FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) Has Weakened If Not Ruined What's Left of Big Media
Likely irrecoverable in many cases
On fake news:
Earlier today I was wading through mountains of fake-ish articles about "AI" (to Uber's credit, while it acknowledged many layoffs it was quick to explicitly clarify those had absolutely nothing to do with "AI"). Liz Warren and the likes of her* - Sen. Sanders included - are just "AI" this, "AI" that. It's tiring. They're brainwashed. As we showed earlier today, The Register MS (to give just one example; there are lots more) writes a lot about "AI" merely because it paid to do this SPAM campaign, which relates to FOMO. Readers are meant to believe that by eschewing "AI" they risk being left "behind" (the propaganda sites of fake-coins do the same thing).
Many things that have existed for decades are now being rebranded as "AI" (even Google Answers, now they call it "Gemini" or "overviews" or "summaries" or whatever). A lot of economic woes are blamed on "AI" (the go-to excuse for everything). A few moments ago I saw the headline "AI Finds Potential Ozempic Side Effects Hidden in an Unexpected Data Source" (they could say computation, not "AI").
Dr. Andrew Tridgell, according to a rare blog post, "knuckles under to slop purveyors," as an associate has put it. Slop code is rubbish and sloppy bug reports are typically a waste of time. They overwhelm their target/s with noise. It's just some dumb gorilla banging on its own chest.
Tridgell has now destroyed his reputation (we see lots of scorn and ridicule online). In one day. Like BCacheFS's developer (a topic we covered before), he wants us to think slop revolutionised something meaningful.
Right... as if fuzzing is new. It's not. So what's new? Nowadays the conned investors are just throwing more money into energy (to be wasted on expensive hardware), mostly due to hype and intentionally false marketing by Anthropic et al. Cory Doctorow saw it coming 3 years ago when he said: "The people who are learning to “prompt engineer” these “toy models” have gotten far more out of them than even their makers imagined possible. They will continue to eke out new marginal gains from these little models, possibly enough to satisfy most of those low-stakes, low-dollar applications. But these little models were spun out of big models, and without stupid bubble money and/or a viable business case, those big models won’t survive the bubble and be available to make more capable little models."
Lots of money is being wasted (lost). The issue isn't "investment in AI" but companies falling deep into debt because their old products - e.g. Windows, Facebook, and brand recognition of Google (search) - don't really interest anybody (it's about vendor lock-in for inertia, very little else).
If the corporate media carries on calling everything "AI" and if this media bags corporate bribes to exaggerate ("sex up") the claims about the practical capabilities, people will tune out and look for alternatives. It's no secret that Futurism became widely cited and very popular owing to - or as a reward for - its much-needed "scepticism" of (realism regarding) slop.
All this "pimp my AI" budget (allocated for media-directed marketing campaigns) will end up dooming the media; alternatives to it will emerge - those which refused to sell out. █
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* We do not oppose those populist politicians, we just find their talking points on "AI" rather embarrassing; they're clearly devoured by the hype and alarmism that serves marketing, just like so-called 'regulations' (we need regulation and enforcement against Ponzi schemes, not "AI regulation").