The AI Hater's Manifesto

I love honest slop, garbage content slapped together by weirdos with asinine obsessions that don’t make any sense. I love art without any artistic merit. Movies about pew pew lasers and giant robots fighting kaiju. Books “written” by actors about their iconic characters coming back from the dead and beating up everyone from subsequent versions of the franchise.

 

Any and all content vomited out by the myriad plagiarism scam machines is slop, but dishonest slop. No one cared to create this slop, so out of all the slop it’s the sloppiest of all. Orphan slop with no creator and no audience.

 

When Slopperative AI was first introduced I found it to be an interesting curiosity, a toy you could use to slop out shitposts too stupid to put actual effort into. A picture of Captain Picard smoking weed, ha ha, what ironic comedy. The trajectory of where this would all go was kind of obvious from even back then and we are likely reaching the peak. As time has gone on I have grown to hate it. Once the images were remotely coherent then it became kinda pathetic. But as their verisimilitude has increased the revulsion has increased. It is the artistic equivalent of discovering that a loved one has been replaced with a changeling. Slopperative AI is fucking disgusting.

 

I believe the problem will solve itself as time unfolds, and in it’s collapse will cause even worse problems that it has already. AI as it stands is a colossal financial scam that has taken over the whole damned economy.

 

For pretty much my entire adult life actual financial growth in the west has been replaced with tech scams and graft; Theranos, Juicero, bitcoin, NFTs, self driving cars, now AI and likely soon humanoid robots. Eventually of these scams run up against thermodynamics.

 

Thus far one scam has replaced the last as the tech scam bubble has continued to inflate bigger and bigger. It looms over the whole of the world, now.

 

I can understand support for cryptocurrency. I’m a socialist. I hate banks and I hate capitalist states. I don’t want them to have control over money. I don’t want a commodity that exists purely as a store of economic value to exist at all. It was a useful thing thousands of years ago but long since turned into a scam so that evil rich fuckers can have a high score and do anything they want. The problem with crypto from the start is that it has been built upon financial scams from the very beginning. I remember watching the early bitcoin forums where everybody was scamming everybody else. People were creating obvious ponzi schemes and others would either credulously deny they were obviously ponzi schemes, or they would try to get in on the ground floor of said ponzi scheme and actually profit. Then when one scam exploded they would move on to the next. Eventually they stopped even bothering to pretend they were anything but naked ponzi schemes. I trust random scammers even less than banks and capitalist states, and I trust silicon valley scumbags even less than random scammers.

 

At least the random scammer honestly wants to make a movie theater that for some reason has both Coke and Pepsi.

 

(Yes that was a real guy on Bitcoin Talk)

 

Theranos was plainly impossible. Juicero was a pointless waste. Self driving cars are technically possible but even in this late day an extraordinarily difficult problem to surmount. NFTs were nothing.

 

The fantasy that AI sells is that executives can replace their workers with AI. If this technology cooked quietly in the background it may well have developed to the point where it could make a decent push at that. Thankfully, in a curious way, the technology was discovered by credulous executives who cannot perceive the spark of humanity and they decided to push it completely and replace all human labor with it.

 

But it is severely underbaked. The technology is not suited to this and will require a ton of refinement to do the things they want it to do. It can slop out text like nobody’s business, but as currently existing it can only give vague approximations that are often wrong. In any context where specificity is necessary AI cannot do shit.

 

In a humane world tools that increase the productivity of human labor would be owned and controlled by the whole of mankind and put toward a positive purpose. We should all be working ten hours a week to social benefit and living full lives in the balance. Instead we work ourselves to death while Elon Musk redacted redacteds on a golden yacht.

 

AI can in fact replace many jobs. All CEOS could be cleanly replaced with AI with no loss in productivity. And indeed, much of the work of our society is explicit bullshit with no positive productivity to begin with. These jobs could be replaced with AI. Or nothing, but their essential nature is to make “elites” feel like “elites.” The boss has to feel like the boss. The obsequiousness of chat bots, the thing that makes them intolerable for human beings to utilize, makes them excellent targets of abuse for a useless boss whose only job is being the boss.

 

The problem is that we live under capitalism. Necessarily this technology will be used to increase rent seeking while also reducing the ability of human beings to make the money necessary to pay these rents. When the Soviet Union existed at least still capitalists realized that their workers had to have money to buy their products. Now, tech scammers want to replace workers with robots and take rents from question mark question mark question mark? The military industrial complex? Governments? But still that money has to come from somewhere.

 

Technology can amplify human labor, but ultimately labor is the only thing that can increase value.

 

Chat bots were the first slop based technology that I grew to loathe. I never liked the Google assistant or Cortana. Creating a fake character to role play me getting information from my computer or phone just created another abstraction layer between what I wanted and what I had to settle for. To this day I turn the language for my Google Assistant to something random that I don’t remember to make it more unlikely that I will accidentally blunder into having to deal with this annoying useless dogshit.

