Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)
William MacAskill is embarrassed that he was buddies with SBF. But back in 2014 he was open that he brainstormed names for his movement with “the Leverage folks” and Geoff Anders. He also mentioned that “we hadn’t planned ‘effective altruism’ to take off in the way that it did” which is consistent with his later statements that he was always about the Longtermism.
The same blog archive from 2014 has recent posts on “Strategic considerations about different speeds of AI takeoff” and “an email conversation with (GiveWell founder) Holden Karnofsky, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Luke Muehlhauser about future-oriented effective altruism” if you need to rub anyone’s nose in it.
Sneerable names include Toby Ord (“I hate Ni****s”) and Peter Singer (““When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed”).
Reason: I was talking to an EA on Reddit who does not want to believe that the eugenics and the skull calipers were in the movement from the beginning.
Large amounts of the LW commentariat cannot get their heads around how students JUST. DON’T. GET. AI.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ySXuvJcqRindQwAk7/how-my-students-think-about-ai
They are extremely surprised by:
Perspective #1: There has not been rapid AI progress. My students do not have any intuitive sense that there has been rapid AI progress in recent years or really have much of a framework for thinking about that issue… With the exception of image/video generation, GPT-4 could do most of what they were looking for from a chatbot. Three years is a long time in their world, and their sense is that chatbots have been a mature technology over roughly that amount of time. They are an imperfect technology — students are well-aware of hallucinations — have been one, and will continue to be one… Historical context I gave them made this worse. The basic sentiment here was “AI was superhuman at chess a decade before we were born, and this is all they’ve done with it since?”…
Perspective #2: Impressive progress or not, AI is going to wreck their lives, the economy, and the social contract.… Corporate leaders are always looking to get rid of workers, even if it is irrational to do so. Various motivations were posited here (hatred of the working class, FOMO, a preference for technology, machines can’t go on strike, etc.) but many of them think that a CEO would ultimately choose to pay twice as much to get AI to do a task half as well… AI will do substandard work that makes products and experiences worse but is capable of just barely scraping past the bar of minimal functionality (many of them independently brought up constantly malfunctioning self check out machines). This will be rapidly rolled out, enshittifying most things.
Perspective #4: Catastrophic/existential risk arguments are sci-fi distractors from the urgent social/economic/political problems associated with AI. My students have a fairly strongly held view that “rogue” AI does not represent a real threat… They also mostly think that, if one does believe that AI is existentially risky, then the strategic interaction is not prisoner’s dilemma or even chicken but rather just a game theoretically boring setup where you die if you defect. Mash these together, and you end up with the view that expressed concerns about existential risk in the AI industry can’t be sincere… Students (both independently in written work and then later in group discussion) hypothesized that this might be a deliberate rhetorical choice to distract from present or immediately foreseeable harms from AI by directing attention towards a sexier but entirely hypothetical scenario… they see discussion of “rogue” AI as an attempt by the companies to divert blame (and perhaps legal liability) away from themselves as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on “rogue cars.”
Perspective #7: The Hugging Face Incident (summer students only) I described the Hugging Face incident to students in my summer course. None of them had heard of it beforehand. Their basic reaction can best be summarized as “OpenAI told a model to do some hacking and then it did some hacking. And?” None of them understood this as representing any kind of meaningful misalignment, nor anything particularly interesting.
Perspective #8: This is definitely a bubble and it’s about to pop. No one had heard about Hugging Face, but a third or so of the summer students had heard about the Situational Awareness meltdown and several brought up Michael Burry. There was near universal consensus that we are in a bubble, it’s about to pop, and everyone will look very silly.
My general approach telegraphs a receptiveness to “sober” forms of argument, an interest in counterintuitive strategic thinking, a distaste for wild speculation, an aversion to nakedly ideological perspectives, and a sense that the past is important for understanding the future. My students probably make some effort (implicit or explicit) to speak in ways that respond to this.
I’m going to leave this part of the author’s self-description here and resist the urge to comment on it.
Perspective #6: AI will not go rogue because AI does not have, and is likely incapable of having, desires.
