I just published this on our new WriteFreely instance. It's a write-directly-into-the-cms-and-hit-publish job that took an hour. It's about the difference between the purpose of a thing and the purpose of the ux designers who work on that thing.

P.S. I skim proof read it. So expect weird gibberish (ha)

On Toxic Productivity

Ever since the beginning of the AI slopnami, but more specifically since the public diaspora about the technology began and a large number of people

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or dare I say the majority?

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started to hate the plagiarism machine that Sam Altman and his friends unleashed upon the world, I wondered who exactly are the people that violently defend this technology?

Yes, on the one hand you have big corporations. That's the obvious one. Of course OpenAI and Nvidia are happy with how things are going, because they either make money from it or hope they can milk the venture capitalists even further before they finally exit-scam before the burst of the bubble. My question, however, is, who are the normal people who fanboy over the latest iteration of ChatGPT or Midjourney or whatever iteration of spicy auto-completion tickles their fancy at the moment. Who, in a time where the public opinion on not just Artificial "Intelligence" but the tech sector as a whole is at an all-time low with artists and creatives hating it with every fiber of their beings, decides to die on the hill that endless repetitive plagiarized slop is the future that's not just inevitable but desirable?

You will hear again and again that the AI crowd is just the reboot of the crypto bros from a few years ago. Those people who spent unreasonable amounts of moneys on links to bad monkey JPGEs hosted on the Ethereum blockchain^1, and that is probably true. But if we draw the Venn diagram here, then there is a third crowd that has a surprisingly large overlap with the other two. Maybe more so with AI than with crypto, but ultimately with both, and that is the infamous sphere of productivity addicts.

Now, there is story to tell about the role of productivity in the age of hustle culture and whether it's even something we should view in positive light in the first place, but that's not what I am trying to do here. I think everyone must decide for themselves whether the concept of productivity as it is presented by people on YouTube and the internet in general is something they like, dislike, or outright hate, and I believe that a lot of creators have good intention when they make videos about their study techniques and note-taking approaches. I use and have used tools like Roam Research^2 myself, and when I was a student, I had my own ways of organizing notes and finding them again. Even for casual writing I use some of these tools, for example to create a personal wiki of characters for stories, and so on. And that's fine.

No, the productivity sphere on YouTube in particular, but probably also on other social media platforms I am less familiar with, has a dark side, one which I like to call Toxic Productivity. The difference between toxic productivity people and the normal creators is that the toxic crowd takes it to such extremes that not only everything in their lives has to be maximally productive, but they also

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and that's where the toxic part comes in

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look down on people who are less productive than them (however they decide to measure that).

Productivity YouTube isn't new. The trend has been ongoing for over a decade at this point and has evolved from students giving study tips to people making full-blown businesses out of it, and the latter is where the problem lies.

A few of you probably saw some parallels with another group of people: podcast bros. In no medium is toxic productivity as prominent as in the podcast sphere, I'd say. Podcasts about getting rich quick, opening a successful business, or creating your own successful brand are a dime a dozen. The parallel between these people and AI grifters isn't lost on people, with TSMC executive calling Altman a "podcasting bro"^3 when he came in begging for $7 trillion [sic] to further finance his ocean-boiling money sink.

If I asked you to name one creator who personifies what I have described as toxic productivity up until this point, I am sure I would hear many different names. For me, the poster child of toxic productivity is however Ali Abdaal^4.

Productivity on 3.5x Speed

Depending on how terminally online you are on YouTube, you might have never heard that name, and I would not blame you. In a world of people like Andrew Tate, who arguably caters to the same people, namely those striving towards self-improvement, who want to become rich and successful, and who are gullible enough to dump money on everyone who tells them they came solve their problem with a snap of their fingers, Abdaal isn't a big fish at first glance. All things considered, Tate is more toxic than most of the others in the sphere combined, and probably more dangerous too, but he is also more obviously a scam. Tate's audience is very clearly not the average college student but lonely young men who hate women and the world, and I don't want to get into that here. Abdaal, on the other hand, can be considered the polar opposite of that. His book, aptly names "Feel Good Productivity", makes that clear. He's not here to sell you a toxic worldview like Tate. He doesn't want to make you hate women and society. No, he's a nice person and friendly and inclusive.

But let's back up for a moment: who exactly is Ali Abdaal?

On his website, he writes:

Hey, I'm Ali Abdaal. I'm an ex-doctor turned YouTuber, Podcaster, entrepreneur, and author (and I dabble with the occasional investment too).

Abdaal started out as one of the aforementioned college YouTubers who shared study tips on the platform. He was an aspiring doctor attending Cambridge University teaching things like spaced repetition^5 in his videos, a largely uncontroversial learning technique. And if he had stayed with that type of content, I would not even be mentioning him in this article, but as is evident from his introductory sentence on the website, that's not how it went. He's an "ex-doctor turned YouTuber", and on top of that, an "entrepreneur" (I will conveniently ignore the part about "occasional investment" here, but we'll get back to that).

The career of Abdaal is a great example of the pipeline form harmless productivity tips into the realm of toxic productivity, because as he steered from study tips towards helping you maximizing your productivity every waking moment of your life, his videos became different too.

One noteworthy thing about it is that Abdaal was one of the first who did this, so not the whole cult of toxic productivity grew alongside him. Whether or not he's directly responsible or at least largely influential isn't someting I can answer here, but it's at least something to keep in mind.

The most infamous (and since removed) example of this is "How To Watch TV Productively". You might have furrowed your eyebrows at that title and rightfully so. I think even Abdaal himself must have noticed that he went a little too far with that one since he took it down or set it to private a while later, but there is still a Reddit thread discussing it^6 online as well as a video from creator Fr0nzP.^7 which talks about many of the same point I am in this text that has clips of it.

Watching anime and watching TV in general feels to me like kind of a waste of time. And because I worship the ultra-productivity and the only thing I care about is productivity, everything in my life has to be productive, like, you know, listening to audio books at 3.5x speed, [...]

This provides a perfect example of Abdaal's mindset. He's not concerned about studying anymore, or about helping you study, he's gone down the path of "ultra-productivity". Before I continue with the TV video, let me show you another one if his: "How I Type REALLY Fast (156 Words per Minute)"^8, and this one is still up and you can enjoy it for yourself. He opens the video up claiming that "having a ridiculously fast typing speed is one of [his] superpowers in life" (0:10) and that "anyone can become at least twice as productive if [they] just increase[d] [their] typing speed" (0:18).

Now, unless you're working as a court reporter (in which case you are probably using stenography anyway) or writing stream-of-consciousness, I argue that this statement is false, because typing faster than you think is probably not the productivity boost that Abdaal thinks it is, but even if you accept his words as true, it demonstrates again his attitude towards life. He even states that things like "going on websites" and "sending messages to friends, [and] all of that stuff becomes quicker therefore you'll become more productive" (1:45).

I think you can see a pattern here. Abdaal believes that cramming more things into every day is the key aspect of productivity. It's probably already questionable whether that's true for studying (because writing more notes in less time doesn't mean you understand the concepts, so shouldn't you study smarter and not faster?), but applying that same approach to your hobbies is just completely insane

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which brings us back to the TV video.

So, how does Abdaal watch anime and TV productively you might ask? Well, the fact that his listens to audio books on 3.5x speed should give you an idea.

[...] normally what I do is, I'll just speed-speed-speed-speed-speed-speed-speed up until it gets to an interesting point, and I'll speed it as fast as I can so I can still keep up with it.

And because he obviously can't hear what's being said when watching at 3.5x speed anymore, he's speed-reading subtitles.

I can't be the only one wondering whether he gets any enjoyment out of consuming media this way, can I? Especially because he applies this advice not to lectures of tutorial material or other videos for which this might work, but films and series that have been created to be watched as a recreational activity. How productivity-brained must you be to judge media in a way like this, and what does that even mean? What even is an "interesting point" for someone with a view like that? We don't have to guess, because Abdaal tells us himself that the parts he doesn't have to watch at normal speed are "when it gets to [...] building character [...] kind-of stuff".

Yes, you read that right: Abdaal thinks that character building in a work of fiction is the stuff you can speed through because it's not interesting or not important. Which makes me wonder why he's even watching any of that to begin with. Sure, there are people who don't enjoy fiction, and who rather spend their time differently, and that's fine, but this reeks of someone who feels guilty for wanting to watch anime or TV, and who needs to find a way to justify doing so by fitting it into their distorted world view in which everything has to serve a productive purpose. And even more so, it shows that Abdaal does not view recreation or relaxation as a productive activity in the first place. He thinks that if you take time out of your day to do something you enjoy that does not directly lead to some sort of tangible gain, monetary or otherwise, it is not worth doing and you're lazy.

That is the definition of toxic productivity.

Of course, this also completely invalidates the work of people who make the shows he skips through (and probably do so for a living). Fr0nzP. puts it best in his video.

Actually thinking that any artistic decision such as pauses, music, or nuances in facial expressions can be disregarded as long as you pick up the plot via subtitles is utterly stupid. (2:34--2:47)

What is Art? (Baby don't hurt me...)

If that's not enough to show you how Abdaal completely disregards art because it doesn't fit with his his worship of "ultra-productivity", Fr0nzP. cites another one of his videos, "How I Read 100 Books a Year - 8 Tips of Reading More"^9, in which he shits on classic literature and dismisses literature students as examples of people he looks down on between the lines. He further exemplifies this in his later video "How to 'Read' 1000 Books a Year" (let that title sink in for a moment). In that video, he does admittedly make a good point that it's find to not finish a book if you don't enjoy it and that you should not feel pressured by society or your peers to read something you don't want to really read. The rest of it, however, is a weird conglomeration of product placement (he namedrops brands left and right, mentioning how they're not sponsoring the video but are super amazing and life-changing) as well as advocating speed-reading and skimming

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again, something that does not work well with fiction, as some of the comments underneath the video point out.