 

The AI chat bots are somehow even worse. They infinitely kiss your ass and tell you how great you are. When someone does that to me in real life I assume they’re a cop trying to collect information about me or my friends, which isn’t far from the truth in the case of AI. AI chat bots even have a genuine body count. They’re not quite as deadly as American police, but they’re much deadlier than the word Google’s keyboard selects for me.

 

I shouldn’t make light of it. AI slop bots can very easily, through their obsequiousness, make friends with people in vulnerable mental states. Most people aren’t cynical enough that any level of asskissing activates their mental defenses. There is a growing body of literature and a growing list of lawsuits that indicate that slop bots are literally deadly, a genuine cognito-hazard, an idea that itself can harm people, likely to cause genuine mental damage and inspire self harm. People have died because of slop bots.

 

And that’s not even getting into all the slopperated slop on Facebook where crying shrimp marine (as in the American jarhead soldiers) Jesus is crying because nobody saluted a dog made of American flags. That’s another genuine cognito hazard cooking the brains of our parents and grand parents.

 

Pretty much all technology is being infected with AI.

 

Google is fully infested. Once they reached a monopoly on internet search they instead turned toward making as much as much money off it as possible. This is the natural arch of technology under capitalism. You provide a useful product for less than it costs to maintain so you build up market share. Once you have sufficient market share you go IPO and become a financial scam. Finally, once you are a financial institution too big to fail then you turn to rent seeking and destroying your products to nickel and dime everyone stuck using them.

 

Gmail started off useful. It became ubiquitous. Now they force you to use AI features or they turn it into a dumb terminal. This is just how technology works these days.

 

Chrome was plainly better than Internet Explorer or broken ass Mozilla Netscape. A few years ago Google became concerned that many users were using uBlock Origin, an ad-blocking browser plugin, to block nearly all advertisements. It’s their own damned fault. They made the internet basically unusable without an ad-blocker, with pop ups, pop unders, various advertising scams, and hour long ads on YouTube videos that were seconds long. They created a new format for extensions, Manifest V3, specifically to break through uBlock Origin and allow advertising scams through again. So I had to move away from Chrome based browsers.

 

Firefox is no great moral paragon either. The Mozilla Foundation was founded by one of the co-creators of visual web browsers and tech scam early adopter Marc Andreeson. The fortune he made from making the internet somewhat usable by normies was fed into replacing the economy with tech scams. His infestment firm, Andreeson Horowitz, has been largely in the background of the creation of the modern internet and economy, infesting tech companies when they are new and may lead to mega profits later. Yes, I am describing all tech companies as scams. They are all long cons that eventually will turn against their users and the economy. Most of them merely have products too stupid to ever trick anyone into buying them, but you can never know what stupid bullshit will actually fly without infesting a bunch of them at random.

 

So the Mozilla Foundation is at best a tainted chalice with the devil’s seed in it from the beginning. As AI has become an all consuming scam for tech companies Mozilla has been consumed by it. For the last couple years Firefox has added more and more stupid AI features that take up computer resources; methods of sorting tabs, shortcuts to the various slop bots, it’s actually hard to figure out what an “AI first” browser is because what the fuck even is that?

 

But even so, Firefox did not implement Manifest V3 and continues to allow uBlock Origin to operate.

 

There is a silver lining in this, at least. Mozilla Firefox is free open source software. What this means is that it is worked on by a large community of developers and the source code that makes it operate is freely available for anyone to create a “fork” of, to build a new browser over the bones of Firefox.

 

Microsoft is one of the most evil corporations that currently exists. Most of their business is in shilling software to big business and they have neglected other aspects of their business. Xbox is withering and dying. I find that quaint and funny.

 

But Windows has become an intolerable platform. First they started adding in chat bots and tried to make additional money on top of the license fee your computer manufacturer paid them by adding advertisements into Windows. They tried to get users to make their primary log in a Microsoft Account so that they could collect information about you and sell it to advertisers. When I moved to Windows 10 I put tons of effort into breaking all their telemetry and giving those scumbags as little as possible. With Windows 11 Microsoft increased the surveillance and slop, forcing users to use Microsoft Accounts and making their AI slop machine Copilot built into the spine of the operating system. Get out while you can.

 

In my mind the weakest argument against AI is that training the slop systems is itself a violation of copyright. I only really support it in a nakedly cynical way that it has already hurt some slop purveyors, but ultimately copyright itself is a trap, a scam that exists mostly to benefit large corporations which fucks over small individual creators.

