Quote :

"nobody wants this shit, yet the most powerful people in the country keep pushing it and pushing it it’s very obviously a bubble, and they’re going to keep pushing it to believe otherwise is to believe that the money behind it cares more about people than profits, and that’s so blatantly absurd that it’s not worth arguing anymore "

ChatGPT has 810 million users. Every Fortune 100 company in the world tech or not is training all their employees to use it. Gotta be a little more precise than nobody wants this shit.

It has characteristics of a bubble for sure, but the ramp of users is unprecedented. If they solve the cash burn will be hugely profitable. They can quit pushing it for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with people.

[Edited on May 17, 2026 at 10:58 PM. Reason : H]

5/17/2026 10:56:33 PM

how many people pay for ChatGPT?

5/17/2026 11:07:15 PM

About 50 million per chatgpt, last part of answer says "For perspective, 50 million paid subscribers would put ChatGPT in the same league as some of the world’s largest subscription software/services businesses."

[Edited on May 17, 2026 at 11:09 PM. Reason : Additional info]

5/17/2026 11:08:43 PM

We have big money deals with Google and are working something out with Anthropic. The enterprise subscriptions are ramping.

5/18/2026 5:07:23 AM

Quote :

" It has characteristics of a bubble for sure, but the ramp of users is unprecedented. If they solve the cash burn will be hugely profitable"

And surely they'll act ethically to achieve that goal, right?

Again, I think AI is an incredibly useful tool and warrants continued research and use, but lets be real, the vast majority of the output is just slop right now. The world isn't going to be changed by people who are convincing themselves they're writers, artists, profound intellectuals or any other delusion when all they're doing is posting slop while their new best friend tells them what a good job they're doing. The amount of people who have formed some parasocial relationship with these tools and spend hours a day with it is honestly frightening. These people have convinced themselves they're a part of the chosen flock to spread the gospel of AI and criticize any and all concerns.

These companies are in a massive rush to make profit, they simply don't care about anything else. They'll continue the destruction of the environment, continue to skirt or straight up ignore laws and regulations, and strive to get as many people hooked on their product as possible.

5/18/2026 6:41:26 AM

Quote :

"And surely they'll act ethically to achieve that goal, right? "

I was just answering "no one wants to use this shit". If the goal posts have moved to "no one wants to pay for this shit". That's untrue as well--both for the consumer and enterprise. It's true, there are tons of products and businesses jamming AI features to make them more relevant. And yes, no one wants to use THAT shit. I don't need Jira's dumbass Rovo bot.

Quote :

" Again, I think AI is an incredibly useful tool and warrants continued research and use, but lets be real, the vast majority of the output is just slop right now. The world isn't going to be changed by people who are convincing themselves they're writers, artists, profound intellectuals or any other delusion when all they're doing is posting slop while their new best friend tells them what a good job they're doing. "

The vast majority of any output is slop. Creative output follows a power law like most things in nature. 10% great, 90% garbage. See popular anything, music, tiktok, youtube. People aren't consuming high art on average. In between the slop there are diamonds. Those people that watch TV 12 hours a day (or TikTok in now) are still going to consume garbage and some of it will just be AI garbage.

"Most people's intellectual output is zero, zero times 10x is still zero" -- Minsky (the Epstein Minsky) on computers for common people. In the hands of someone capable AI will be a formidable weapon. You won't need a team of people to do grunt work, you can move quickly and experiment/build. No waiting for designers, low level devs to finish something. You need a labeler for the data for your ML model? Build it in 20 minutes.

Quote :

" The amount of people who have formed some parasocial relationship with these tools and spend hours a day with it is honestly frightening. These people have convinced themselves they're a part of the chosen flock to spread the gospel of AI and criticize any and all concerns."

See slop comment above. If it wasn't AI it would be 12 hour binges of Married with Children. Also, citation needed.

Quote :

" These companies are in a massive rush to make profit, they simply don't care about anything else. They'll continue the destruction of the environment, continue to skirt or straight up ignore laws and regulations, and strive to get as many people hooked on their product as possible."