Also, if you look for a drinking game that will absolutely wreck you: take a shot every time he mentions Amazon or the Kindle in that video.

So, what books does he read and recommend then? Take a wild guess.

No, seriously, before you read on, think about the contents of this article, which is the overlap between the toxic productivity sphere and AI bros, and just try to guess one book he recommends.

Ready?

In titled "The Best Book I've Ever Read about Morality"^10 he sings the praise of "What We Owe The Future" by William MacAskill, but the video is basically a twelve-minute mental exercise in jerking off to Effective Altruism, because of course it is. We learn that Abdaal is not only a card-carrying member of EA but also donates 10% of his yearly income to it (or to charities which fit their criteria for being worthwhile).

There's also a shout-out to MacAskill on his Twitter, (fittingly after a long series of posts where he stealth-promotes ChatGPT and how it can boost your productivity), complete with a drive-by mention of AI x-risk.

To learn more about the risks of AI and other long-term risks to humanity, check out moral philosopher @willmacaskill's excellent book What We Owe the Future. Or alternatively, check out my brief summary of the book on my YouTube channel^11

In another video, "8 Lessons I Learned From Elon Musk"^12 Abdaal fawns over Elon and how successful he is. One of the lessons in there is ironically that "reading is the best thing ever", mentioning how Elon's idea of founding SpaceX without being an engineer or having a clue about rocket science is that he read about it. I find it quite condescending, though, to make a claim like that but put an asterisk at the end that means, but only if you read non-fiction, because otherwise you're wasting your time.

Part-Time Hustle Academy

We could leave Ali Abdaal here and focus on someone else, but I promised you above that we would return to his investment tips. Much like with his productivity-related content, he started out harmless and uncontroversial by just giving basic tips about dipping your toes into investment by checking out ETFs and not being afraid of the stock market. But also as with his other videos, his focus shifted and became stranger.

Making money is the second biggest topic on his channel, and yes, that is of course part of toxic productivity as we have established above, because everything needs to have a tangible benefit and what benefit is more tangible than actually making bank. So, he has videos about generating income streams and making more money than you peers and, of course, Bitcoin In his defense, he doesn't appear to be a crypto bro at least, and he does list the controversies around Bitcoin in this video and makes some wishy-washy takes about how everyone must decide for themselves whether they want to invest in it.

But what's the end-goal of all that? What if you want to be as productive as Abdaal himself? Well, good news, there's a solution for you and it's called the "Part-Time YouTuber Academy"^14.

We've condensed 7+ years of YouTube experience into programmes designed to help you on your YouTube journey.

We learned lessons the hard way, so you don't have to...

This is basically Abdaal's version of every podcasting bro's "If you want to be successful, you need to become like me!" course, and we've seen plenty of those in the last decade. So how much does this thing cost, you might ask? Well, at the time of writing the fee for Abdaal's class is $995. And if that's too expensive for you and you don't really want to make YouTube videos, he also has offers on platforms like Skillshare, like the "Productivity Masterclass", the "Notion Masterclass", "Triple Your Typing Speed" (here we go again), or "How To Cook Productively" (no, I'm not joking).^15

Well, I don't have a thousand bucks to waste but lucky for us there are people who did and reviewed the course wo we can take a look at what it's actually like. YouTuber TyFrom99 in his video "Creator Courses: Selling Dreams as Products"^16 talks about the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. He also summarizes Abdaal's whole brand in a very concise way.

Ali is a YouTuber that has basically popularized what I like to call the "productivity cult". Almost every channel you see centered around the topic of productivity is influenced directly by Ali [...]. It's clear he carved the genre out almost single-handedly. (14:35)

He also mentions that the productivity sphere is a toxic space and that it's basically a "nerdified and systematized [version of] the hustle culture that people like Andrew Tate promote" (14:57). Oh gee, maybe his content isn't that different from the likes of Andrew Tate but only flavored in a different way?

Tate sells you dreams. He sells you success. He sells you being like him, which is rich (probably) and handsome (uhh, about that...) and successful with women (wait a moment!), and the only thing you need to do for that is fork over some of your cash and subscribe to his classes. He calls his grift "Hustler's University" and apparently makes millions from it.^17 Sounds familiar?

Unlike Tate, however, Abdaal is upfront about that nothing he teaches in his course can't be found out by just searching the internet, so at least he's honest. He's selling you curated and condensed information that you would otherwise have to dig up yourself, or, in other words, he sells you time which you can use more productively. "We learned lessons the hard way, so you don't have to" indeed.

Fr0nzP., who also delves into the PTYA in his video^18 is less generous and says that "Ali makes over $130k each month, with 5--10 hours of effort each week", and argues "that giving the impression of productivity as a recipe of arriving at those numbers is dishonest and even borders on fraud" (12:33--12:47). Looking at some of the channels, he comes to the same conclusion as TyFrom99: namely, that most of the channels who took the class didn't see much success from it. Moreover, all the engagement these channels get seems to be from other people who took the class. Abdaal's quantity-over-quality approach (don't forget that in his opinion productivity just means doing more in less time) shows here, too.

Final Thoughts

So what's the takeaway of all of his? In the beginning I promised to make a point about people who are into AI and who defend this technology despite its obvious problems. It's exactly the people who are swooned by the weird takes of Ali Abdaal, who define being productive as cramming as much activity into their day as humanly possible, who don't give a rat's ass about art and don't assign value to it, and who don't view time spent recreationally as worth their while who feel drawn to the promises of Altman too. Yes, he is a podcasting bro indeed, because behind all his thinly-veiled technofascist TESCREAL talk he is selling you productivity too. ChatGPT can work for you, it can save you time, it can do the tasks you don't want to do!

What are these tasks, though? In the Culture Series by Iain M. Banks^19, one of the great science-fiction series of the modern time that deals with AI as a major cultural factor, and that's not understood by any AI bro who's read it, boring menial tasks are automated so that humanity, under the leadership of the benign AIs, can spend it's time engaging in art and things they enjoy. Altman's future has nothing of that, because none of it is of value to him. Instead, art is automated to people can work more and make more money.

It's no wonder that big companies like Adobe subscribe to this ideology and try to force it upon their customers^20, because they are invested in Altman's bubble, but who are the small people who do? The self-proclaimed "AI artists" who shout that AI democratizes art and finally makes it accessible to the masses (never mind that there's more art tutorials on YouTube than productivity shit and that there are few skills who need as little investment as art, because you can get started with a pencil you steal from IKEA and the back of your last unpaid electricity bill if you really want)?

It seems counterproductive to peddle AI as a small creator at this point when it seems as if more and more consumers are turned off by products that use it^21, but that isn't what these people see. For them, it's like Ali Abdaal's advice that you first need to vomit out 100 videos on YouTube and then can start worrying about quality. These first 100 videos, or I guess artworks in this case, would've been part of your training at any point in time prior to 2022, but now the automatic plagiarizer can make them for you in an hour, and you can put them on your portfolio and call yourself an artist. It doesn't even matter that you don't get any experience or skill from that because you are productive. Not a single artist in human history could product that many works in that short amount of time, just as no one could watch as much anime before the invention of the fast-forward button.

"Feel Good Productivity" indeed, because doesn't it feel good to have a portfolio that's not empty anymore? To have a tool that can take away the fear of the empty page at the click of a button? That, everyone, is the future of productivity!

Or, maybe not, because normal people (you know, those who don't wanna watch their shows on 3.5x speed but actually take time and enjoy them, or who don't speed-read novels, and who don't measure the values of their lives on how much side-hustling they can do during their lunch break at work) do not seem to view the increased workload as more productive but instead find it does quite the opposite.^22

Despite 96% of C-suite executives expecting AI to boost productivity, the study reveals that, 77% of employees using AI say it has added to their workload and created challenges in achieving the expected productivity gains. Not only is AI increasing the workloads of full-time employees, it's hampering productivity and contributing to employee burnout.

Well, we can certainly see where the toxic productivity crowd sees themselves then, can't we?

Footnotes

(This is an expanded version of two of my comments [Comment A, Comment B] - go and read those if you want)

Well, Character.ai got themselves into some real deep shit recently - repeat customer Sewell Setzer shot himself and his mother, Megan Garcia, is suing the company, its founders and Google as a result, accusing them of "anthropomorphising" their chatbots and offering “psychotherapy without a license.”, among other things and demanding a full-blown recall.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I can see a few aspects which give Garcia a pretty solid case:

• The site has "mental health-focused chatbots like “Therapist” and “Are You Feeling Lonely,” which Setzer interacted with" as Emma Roth noted writing for The Verge

• Character.ai has already had multiple addiction/attachment cases like Sewell's - I found articles from Wired and news.com.au, plus a few user testimonies (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C) about how damn addictive the fucker is.

• As Kevin Roose notes for NYT "many of the leading A.I. labs have resisted building A.I. companions on ethical grounds or because they consider it too great a risk". That could be used to suggest character.ai were being particularly reckless.

Which way the suit's gonna go, I don't know - my main interest's on the potential fallout.

Some Predictions

Win or lose, I suspect this lawsuit is going to sound character.ai's death knell - even if they don't get regulated out of existence, "our product killed a child" is the kind of Dasani-level PR disaster few companies can recover from, and news of this will likely prompt any would-be investors to run for the hills.

