It’s just a quick link this evening to a blog post about the “rise” of genAI slop, coming at it not from the “working with a corpus of stolen goods” angle or the “boiling lakes to make fake pictures” angle, but from the angle of the results of these next-word-guessing programs being basically useless. Which is also super-valid, alongside those other non-trivial concerns. Here, have a pull quote:

My gripes are more of a tangled web that I can only summarize as: the vibes are bad. The tone is unbearable. The lying as a fallback is offensive. The advertising keeps focusing on how you can coast through life without caring about your work or family because you can just generate a birthday card or whatever. The people funding and pushing it keep openly salivating at the idea of replacing as much human input as possible with a machine best known for generating titles of books that don’t exist.

Now, go read the whole thing because it’s so, so true, top to bottom.

There are so many reasons to despise the state of “generative AI,” and 404 Media highlights one more absolutely depressing and distressing reason: It’s intellectually kneecapping a generation of schoolkids and hobbling the teachers who try to impart learning unto them:

They try to show me “information” ChatGPT gave them. I ask them, “How do you know this is true?” They move their phone closer to me for emphasis, exclaiming, “Look, it says it right here!” They cannot understand what I am asking them. It breaks my heart for them and honestly it makes it hard to continue teaching.

Read the whole thing at Teachers Are Not OK, if you’re in the headspace to deal with feeling even more grim than usual on a Monday morning in this timeline we inhabit.