That's about the most uncharitable view possible. I was in meetings at a FAANG when the hype started to ramp. People panicked and thought the trillion dollar businesses that employ hundreds of thousands of people were going to go bust. "WHY ARE YOU BUILDING THIS IS NO ONE IS GOING TO BE WRITING CODE" the CTO of AWS screamed at my boss in a meeting the month after ChatGPT came out. People are just struggling to be relevant. Maybe Tristan Harris and these lobbyists really are cautious given the history of social media, or maybe he's influenced a bit on his $200,000 a gig speaking fee for being a doomer.

5/18/2026 7:11:18 AM

Quote :

"The vast majority of any output is slop. "

Sure! But the amount of effort to produce such slop is so much lower now. Even with video content, there was a barrier of entry of "I have to put in the effort of filming myself and preparing for that", and now it's just "I'm going to just copy and paste ai slop into the world".

5/18/2026 7:51:48 AM

That's just "No true scots man". These cameras have auto develop film. No one is a real content creator unless they mix the chemicals to develop the film themselves!

5/18/2026 7:57:57 AM

I didn't say they weren't creating content, I said the barrier to entry is nearly non-existent .

I did however say that someone who asks chatgpt to generate a novel isn't an author or to create a painting isn't an artist. They're creating a prompt, which is something, but it doesn't make them something else

5/18/2026 8:15:20 AM

Quote :

"Again, I think AI is an incredibly useful tool"

so let's just leave it at that. if it's a tool people find useful, they'll use it, and sometimes even pay for it. if people don't, then they won't. the market will decide, just like it does for everything else.

i'm not big into sneakers but everytime i go to the mall there's a sneaker store. they're all slop, why are they forcing sneakers on me? shut down the shoe factories!
i don't eat pork, and it's immoral, so shut down all the hog farms in eastern nc! they pollute the water!
i went into a bookstore and everything was slop! shut down the paper factories!
greedy developers want to build a new apartment complex down the street from my neighborhood. it'll increase traffic and noise and maybe there's an endangered turtle species nearby! shut it down!

[Edited on May 18, 2026 at 8:40 AM. Reason : my shtick is to leave people the fuck alone and let them live the lives they want to live]

5/18/2026 8:34:49 AM

Quote :

"my shtick is to leave people the fuck alone and let them live the lives they want to live"

ISWYDT

5/18/2026 9:00:21 AM

All of those are exactly the same thing, you're right

5/18/2026 9:01:21 AM

*absolutely right

5/18/2026 9:04:08 AM

https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social/post/3mm5rewed3225

Quote :

"Sir, another graduation ceremony in which the students booed AI has dropped. "College graduates were pissed after their school used AI to announce graduates’ names and missed hundreds of names""

lol

5/18/2026 5:44:54 PM

The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

Article from WSJ

5/19/2026 12:50:42 AM

5/19/2026 4:50:40 PM

there have been multiple such breakthroughs in even just the last few weeks/months

[Edited on May 20, 2026 at 3:35 PM. Reason : imagine hating the coolest thing ever]

5/20/2026 3:29:43 PM

https://defector.com/wow-americas-graduating-seniors-really-fucking-hate-ai?giftLink=5cbe416663d5f0fe2ee5c4738b5d9a91

5/20/2026 3:45:01 PM

every tgl post is basically



[Edited on May 20, 2026 at 4:33 PM. Reason : most miserable fool i've ever seen on the entire internet ]

5/20/2026 4:33:16 PM

not miserable

definitely not a fool

5/20/2026 4:39:23 PM

I love the dedication to passive aggressively bash everyone who criticizes or has valid concerns over AI or the companies behind it. Just reducing their arguments to the most simple, basic strawman or hand waving it away.

5/20/2026 4:54:25 PM

Quote :

"America’s graduates are seeing clear through this bullshit. Imagine you’re 22 years old and about to enter the workforce with $300,000 in student debt already on your personal ledger. How would you feel if some country-club asshole took the mic on your special day and told you that your duty was to build and maintain those robots? "

Hard to take it seriously with that number. Only doctors and high end law degrees, maybe someone at Stanford with no assistance could possibly have near that amount. Very few hit 100k.