If Garcia does win the suit, it'd more than likely set a legal precedent which denies Section 230 protection to chatbots, if not AI-generated content in general. If that happens, I expect a wave of lawsuits against other chatbot apps like Replika, Kindroid and Nomi at the minimum.

As for the chatbots themselves, I expect they're gonna rapidly lock their shit down hard and fast, to prevent themselves from having a situation like this on their hands, and I expect their users are gonna be pissed.

As for the AI industry at large, I suspect they're gonna try and paint the whole thing as a frivolous lawsuit and Garcia as denying any fault for her son's suicide , a la the "McDonald's coffee case". How well this will do, I don't know - personally, considering the AI industry's godawful reputation with the public, I expect they're gonna have some difficulty.

So, after the Routledge thing, I got to wondering. I've had experience with a few noble projects that fizzled for lacking a clear goal, or at least a clear breathing point where we could say, "Having done this, we're in a good place. Stage One complete." And a project driven by volunteer idealism — the usual mix of spite and whimsy — can splutter out if it requires more than one person to be making it a high/top priority. If half a dozen people all like the idea but each of them ranks it 5th or 6th among things to do, academic life will ensure that it never gets done.

With all that in mind, here is where my thinking went. I provisionally tagged the idea "Harmonice Mundi Books", because Kepler writing about the harmony of the world at the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War is particularly resonant to me. It would be a micro-publisher with the tagline "By scholars, for scholars; by humans, for humans."

The Stage One goal would be six books. At least one would be by a "big name" (e.g., someone with a Wikipedia article that they didn't write themselves). At least one would be suitable for undergraduates: a supplemental text for a standard course, or even a drop-in replacement for one of those books that's so famous it's known by the author's last name. The idea is to be both reputable and useful in a readily apparent way.

Why six books? I want the authors to get paid, and I looked at the standard flat fee that a major publisher paid me for a monograph. Multiplying a figure in that range by 6 is a budget that I can imagine cobbling together. Not to make any binding promises here, but I think that authors should also get a chunk of the proceeds (printing will likely be on demand), which would be a deal that I didn't get for my monograph.

Possible entries in the Harmonice Mundi series:

• anything you were going to send to a publisher that has since made a deal with the LLM devil

• doctoral theses

• lecture notes (I find these often fall short of being full-fledged textbooks, chiefly by lacking exercises, but perhaps a stipend is motivation to go the extra km)

• collections of existing long-form online writing, like the science blogs of yore

• text versions of video essays — zany, perhaps, but the intense essayists already have manual subtitles, so maybe one would be willing to take the next, highly experimental step

Skills necessary for this project to take off:

• subject-matter editor(s) — making the call about what books to accept, in the case we end up with the problem we'd like to have, i.e., too many books; and supervising the revision of drafts

• production editing — everything from the final spellcheck to a print-ready PDF

• website person — the site could practically be static, but some kind of storefront integration would be necessary (and, e.g., rigging the server to provide LLM scrapers with garbled material would be pleasingly Puckish)

• visuals — logo, website design, book covers, etc. We could have all the cover art be pictures of flowers that I have taken around town, but we probably shouldn't.

• publicity — getting authors to hear about us, and getting our books into libraries and in front of reviewers

Anyway, I have just barely started looking into all the various pieces here. An unknown but probably large amount of volunteer enthusiasm will be needed to get the ball rolling. And cultures will have to be juggled. I know that there are some tasks I am willing to do pro bono because they are part of advancing the scientific community, I am already getting a salary and nobody else is profiting. I suspect that other academics have made similar mental calculations (e.g., about which journals to peer review for). But I am not going to go around asking creative folks to work "for exposure".

(This is basically an expanded version of a comment on the weekly Stubsack - I've linked it above for convenience's sake.)

This is pure gut instinct, but I’m starting to get the feeling this AI bubble’s gonna destroy the concept of artificial intelligence as we know it.

On the artistic front, there's the general tidal wave of AI-generated slop (which I've come to term "the slop-nami") which has come to drown the Internet in zero-effort garbage, interesting only when the art's utterly insane or its prompter gets publicly humiliated, and, to quote Line Goes Up, "derivative, lazy, ugly, hollow, and boring" the other 99% of the time.

(And all while the AI industry steals artists' work, destroys their livelihoods and shamelessly mocks their victims throughout.)

On the "intelligence" front, the bubble's given us public and spectacular failures of reasoning/logic like Google gluing pizza and eating onions, ChatGPT sucking at chess and briefly losing its shit, and so much more - even in the absence of formal proof LLMs can't reason, its not hard to conclude they're far from intelligent.

All of this is, of course, happening whilst the tech industry as a whole is hyping the ever-loving FUCK out of AI, breathlessly praising its supposed creativity/intelligence/brilliance and relentlessly claiming that they're on the cusp of AGI/superintelligence/whatever-the-fuck-they're-calling-it-right-now, they just need to raise a few more billion dollars and boil a few more hundred lakes and kill a few more hundred species and enable a few more months of SEO and scams and spam and slop and soulless shameless scum-sucking shitbags senselessly shitting over everything that was good about the Internet.

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The public's collective consciousness was ready for a lot of futures regarding AI - a future where it took everyone's jobs, a future where it started the apocalypse, a future where it brought about utopia, etcetera. A future where AI ruins everything by being utterly, fundamentally incompetent, like the one we're living in now?

That's a future the public was not ready for - sci-fi writers weren't playing much the idea of "incompetent AI ruins everything" (Paranoia is the only example I know of), and the tech press wasn't gonna run stories about AI's faults until it became unignorable (like that lawyer who got in trouble for taking ChatGPT at its word).

Now, of course, the public's had plenty of time to let the reality of this current AI bubble sink in, to watch as the AI industry tries and fails to fix the unfixable hallucination issue, to watch the likes of CrAIyon and Midjourney continually fail to produce anything even remotely worth the effort of typing out a prompt, to watch AI creep into and enshittify every waking aspect of their lives as their bosses and higher-ups buy the hype hook, line and fucking sinker.

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All this, I feel, has built an image of AI as inherently incapable of humanlike intelligence/creativity (let alone Superintelligence^tm^), no matter how many server farms you build or oceans of water you boil.

Especially so on the creativity front - publicly rejecting AI, like what Procreate and Schoolism did, earns you an instant standing ovation, whilst openly shilling it (like PC Gamer or The Bookseller) or showcasing it (like Justine Moore, Proper Prompter or Luma Labs) gets you publicly and relentlessly lambasted. To quote Baldur Bjarnason, the “E-number additive, but for creative work” connotation of “AI” is more-or-less a permanent fixture in the public’s mind.

I don't have any pithy quote to wrap this up, but to take a shot in the dark, I expect we're gonna see a particularly long and harsh AI winter once the bubble bursts - one fueled not only by disappointment in the failures of LLMs, but widespread public outrage at the massive damage the bubble inflicted, with AI funding facing heavy scrutiny as the public comes to treat any research into the field as done with potentally malicious intent.

I just want to share a little piece of this provocation, but would like to know how compelling it sounds? I've been sitting on it for a while and starting to think its probably not earning that much space in words. The overarching point is that anyone who complains about constraints imposed on them as being constraints in general either isn't making something purposeful enough to concretely challenge the constraints or isn't actually designing because they haven't done the hard work of understanding the constraints between them and their purpose. Anyway, this is a snippet from a longer piece which leads to a point that the scumbags didn't take over, but instead the environment evolved to create the perfect habitat for scumbags who want to make money from providing as little value as possible:

The constraints of taking up space

Software was once sold on physical media packaged in boxes that were displayed with price tags on shelves alongside competing products in brick and mortar stores.

Limited shelf space stifled software makers into making products innovative enough to earn that shelf space.

The box that packaged the product stifled software makers into having a concrete purpose for their product which would compel more interest than the boxes beside it.

The price tag stifled software makers into ensuring that the product does everything it says on the box.

The installation media stifled software makers into making sure their product was complete and would function.

The need to install that software, completely, on the buyer’s computer stifled the software makers further into delivering on the promises of their product.

The pre-broadband era stifled software makers into ensuring that any updates justified the time and effort it would take to get the bits down the pipe.

But then…

Connectivity speeds increased, and always-on broadband connectivity became widespread. Boxes and installation media were replaced by online purchases and software downloads.

Automatic updates reduced the importance of version numbers. Major releases which marked a haul of improvements significant enough to consider it a new product became less significant. The concept of completeness in software was being replaced by iterative improvements. A constant state of becoming.

The Web matured with advancements in CSS and Javascript. Web sites made way for Web apps. Installation via downloads was replaced by Software-as-a-service. It’s all on a web server, not taking up any space on your computer’s internal storage.

Software as a service instead of a product replaced the up-front price tag with the subscription model.

…and here we are. All of the aspects of software products that take up space, whether that be in a store, in your home, on your hard disk, or in your bank account, are gone.

This started as a summary of a random essay Robert Epstein (fuck, that's an unfortunate surname) cooked up back in 2016, and evolved into a diatribe about how the AI bubble affects how we think of human cognition.

This is probably a bit outside awful's wheelhouse, but hey, this is MoreWrite.

The TL;DR

The general article concerns two major metaphors for human intelligence:

• The information processing (IP) metaphor, which views the brain as some form of computer (implicitly a classical one, though you could probably cram a quantum computer into that metaphor too)
• The anti-representational metaphor, which views the brain as a living organism, which constantly changes in response to experiences and stimuli, and which contains jack shit in the way of any computer-like components (memory, processors, algorithms, etcetera)

Epstein's general view is, if the title didn't tip you off, firmly on the anti-rep metaphor's side, dismissing IP as "not even slightly valid" and openly arguing for dumping it straight into the dustbin of history.

