Paid Members hallicks Posted July 28 Paid Members Posted July 28 A great article from Nikhil Suresh about AI-mania, and how a lot of people involved are aware of the bullshit but are powerless to stop it: https://www.hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking Quote
wordsfromlee Posted August 1 Posted August 1 We could do with an asteroid to hit the Earth any time now really. Quote
Paid Members Sergio Mendacious Posted August 1 Paid Members Posted August 1 Definitely want to stick my family's whereabouts on there, think that's a great idea. How about my bank details too? Quote
Awards Moderator HarmonicGenerator Posted August 1 Awards Moderator Posted August 1 The AI companies are pulping and destroying millions of rare and out of print books. They’re calling it “disruptive scanning” and are saying things like “A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information. Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose. What remains is paper, ink, and binding material.” How do these fuckers keep getting worse. And why do we keep letting them. (Australia, at least, sounds from this article like it’s trying to do something about it.) Quote
Paid Members Carbomb Posted August 1 Paid Members Posted August 1 No offence to you, @Scratch as you're a good bloke with good intentions, but can you please change the thread title? Quote
Paid Members Scratch Posted August 2 Author Paid Members Posted August 2 18 hours ago, Carbomb said: No offence to you, @Scratch as you're a good bloke with good intentions, but can you please change the thread title? Absolutely fair, I’ve just updated it. Quote
DavidB6937 Posted August 2 Posted August 2 17 minutes ago, Merzbow said: General AI? Is he the manager of Sheik Hogan? Don't give WWE any gimmick ideas! Quote
Paid Members Lion_of_the_Midlands Posted August 2 Paid Members Posted August 2 20 hours ago, Sergio Mendacious said: Definitely want to stick my family's whereabouts on there, think that's a great idea. How about my bank details too? They've already got those, scanning your direct debits and tailoring adverts to you based on your expenditure. Your £25 subscription to Forklift Ladies Monthly will soon send your advert algorithm in to overdrive. Quote
RedTwoster Posted August 2 Posted August 2 A little bit late on this one and I’m obviously not a Take A Break reader, but this is about as shitty a use of AI as I’ve seen. If you can’t be arsed writing a story, why should anyone be arses reading it? Fuck, if I (inexplicably) wanted an AI story I could get Chat GPT to generate one without paying a penny. The only positive I can see to this, is the greed of major companies causing smaller, creator-led publications to run fairly sustainable business models. Capitalism is, to an extent, killing itself in the quest to provide ‘value’ for shareholders. Quote
Paid Members tiger_rick Posted August 3 Paid Members Posted August 3 (edited) My Mum used to be a Take A Break reader so I still have a laugh at it's cover sometimes. Only this weekend I commented to my missus that it was only £1.55, which compared to most magazines is pretty remarkable these days. Guess it's easier to keep costs down if you aren't employing people. Apologies for FB link but he didn't post it on YT, Ben from Tasy Classics had a but of a rant at lazy AI thumbnails that I enjoyed: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Xq4pQBsDh/ Edited August 3 by tiger_rick Quote
Paid Members BomberPat Posted August 3 Paid Members Posted August 3 On 8/1/2026 at 1:43 PM, Sergio Mendacious said: Definitely want to stick my family's whereabouts on there, think that's a great idea. How about my bank details too? There was a story on Jamie Bartlett's last podcast about someone using AI to manage their calendar, and asking it to try and arrange a meeting with somebody important. The AI apparently decided that the best way to convince this person to meet with them was to make a sizeable donation to their preferred charity, and took the money from the guy's bank account. It's sold as this horror story about how AI is out of control, but it jumps over so many points to get there - how did the AI get access to his account in the first place? I can't do a bank transfer without two or three layers of security, how is AI doing it for him? Even if the AI does have access to his bank account, it's skipping over the point where he must have given it access in the first place, it's not just magically finding its way in there of its own volition. I'm sure the answer to these things is almost certainly "people trust AI too much, and give it the information", but there's a bit of a chinny reckon to it - there's a post I've seen going around of an ordering machine at some fast food place, with the caption saying that "the AI" added a tip of millions or billions of quid to the bill, and it's just being taken as read as being a real "AI gone mad" horror story, when it looks far more likely that the person ordering just entered their phone number in the tip column rather than in where to send the receipt. I think similarly of a lot of AI scams, where the story is some variation of "the AI clones your voice, then phones your parent with a reconstructed version of your voice saying that you have been kidnapped/are in trouble and need money". I can't get my head around all of the steps in that process that need to have happened for that to work. The scammer (or their AI) needs to find sufficient samples of my voice to believably reconstruct it - fair enough, it can do that for me via podcasts, recordings, a lot of freely available places I've spoken on record, but that's not going to be true for most people, so is it finding voice notes and phone calls and building it from there? Where is it accessing them from? Once it has your voice, it also needs to somehow have learned who your parents are, and found their phone number to make the call. Maybe I'm being naive, but it all sounds like way too many steps? Quote
Paid Members gmoney Posted August 3 Paid Members Posted August 3 5 minutes ago, BomberPat said: I think similarly of a lot of AI scams, where the story is some variation of "the AI clones your voice, then phones your parent with a reconstructed version of your voice saying that you have been kidnapped/are in trouble and need money". I can't get my head around all of the steps in that process that need to have happened for that to work. The scammer (or their AI) needs to find sufficient samples of my voice to believably reconstruct it - fair enough, it can do that for me via podcasts, recordings, a lot of freely available places I've spoken on record, but that's not going to be true for most people, so is it finding voice notes and phone calls and building it from there? Where is it accessing them from? Once it has your voice, it also needs to somehow have learned who your parents are, and found their phone number to make the call. Maybe I'm being naive, but it all sounds like way too many steps? You can do it in Uplink, and that's set in 2010. Fuck, I need to play Uplink again. Quote
Paid Members Lorne Malvo Posted August 3 Paid Members Posted August 3 Christ, these people are so pathetic. Quote
Dai Posted August 3 Posted August 3 10 minutes ago, Lorne Malvo said: Christ, these people are so pathetic. What about real people who post the same image as someone else, literally on the same page, on a Wrestling/Shitting forum? Quote
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