This one I found interesting largely because it suggests an inability on the writer’s part to really understand point 4, despite featuring one of the better sneers on the subject (“as if Ford made a car with faulty brakes and then tried to blame this on ‘rogue cars.’”). Maybe I’m overstating something here, but the way I see it the difference between the rogue AI and faulty AI scenarios aren’t really in the distinct events of the scenario. Faulty AI could absolutely do as much damage as “rogue” AI if it was plugged into all the systems that would be necessary to, say, liquidate humanity and pull the iron from their blood. The difference is entirely in framing and responsibility. We should ask questions now about how these systems are used, what their limitations are, and how we deal with that. Instead, the Rogue AI people presuppose that we ignore all of those questions and opportunities to mitigate harm that these faulty systems can do and skip straight to the part where they have universal and immediate power over everything, and then use the idea that the AI went rogue and has agency to avoid how obviously bad of a decision this would be. The fact that this is also the part where the AI companies make a fucktillion dollars and finally show them, show them all, muhuhahaha is, I’m sure, irrelevant to their sober analysis.
The kids are alright!
This gives me very good vibes. The kids are all right. Maybe not economically, probably not, but in spirit at least.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/101070-study-finds-63-of-religion-books-on-amazon-likely-ai-written.html h/t naked capitalism
Over the first six months of 2026, the company scanned the three elements of books available on Amazon: summaries, author bios, and in-book samples, with the samples serving as the study’s primary metric. Any text with a score of 50 or above was classified “Likely AI.” (The study’s authors note that detection indicates a book was likely written with AI, but doesn’t prove authorship.)
Originality.ai found that AI is most prolific among the subgenres of witchcraft (in which 78% were “Likely AI”), Hinduism (76%) and Taoism (74%), and least used in the subgenres of Satanism (22%), atheism (40%) and Mormonism (42%). The authors note that the sample sizes for the last three categories are smaller than the first three; they also offered up a theory about why Eastern religion books are likely AI-generated: “Our hypothesis is that non-native English speakers are likely using AI to enter the English-speaking market.”
“Satanists least tainted by AI, says AI detection AI”. it WOULD say that. /s
on an unrelated note on the same topic, I read the ebook by Jesus Freak Computer Geek blogger that argues that LLMs are actually channeling nephilim / demons (hence the six fingers in dalle) and that they have used the Mandela effect to corrupt the KJV and also herald the antichrist. Him and Thiel should, like, call in to coast to coast am where these things can be properly debated.
Presented without comment
spoiler
A street ad for a breakfast burrito with an AI-generated image of a disgusting burrito that is full of maggots
I heard the image is likely to be totally ai generated and might not be real
I am now convinced it is indeed fake. Shame on me, posting slop
It got me as well before.
Doesnt help that i saw overgreebled food advertisements like that irl. I did ‘boycot’ that food place.
@Soyweiser Got me, too. Highlights the ubiquity of LLM slop in viral clickbait these days. This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here … nothing valued is here (&c.)
Yeah actually, the sign border is weird, building in backround makes no sense, building on the right has a couple of weird features, trees are very indistinct, pavement on left abruptly changes paving pattern just before the sign, pavement-road on right of sign.
Automated company or attempt at viral marketing?
deleted by creator
Jesus H. Fuck
The protein craze has gone too far
over on the corporate hell site, Timnit has found a link
Well guys, I KNEW that we were going to connect the network hounding Arday to the TESCREAL bozos somehow. I could smell it.
This is a “paper” by the professor of “ethics” who hired the vile Cofnas at Ghent University. This is the kind of “research” they do.
✴️ Reminder the L in TESCREAL stands for “longtermism”. Read more at https://lnkd.in/ge2VFMe4. These are the eugenicists who pushed generative AI down your throats, including Ben Goertzel who told Epstein that when he creates a super brain, there won’t be the kind of women who accused Epstein of rape.
✴️ “Dysgenic pressures” is the opposite “eugenic pressures.” In this so-called paper, they’re talking about undesirables like Black people reproducing too much.
cofnas got suspended for being a racist dipshit
times high education got wind of it all over nine months before cofnas did, but didn’t publish because of SLAPP possibility https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-police-over-arday-case-i-was-just-doing-my-job https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/jason-arday-many-things-can-be-possible-same-time i read it as multifaceted shitshow
So the argument is that the hypothetical future generations that longtermists value might be too dumb to care about because of
black and brown people reproducingmiscegenation“dysgenic pressures”. But if we assume, as they appear to, that longtermists should be taken seriously rather than pointed at and mocked, then the math involved would basically necessitate that people alive today should also merit effectively zero moral consideration. Something tells me that they get real conceptual real fast and start avoiding the shut up and multiply people hard.The paper by de Vries cites all our favourite race cranks: Bo Winegard, Aporia Magazine, Michael Woodley of Menie, Helmuth Nyborg, Diana Fleischman, E.O.W. Kirkegaard, Steven Pinker (not out AFAIK but he keeps promoting Nazis), G. Meisenberg of Mankind Quarterly, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103417
that shortened link is just redirect to https://dair-institute.org/projects/tescreal/
OT: I just turned 26. I’m taking a trip to a local steakhouse to celebrate.
