Clojurians Log v2
ai-skeptics 2026-11-03
Not programming, but still relevant to creative work: El Estepario (famous youtube-drummer) sums up the current state of affairs in his corner of the world in this short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vc7mSwev-M0 • First stage: AI performers (create any performer you want, trained on his and others creative work) • Second stage: AI reactions (fake avatars with reaction videos to his and others work - "steal it twice") • Third stage: AI reactions to AI performers - full circle - who needs the humans anyway?? 🙈 (The issue here is obviously not the technology, but the companies behind it that completely disregards IP)
Oh, but AI does obey licenses... when it's convenient: https://www.firstpost.com/tech/anthropic-restricts-claudes-use-for-reverse-engineering-games-including-through-rea-tool-14056978.html
As far as I know it’s a legislative vacuum. The owners of stack overflow and reddit have at least made some coin off the strip mining of their content.
It is a legislative vacuum, but these AI freaks know pretty well when these vacuum will explode (and hit them in the face) and when it'll be "just the way it is, sorry your life work was stolen"
I said that when GitHub stole every code of every person (the first time) and I will say it again now: if anyone of us tried what these people do, we would be in jail. No question. It wouldn't even mater if we could prove we simply downloaded things and never used for anything, read it, accessed it, etc - we would be in jail.
I've always struggled with why people watch AI music videos imitating a virtuoso musician. Or for that matter, sports. I feel like I'm missing something making this attractive. Isn't the point of these videos the impressiveness of the human doing it? I mean, I could watch someone deadlift weights and be impressed. Watching a forklift lift the same weight is not at all interesting. The AI reaction videos to the forklift is absurd. Are people so bored that this is entertaining? Or is something else gaming the system?
It’s crazy. I can’t make sense of it
Maybe a cynical take but what if the attraction was never the achievement but being part of the tribe. Slop is compelling because there’s literally no substance to it except the observer/consumer. It’s peak narcissism.
Was talking about this today and people said I was naive for having missed two obvious cases • entertainment as a shallow distraction, potentially while high - think tiktok (this is similar to @richardc.2074’s suggestion) • simple bots may be “watching” the circular-AI videos to generate revenue for the video These both seemed cynical at first, but now I’m not so sure.