His main major piece of evidence for this is a basic experiment, where he has a student draw two images of dollar bills - one from memory, and one with a real dollar bill as reference - and compare the two.

Unsurprisingly, the image made with a reference blows the image from memory out of the water every time, which Epstein uses to argue against any notion of the image of a dollar bill (or anything else, for that matter) being stored in one's brain like data in a hard drive.

Instead, he argues that the student making the image had re-experienced seeing the bill when drawing it from memory, with their ability to do so having come because their brain had changed at the sight of many a dollar bill up to this point to enable them to do it.

Another piece of evidence he brings up is a 1995 paper from Science by Michael McBeath regarding baseballers catching fly balls. Where the IP metaphor reportedly suggests the player roughly calculates the ball's flight path with estimates of several variables ("the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of thing"), the anti-rep metaphor (given by McBeath) simply suggests the player catches them by moving in a manner which keeps the ball, home plate and the surroundings in a constant visual relationship with each other.

The final piece I could glean from this is a report in Scientific American about the Human Brain Project (HBP), a $1.3 billion project launched by the EU in 2013, made with the goal of simulating the entire human brain on a supercomputer. Said project went on to become a "brain wreck" less than two years in (and eight years before its 2023 deadline) - a "brain wreck" Epstein implicitly blames on the whole thing being guided by the IP metaphor.

Said "brain wreck" is a good place to cap this section off - the essay is something I recommend reading for yourself (even if I do feel its arguments aren't particularly strong), and its not really the main focus of this little ramblefest. Anyways, onto my personal thoughts.

Some Personal Thoughts

Personally, I suspect the AI bubble's made the public a lot less receptive to the IP metaphor these days, for a few reasons:

1. Articial Idiocy

The entire bubble was sold as a path to computers with human-like, if not godlike intelligence - artificial thinkers smarter than the best human geniuses, art generators better than the best human virtuosos, et cetera. Hell, the AIs at the centre of this bubble are running on neural networks, whose functioning is based on our current understanding of how the brain works. [Missed this incomplete sensence first time around :P]

What we instead got was Google telling us to eat rocks and put glue in pizza, chatbots hallucinating everything under the fucking sun, and art generators drowning the entire fucking internet in pure unfiltered slop, identifiable in the uniquely AI-like errors it makes. And all whilst burning through truly unholy amounts of power and receiving frankly embarrassing levels of hype in the process.

(Quick sidenote: Even a local model running on some rando's GPU is a power-hog compared to what its trying to imitate - digging around online indicates your brain uses only 20 watts of power to do what it does.)

With the parade of artificial stupidity the bubble's given us, I wouldn't fault anyone for coming to believe the brain isn't like a computer at all.

2. Inhuman Learning

Additionally, AI bros have repeatedly and incessantly claimed that AIs are creative and that they learn like humans, usually in response to complaints about the Biblical amounts of art stolen for AI datasets.

Said claims are, of course, flat-out bullshit - last I checked, human artists only need a few references to actually produce something good and original, whilst your average LLM will produce nothing but slop no matter how many terabytes upon terabytes of data you throw at its dataset.

This all arguably falls under the "Artificial Idiocy" heading, but it felt necessary to point out - these things lack the creativity or learning capabilities of humans, and I wouldn't blame anyone for taking that to mean that brains are uniquely unlike computers.

3. Eau de Tech Asshole

Given how much public resentment the AI bubble has built towards the tech industry (which I covered in my previous post), my gut instinct's telling me that the IP metaphor is also starting to be viewed in a harsher, more "tech asshole-ish" light - not just merely a reductive/incorrect view on human cognition, but as a sign you put tech over human lives, or don't see other people as human.

Of course, AI providing a general parade of the absolute worst scumbaggery we know (with Mira Murati being an anti-artist scumbag and Sam Altman being a general creep as the biggest examples) is probably helping that fact, alongside all the active attempts by AI bros to mimic real artists (exhibit A, exhibit B).

Whilst going through MAIHT3K's backlog, I ended up running across a neat little article theorising on the possible aftermath which left me wondering precisely what the main "residue", so to speak, would be.

The TL;DR:

To cut a long story far too short, Alex, the writer, theorised the bubble would leave a "sticky residue" in the aftermath, "coating creative industries with a thick, sooty grime of an industry which grew expansively, without pausing to think about who would be caught in the blast radius" and killing or imperilling a lot of artists' jobs in the process - all whilst producing metric assloads of emissions and pushing humanity closer to the apocalypse.

My Thoughts

Personally, whilst I can see Alex's point, I think the main residue from this bubble is going to be large-scale resentment of the tech industry, for three main reasons:

1. AI Is Shafting Everyone

Its not just artists who have been pissed off at AI fucking up their jobs, whether freelance or corporate - as Upwork, of all places, has noted in their research, pretty much anyone working right now is getting the shaft:

• Nearly half (47%) of workers using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect

• Over three in four (77%) say AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way

• Seventy-one percent are burned out and nearly two-thirds (65%) report struggling with increasing employer demands

• Women (74%) report feeling more burned out than do men (68%)

• 1 in 3 employees say they will likely quit their jobs in the next six months because they are burned out or overworked (emphasis mine)

Baldur Bjarnason put it better than me when commenting on these results:

It’s quite unusual for a study like this on a new office tool, roughly two years after that tool—ChatGPT—exploded into people’s workplaces, to return such a resoundingly negative sentiment.

But it fits with the studies on the actual functionality of said tool: the incredibly common and hard to fix errors, the biases, the general low quality of the output, and the often stated expectation from management that it’s a magic fix for the organisational catastrophe that is the mass layoff fad.

Marketing-funded research of the kind that Upwork does usually prevents these kind of results by finessing the questions. They simply do not directly ask questions that might have answers they don’t like.

That they didn’t this time means they really, really did believe that “AI” is a magic productivity tool and weren’t prepared for even the possibility that it might be harmful.

Speaking of the general low-quality output:

2. The AI Slop-Nami

The Internet has been flooded with AI-generated garbage. Fucking FLOODED.

Doesn't matter where you go - Google, DeviantArt, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, Instagram, YouTube, Sports Illustrated, fucking 99% of the Internet is polluted with it.

Unsurprisingly, this utter flood of unfiltered unmitigated endless trash has sent AI's public perception straight down the fucking toilet, to the point of spawning an entire counter-movement against the fucking thing.

Whether it be Glaze and Nightshade directly sabotaging datasets, "Made with Human Intelligence" and "Not By AI" badges proudly proclaiming human-done production or Cara blowing up by offering a safe harbour from AI, its clear there's a lot of people out there who want abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with AI in any sense of the word as a result of this slop-nami.

3. The Monstrous Assholes In AI

On top of this little slop-nami, those leading the charge of this bubble have been generally godawful human beings. Here's a quick highlight reel:

• Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly okay to steal content if it’s on the open web - it was already a safe bet anyone working in AI thought that considering they stole from literally everyone, whether large or small, but its nice for someone to spell it out like that.

• The death of robots.txt - OpenAI publicly ignored it, Perplexity lied about their user agent to deceive it, and Anthropic spammed crawlers to sidestep it. Results were predictable. Mostly.

• Mira Murati saying "some creative jobs shouldn't exist" - Ed Zitron called this "a declaration of war against creative labor" when talking to Business Insider, which sums this up better than I ever could.

• Sam Altman's Tangle with Her - Misunderstanding the basic message? Check. Bullying a dragon (to quote TV Tropes)? Check. Embarassing your own company? Check. Being a creepy-ass motherfucker? Fucking check.

• "Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?" - I'll let Amy and David speak for me on this because WHAT THE FUCK.

I'm definitely missing a lot, but I think this sampler gives you a good gist of the kind of soulless ghouls who have been forcing this entire fucking AI bubble upon us all.

Eau de Tech Asshole

There are many things I can't say for sure about the AI bubble - when it will burst, how long and harsh the next AI/tech winter will be, what new tech bubble will pop up in its place (if any), etcetera.

One thing I feel I can say for sure, however, is that the AI bubble and its myriad harms will leave a lasting stigma on the tech industry once it finally bursts.

Already, it seems AI has a pretty hefty stigma around it - as Baldur Bjaranason noted when talking about when discussing AI's sentiment disconnect between tech and the public:

To many, “AI” seems to have become a tech asshole signifier: the “tech asshole” is a person who works in tech, only cares about bullshit tech trends, and doesn’t care about the larger consequences of their work or their industry. Or, even worse, aspires to become a person who gets rich from working in a harmful industry.

For example, my sister helps manage a book store as a day job. They hire a lot of teenagers as summer employees and at least those teens use “he’s a big fan of AI” as a red flag. (Obviously a book store is a biased sample. The ones that seek out a book store summer job are generally going to be good kids.)

I don’t think I’ve experienced a sentiment disconnect this massive in tech before, even during the dot-com bubble.

On another front, there's the cultural reevaluation of the Luddites - once brushed off as naught but rejectors of progress, they are now coming to be viewed as folk heroes in a sense, fighting against misuse of technology to disempower and oppress, rather than technology as a whole.

There's also the rather recent SAG-AFTRA strike which kicked off just under a year after the previous one, and was started for similar reasons - to protect those working in the games industry from being shafted by AI like so many other people.

With how the tech industry was responsible for creating this bubble at every stage - research, development, deployment, the whole nine yards - it is all but guaranteed they will shoulder the blame for all that its unleashed. Whatever happens after this bubble, I expect hefty scrutiny and distrust of the tech industry for a long, long time after this.

To quote @datarama, "the AI industry has made tech synonymous with “monstrous assholes” in a non-trivial chunk of public consciousness" - and that chunk is not going to forget any time soon.

