And the speech was given to graduating students from the College of Arts and Humanities and the School of Communication and Media.
Possibly the worst audience to stand in front of and praise the ‘revolution’ of AI
I thought she was out of touch with reality but this sounds more like stupidity as well.
Grads: “We just got art degrees”
Speaker: “AI can create art that replaces artists”
Grads: “boooo”
Speaker: “why are the booing”
AI Spokesmodel: “We built a big machine that steals your work product to plagiarize it, then sucks you into an assembly-level job that pays under-subsistence wages to tidy up all the crap it injects”
Journeymen Professionals: “This sucks! Smash the looms!”
AI Spokesmodel: “Don’t worry, though. Some of you can still become cops!”
Austrian Art School Dropouts: “We’re listening”.
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No.

byebyepaywall.com This article without pay bullshit here
How can she be surprised? “Hey, here is this thing we’re building that we hope makes 90% of you obsolete!”, sounds like a great perspective for the future.
It’s not gonna make them obsolete. It’s gonna keep piling on technical debt from bad practices of which it’s entirely unaware (not that it’s ever “aware” of anything) while tricking dumb upper management, C-suite, and investors into thinking that it can render so many people obsolete, before it all crashes. “Pride comes before the fall.”
Proof: the layoffs are failing to generate improved returns https://toast.ooo/post/13892904
It’s not going to replace artists, though. It will replace art made by committee, or art made for the balloon aisle at Walmart.
The artists that sold their soul for corporate Hollywood deserve this. They were making slop before the AI ever appeared.
The last industrial revolution turned farmers into factory drones. This one will turn tech workers into homeless gig slaves.
to homeless gig slaves.
any alternatives?
Guerilla trout rancher?
Honestly, she isn’t wrong.
However, the Industrial Revolution was a step forward, the AI revolution is most likely a great filter event. Industrialized Stupidity at Scale; Buliding giant data centers and turbo-charging climate change so some billionaires can race to see who can be the first trillionaireEdit: I think a lot of you skimmed what I wrote and didn’t actually READ it. Yes AI bad, I agree.
And those saying the Industrial Revolution was bad (it was, to a group. But you would not be bitching on the Internet without it.)
We can agree not everything is 100% good/bad right? Like yes, the Industrial Revolution was bad for the workers at the time, but at the same time, you wouldn’t have the phone in your hand without it. You wouldn’t have the computer on your desk without it. Hell you probably wouldn’t have your bicycle/car whatever without it.
Luckily with the “AI revolution” we’ll all probably die from the Climate Change, World War 3 and world wide Economic collapse before we get to an equilibrium point.
For the working class, the industrial revolution was not a step forward. It took a lot of time, hard union work and political regulation to wrangle the beast that was the industrial revolution.
And it’s the thing responsible for the climate change. It bring wonderful things, but may make the world unlivable for humans so… I won’t call it an unambiguous step.forward.
It’s going to happen anyway. We’ll follow instinct, same as everything else. We’re programmed to consume, expand, decay, and pass the entropy along.
Probably the only thing we can do about this is bring the population down to a very small number. You will never convince a large percentage of people to care, ever, and when it comes to the existential threat of climate change you can’t wait for them to change their minds.
This isn’t me saying we can’t do anything about it. This is me saying we won’t because of what that cost would be.
I ain’t programmed for shit, much less what you’re accusing me of
bro thinks he isn’t programmed 💀
Honestly, she isn’t wrong.
AI Slop is a sub-optimal replacement that requires enormous amounts of materials and second-order human labor to produce. Like so many other industrial innovations, it’s a waste-production machine that has the added benefit of occasionally producing consumables.
We get to run the AI Slop machine at a profit because the market for slop is heavily monopolized and the consumer base is cash rich and alienated from its laboring peers. But a downturn in the domestic economy, a sudden shortfall in cheap raw materials, a major shift in popular consumption habits, or a higher quality alternative at a lower price point all put AI slop at risk of losing profitability.
It’s a far more fragile industry than any Slop Advocate wants to admit. And it needs an enormous structural investment to function.
the Industrial Revolution was a step forward
A step forward into what, though? Mass overproduction resulting in economy-wide enshitification and a crisis of excess waste all carried enormous tail costs.
Are you really better off today buying furniture from IKEA that won’t last ten years, rather than inheriting antiques from your parents that have endured for the last century? Are you better of driving a car built in a big machine-factory than riding a trolley that was designed custom for the city lines? Are you better of eating individually plastic-wrapped slices of fake cheese than carving a chunk off the giant wheel in your pantry?
Idk, man. Views differ on that one.
Are you really better off today buying furniture from IKEA that won’t last ten years, rather than inheriting antiques from your parents that have endured for the last century?
Most people dont have the choice of inheriting pieces of furnitute with a value of months worth of wages when they first get a home of their own.
Are you better of driving a car built in a big machine-factory than riding a trolley that was designed custom for the city lines?
Do you think trolly buses are a pre-industrial thing, with their electric powered engines running on steel rails through dense urban areas?
Trolly buses are older than the industrial revolution, they just used horses instead
Smart kids
She really read the room wrong on this one!
I love that she was genuinely baffled. Hope it makes her reexamine her thoughts on AI.
here’s a direct link to youtube of the commencement, queued up to the speech in question.
Love to go to my graduation ceremony and get a two hour long YouTube ad.
Students fail to make the is/ought distinction.
Maybe they’re booing adults who fail to understand the can/will distinction.