Happy birthday, my friend! Glad to hear that the steakhouse delivered.
Solid plan!
This policy seeks to ensure that our courses focus on requisite cognitive skills by default. It provides students with the opportunity to develop the skills they need to conceptualize, outline, draft, revise, and edit their work by forbidding the use of AI for these purposes in connection with work submitted for credit. It also forbids using AI to translate work for credit, thus providing students with the opportunity to develop and exercise their own fluency with legal English. […] The use of AI is prohibited for aid in conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit. AI use is prohibited for any use for any purpose in any exam situation. Students may not upload course materials—including assignments, readings, slides, class recordings, or other class content—into generative AI systems.
I wonder how long until some big AI company has a massive leak of identifiable-user chat logs with god knows what confidential stuff on it, since they HAVE to have all this in plaintext
that already kinda happened (for a certain groups of users) with the public share links thing, but my money is on a corporate self-own a la the old AOL search data set.
man good for them. meanwhile down south we keep throwing good money after bad while also doing layoffs.
Annie Altman, Sam Altman’s sister who has accused him of abuse has recently posted:
If any harm ever comes to me “mysteriously” - you know who it was.
I love my life.
https://xcancel.com/anniealtman108/status/2089964553207775529
She also added " I am not suicidal, nor on any kind of drug I could overdose on".
As usual this sort of message actually makes me worried about what she might do to herself. :(
I’ve never heard of abuse allegations against Altman, so I looked them up and holy shit wow.
Scott Alexander has told many stories about why he is pseudonymous. In 2013, when he was applying for medical residency, he told a simple story which begins with an interviewer saying he would have to take his LiveJournal down if he were accepted:
I originally deliberately linked this blog and some of my other writings to my real name in order to bury Google evidence of certain stuff I did online when I was a dumb teenager, but that mission is pretty thorougly (sic) accomplished and now I agree with my interviewer that even if I don’t get hired (cue serious of elaborate ritual hand gestures to ward off unthinkable misfortune) it is to my benefit to switch back to my normal totally un-Google-able pseudonym of Scott Alexander (well, actually just my first and middle name).
FYI, this is why its a red flag that someone has public profiles on dozens of sites. Its a standard technique to bury negative posts in Google results, PR firms will write the profiles and get you a few press releases and talks to help. I hope this is the last thing I have to say about this particular creep.
What did he do, leave written evidence of white supremacist leanings?
at least that. considering that as a working psychiatrist he didn’t mind posting details of private lives of his patients and write about his disdain for them,
if you held a gun to my head I would guess it would be his racism (he thinks that different groups have natural places in society driven by their inborn hereditary differences), but I don’t see any point in trying to track it down. He is clever but uses his brains for very common, very bad ideas and the things he has done since 2013 are much worse than the things he could have posted as a young man.
Came across this on the orange place: dontpastetheai.com
I was expecting like nohello.net but instead we get a decent intro explaining nuance as to why people ask other people questions followed by how to use AI and hide that you used it.
Is it me, or do attempts to make movies with AI tools
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/24RKHEkwgZ6Hm6ygY/can-an-llm-make-a-feature-length-movie-on-its-own
Remind me of SCPs
Quoth the blog post:
I have a YouTube channel where I mostly get LLMs to write albums and make them into music videos.
… the fuck did I just read?
Same person has a history of posting collections of AI generated music videos to LW talking about how they let various different generative AI systems ‘express themselves’ and analyzing the different kinds of imagery in each.
If you wonder how you can look at any of this without viscerally realizing that it’s absolute dogshit, I found the
authorsperpetrators conclusion very insightful.Where we go from here
I expect these issues to all be fixed by the end of 2027.