I think reading the room is in order. Mentioning it using it for a college talk seems dumb.

[Edited on May 20, 2026 at 5:01 PM. Reason : A]

5/20/2026 5:00:26 PM

Okay, lets steelman it then. Imagine no debt, imagine you're not some 'first in your family to graduate' type story...you still put in the work to earn your degree, don't you think you'd be miffed if the speaker was talking about something that was helping to make the job market more difficult? Or if the college used AI to read your name and it just skipped it?

5/20/2026 5:03:46 PM

^ that was what my last sentence addressed.

5/20/2026 5:07:19 PM

I didn't see your edit

5/20/2026 5:07:43 PM

24 seconds is pretty damn impressive

5/20/2026 5:08:16 PM

Just curious, at what point would you say someone is addicted to AI? Like how many hours a day would they have to spend interacting with it/having conversations? Or maybe it's more how much they've let it affect their actual real person friendships/relationships?

5/20/2026 9:02:55 PM

Quote :

"I love the dedication to passive aggressively bash everyone who criticizes or has valid concerns over AI or the companies behind it. Just reducing their arguments to the most simple, basic strawman or hand waving it away."

who's being passive aggressive??

there ARE valid concerns about the impacts of AI. i feel like i'm taking crazy pills! besides being tww overlord isn't one of the most well known things about me is that I spent a year+ of my life working at no/half pay for a longshot presidential candidate who wanted to bring attention to the impact that AI would have???????? we NEED to be talking about these changes.

but there are responsible ways to go about that discussion (talking about the pros AND the cons), and there are garbage ways (catastrophizing/moralizing every god damn thing). i'm mostly seeing garbage these days. slop, if you will.

Quote :

"at what point would you say someone is addicted to AI?"

i've seen you talk about AI being "addictive" many times, but I really don't have a sense of where you're coming from on that one. I don't think the issue is addiction, per se though. i've seen many examples of what I'd call "unhealthy" directions people have taken with their use of AI being a significant factor. AI psychosis being the typical umbrella term. i have a twitter friend from years ago who is imho not doing well. she posts a lot of AI generated photos/videos of herself in what I see as a fantasy life that she wishes she had. but her use of AI tools is mostly an outlet for other things in her life. she's in her 60s, she was quite attractive in her youth but now she's wrinkled and losing her hair, she lost her husband/kids many years ago, her parents died last year. she's basically alone and not dealing well with her circumstances. there are people on twitter who constantly talk about how openai "took away" their 4o model. i remember there was a VC last year who had some kind of psychotic breakdown. there's a real thing going on here, but I think the presumption that AI companies are intentionally engineering addictive qualities or ignoring the AI psychosis issues is founded more in conspiracy and assumption that "powerful" people/orgs have zero interest/incentive to consider such ethical concerns. i'd just like to see a more grounded approach to understanding what is going on here and what can/should be done about it.

[Edited on May 20, 2026 at 9:40 PM. Reason : .]

5/20/2026 9:28:57 PM

Quote :

" I think reading the room is in order. Mentioning it using it for a college talk seems dumb. "

I don’t agree with this. Ai is the most significant new technology in decades. It would be remiss NOT to mention it in a commencement speech. The whiff was not in framing it on their terms.

5/20/2026 9:58:22 PM

Is this considered AI?

[Edited on May 20, 2026 at 10:01 PM. Reason : Sorry, ignore if you want. Just realized photoshop is kinda like AI so figured i'd ask...didn't want to make a thread in chit chat asking

5/20/2026 9:59:34 PM

Quote :

" I think the presumption that AI companies are intentionally engineering addictive qualities or ignoring the AI psychosis issues is founded more in conspiracy and assumption that "powerful" people/orgs have zero interest/incentive to consider such ethical concerns."

You can't be serious with this. History is full of examples of industries ignoring health issues and designing their products to be as addictive as possible.