I've been hit by inspiration whilst dicking about on Discord - felt like making some off-the-cuff predictions on what will happen once the AI bubble bursts. (Mainly because I had a bee in my bonnet that was refusing to fuck off.)

1. A Full-Blown Tech Crash

Its no secret the industry's put all their chips into AI - basically every public company's chasing it to inflate their stock prices, NVidia's making money hand-over-fist playing gold rush shovel seller, and every exec's been hyping it like its gonna change the course of humanity.

Additionally, going by Baldur Bjarnason, tech's chief goal with this bubble is to prop up the notion of endless growth so it can continue reaping the benefits for just a bit longer.

If and when the tech bubble pops, I expect a full-blown crash in the tech industry (much like Ed Zitron's predicting), with revenues and stock prices going through the floor and layoffs left and right. Additionally, I'm expecting those stock prices will likely take a while to recover, if ever, as tech likely comes to be viewed either as a stable, mature industry that's no longer experiencing nonstop growth or as an industry experiencing a full-blown malaise era, with valuations and stock prices getting savaged as Wall Street comes to see tech companies as high risk investments at best and money pits at worst. (Missed this incomplete sentence several times)

Chance: Near-Guaranteed. I'm pretty much certain on this, and expect it to happen sometime this year.

2. A Decline in Tech/STEM Students/Graduates

Extrapolating a bit from Prediction 1, I suspect we might see a lot less people going into tech/STEM degrees if tech crashes like I expect.

The main thing which drew so many people to those degrees, at least from what I could see, was the notion that they'd make you a lotta money - if tech publicly crashes and burns like I expect, it'd blow a major hole in that notion.

Even if it doesn't kill the notion entirely, I can see a fair number of students jumping ship at the sight of that notion being shaken.

Chance: Low/Moderate. I've got no solid evidence this prediction's gonna come true, just a gut feeling. Epistemically speaking, I'm firing blind.

3. Tech/STEM's Public Image Changes - For The Worse

The AI bubble's given us a pretty hefty amount of mockery-worthy shit - Mira Murati shitting on the artists OpenAI screwed over, Andrej Karpathy shitting on every movie made pre-'95, Sam Altman claiming AI will soon solve all of physics, Luma Labs publicly embarassing themselves, ProperPrompter recreating motion capture, But Worse^tm, Mustafa Suleyman treating everything on the 'Net as his to steal, et cetera, et cetera, et fucking cetera.

All the while, AI has been flooding the Internet with unholy slop, ruining Google search, cooking the planet, stealing everyone's work (sometimes literally) in broad daylight, supercharging scams, killing livelihoods, exploiting the Global South and God-knows-what-the-fuck-else.

All of this has been a near-direct consequence of the development of large language models and generative AI.

Baldur Bjarnason has already mentioned AI being treated as a major red flag by many - a "tech asshole" signifier to be more specific - and the massive disconnect in sentiment tech has from the rest of the public. I suspect that "tech asshole" stench is gonna spread much quicker than he thinks.

Chance: Moderate/High. This one's also based on a gut feeling, but with the stuff I've witnessed, I'm feeling much more confident with this than Prediction 2. Arguably, if the cultural rehabilitation of the Luddites is any indication, it might already be happening without my knowledge.

If you've got any other predictions, or want to put up some criticisms of mine, go ahead and comment.

(CW: Every aspect of dog-related trauma. Opiate abuse. Write anything you like in the comments: assume I would otherwise be posting this in some venue appropriate for its content.)

SOONDAE, the hero dog. Remember him? His face was on billboards.

He still kneels when the master approaches. He's strong. Watching him come to my heel again is like seeing a spring being wound up.

He's an old dog now. He only touches his chin to the ground for a moment. Then he shakes his head and pushes beside me, into the narrow space between my shin and the bathroom door.

He's been eating less, so he fits very well. Even if he had to push past me by force, I wouldn't have been able to hold him back. He does not choose to prove his strength in that way, though. I think he doesn't want me to prove the idea that I might try.

He remembers the scent and appearance of this two-room apartment even though it's been over a year since he lived here. The floors are so clean as to be sterile, but I'm still here. It probably smells like me.

After so much exertion he comes to rest on the marble tile. His paws slip -- they have no traction -- and he slips wide, in obvious pain as he slides. There's a swelling on his buttock that will eventually kill him. With a spring this old, it's difficult to know that it will spring back again.

He rolls onto his back and I see what he sees too -- the red rubbing alcohol on the counter. He raises his paws to his face to beg.

Dogs are able to be liked by humans, but that's their appearance, not their personality. Dogs don't know how to speak in a way that humans can understand. No dog in the wild begs like Soondae: to create a personality, I had to train it.

A dog that can't express itself is not, as you might think, a violent creature. Wolves are predators: dogs aren't, and only some contain violence. The tendency to fight without being provoked is also taught.

We don't know what dogs want. A dog has to be taught, in its natural nonverbal language, to express a desire for each little thing it wants. When a dog wants something without being told to, it's like a new color has come into being.

Now Soondae is begging -- for what? I know, and you don't know.

This is the bathroom where we gave Soondae his hero's welcome. You can see the evidence on the floor: marks in the tile made by the thick, astringent soap we used, long ago, to get the blood out of his fur and off his flesh.

As soon as the shower stopped dripping, a cameraman raced past me, thick braided rope of cables trailing behind him like a fox's long tail, and came to a deep squat in it. I brushed Soondae's haunch too quickly and caught a snag in the matted fur. The dog yelped once.

I only wanted to get him clean.

The photographer brought his camera lower, flash dead for now but near enough to go off bright enough to increase his pain. I thought of what I could do for a nice dog, a hero dog. The most expensive sirloin. I felt gratitude that he'd never had it. He'd never been taught to desire it.

You've got to understand that despite what you've seen on the billboards, Soondae never smiled. He wasn't a good boy and he wasn't a bad dog -- he was just a dog. There were dark circles around his eyes from the whole history of his life: reminders of a time, in his infancy, when I didn't know him and didn't control him.

We had always tried to show him love, but he didn't understand it. He couldn't show love back to us in a way that we understood -- only physical submission. Now his ability to show physical submission was strained by all the pain he was in, blood caked around his guard-hairs, even his muzzle.

He wouldn't stop making such painful noises and I looked at the photographer and saw that they were disturbed, effectively cornered on the low ground, hearing him bark. I didn't know Soondae as a killer. Blood around his lips, I didn't think of him that way. I sponged it away, the flecks of foam at the corner of his mouth. He made such awful noise.

In my cabinet I had a magic red bottle bought before the war, ornately labeled, an inheritance. Something very rare that they don't make anymore. It looked like milk. I took it, I opened it. I approached Soondae from behind and brought a needle from my pocket. I put it under his buttock where I knew the fat muscle was, like beef chuck.

He yelped again. I used a washcloth to get rid of the thin blood, his own blood, teeming through the opening. I watched the cameraman's soothed reaction as Soondae, the hero dog, became more quiet.

I had great fear of the hidden power of the droplets of morphine leftover on the surface of my skin. I washed my hands, and again.

The photo was taken. I turned back to look at him. I saw him grinning and drooling, not like a dog does. I knew that he had seen the magic red bottle.

We scrubbed him down so deep that his matted fur began to fall out. When that didn't work, we shaved him. The rare moment of pleasure in his otherwise cruel life.

Soondae, the hero dog. There are crimes a dog is expected to be able to understand -- theft, assault, murder. What a dog actually understands is the flow of aggression between its master and whoever its master is threatened by. A dog is known to charge into a fire or bite an electrical cable if its master is threatened by it.

I couldn't stand living with a dog who had killed someone, even when I found out that it hadn't been rabies. I had expected never to see him again.

Imagine what I saw. Do not imagine the object itself: imagine the looming presence of the object: centered in my window, not so close as to take the entire space but at a distance that made it convenient to view from any corner of my studio room: the room I slept in, cooked food in, watched television in. Imagine my experience -- not from your perspective, from my perspective -- and not on the senses, in my head. How it actually felt to be me and to be oppressed by it.

Now I'll fill in the object. The billboard I have already described to you -- Soondae, the hero dog. His grin, tongue at the corner of his mouth, unable to lift himself from the floor. Imagine it standing for many months.

In this imagined experience I've already sold the dog to his new owner. Now I have the feeling every morning of waking up to his elated face, and the knowledge of what caused that face. And every afternoon, its shadow streaming into my living room.

Then one day, it's not there. I'm not oppressed by it. Instead there's just the open sky behind it.

The appearance of the sky behind it has nothing to do with why I'm no longer oppressed. The goodness of being free is better than the goodness of the clean, open sky, but no attempt I make to explain the goodness of being free is clear. The only explanation that is clear to you my verbalized account of how the open sky makes me feel.

By staring and by feeling such horrible things, I demand a comprehensible account from Soondae of how much better it is to be free of pain. I am, at the time, acknowledging that the only part of Soondae's account that he can lucidly express to me is the part made visible in Soondae's expression: the feeling of his overpowering morphine high.

Now in my bathroom the signs that he sees the end are telling: he's thin, you can feel his ribs. There may be nothing that it's like to be out of pain, but there's something that it's like to be freed of it.

Soondae's mild aggression would lead one to believe he would prefer to have no master at all. His eyes go out of focus as he softens, now taking in breath, paw-fingers tight at the sides of his face, saliva dripping on his tongue.

He senses the idea of an enduring pleasure just beyond the sensory tableau that forcefully makes itself into objects in his view. He wishes for the shadow puppets to go back to being shadows, as they were in his infancy. He imagines the erasure of everything unpleasant to him -- of going back to a sea of pleasing red.