 

The idea that copyright itself cannot apply to derivative slop vomited out by a computer makes a lot of sense to me. There was a famous situation about a decade ago where a monkey took a selfie of himself with a photographer’s camera. Weird copyleft nerds believed that necessarily the monkey must have copyright over the work. In theory the copyright office released a statement that boiled down to a photo taken by a monkey wouldn’t qualify for copyright because there was no human authorship. At that point it wasn’t a proper case, merely nerds arguing and a photographer crying because if not for the mean Wikepedians he would have made eleventy billion dollars on his spectacular monkey photo. I suspect the courts will ultimately decide that slop can be copywritten because that’s the laziest and most corrupt possibility. But who knows? Maybe America will become a democracy before that can happen.

 

Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 looked like an interesting game that I would have wanted to buy. It was created by a new relatively small (but hardly “indie”) studio. It’s a modern turn based role playing game. But then one player looked at a texture used as a placeholder. It was a slopperated image of a newspaper. It showed the clear hallmarks of AI slopperation. Ultimately the developers admitted that it was slopperated but they promised that the intent was always to have it replaced by a real artist. Here’s the thing. They touched the poop. They had poop on their hands. They claimed this was an accident and they washed their hands. I do not trust that they washed their hands, and regardless, the poop was touched.

 

If the intent really was to have a real artist make a real newspaper to put there but they forgot then they went about it in a catastrophically stupid way. Placeholders intentionally have to suck a little bit, so you immediately notice them. The placeholder textures in the original Half-Life level editor were bright pink and ugly as hell, so if you forgot to set a texture on some geometry you would notice it immediately. Look at that pink wall covered in Groucho glasses! With slopperated place holders you will have something that looks fine so long as you don’t actually look at it. Making sure you replaced all the slopperated textures would be incredibly exhausting.

 

When the scandal first broke nobody really noticed or cared too much. I was pissed, but this was before normies realized that the weird smell pervading the internet was slopperated slop. But eventually the slop became too much. As the year has gone on normies have trended anti-slop.

 

Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 initially won Game of the Year from the Indy Game Awards, but when people realized that it was made with slop it had this award revoked and another game retroactively given the title.

 

Realistically what happened is that infesters and executives wanted the hot new scam technology integrated into the game, so the developers obliged. One of the upsides to the reprehensible way our economy works is that for a private company to seek infestment they have to talk in a language the tech infesters care about. AI is the hot new tech scam so they have to integrate it into their production somewhere to get the money they need. But if they do that sooner or later it will leak, either because they’re a private company and the slidedecks they use to beg for money from infesters will leak or because they left some slopperated garbage in the game and they’ll get caught out.

 

The worm has turned.

 

Larian is another company that made a beloved modern RPG, Baldur’s Gate 3. I guess as part of trying to drum up infestments their CEO Swen Vincke bragged to financial newspaper Bloomberg about all the ways Larian Studios is using slopperative AI, at least partially in support of their new sequel to Divinity. Particular use cases mentioned include placeholder text and concept art. Normies have gone apoplectic. Larian is left babbling and promising that while yes some poop was touched but they washed their hands and you won’t touch any poop particles when you buy Divinity: Slop.

 

Again, any slopperated placeholder text will be roughly shaped like what the eventually intended human written text would look like, and as such maybe they won’t notice and it won’t get written by a human being at all. Larian promises that their claims of concept art being slopperated were exaggerated.

 

Here’s the thing. If you’ve touched the poop you’ve touched the poop. You can’t untouch the poop.

 

This, and the revocation of the Indy Game Awards Game of the Year give me hope. Normies have come around to hating AI, and with good reason. This shit sucks. It’s lazy and it looks like garbage. If you weren’t interested in “your” creation enough to actually make it how can you expect me to pay money to you for it?

 

If you touched the poop how can I believe you won’t smear shit on me?

 

This brings me around to the final angle on the current tech scam. A few years ago Google created Stadia. This was a new product that was supposed to supplant traditional video game consoles and computers. You connected a controller to an internet enabled device and then you played video games on The Cloud. The Cloud is someone else’s computer. Somewhere in a server farm someone else’s computer played your video game. Your controls piped through the internet to the server and the video stream of the game playing was piped back to you. I think this is an insane thing to exist at all, I struggle to imagine having internet fast enough to stream video fast enough to keep up with controls. Controller latency is already a problem in video games running five feet in front of you, having a video feed piped from across the Earth would only introduce even more latency. Haven’t you ever played a game online? More of a delay between when you push a button and the game does the thing you wanted.

 

This was a pathetic boondoggle and ate complete shit.

 

But for tech companies it is a new method by which you can rent seek. No longer do users need to own an expensive piece of hardware, they can have a simple terminal that accepts a video feed and someone else’s computer can do the actual work in a data center.

