AI slop is very good at falling into the uncanny valley, whether that paragraphs of pure nothingness from a text extruder, or strange almost-human looking imagery that looks and feels inexplicably wrong. Its a great way to produce some accidental nightmare fuel, especially considering the AI bros glazing such shit are incapable of recognising its accidentally disturbing nature.

As a "fun" sidenote, there was an SCP article on the site which acted like a slop generator (SCP-1004, Factory Porn). Its writer, DrBright, was permabanned in 2022 after a lengthy history of sexual harassment was uncovered (and the article was deleted altogether in February of this year). Feels oddly fitting, in the worst way possible.

Witnessed an "AI-Powered political sandbox" called President Simulator crop up after seeing someone stream it on Discord.

I felt tempted to try and fuck with it, but its asking me to sign up for some fucking reason

Found the guy's webshite - its zero effort mInImAlIsT garbage at its core, and it proudly advertises his role in making scamchain, scamchain and more scamchain.

So, nothing really shocking

My thesis is that, with such short prompts, the user is doomed to receive a milquetoast average response; the bot correctly identifies the specific domain but elaborates a global non-specific approach that isn’t sufficiently nuanced.

Seems you're on to something - I submitted the phrase "Demoknight TF2" (an old(ish) meme started by/referencing TF2ber SolarLight, and referencing the Demoknight subclass, which explicitly forgoes a Stickybomb Launcher for a shield), and it gave me a godawful slop guide to the aforementioned subclass:

Going over a few things obviously wrong with this:

Demoknight is a popular TF2 "Demoman" build/theme

w h a t ?

mobile melee/ranged threat

Hybrid Demoknight (which takes a grenade launcher in the primary slot), I can see describing as a ranged threat. Full Demoknight (which takes Ali Baba's Wee Booties instead), not so much.

usually with a shield for mobility/survivability and a sword or axe for damage

Demoknight explicitly forgoes the Stickybomb Launcher for a shield of some description

Scotsman (sword/knight vibe)

There's no weapon called the Scotsman, but there is an axe called the Scotsman's Skullcutter

or other sword/axe-style options depending on the playstyle

There's only one axe for the Demo in the vanilla game - the aforementioned Skullcutter.

Shield: Tide Turner (more aggressive with better survivability/tempo) or Splendid Screen (more defensive, survivability-oriented).

There is a survivability-oriented shield, but its neither of these - its the Chargin' Targe, which offers 50% fire resist and 30% explosive resist (the Screen offers 30% resist on both, and the Turner offers only 15% on both, for comparison.

Calling the Splendid Screen "defensive" is also pretty far off the mark - beyond the aforementioned reduced resistances, its main advantage is a faster recharge on the shield charge, and a 70% increase to shield bash damage

As for the Tide Turner, it trades in offensive capabilities (it prevents its user from landing charge crits with their melee) for mobility-related ones (it completely disables turn control restrictions).

Grenade / support: often a grenade launcher for area control when you can’t reach melee cleanly, or a weapon that complements your survivability/engagements.

Yeah, seems the chatbot can't tell the difference between full and hybrid knight. Also, the grenade launchers are generally better for landing direct hits - area control is more the domain of a stickybomb launcher, or the Soldier's Rocket Launcher(s).

Use explosives smartly: not constant spam—more like zoning, forcing movement, or punishing groups.

Seems the chatbot got Demoknight and stock Demo mixed up.

Demoknight in general should stump chatbots pretty easily - beyond being effectively a different class from stock Demo, the subclass has a lot of nuance that can and will trip up the chatbots. To quote SolarLight's hour-long video on the charge mechanic:

"Well, at least you know that all of Demoknight's weapons have their uses when it comes to charging, and that Demoknight's charge can be essentially be boiled down into three different types (listed on-screen as "Full Control", "Some Control", and "Low Control"). There's also a distinction between Full Demoknight (melee-only) and Hybrid Demoknight (melee + grenade launcher), which is often a massive shift in playstyle. Demoknight has so much​ ​weapon variety, that talking about specific strategies can be a bit of a nightmare. Any given strategy might be godlike in one loadout, suboptimal in another, and impossible in another."

OT: What the fuck happened whilst I was asleep

alt: A screenshot showing nineteen fucking notifs

On one hand, this is awful. On the other hand, if I worked at a garbage tech company and my boss would not only pay me to sabotage the code base and spend their money but also reward me for doing so… I mean that’s an attractive proposition.