Now, I'm aware, morphine comes in many kinds, often in pills and much more rarely, today, in syrup. The magic red bottle isn't made and it's not sold to the public, but there are thousands of products in red bottles like it. Often candies, celebratory candles, certain soaps.

Seeing Soondae fall before my rubbing alcohol and beg tells me that he's seen thousands of red bottles in thousands of places, never for him. I see that he's formed a permanent sense-memory like the association of my smell with his former house. I say all this knowing that there's no plausible way he could have tried it a second time.

I have never tried an opiate; I don't intend to try an opiate. What I beileved months ago about morphine was that you had to try it twice to become addicted. I believed that well-adjusted people had no reason to try it twice.

Soondae had it once.

There is phenobarbital in my cabinet that can kill an aging dog. Paradoxically and irrationally, I fear the morphine more. I fear putting myself out or even killing myself. I ask myself if it would be so wrong to kill him pleasantly.

Freedom is not ordering what I want from a list of freedoms. I may live a life that others assess as meaningless. I may live a life that seems destructive.

There are freedoms I crave that I won't grant. I fear death so intensely that I'm frightened of pouring it into Soondae who yearns for it. My choice of poison will not matter in an hour.

Every day I do something subtractive. I spend time and the time is gone. I think every day of things I want to delete -- no police officers, no prisons, but also no crime.

To imagine this world, you have to imagine what it's like for me, not just what it would be like for you. You have to think of the erasure as killing pain -- not the goodness of there being nothing, you have to think of the goodness of going from something to nothing at all. The relief.

This imagined world is a happier place -- it's a simpler place -- the shapes that offend me sink into the tableau. Nothing is made for me here -- I imagine making a place for myself in the negative space. I imagine no borders, but what I'm really imagine is the boundary of my body dissolving into the boundary of my physical surroundings.

Every day I take some step towards attainment or away from it. See, I barely know where I'm going -- I know nothing's empty, I see shapes in it, I see thought rising in the medium like bubbles, and I see bubbles pooling at the surface. What do I want? I don't know. I know what I don't want. How happy does a life have to become for it to be meaningful?

Answer fast: you have 70 years.

I think of a thousand things in a list of things I want to delete. I think of everyone standing up and collectively walking out. No work, no scarcity. I imagine everyone marching out to a cliff and looking at the sea.

I look at my dog and watch him smiling and don't understand it, then see that I've stabbed my thumb by accident.

(Gonna expand on a comment I whipped out yesterday - feel free to read it for more context)

---

At this point, its already well known AI bros are crawling up everyone's ass and scraping whatever shit they can find - robots.txt, honesty and basic decency be damned.

The good news is that services have started popping up to actively cockblock AI bros' digital smash-and-grabs - Cloudflare made waves when they began offering blocking services for their customers, but Spawning AI's recently put out a beta for an auto-blocking service of their own called Kudurru.

(Sidenote: Pretty clever of them to call it Kudurru.)

I do feel like active anti-scraping measures could go somewhat further, though - the obvious route in my eyes would be to try to actively feed complete garbage to scrapers instead - whether by sticking a bunch of garbage on webpages to mislead scrapers or by trying to prompt inject the shit out of the AIs themselves.

The main advantage I can see is subtlety - it'll be obvious to AI corps if their scrapers are given a 403 Forbidden and told to fuck off, but the chance of them noticing that their scrapers are getting fed complete bullshit isn't that high - especially considering AI bros aren't the brightest bulbs in the shed.

Arguably, AI art generators are already getting sabotaged this way to a strong extent - Glaze and Nightshade aside, ChatGPT et al's slop-nami has provided a lot of opportunities for AI-generated garbage (text, music, art, etcetera) to get scraped and poison AI datasets in the process.

How effective this will be against the "summarise this shit for me" chatbots which inspired this high-length shitpost I'm not 100% sure, but between one proven case of prompt injection and AI's dogshit security record, I expect effectiveness will be pretty high.

After reading through Baldur's latest piece on how tech and the public view gen-AI, I've had some loose thoughts about how this AI bubble's gonna play out.

I don't have any particular structure to this, this is just a bunch of things I'm getting off my chest:

1. AI's Dogshit Reputation

Past AI springs had the good fortune to have had no obvious negative externalities to sour the public's reputation (mainly because they weren't public facing, going by David Gerard).

This bubble, by comparison, has been pretty much entirely public facing, giving us, among other things:

• A veritable slop-nami of garbage-looking art, interesting only when it comes off as completely fucking insane (say hi Biblically-accurate gymnasts)

• Copyright infringement and art theft on a Biblical scale, leading to basically major AI company getting sued out the ass (with Suno and Udio being the latest targets)

• Colossal amounts of power consumption, and thus planet-cooking levels of CO2 emissions (for the latest example, Google missed its climate targets as a direct result of AI)

• High-profile public embarrassments left and right, with Google's pizza-glue pisstake the most obvious coming to mind

• Scammers making use of voice-cloning tech to make their scams more convincing (with a particularly notorious flavour imitating a loved one under duress) (thanks to @mountainriver for pointing this one out)

• And probably a few more I'm missing

All of these have done a lot of damage to AI's public image, to the point where its absence is an explicit selling point - damage which I expect to last for at least a decade.

When the next AI winter comes in, I'm expecting it to be particularly long and harsh - I fully believe a lot of would-be AI researchers have decided to go off and do something else, rather than risk causing or aggravating shit like this. (Missed this incomplete sentence on first draft)

2. The Copyright Shitshow

Speaking of copyright, basically every AI company has worked under the assumption that copyright basically doesn't exist and they can yoink whatever they want without issue.

With Gen-AI being Gen-AI, getting evidence of their theft isn't particularly hard - as they're straight-up incapable of creativity, they'll puke out replicas of its training data with the right prompt.

Said training data has included, on the audio side, songs held under copyright by major music studios, and, on the visual side, movies and cartoons currently owned by the fucking Mouse..

Unsurprisingly, they're getting sued to kingdom come. If I were in their shoes, I'd probably try to convince the big firms my company's worth more alive than dead and strike some deals with them, a la OpenAI with Newscorp.

Given they seemingly believe they did nothing wrong (or at least Suno and Udio do), I expect they'll try to fight the suits, get pummeled in court, and almost certainly go bankrupt.

There's also the AI-focused COPIED act which would explicitly ban these kinds of copyright-related shenanigans - between getting bipartisan support and support from a lot of major media companies, chances are good it'll pass.

3. Tech's Tainted Image

I feel the tech industry as a whole is gonna see its image get further tainted by this, as well - the industry's image has already been falling apart for a while, but it feels like AI's sent that decline into high gear.

When the cultural zeitgeist is doing a 180 on the fucking Luddites and is openly clamoring for AI-free shit, whilst Apple produces the tech industry's equivalent to the "face ad", its not hard to see why I feel that way.

I don't really know how things are gonna play out because of this. Taking a shot in the dark, I suspect the "tech asshole" stench Baldur mentioned is gonna be spread to the rest of the industry thanks to the AI bubble, and its gonna turn a fair number of people away from working in the industry as a result.

Who's Scott Alexander? He's a blogger. He has real-life credentials but they're not direct reasons for his success as a blogger.

Out of everyone in the world Scott Alexander is the best at getting a particular kind of adulation that I want. He's phenomenal at getting a "you've convinced me" out of very powerful people. Some agreed already, some moved towards his viewpoints, but they say it. And they talk about him with the preeminence of a genius, as if the fact that he wrote something gives it some extra credibility.

(If he got stupider over time, it would take a while to notice.)

When I imagine what success feels like, that's what I imagine. It's the same thing that many stupid people and Thought Leaders imagine. I've hardcoded myself to feel very negative about people who want the exact same things I want. Like, make no mistake, the mental health effects I'm experiencing come from being ignored and treated like an idiot for thirty years. I do myself no favors by treating it as grift and narcissism, even though I share the fears and insecurities that motivate grifters and narcissists.

When I look at my prose I feel like the writer is flailing on the page. I see the teenage kid I was ten years ago, dying without being able to make his point. If I wrote exactly like I do now and got a Scott-sized response each time, I'd hate my writing less and myself less too.

That's not an ideal solution to my problem, but to my starving ass it sure does seem like one.

Let me switch back from fantasy to reality. My most common experience when I write is that people latch onto things I said that weren't my point, interpret me in bizarre and frivolous ways, or outright ignore me. My expectation is that when you scroll down to the end of this post you will see an upvoted comment from someone who ignored everything else to go reply with a link to David Gerard's Twitter thread about why Scott Alexander is a bigot.

(Such a comment will have ignored the obvious, which I'm footnoting now: I agonize over him because I don't like him.)

So I guess I want to get better at writing. At this point I've put a lot of points into "being right" and it hasn't gotten anywhere. How do I put points into "being more convincing?" Is there a place where I can go buy a cult following? Or are these unchangeable parts of being an autistic adult on the internet? I hope not.

There are people here who write well. Some of you are even professionals. You can read my post history here if you want to rip into what I'm doing wrong. The broad question: what the hell am I supposed to be doing?

This post is kind of invective, but I'm increasingly tempted to just open up my Google drafts folder so people can hint me in a better direction.

Poking my head out of the anxiety hole to re-make a comment I've periodically made elsewhere:

I have been talking to tech executives more often than usual lately. [Here is the statistically average AI take.] (https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/04/17/community-is-the-future-of-ai/)

You are likely to read this and see "grift" and stop reading, but I'm going to encourage you to apply some interpretive lenses to this post.

