all that much - they’re one of the largest megacorps on the entire planet, and they’ve got damning evidence of infringement against Midjourney.

How much damage Midjourney’s gonna take (at least in the immediate term), I’m not sure. If they settle ASAP, they can probably limit the damage, but if they try and fight, they’ll probably be bankrupted by the case.

I expect they think they can get a precedent here.

That’s true - the case is pretty clear-cut thanks to how much damning evidence they’ve managed to pull out. The old trend of using AI to make offensive shit in the Pixar style likely helped as well, but that’s speculation on my end.

Midjourney is also odd in that it didn’t take money from outside investors and it’s actually profitable selling monthly subscriptions. This is an AI company that is not a venture capital money bonfire, it’s an actual business.

I suspect Disney isn’t out to just shut Midjourney down. Disney’s goal is to gouge Midjourney for a settlement and a license.

In practice, I doubt Disney’s gonna get to shake much out of Midjourney before they end up going under - given that gen-AI is built to facilitate plagiarism and copyright infringement, a win for Disney here would lead to a de facto ban on generative AI.

Eric “Slophand” Slopton: He’s like Eric Clapton, but somehow more racist

Got a hilarious story for today: ChatGPT Lost a Chess Game to an Atari 2600

New Blood in the Machine: The weaponization of Waymo, about protesters torching Waymos in a repeat of last year’s Waymo Warm-Overs.

Rare TERF Island W

…okay in retrospect “AI is gambling” does explain a lot about why people are going completely fucking bonkers for autoplag

Cocaine doesn’t make you a business genius — it just makes you think you’re a business genius. Same for AI.

This is completely unrelated, but I once saw a dude snort a line of cocaine straight off a Nintendo Switch. Its kinda funny to think about.

New piece which caught my attention: Against AI literacy: have we actually found a way to reverse learning?

Why do they think people buy newspapers in 2025?

To be fair to WaPo, The Onion returned to print in 2024 and reportedly did pretty well from the move.

Granted, this is a bit of an apples-and-oranges situation - for one thing, the Onion is a serious journalistic outlet, whilst WaPo is not.

ETA: If you’ve had your interest piqued, you can grab the print versions through their membership program - minimum cost is a pretty hefty $99 a year, though.

Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo’s jumping headfirst into it.