The real question is of course whether or not anyone is gonna do something past changing their profile pictures.

I give this trend a couple of months. Maximum a year and then a bunch of people will have clippy avatars and everything will go back to normal.

Something like Stop Killing Games was an initiative that only survived because one man dedicated a good portion of his life to get the issue brought before the eyes of actual politicians. Even before the pirate software drama, Ross had been talking about this issue for years and many people agreed, but nobody did anything except for Ross. Maybe the petition would have reached its goal without piratesoftware’s initial meddling. Maybe it wouldn’t. His subsequent sperging turned failure into success, but the issue is still in process to be reviewed and maybe it will be a win, maybe the lobbyists will shut it down. We don’t know yet. But without Ross’ stubbornness, nothing would be done.

Imagine if Ross had told gamers to change their profile pic to pacman to show game companies and consumers that "we dont agree with the companies’ practices? That would be a total joke.

Personally, I have more of a “I’m not alone” feeling when I actively leave services that I disagree with and through word of mouth find alternatives where I can talk to people who seem to have the same base values I do. Even if we disagree on other things.

It’s the laziness of this initiative that drives me up a wall. People want change but they don’t want to work for or sacrifice anything for it.

Thank you. I needed that chuckle 😂❤️

Pff. This reminds me of the This Is Bob protest against the forced Google+ accounts that were the beginning of youtube enshittification. It didn’t do shit. Anyone who wants a profile on youtube nowadays has a Google account. Google+ may have failed but the intent and mission behind it didn’t. Google has total control over anyone who wants to use YouTube now.

You can set clippy as your profile pic and feel like you have done something, but it’s not gonna change anything.

If people want to actually do something, they should abandon these predatory services and go open source or maybe become anti tech as much as possible. It doesn’t matter whether or not you signal to the Zuckerburgers on top how you feel if you’re just gonna continue to use their products.

The only thing that would scare them would be the numbers plummeting if they saw a mass exodus from their platforms and services and people actively began looking for alternatives. But most people can’t be fucked to do that because they are too enmeshed with these services that it is easier to stay. But putting clippy as your profile pic is super easy and costs you nothing so yay. You get to feel like you did something without actually sacrificing anything to make change and the Zuckerburgers will look at you and shrug. “Ah, the peasants are blowing off some steam again”.

Sorry for being so negative, but this is honestly so fucking weak. I may have missed something, but when has slacktivism ever changed the minds of these companies?

And Google would never lie about how much energy a prompt costs, right?

Especially not since they have an invested interest in having people use their AI products, right?

Maybe not an individual prompt, but with how many prompts are made for stupid stuff every day, it will stack up to quite a lot of CO2 in the long run.

Not denying the training of AI is demanding way more energy, but that doesn’t really matter as both the action of manufacturing, training and millions of people using AI amounts to the same bleak picture long term.

Considering how the discussion about environmental protection has only just started to be taken seriously and here they come and dump this newest bomb on humanity, it is absolutely devastating that AI has been allowed to run rampant everywhere.

According to this article, 500.000 AI prompts amounts to the same CO2 outlet as a

round-trip flight from London to New York.

I don’t know how many times a day 500.000 AI prompts are reached, but I’m sure it is more than twice or even thrice. As time moves on it will be much more than that. It will probably outdo the number of actual flights between London and New York in a day. Every day. It will probably also catch up to whatever energy cost it took to train the AI in the first place and surpass it.

Because you know. People need their memes and fake movies and AI therapist chats and meal suggestions and history lessons and a couple of iterations on that book report they can’t be fucked to write. One person can easily end up prompting hundreds of times in a day without even thinking about it. And if everybody starts using AI to think for them at work and at home, it’ll end up being many, many, many flights back and forth between London and New York every day.

Gen X are also pretty tech savvy. Let’s not pretend like they didn’t pave the way for us millennial to learn how to fix computers.

I say, as a tech retarded millennial, but fuck it, I’m right.

VR was and is also still a very inaccessible tool for most people. It costs a lot of money and time to even get to the point where you’re getting the intended VR experience and that is what it mostly boils down to: an experience. It isn’t convenient or useful and people can’t afford it. And even though there are many gamers out there, most people aren’t gamers and don’t care about mounting a VR headset on their cranium and getting seasick for a few minutes.

AI is not only accessible and convenient, it is also useful to the everyday person, if the AI doesn’t hallucinate like hell, that is. It has the potential to optimize workloads in jobs with a lot of paperwork, calculations and so on.

I completely agree with you that AI is being pushed very aggressively in ways we haven’t seen before and that is because the tech people and their investors poured a lot of money into developing these things. They need it to be a success so they can earn their money back and they will be successful eventually because everybody with money and power has a huge interest in this tool becoming a part of everyday life. It can be used to control the masses in ways we cannot even imagine yet and it can earn the creators and investors a lot of money.