Before, sabotaging your competition was difficult and legally risky. AI fixes this - now, your competition shall sabotage themselves, leaving you free to focus on other things.

I've already seen people go absolutely fucking crazy with this - from people posting trans-supportive Muskrat pictures to people making fucked-up images with Nintendo/Disney characters, the utter lack of guardrails has led to predictable chaos.

Between the cost of running an LLM and the potential lawsuits this can unleash, part of me suspects this might end up being what ultimately does in Twitter.

Not only that, she introduced mass surveillance to Bluesky and is brainstorming further methods of such in response to getting clowned on so hard.

To reference a previous sidenote, DeepSeek gives corps and randos a means to shove an LLM into their shit for dirt-cheap, so I expect they're gonna blow up in popularity.

you_were_the_chosen_one.gif

I jumped ship to Librewolf a year and a half ago (after seeing Mozilla steal people's data and sell it to advertisers), and I'm pretty fucking thankful for that. For anyone looking to leave Mozilla to rot, I highly recommend it.

Baldur Bjarnason's given his thoughts on Bluesky:

My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.

I’ve heard so many examples of closed source projects that get shipped but don’t actually work for the business. And too many examples of broken closed source projects that are replacing legacy code that was both working just fine and genuinely secure. Pure novelty-seeking

chefs kiss

Musk says: “At times, I think Grok-3 is kind of scary smart.” Grok is just remixing its training data — but a stochastic parrot is still more reality-based than Elon Musk. [Bloomberg, archive]

If someone roasted me such such surgical precision like that, I'd delete my entire Internet presence out of shame. God damn.

Related Tweet:

Black Ops 7 sold less than half as much as last year’s Battlefield 6.

That's definitely a mistype - the previous CoD game was Black Ops 6, and Battlefield 6 was made by DICE and published by EA. Still, makes a good segue into how Blops 7 (which went all-in on AI) compared against BF6 (which released more-or-less AI-free, going by DICE's own comments).

In terms of sales, Blops 7 sold 63% less on launch than Battlefield 6 did in its opening week, earning Battlefield its first sales victory over CoD in both series' history, and breaking a streak of #1 sales CoD had held since 2006.

On Metacritic, BF6 got "generally favourable" critic scores in the low-80s, whilst Blops 7 hovers around the 67% mark. The user scores are much more favourable - whilst BF6 is hovering at 7/10 as of this writing, BO7 is currently at 1.6/10, beating the notoriously maligned Modern Warfare III to become the lowest-rated entry in the series' history.

On OpenCritic, Battlefield 6 earned a "Strong" rating on all fronts (83% top critic average, 90% Critics Recommend, player rating of 90) whilst Blops 7 got a "Weak" rating (65% top critic average, 35% Critics Recommend, player rating of 20).

Overall, signs are pointing to a historic victory for Battlefield over its long-running rival in the FPS genre, and a very public rejection of AI slop in all its forms.

Found a primo response in the replies:

I've already heard of this - mainly thanks to the nuclear backlash it (and basically anything related to AI) is getting. Pulling out a particular highlight, here's Ashley Lynch tearing the whole thing a new one:

Stuff like this is perfect because it shows how utterly devoid of creativity genAI evangelists are. Great, you recreated a photo that already exists in a drawing style that only has currency because of who you're stealing it from giving the world something with absolutely no value or meaning. I can't tell you how excited I am that we're literally burning the Earth up for this garbage.

Every genAI techbro needs to be sent to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity with how they've traded our future for this absolute bullshit. Straight up capital punishment for every one of these fucking losers responsible for cursing us with this garbage. I have zero chill on this issue anymore. They represent the end of humanity.

On the one hand, Google's still the dominant search engine, having used every dirty trick in the book to reach that position and maintain it. If you aren't on Google, you arguably might as well not exist.

On the other hand, Google's already under heavy scrutiny since being officially declared an illegal monopoly, and the public is pissed with how Google's declined in search quality - and deliberately so.

Part of me says we're about to see some truly wild shit go down.

But Apple Intelligence has its good points. “I find the best thing about Apple intelligence is that since I haven’t enabled it, my phone optimized for onboard AI has incredible battery life,” responded another Bluesky user. [Bluesky]

Y'know, if Apple had simply removed the AI altogether and went with that as a marketing point, people would probably buy more iPhones.

At the bare minimum, AI wouldn't be actively driving people away from buying them.

The good news is I barely use Protonmail (or email at all, for that matter).

The bad news is I have a fucking Proton account. Fuck.