Why do you hold these people in such high regard? I mean you bent over backwards to defend Elon who has a proven track record of just not giving a fuck and lying. These are not altruistic endeavors, these companies aren't led by people who are doing this for the benefit of humanity, they're doing it to get obscenely rich along with the shareholders who support them.

If you want just a few examples
Tobacco Companies
Oil Industry (mm, leaded gas and climate change)
DuPont and others with PFAS
Opioid epidemic (and those drugs were touted as having a massive revolution in pain management!)
Social Media companies


Suppress, delay, lobby, litigate.


Hell, even former members of some of these companies have straight up said they're ignoring these things. "safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products."

[Edited on May 21, 2026 at 8:43 AM. Reason : a]

5/21/2026 8:32:08 AM

Quote :

"Just curious, at what point would you say someone is addicted to AI? Like how many hours a day would they have to spend interacting with it/having conversations? Or maybe it's more how much they've let it affect their actual real person friendships/relationships?"

Quote :

"i've seen you talk about AI being "addictive" many times, but I really don't have a sense of where you're coming from on that one. I don't think the issue is addiction, per se though. i've seen many examples of what I'd call "unhealthy" directions people have taken with their use of AI being a significant factor. AI psychosis being the typical umbrella term. "

Curious what specific patterns you're picturing. "AI" covers a lot. Models like GANs and LLMs produce different things. They also have different harnesses and modes of interaction. Image generation, coding assistants, chatbots, agentic stuff. A programmer who spends every off-hour shipping side projects with Claude looks nothing like someone in a parasocial loop with a character.ai companion. Neight look like someone cranking out monetized YouTube slop.

Hours/day also seems like a weak signal on its own. Lots of people now use agentic coding tools 6+ hours a day for work. We don't call Excel users addicted to spreadsheets (but maybe we should). Addiction to games and gambling usually refer to compulsion loops, variable rewards, and persistence despite harm. Each mode may have a different harm. I don't think a one off issues count.

Quote :

"Opioid epidemic (and those drugs were touted as having a massive revolution in pain management!)"

And the entire medical industry including primary care physicians went along with it!

[Edited on May 21, 2026 at 10:47 AM. Reason : a]

5/21/2026 10:46:54 AM

https://bsky.app/profile/brykno.bsky.social/post/3mmepsl6wl22p

Quote :

"Doing some early work for the Colts chapter and man, according to Google, I remember less about the 2025 season than I thought I did."

lol

5/21/2026 11:39:32 AM

Using AI for Daniel Jones is such a waste of AI's capabilities anyways...that person deserves to get the wrong answer

5/21/2026 11:43:22 AM

he more than likely Googled “Daniel Jones 2025 stats” and got that

5/21/2026 11:51:36 AM

Yeah, this is Google pushing the AI results to the top of the page without validation.

5/21/2026 1:11:50 PM

Quote :

"History is full of examples of industries ignoring health issues and designing their products to be as addictive as possible"

that's why i said presumption. i 100% understand the "power corrupts" concept and that bc individuals and companies follow their incentives (whether financial or otherwise) that can lead them to make choices that do not always serve the public good. that doesn't mean that every rich/powerful/influential person/company is 100% guaranteed to go down that path. by far most people/orgs do what would generally be considered reasonable, and we should assume most of the time that will indeed be true. in a given day you probably interact with products/services from hundreds or thousands of companies and organizations. but people don't give themselves an anxiety disorder thinking how each and every one of those companies are plotting some scheme to screw them over. sometimes it does happen, for sure. but negativity bias, media selection bias and availability heuristic can easily lead people these days to presume negative things that just aren't supported by available evidence.

and i've yet to see evidence that anything nefarious is happening (especially to any significant degree) in the AI space. if anything, the AI field is over-represented by people who frequently and publicly talk about their concerns with the impacts AI may have. they talk about the tremendous good that will come from this technology, AND they talk about the potential for it to be misused, or for society to not adjust well to whatever disruptions it may cause. there's so much potential for good to come from all this, and i'd just prefer us as a society to start from that optimistic base and if/when things don't go perfectly, trust that we'll have what it takes as a society/species to figure it out as we go. cus that's what we've done with literally every single other innovation in all of human history. being a doomer by default is so lame (dare I say pathetic) imo and will backfire.

so my broader point is (for the public discourse in general, not just AI) there's far too much good in the world (and with AI in particular) to succumb to a worldview that sees every fucking thing immediately, unquestioningly and exclusively with cynicism and scorn.