They are already making AI computers. According to some it will entirely replace the types of computers we are used to today. From what I can understand, it will be preferable to the open AI setups we have currently that are burning our planet to a crisp with the amount of data centers that need to keep them active. Supposedly the AI computer will have it be a local thing on the laptop and it will therefore demand less resources, but I’m so fucking skeptic about all this shit that I’m waiting to see how much power a computer with an AI operating system will need to swallow in energy. I’m too tech-ignorant to understand the ins and outs of what this and that means, but we are definitely going to have to accept that AI is here to stay and the current setup with open AIs and forced LLM’s in every search engine is a massive environmental nightmare. It probably won’t stop or change a fucking lick because people don’t give a fuck as long as they are comfortable and the companies are getting people to use their trash tech just like they wanted so they won’t stop it either.

I feel the same way. I was talking with my mom about AI the other day and she was still on the “it’s not good that AI is trained on stolen images, how it’s making people lazy and taking jobs away from ppl” which is good, but I had to explain to her how much one AI prompt costs in energy and resources, how many people just mindlessly make hundreds of prompts a day for largely stupid shit they don’t need and how AI hallucinates, is actively used by bad actors to spread mis- and disinformation and how it is literally being implemented into search engines everywhere so even if you want to avoid it as a normal person, you may still end up participating in AI prompting every single fucking time you search for anything on Google. She was horrified.

There definitely are some net positives to AI, but currently the negatives outweigh the positives and most people are not using AI responsibly at all. I have little to no respect for people who use AI to make memes or who use it for stupid everyday shit that they could have figured out themselves.

The most dystopian shit I have seen recently was when my boyfriend and I went to watch Weapons in cinema and we got an ad for an AI assistent. The ad is basically this braindead bimbo at a laundry mat deciding to use AI to tell her how to wash her clothes instead of looking at the fucking flips on her clothes and putting two and two together. She literally takes a picture of the flip and has the AI assistent tell her how to do it and then going “thank you so much, I could have never done this without you”.

I fucking laughed in the cinema. Laughed and turned to my boyfriend and said: this is so fucking dystopian, dude.

I feel insane for seeing so many people just mindlessly walking down this path of utter retardation. Even when you tell them how disastrous it is for the planet, it doesn’t compute in their heads because it is not only convenient to have a machine think for you. It’s also addictive.

I think she’s right. There is certainly a space in fiction for depressing dystopias, but personally, I think that it is also important to make space for hopeful stories about the future. Else it’s just too dark. Our news are depressing, our lives are depressing. Our fiction is depressing. If there isn’t much positive stuff to look forward to, then what’s the point? In the 1930s, 40s and 50s where war and crisis and recovery was on the menu, fiction tended to be more comforting and hopeful.

That’s why Disney’s Snow White was such a massive success in 1937. It gave people a break from their lives and allowed them to dream themselves away to a different world where everything was a bit simpler, where the downtrodden, yet hardworking and kind herione is rewarded for her efforts in the end. Many people may nor have had that happy ending themselves, but it must have given them some hope to watch a film about someone just like them who managed to pull through in the end and have her worth validated.

I mean… the one first 1950s sci-fi story I ever read as a kid was The Sound of Thunder. It is and will always be the first thing I think about when it comes to 50s sci-fi. And that story isn’t exactly happy or optimistic about humanity fucking around with tech and time, lol.

I sometimes struggle to understand that people willingly partook in that trend with zero skepticism.

It is the same mindless behavior when people blindly go down the AI route and use it to think for them while burning the planet to a crisp.

I generally consider myself to be dumb as a brick most of the time, but fuck me if I’m not surprised when I see people I believe to be smarter than me skip down these lanes of absolute reckless behavior for no other reason than “teehee, it’s funny” or “teehee, it’s so convenient”.

Anyone who pay to give companies their DNA is either not thinking through their actions or maybe they are somehow dumber than me.

It’s the same weirdness when some (usually) Christian Americans think it’s a gotcha when an atheist says “omg”.

I hope they bring that same energy to themselves when they live by the weekdays that were all named after Norse gods or refer to the other planets in the solar system by the names they were given from the Roman gods.

Omg did you just say WEDNESDAY? You believe in Odin, huh?

I mean, you can just skip the trailers and not every disc has the piracy ad. At least that is not my experience! Out of all the dvds I own or have borrowed from the library, only a handful of them have the unskippable piracy ad. In fact, I have experienced a lot of dvds that don’t even have ads and just skip straight to the menu. Those rarely have extra material either. Only language options and a play button. Seems to mostly be a thing with modern dvd movies.

I went back to physical media half a year ago. Fuck streaming. I don’t miss that shit. My local library has tons of dvds and blurays so my household gets to experience many interesting films these days.

New money energy.

I also didn’t notice it until my friend pointed it out to me a month ago. I was too busy being upset when Trump and Vance bullied Zelenskyj to notice their hip hop gangsta crib at the time.