I expect no-longer-obviously silly movies to be doable within two years, right now it’s going slower than I expected in January 2026 because the frontier labs are no longer competing over having the best video generator, like they were when we had Sora2 and Veo 3.1.
And WHY are they no longer competing over this? Tell me. Could it be that its incredibly expensive to make somthing that nobody wants except fraudsters, and that further improvement via the kind of ML we do just produces exponentially diminishing returns for ever increasing huge amounts of effort and they realized it’s not worth it?
Just like they will never understand that the openAI ‘pause’ for ‘security and alignment’ is a convenient excuse for the fact that they have no goddamned money and are on a treadmill to oblivion.
Oh boy, this is the most straightforwardly delulu lesswrong post I’ve ever seen.
If you see issues in the YouTube video, rest assured that those issues survived even more than two generation attempts.
lol
Oh MAN… quote:
Throughout this project, I was using Fable and Sol with very little restraint and under the (very affordable to me) $200/month subscription plans.
[If you check out my Straude, I probably used $5,000 of tokens, but the actual subscriptions are $200/month.]
Video is much more expensive: at Gemini Omni Flash’s current price of $0.10/second, it would cost $645.40 to generate this movie, but that would balloon massively to $5,146.10 when you add in the 45,007s of footage I generated which didn’t make the cut [The full details are that the final cut is 6,454s of runtime, made from 849 clips and the rejects are 5,509 clips with 45,007s of runtime, which means there are 6,358 clips in total with 51,461s of runtime. Thus only about 13% of the clips I made were included in the final cut.]
Companies are STILL subsidizing video generation to hold people’s interests.
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.
I’ve had the same thought about Factory Porn, it’s is basically what Image slop generators are, right down to the addictive nature, even when it isn’t porn being generated.
It still cant keep scenes consistent for more than 5 seconds amazing.
I got to 47 seconds and there’s a guy driving a tent stake with a mallet that isn’t quite there, only to have the mallet disappear.
“So you printed out a piece of the internet for us to throw away.”
I am mildly fascinated by the types of issues that appear and the contrasts with other things that can locally in space and time look right.
An object doing nothing will have a consistent surface and show perspective relative to the viewpoint. The systems are able to have representations of surfaces of different types and how they can fit together within an object. I am of course talking about within a given generation, not between generations where its utterly unsurprising that consistency is very difficult or impossible.
But multiple objects in interaction with each other do very strange things. Their relative sizes change as if they are in different positions relative to the camera. They snap between individually plausible relationships, without going through intermediate states. Doors open on the hinge side when the other side is not visible. The relative size of and distance to the background can suddenly change, as the foreground suddenly interacts with something that should be far in the background.
Objects that change also do so in bizarre ways. Living things morph between different archetypes. Flames in particular change wildly between types and sizes and respond to the facial expressions of humans, smoke and water effects blend together. Sudden movements with no cause occur, sudden morphings of one object into another when the context around them changes and something else makes sense, especially when held in a hand. Time-reversed motions occur mixed in with time-forward motions, and slow-mo with regular time. Debris suddenly appears from an object but when the dust clears the original fails to have been eroded away into the fallen debris.
On multiple occasions, a carried candle keeps moving with a characcter rising and falling with their footsteps hovering in front of them when both hands become occupied with other tasks. This is fascinating and indicates that the relationship between the two objects motion is represented separately from the idea of something being ‘carried’. (This is positively Lovecraftian.) Candles also indicate something else, with flowing wax changing wildly in timescales that do not make sense, with the system apparently understanding that there are different patterns but having no idea how they come about or change. There is no generality here, just an endlessly compounding list of rules of thumb.
Excessive correlations between objects across the frame are rampant. Footsteps preferentially synchronized. People in the background lipsyncing with foreground characters, faces changing expression in unison. Textures changing across multiple objects at once.
I have said it before, and I will say it again, the relationship between the outputs of these systems and what they mimic are precisely the relationship between a stick insect and a stick, or a social-parasite-beetle and a baby ant. Not just in form, but because that is also precisely the same forces that drove both things into existence - superficial resemblance to something else with a very different internal set of causes, that can fool to a first inspection by the inspection applied but just isnt doing the same thing. And again, SCP-2030 feels the same.