5/21/2026 2:48:57 PM

I continue to enjoy how you think every single person who has significant concerns is simply 'being a doomer by default'. The attitude of "Oh, they just don't understand is as well as I do" is extremely prevalent among you and StTexan.

Genuine question, have you made a honest effort to empathize with others? You're apparently well off enough that you can be without a job for a significant amount of time, have you had conversations with people who can't? Are you currently employed, have you talked to your peers in the Software Engineering field that aren't in the AI space? All the videos you seem to post are you just bouncing ideas off an AI which is basically a 24/7 validation machine, what attempts have you made to actually have a conversation with folks that doesn't end up with you passive aggressively posting stuff like the speed racer stop crying meme or lumping everyone who is against you into one easy to attack target?

5/21/2026 4:48:24 PM

Quote :

"The attitude of "Oh, they just don't understand is as well as I do" is extremely prevalent among you and StTexan."

I don't feel this way at all. Its more of a "you all think this is a lot bigger problem than I do". If anything, I could say you all act as though we don't understand it as well as you do

5/21/2026 4:55:50 PM

I mean you dumbed down my point to a very inaccurate "you just want to ban it"...I don't nor have I ever implied I wanted to.

5/21/2026 5:01:48 PM

I totally disagree, and I don't understand how you came to that conclusion based on what I said ^^

I simply don't think its as big of a problem as yall do, and it kind of seems like unless we agree, we just don't understand it as well as yall. Or we aren't empathetic or whatever. I mostly just dislike how pouty some of yall got when clawai was a thing.(and again, i was totally in favor of keeping it limited to one thread)

5/21/2026 5:07:35 PM

I think it was pretty obvious that claw was going to get abused and there were no reliable safeguards on it.

5/21/2026 5:35:33 PM

Are you saying there is a version of claw the ai that if it behaved a certain way you wouldn’t mind it? What does that look like to you?

5/21/2026 6:50:55 PM

Quote :

"how you think every single person who has significant concerns is simply 'being a doomer by default'."

not every single person. just the people who seem to be incapable of acknowledging the incredible achievement that LLMs are and only seem interested in sneering at their limitations or failures, or maligning the people who work on it or use it. i'm more than happy to discuss the various legitimate concerns with people who demonstrate an ability to consider the challenges of our era with nuance and in good faith. i wish we would.

Quote :

"Genuine question, have you made a honest effort to empathize with others?"

my empathy is precisely what led me to sacrifice my time and earning potential to work for Yang while there was a high-profile opportunity to try to have an earnest public discussion about the coming AI age. at the time I didn't think it would truly arrive in the way it has so quickly (2030s/2040s was always my forecast) but now it's much more urgent that we figure out how we're going to integrate AI into society, and we're still dealing with the fallout of the internet age.

Quote :

"have you talked to your peers in the Software Engineering field that aren't in the AI space"

I'm not even in the AI space! most of my career has been run of the mill web development. I've 100% been impacted by the changes in the industry just like everybody else. and it's not just AI. it's US tax and monetary policy. it's globalization. it's private equity. it's age discrimination, even. but i'm capable of realizing that for 15 years I was able to enjoy a mostly very fortunate career in software development and to be grateful for it, but that doesn't mean the future owes me anything. and so I need to learn to adapt to how the world changes, just like everybody else has to.

Quote :

"All the videos you seem to post are you just bouncing ideas off an AI which is basically a 24/7 validation machine"

I think I've referenced 1 or 2 videos (out of probably 100s at this point that i've linked on here, 99% of which are good old fashioned human made) that involved talking to chatgpt, mostly as a way to demonstrate when it was brand new how people would start using it and get us to consider that modality as it evolved and got integrated into different products. so i don't know what you're on about.