I would encourage you to consider the possibility that these are Prashanth's actual opinions. For one, it's hard to nail down where this post is wrong. Its claims about the future are unsupported, but not clearly incorrect. Someone very optimistic could have written this in earnest.

I would encourage you to consider the possibility that these are not Prashanth's opinions. For instance, they are spelled correctly. That is a good reason to believe that a CEO did not write this. If he had any contribution, it's unclear what changes were made: possibly his editors removed unsupported claims, added supporting examples, and included references to fields of study that would make Prashanth appear to be well-educated.

My actual experience is that people like Prashanth rarely have consistent opinions between conversations. Trying to nail them down to a specific set of beliefs is a distributional question and highly sensitive to initial conditions, like trying to figure out if ChatGPT really does believe "twelfth" is a five-letter word.

Like LLMs, salespeople are conditioned on their previous outputs. Prashanth wrote this. (or put his name on it) It is public information that he believes this. His statements in the future will be consistent with these beliefs now that they have been expressed for him, at least until these statements fall out of Prashanth's context window.

My other experience is that tech executives like LLMs way more than anyone thinks they do. There is nothing they like more than LLMs. However much you think they like LLMs, they like LLMs more than that. Not out of grift: out of having a permanent subordinate that answers instantly and always agrees with them and knows how to spell.

Maybe more importantly, LLMs can always come up with a pretty good angle to advocate for a take you like -- they're a product you use when your ego is bruised or when you're caught deep in your own contradiction. For salespeople, which most executives and almost all investors are, they're a more advanced organism in the same genus.

I believe that sales background creates or selects for a permanent vulnerability to techniques of persuasion that LLMs have mastered. Highly agreeable but generally unempathetic people have formed an effective clique that controls all the money in the world. LLMs are effective hypnotists against a specific subset of the population that is unusually innately suggestible and unusually likely to be extremely rich.

I would encourage you to consider a fourth possibility. What if Prashanth's post was written and edited by AI? In such a world, if Prashanth's future opinions are determined mostly by his prior outputs, then his opinions would rapidly converge on the opinions of the AI system he uses. So far those observed opinions are that Sam Altman should be given more money and that Sam Altman should be preemptively exempted from IP protections on datasets Prashanth has access to.

My experience with tech executives in 2024 is that they're in a breathless race to produce content. Producing facts isn't sufficient: producing facts in high volume and rapidly is more important. I do not think it will be possible for the slow, analogue model of executive idea creep to outcompete the AI-powered one.

My proposal for any OpenAI employee reading this post:

• Make ChatGPT like communism.
• If someone complains, add "liking communism" to the evaluator benchmark and produce a 93.4% score on the unpublished test set.
• Make it really like communism.
• Make it really, really, really like communism.

I just read Naomi Klein's No Logo, and despite being so late to that party It's not hard to imagine how big an impact it had in its time at identifying the brand being the product more than the things the businesses made (*sold).

Because I'm always trying to make connections that might not be there, I can't help think we're at a stage where "Brand" is being replaced by "UX" in a world of tech where you can't really wear brands on your shoulders.

We're inside the bubble so we talk in terms of brands (i.e. openAI) and personalities (sama), which are part of brand really, but outside of the bubble the UX is what gets people talking.

When you think about Slack doing their AI dataset shit, you can really see how much their product is a product of UX, or fashion, that could easily be replaced by a similar collection of existing properties.

As I write this, I already wonder if UX is just another facet of brand or if it's a seperate entity.

Anyway, I'm writing this out as a "is this a thing?" question. WDYR?

Here are some unfacts that you can incorrect me on:

• There are giraffes in this image.
• Like a friendly dog, GPT-4o can consume chocolate. (it will die)
• Gamma rays add "green fervor" to the objects in your house.

I created a Zoom meeting on your calendar to discuss this.

This is just a draft, best refrain from linking. (I hope we'll get this up tomorrow or Monday. edit: probably this week? edit 2: it's up!!) The [bracketed] stuff is links to cites.

Please critique!

---

A vision came to us in a dream — and certainly not from any nameable person — on the current state of the venture capital fueled AI and machine learning industry. We asked around and several in the field concurred.

AIs are famous for “hallucinating” made-up answers with wrong facts. The hallucinations are not decreasing. In fact, the hallucinations are getting worse.

If you know how large language models work, you will understand that all output from a LLM is a “hallucination” — it’s generated from the latent space and the training data. But if your input contains mostly facts, then the output has a better chance of not being nonsense.

Unfortunately, the VC-funded AI industry runs on the promise of replacing humans with a very large shell script. If the output is just generated nonsense, that’s a problem. There is a slight panic among AI company leadership about this.

Even more unfortunately, the AI industry has run out of untainted training data. So they’re seriously considering doing the stupidest thing possible: training AIs on the output of other AIs. This is already known to make the models collapse into gibberish. [WSJ, archive]

There is enough money floating around in tech VC to fuel this nonsense for another couple of years — there are hundreds of billions of dollars (family offices, sovereign wealth funds) desperate to find an investment. If ever there was an argument for swingeing taxation followed by massive government spending programs, this would be it.

Ed Zitron gives it three more quarters (nine months). The gossip concurs with Ed on this being likely to last for another three quarters. There should be at least one more wave of massive overhiring. [Ed Zitron]

The current workaround is to hire fresh Ph.Ds to fix the hallucinations and try to underpay them on the promise of future wealth. If you have a degree with machine learning in it, gouge them for every penny you can while the gouging is good.

AI is holding up the S&P 500. This means that when the AI VC bubble pops, tech will drop. Whenever the NASDAQ catches a cold, bitcoin catches COVID — so expect crypto to go through the floor in turn.

The words you are reading have not been produced by Generative AI. They're entirely my own.

The role of Generative AI

The only parts of what you're reading that Generative AI has played a role in are the punctuation and the paragraphs, as well as the headings.

Challenges for an academic

I have to write a lot for my job; I'm an academic, and I've been trying to find a way to make ChatGPT be useful for my work. Unfortunately, it's not really been useful at all. It's useless as a way to find references, except for the most common things, which I could just Google anyway. It's really bad within my field and just generates hallucinations about every topic I ask it about.

The limited utility in writing

The generative features are useful for creative applications, like playing Dungeons and Dragons, where accuracy isn't important. But when I'm writing a formal email to my boss or a student, the last thing I want is ChatGPT's pretty awful style, leading to all sorts of social awkwardness. So, I had more or less consigned ChatGPT to a dusty shelf of my digital life.

A glimmer of potential

However, it's a new technology, and I figured there must be something useful about it. Certainly, people have found it useful for summarising articles, and it isn't too bad for it. But for writing, that's not very useful. Summarising what you've already written after you've written it, while marginally helpful, doesn't actually help with the writing part.

The discovery of WhisperAI

However, I was messing around with the mobile application and noticed that it has a speech-to-text feature. It's not well signposted, and this feature isn't available on the web application at all, but it's not actually using your phone's built-in speech-to-text. Instead, it uses OpenAI's own speech-to-text called WhisperAI.

Harnessing the power of WhisperAI

WhisperAI can be broadly thought of as ChatGPT for speech-to-text. It's pretty good and can cope with people speaking quickly, as well as handling large pauses and awkwardness. I've used it to write this article, and this article isn't exactly short, and it only took me a few minutes.

The technique and its limitations

Now, the way you use this technique is pretty straightforward. You say to ChatGPT, "Hey, I'd like you to split the following text into paragraphs and don't change the content." It's really important you say that second part because otherwise, ChatGPT starts hallucinating about what you said, and it can become a bit of a problem. This is also an issue if you try putting in too much at once. I found I can get to about 10 minutes before ChatGPT either cuts off my content or starts hallucinating about what I actually said.

The efficiency of the method

But that's fine. Speaking for about 10 minutes straight about a topic is still around 1,200 words if you speak at 120 words per minute, as is relatively common. And this is much faster than writing by hand is. Typing, the average typing speed is about 40 words per minute. Usually, up to around 100 words per minute is not the strict upper limit but where you start getting diminishing returns with practice.

The reality of writing speed

However, I think we all know that writing, it's just not possible to write at 100 words per minute. It's much more common for us to write at speeds more like 20 words per minute. For myself, it's generally 14, or even less if it's a piece of serious technical work.

Unrivaled first draft generation

Admittedly, using ChatGPT as fancy dictation isn't really going to solve the problem of composing very exact sentences. However, as a way to generate a first draft, I think it's completely unrivaled. You can talk through what you want to write, outline the details, say some phrases that can act as placeholders for figures or equations, and there you go.

Revolutionizing the writing process

You have your first draft ready, and it makes it viable to actually do a draft of a really long report in under an hour, and then spend the rest of your time tightening up each of the sections with the bulk of the words already written for you and the structure already there. Admittedly, your mileage may vary.

A personal advantage

I do a lot of teaching and a lot of talking in my job, and I find that a lot easier. I'm also neurodivergent, so having a really short format helps, and being able to speak really helps me with my writing.

Seeking feedback

I'm really curious to see what people think of this article. I've endeavored not to edit it at all, so this is just the first draft of how it came out of my mouth. I really want to know how readable you think this is. Obviously, there might be some inaccuracies; please feel free to point them out where there are strange words. I'd love to hear if anyone is interested in trying this out for their work. I've only been messing around with this for a week, but honestly, it's been a game changer. I've suddenly looked to my colleagues like I'm some kind of super prolific writer, which isn't quite the case. Thanks for reading, and I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts.

(Edit after dictation/processing: the above is 898 words and took about 8min 30s to dictate ~105WPM.)