Wow, I watched 15 minutes from 45:00 and it’s just like… wtf. The guy is old, younger, mustache, no mustache, sets a gun down and then pulls another gun out of thin air, sometimes the gun it’s a double barrel side x side, sometimes it’s an over-under, sometimes a muzzle loader… The candles, wtf is up with the candles? The dog is remarkably consistent but the mouth doesn’t move right and it’s just a horror show. The cave setting changes…
Yeah, it’s just so fucked up.
My favourite error, and it appears repeatedly, is that instead of an object passing from one character to another, a copy of the object suddenly finds itself in the second person’s hands. It is shockingly bad at portraying any kind of action! It’s never going to get better!
In the same cut, the guy then materializes a hat in his hand and puts it on, replacing the hat he was already wearing.
45 minutes is even better
I picked a bit randomly where a walking stick changes shape, disappears, appears, the guys hair changes color etc.
SlateScott first floated his bright idea about “medical ethics are for foreigners not a good-hearted genius like me” in 2010.
Here’s what happens. In some far off corner of the world, some psycho doctor does something horrible like deliberately inject a patient with flesh-eating bacteria. The media hears about it and panics the public, who become suitably enraged and make demands of their politicians. Their politicians go to leading medical administrators and demand that doctors be more ethical. The leading medical administrators obviously don’t control the actions of every single psycho doctor, so they think quick and say “Okay, we’ll make all medical students take a class on Ethics and Professionalism,” hand the implementation off to professors, and then raise their own salaries for thinking of such a brilliant idea.
I guess California and Alberta and Sweden and Japan were far off from Cork, Ireland. How did he pass that class?
Hippocratic oath is government-imposed oppression apparently
There is no way that the class did not cover how MDs and nurses have been central to state atrocities for 150 years, from Bush’s torture program to MK-ULTRA to Unit 731 to the original eugenicists (who kept committing wild sterilizations into the 1970s). There is no way that it did not cover how authorities often hint at what they want done without being so vulgar as to say it where it could come up at their trial.
But didn’t he get that authoritarian followers are deterred if an authority figure like a professor says “the following acts are unacceptable?”
OpenAI is slowing development because of uh safety https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/open-ai-pause-hack
Definitely not because improvement is stagnating and they’re running out of money
It just occurred to me that this makes Anthropic look bad, actually
if OpenAI is slowing down because they concerned about
moneyAI safety, then it makes Anthropic look like fools for publishing that blog where they waffle on about keeping up the race because of “bad actors”If OpenAI is slowing down, an Anthropic that actually is concerned about safety would slow down too. But they won’t, because
moneyChina“bad actors”Well I’d like it if they actually stuck to this, since it would finally lessen the flow of AI slop. Wouldn’t be surprised if this gets quietly ignored because OpenAI
otherSneerClub has a post where some kind of statistics/science VTuber (??) analyzes aella’s twitter polls and resulting studies. it’s fun. I’ll link to the substack directly but the reddit post should be easy to find. Link
This post is so good. Erika nails Rationalists wanting the respectability Science would give their arguments without practicing the rigour.
The ‘uwu im just smol bean researcher :(’ is how any critique is usually responded to.
this blog post is so badass
the woman herself shows up in the substack comments with the most pitiful display of “I’m just a smol self-taught bean why are you being so mean to me?”
Erika rightly responds by calling out Aella’s own attitude towards the people who know how to apply the level of rigor to the data that she (apparently admittedly?) doesn’t. Like, you can’t simultaneously be this dismissive of the norms and processes of the scientific establishment and also claim ignorance and inability when your inability or refusal to follow those norms leads you to crap conclusions.
I really like the self perpetuating optimism loop thing in the reply to Aella, it’s like a whole new cognitive bias I hadn’t thought applied to rationalists.
I also still believe academia is a deeply broken culture. I believe this in large part because most academics have told me this.
You seem to believe uncritically what they tell you here. The truth is, everyone LOVES to complain but if you tell them “THEN LEAVE??” they’d rather keep their position. And it’s very normal, actually. most systems (idk, liek law, healthcare, environmental protection) are “deeply broken.”
Maybe you think that only systems worth engaging with are those with self-perpetuating optimism loops? where everyone is so happy and satisfied with the community and activities? If so, it matches really well the intellectual environment I think you are in.
Update on the slop dentist situation: second opinion says that loved one has zero cavities. I suspect that her only problem was having a non-median mouth that wasn’t well-represented in Pearl AI’s training data.
It was called fucking Pearl AI? god these people suck so fucking bad
ugh, right?