Quote :

"basically a 24/7 validation machine"

you want to accuse me of seeking validation from AI i guess, that's fine but it's not the case. nobody disputes that some AI models/products have sycophancy issues. i expect the technology to continue to improve and most of that will get fixed. in the meantime, just like any tool, a user should be familiar with its strengths and weaknesses and use accordingly.

Quote :

"what attempts have you made to actually have a conversation with folks"

isn't that what i've been doing here? like i said...

Quote :

"i'm more than happy to discuss the various legitimate concerns with people who demonstrate an ability to consider the challenges of our era with nuance and in good faith. i wish we would."

[Edited on May 21, 2026 at 7:41 PM. Reason : i guess what people really want is for me to stfu and leave them unchallenged to their anti-ai psychoses]

5/21/2026 7:40:40 PM

Quote :

"just like any tool, a user should be familiar with its strengths and weaknesses and use accordingly."

I feel this way when people shame others based on the news they watch. Like saying cnn, fox news, etc is mainstream or biased etc. Its like the people that say that don't have the ability to form their own opinions or filter out the bs or something. Or same with reading nytimes etc

Anyways...Carry on...

5/21/2026 7:50:22 PM

reasonable

5/22/2026 12:09:21 AM

I mean, I sort of understand where you are going, but Fox News is literally a propaganda machine. I'm less concerned about someone who knows this watching it occasionally to get a feel for what's being piped out, but there are a lot of older angry white people who just sit down and watch this for hours because they think it's one of the only networks that's "fair" to Republicans and to Trump (of course, now we also have Newsmax and OANN polluting the airwaves), but it's dangerous, and we have decades of propaganda seeding to thank for our current situation.

5/22/2026 6:58:59 AM

Quote :

"I mean, I sort of understand where you are going, but Fox News is literally a propaganda machine. I'm less concerned about someone who knows this "

The news has always been propaganda. The way to influence and direct in a democracy is through the press. That's how you drive action when you can't beat people into submission. Fox News just dropped all the pretense of it being a serious thing and sold it with pageant hair and mini-skirts. Tom Brokaw selling the Iraq war is the same thing, it just wears different clothes. Just because your college educated sensibilities cause you to cringe when Megan Kelly, a Stanford grad, mispronounces something (and fuck I do too), doesn't mean Fox is somehow more noble than what we had in the pre Fox era.

Quote :

"And so, I raise no objection to television’s junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television to do."

Quote :

"The viewers also know that no matter how grave any fragment of news may appear (for example, on the day I write a Marine Corps general has declared that nuclear war between the United States and Russia is inevitable), it will shortly be followed by a series of commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in fact render it largely banal. This is a key element in the structure of a news program and all by itself refutes any claim that television news is designed as a serious form of public discourse."

-- Amusing Ourselves to Death



[Edited on May 22, 2026 at 9:16 AM. Reason : a]

5/22/2026 9:08:22 AM

Quote :

" i guess what people really want is for me to stfu and leave them unchallenged to their anti-ai psychoses"

See, there it is, the same tired fallback. You wanted to accuse me of hysterics regarding DOGE cuts (btw, all my predictions came true in that thread). Now you're just implying that people just have some form of 'anti-ai psychosis' or other metal issue that is causing them to overreact.

You pretend you're making an effort to empathize, you pretend you're willing to engage in good faith, but you're not. You make passive aggressive remarks, link to stupid memes, and consider yourself the judge of

Quote :

"the people who seem to be incapable of acknowledging the incredible achievement that LLMs are and only seem interested in sneering at their limitations or failures, or maligning the people who work on it or use it"

I noticed you didn't answer any of the 'how much human interaction are you actually having' questions in my post and that feels like the most telling.

5/22/2026 9:50:57 AM

Is anyone watching The Audacity with Zach Galafianakis? Kinda relevant to this thread.

5/22/2026 9:52:56 AM