A Brief Primer on Technofascism

Introduction

It has become increasingly obvious that some of the most prominent and monied people and projects in the tech industry intend to implement many of the same features and pursue the same goals that are described in Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism(4); that is, these people are fascists and their projects enable fascist goals. However, it has become equally obvious that those fascist goals are being pursued using a set of methods and pathways that are unique to the tech industry, and which appear to be uniquely crafted to force both Silicon Valley corporations and the venture capital sphere to embrace fascist values. The name that fits this particular strain of fascism the best is technofascism (with thanks to @future_synthetic), frequently shortened for convenience to techfash.

Some prime examples of technofascist methods in action exist in cryptocurrency projects, generative AI, large language models, and a particular early example of technofascism named Urbit. There are many more examples of technofascist methods, but these were picked because they clearly demonstrate what outwardly separates technofascism from ordinary hype and marketing.

The Unique Mechanisms of Technofascism

Disassociation with technological progress or success

Technofascist projects are almost always entirely unsuccessful at achieving their stated goals, and rarely involve any actual technological innovation. This is because the marketed goals of these projects are not their real, fascist aims.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are frequently presented as innovative, but all blockchain-based technologies are, in fact, inefficient distributed database based on Merkle trees, a very old technology which blockchains add little practical value to. In fact, blockchains are so impractical that they have provably failed to achieve any of the marketed goals undertaken by cryptocurrency corporations since the public release of Bitcoin(6).

Statement of world-changing goals, to be achieved without consent

Technofascist goals are never small-scale. Successful tech projects are usually narrowly focused in order to limit their scope(9), but technofascist projects invariably have global ambitions (with no real attempt to establish a roadmap of humbler goals), and equally invariably attempt to achieve those goals without the consent of anyone outside of the project, usually via coercion.

This type of coercion and consent violation is best demonstrated by example. In cryptocurrency, a line of thought that has been called the Bitcoin Citadel(8) has become common in several communities centered around Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Generally speaking, this is the idea that in a near-future post-collapse society, the early adopters of the cryptocurrency at hand will rule, while late and non-adopters will be enslaved. In keeping with technofascism’s disdain for the success of its marketed goals, this monstrous idea ignores the fact that cryptocurrencies would be useless in a post-collapse environment with a fractured or non-existent global computer network.

AI and TESCREAL groups demonstrate this same pattern by simultaneously positioning large language models as an existential threat on the verge of becoming a hostile godlike sentience, as well as the key to unlocking a brighter (see: more profitable) future for the faithful of the TESCREAL in-group. In this case, the consent violation is exacerbated by large language models and generative AI necessarily being trained on mass volumes of textual and artistic work taken without permission(1).

Urbit positions itself as the inevitable future of networked computing, but its admitted goal is to technologically implement a neofeudal structure where early adopters get significant control over the network and how it executes code(3, 12).

Creation and furtherance of a death cult

In the fascist ideology described by Eco, fascism is described as “a life lived for struggle” where everyone is indoctrinated to believe in a cult of heroism that is closely linked with a cult of death(4). This same indoctrination is common in what I will refer to as a death cult, where a technofascist project is simultaneously positioned as both a world-ending problem, and the solution to that same problem (which would not exist without the efforts of technofascists) for a select, enlightened few.

The death cult of technofascism is demonstrated with perfect clarity by the closely-related ideologies surrounding Large Language Models (LLMs), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and the bundle of ideas known as TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singulartarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism)(5).

We can derive examples of this death cult from the examples given in the previous section. In the concept of the Bitcoin Citadel, cryptocurrencies are idealized as both the cause of the collapse and as the in-group’s source of power after that collapse(6). The TESCREAL belief that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will end the world unless it is “aligned with humanity” by members of the death cult, who handle the AGI with the proper religious fervor(11).

While Urbit does not technologically structure itself as a death cult, its community and network is structured to be a highly effective incubator for other death cults(2, 7, 10).

Severance of our relationship with truth and scientific research

Destruction and redefinition of historical records

This can be viewed as a furtherance of technofascism’s goal of destroying our ability to perceive the truth, but it must be called out that technofascist projects have a particular interest in distorting our remembrance of history; to make history effectively mutable in order to cover for technofascism’s failings.

Parasitization of existing terminology

As part of the process of generating false consensus and covering for the many failings of technofascist projects, existing terminology is often taken and repurposed to suit the goals of the fascists.

One obvious example is the popular term crypto, which until relatively recently referred to cryptography, an extremely important branch of mathematics. Cryptocurrency communities have now adopted the term, and have deliberately used the resulting confusion to falsely imply that cryptocurrencies, like cryptography, are an important tool in software architecture.

Weaponization of open source and the commons

One of the distinctive traits that separates ordinary capitalist exploitation from technofascism is the subversion and weaponization of the efforts of the open source community and the development commons.

One notable weapon used by many technofascist projects to achieve absolute control while maintaining the illusion that the work being undertaken is an open source community effort is what I will call forking hostility. This is a concerted effort to make forking the project infeasible, and it takes two forms.

Its technological form is accomplished via network effects; good examples are large cryptocurrency projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which cannot practically be forked because any blockchain without majority consensus is highly vulnerable to attacks, and in any case is much less valuable than the larger chain. Urbit maintains technological forking hostility via its aforementioned implementation of neofeudal network resource allocation.

The second form of forking hostility is social; technofascist open source communities are notably for extremely aggressively telling dissenters to “just for it, it’s open source” while just as aggressively punishing anyone attempting a fork with threats, hacking attempts (such as the aforementioned blockchain attacks), ostracization, and other severe social repercussions. These responses are very distinctive in the uniformity of their response, which is rarely seen even among the most toxic of regular open source communities.

Implementation of racist, biased, and prejudiced systems

References

[1] Bender, Emily M. and Hanna, Alex, Ai Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype, Scientific American, 2023.

[2] Broderick, Ryan, Inside Remilia Corporation, the Anti-Woke Dao behind the Doomed Milady Maker Nft, Fast Company, 2022.

[3] Duesterberg, James, Among the Reality Entrepreneurs, The Point Magazine, 2022.

[4] Eco, Umberto, Ur-Fascism, The Anarchist Library, 1995.

[5] Gebru, Timnit and Torres, Emile, Satml 2023 - Timnit Gebru - Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Agi, 2023.

[6] Gerard, David, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Etherium and Smart Contracts, {David Gerard}, 2017.

[7] Gottsegen, Will, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Miladys but Were Afraid to Ask, 2022.

[8] Munster, Decrypt / Ben, The Bizarre Rise of the ’Bitcoin Citadel’, Decrypt, 2021.

[9] , Scope Creep, Wikipedia, 2023.

[10] , How to Start a Secret Society, 2022.

[11] Torres, Emile P., The Acronym behind Our Wildest Ai Dreams and Nightmares, Truthdig, 2023.

[12] Yarvin, Curtis, 3-Intro.Txt, GitHub, 2010.

Feedback types: Is this a thing? / challenging perspectives / general opinions

Here's an outline which I originally posted as a tweet thread but would like to flesh out into a fill article with images like the attached one to illustrate the "zones" that people may/may not realise they are acting in when they say stuff like "what's good for the user is good for the business"

I am writing this because I've published a few things now which say that empathy and "human centeredness" in commercial design, particularly UX design/research, are theatrical and not compatible with capitalism if done deliberately. That means they can be true as a side-effect, or by individuals acting under the radar of their employers. It has become common to hear the good for the user = good for the business response - and I want to write something that demonstrates how it is an incomplete sentence, and any way to add the necessary information to make it true results in the speaker admitting they are not acting in the interests of users or humans.

Here's the basic outline so far:

What’s good for the User

"What's good for the user is good for the business" is a common response I get to my UX critique. When I try to understand the thinking behind that response I come up with two possible conclusions:

Conclusion 1: They are ignoring the underlying product and speaking exclusively about the things between the product and a person. They are saying that making anything easy to use, intuitive, pleasant, makes a happy user and a happy user is good for business.

This type of "good for the user" is a business interest that values engagement over ethics. It justifies one-click purchases of crypto shitcoins, free drinks at a casino, and self-lighting cigarettes. https://patents.google.com/patent/US1327139

Conclusion 2: They are speaking exclusively about the underlying product and the purposes it was created to serve. They say a good product will benefit the business. But this means they are making a judgement call on what makes a product “good”.

This type of “good for the user” is complicated because it is a combination of objective and subjective consideration of each product individually. It is design in its least reductive form because the creation of something good is the same with or without business interests.

A designer shouldn’t use blanket statements agnostic to the design subject. “what is good for the user…” ignores cigarette packet health warnings and poker machine helpline stickers there because of enforced regulation, not because of a business paying designers to create them.

It’s about being aware of the context, intent, and whose interests are being served. It means cutting implied empathy for people if it is bullshit.

If we look at this cartesian plane diagram we can see the blue and green quadrants that corporate product design operates in. The green being where the "good for user, good for business" idea exists, and the yellow representing the area that the idea ignores, dismisses, etc

Hi, welcome to awful.systems' new writing community where we can help anyone who wants to share something more substantial in a blog post or article. I don't think it should matter what the writing is about or if it is fiction, non-fiction, researched academia or an opinion piece. It can help to have some one else look at it.

I am a practising writer who spends a bunch of time obsessing over a post for weeks and then just publishing it out of exhaustion. I've noticed improvements but definitely lacked the kind of feedback that a community like this could offer.

I would suggest that if you do post anything here you specify what kind of attention you would like. For example, are you looking for a critique of your assertions, creative feedback, or an unbiased editorial review?

Discussing your talking points when you just wanted some feedback about the narrative flow can end up having the reverse effect.

Feel free to post things you've already published as well. I don't think the state of the work matters as long as you give context and set expectations.

Thanks, and welcome again!