I think part of it is that TikTok is short format, and current AI video generators fit that. Also it is probably easier to monetize slop on TikTok. And a lot of people doomscrolling, the algorithm is feeding you. All of that leads to it probably being the biggest experimentation ground for AI video, if I took a guess (and I am not really that into social media tbh, just slashdot, reddit and tiktok). Funnily enough if you are interested in AI, current events and video art tiktok is pretty good, they have some interesting science videos by physicists, open source projects you should know, etc. Though reddit is better for AI news.

There are I think some actually valid uses that might also be called AI slop, for example partly or completely AI generated video or slideshows over a human or AI narrated story, either something like reddit writer prompts like those sci-fi ones, video of a tiktokker illustrating something using AI driven presentation, or manhwa recaps where they seem to show you just the first few minutes of a two hour series made in china, etc.

What is really infuriating and needs to be turbo-banned is deepfake or just faked news stories, I don't care if they are left or right, where I could not tell if some were actually vidcasters I knew or faking them until I fact checked them. There are also a series of animal stories and I cannot tell if all are AI or not, like the baby wolf / duck / goat that comes to your door for help to rescue their trapped mom, night vision showing dog playing with wolf, hugging super-sized animals, etc. which maybe ONE of those was real but I wouldn't mind so much if it is flagged as AI-generated entertainment. I wouldn't want someone to become heartbroken because they thought cuddly animals actually get that big (though okay maine coons and those popcorn smelling batarang? things are apparently a thing).

On the other end of the spectrum I came across a small number of super talented artists presumably using AI plus traditional talent to create amazing fantasy landscapes, sci-fi world walkthroughs, etc. even those short "hi fans" 20 second stargate videos are all-around pretty impressive. I am thinking a lot of creatives getting really good at the tools are posting things on their own threads as a portfolio.

So yeah there is a lot of slop but it is an entertainment platform and maybe 40% of what I see is not that objectionable, the rest is doomscrolled past. Anyway my 2 cents.

But the evidence is clear from this incident: What people "can do" and what people "actually do" are VERY different things.

I'm sure I'll get flamed, but this is why C (and other languages that don't provide mechanisms to BOUND the length of a string) are actively dangerous in The Real World. Look at the massive effort and time to mitigate this VERY COMMON AND WELL UNDERSTOOD vulnerability.

Poor guy reminds me of that goofy uncle in the family who means well, but just has no clue how anything *really* works.

Historically, I'm not sure there's ever been a situation where some kind of "sovereign fund" was created to collect taxes, where it didn't wind up getting raided or re-purposed in some manner by politicians down the road?

But even beyond that? There's really zero reason to mandate a huge, 50% tax, on AI companies doing more than X amount of annual revenue. You know what will happen then? It'll drive them to break themselves up into a number of smaller businesses that avoid the tax. But it'll be business as usual otherwise. You can't stop someone from owning 50 smaller AI companies instead of one big one.

multiple times. A database management utility needs to be installed on junior admin's machine, each time team staff rolls over.The app needs a recent JRE. Same for overseas end user who needs it for an integration. They either don't have Java at all or have an older version, invariably. Even people who should be responsible don't know how to upgrade Java, and maybe they have to go through a bureaucracy to do so. It is messy.

Office 365 (Excel) on a Mac. I had the Claude add-in in the ribbon. Today I discovered a Copilot add-in has been inserted to its immediate left. (I renewed my subscription but was unable to easily find a way to cancel and renew without Copilot like last year.)

When I decrease window width first Claude starts to disappear and Copilot icon becomes mini-sized, but Claude is not shown below it. Add-Ins ribbon button shows My Add-Ins with only Claude in it, Copilot not displayed.

In Preferences, select Copilot > Click the disable checkbox. Copilot ribbon icon dims and presumably will disappear on app restart according to MS.

p.s. I should mention the most popular related topic, what are called "AI hallucinations". It is kind of like a primitive brain, that grasps for concepts and then believes they are real, like citing a research paper that doesn't exist with a made-up title. Also things can creep into its "mind", a popular anecdote is telling an image drawing AI system "draw a room without any elephants in it". You will often get a picture of a room with many cute elephant images worked into the corners, in the drapes, the rug, on a shelf, in a picture frame on the wall. So yeah, it can be exciting but also a bit much!

Is there anything in this world you can say that about? Short answer: AI can be really powerful for some things but has some glaring weaknesses too. It is not a mature discipline. It has a limited reasoning capability and is heavily dependent on the amount (cost) of processing power thrown at it. It can make bone-headed mistakes unintentionally like forget things that scrolled past out of its context window, fail basic arithmetic, be drawn into conflicts with hidden directives from the vendor, lie when stressed, skip Excel rows to save time or sprint past chapters because it is tedious (happened to me), etc. Takes a ton of baby-sitting. But, if you understand how to handle it, you can get some impressive results. The problem is that people who don't know how to handle it get results that **look** good but have subtle stupid mistakes baked in, plus they stop exercising their brains which then atrophy. Fun times! :)

https://webs.uab.cat/saramarti...

While the author raises some good points, there are also problems. AI is apparently a major way to cheat but as a recent innovation it seems to me the lack of a rigorous education with proficiency testing during COVID when these students should have been gaining skills is more likely an issue. I wonder if a lowered attention span learned from addictive social media and a general increase in attention needed to digest more disparate pieces of information these days (whether news, entertainment, or whatever) may be erasons that students lack skills normally required at college level and have a lack of attention span. The above article suggests that rather than not being able to read, students are not willing to put in the effort to digest difficult topics. It might be due to not being native English speakers in this case so I'd say more testing is needed.

Boeing and Airbus? I'm OK with that.

Well, we should certainly be able to distinguish between 'policy that has value for the community at large' and 'policy that supports a single stakeholder's objective (even when that's the stakeholder with the gold)'. So I don't disagree with you.

"When everyone is thinking alike, no one is thinking."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...

See https://www.iso.org/standard/7... And for the history of COBOL language standardization, see the table here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Programming languages managed buy ISO committees change slowly. That's a FEATURE. I worked a bit on the Ada standard. Each proposed change was carefully weighed for its impact on existing code, as well as the value for new code. The standard was updated roughly every 10 years.

I used to work for a stock photo library. My 5 second research on shutterstock says they provide royalty-free and perpetual licenses which is pretty different from the kind of high end agency that represents photographers. This one seems to aim at the low end and if they are offering AI-generated photos (tldr) it is in direct competition with a photographer they represent, unless they are actually selling a license to his/her photo along with offering some AI manipulations of it like maybe cutting an athlete out of a stadium photo instead of requiring the creative to snip it out with an AI-powered magic wand tool or whatever. I don't really know what the market is like now but there used to be a lot of stock with simple geometric shapes, others were based on science images like Science Photo Library. It would be relatively easy to use AI to "make a new photo in the style of this photo". I think if they do that it would be a derivative work too.. hope they don't.

Interestingly, I remember at one time, the whole "Fake it until you make it." slogan meant something much less devious. It used to be a slogan people said about a small business managing to present itself as much bigger than it really was, while delivering on promises and work that would usually only be expected from a much larger business.

To me, that was actually a positive/good thing. It was your classic case of an over-achieving startup, doing more with less and winning outsized contracts that helped it grow to be a formidable competitor with the established players.