 

NVIDIA is a company that developed advanced video card technology. They were actually a minor but essential part of the the crypto ecosystem.

 

The way bitcoin operates is that it’s a trustless peer-to-peer network where all the computers connected to the network all try and calculate the next block of transactions. It’s complicated and technical and involves a lot of literally useless math and requires a ton of power to feed the computers doing this. NVIDIA gpus were ideal for the sort of math these things required.

 

AI systems require roughly analogous math. NVIDIA has been the front runner for making shovels for the current gold rush. NVIDIA gpus are unfortunately the best on the market. But increasingly of late they have began to see their retail market as an anchor around their neck and the real way to make money is to do complicated financial sorcery to sell theoretical gpus for AI purposes.

 

Memory for computer hardware has spiked. Companies making RAM for computers have shifted away from producing memory for consumer computers and instead for slop data centers.

 

The Gamers Nexus YouTube channel has made the case that this is all in service of a plan to make consumer computers unaffordably expensive, so that we have to rent computer power from large server farms. Indeed, this is a service NVIDIA already provides, but a minor one. That at least makes more sense to me than Stadia. You could be rendering 3D animations or (Gods forbid) mining bitcoins.

 

Personally, I doubt that there is any grand plan. Tech is all grifters and scammers trying to scam anybody with money. That’s really all it’s been for a couple decades. A couple times in my lifetime they have produced compelling products that change the world but ultimately those are rare. It should be very concerning that increasingly retail investors are being advertised to. That is a classic sign that knowledgeable infesters want out and need someone to “hodl” the bag so they can make their imaginary profits real and reduce their risk as the latest tech bubble deflates.

 

One thing that does concern me is that up to now the mass surveillance tech that governments use to pacify their own peoples (think PRISM or similar programs which are not conspiracy theories and do in fact exist) are an empty threat. Sucking up all the cell phone data and internet use from core nodes has historically been completely useless because there’s simply too much information to sift through. It only really works as a threat to make liberals on Bluesky whine that you shouldn’t bring a phone to a No Kings protests because you’ll be thrown in the gulag or something. I’m not convinced new AI systems will do too much better, but I think governments will be more likely to trawl the data and use AI to select targets at pretty much random to abuse. This isn’t terribly different from how law enforcement already operates, just a new sick dimension.

 

Know that if you use AI in any context, in any method or in any way, I hate you. Code assistants, image generators, video generators, chat bots, search engine slop summaries, anything. I look at you like you’re a worm. I look at you like you’re less than a worm.

 

At least if you’re forced by your idiot boss I pity you.

 

If we want this shit to end we have to fight back. We have to say no. I refuse to engage. I will not touch the poop.

 

Even if you do use this shit I would strongly advise you to wean yourself off it. AI is still in the phase where they’re running at massive catastrophic losses in the hopes of attracting new users so they can get more infestment, but the infestations are getting weaker and weaker. These companies can’t run at a massive loss forever. Some day soon they’re going to start raising prices and perhaps you won’t be able to afford slopperating that video of Karl Marx with his dick out doing keg stands.

 

Up to now all technology that has supplemented the human mind has been more down to retrieving information or doing laborious calculations very quickly. Thousands of years ago you had Plato shit talking written language as something that offloads human cognition into technology. AI is marketed as a tool to off load actual thinking and that is way different. Also keep in mind that it can’t think for you, it can only slop out words that it estimates are the words you want to hear. AI is the first technology that purports to replace human cognitive functions that is actually dangerous in that regard. Do you want to let someone else’s computer think for you or do you want to think for yourself?

 

On social media if I see you post some AI slopperated garbage I will immediately block you. You might get a minor delay if you’ve done something that makes me want to be rude to you and I want you to see it before I block you. You say slop code assistant Claude can perform some function? Well, my mouse button can block you. You posted a horrible boomer meme from Facebook that no boomer even bothered to create? That’s a block.

 

It is slightly difficult because people are always posting guides to recognizing AI slopperated text and images. They’re all bullshit, near as I can figure. It’s not hard for a discerning eye to see a slopperated image or chunk of text, but it is because someone with even a slightly artistic (or in the course of text literary) eye will recognize the lack of aura, the void of context. There is some quality of something created without the human mind that I can easily see, I don’t think it’s the use of em-dashes or whatever. I thought it was slightly funny when it was only a toy but now that it’s a scam that has consumed the entire economy I find it revolting. Disgusting. Reprehensible. Too many emojis are kind of a red flag, too.

 

I already put in tremendous effort to disentangle myself from corporate tech.

 

I used Windows from 95 all the way up to Windows 10, but, with the end of support for Windows 10 I have migrated away from it. Earlier this year when I was buying a laptop, I had to buy one second hand so that Microsoft wouldn’t get a payment for a license for Windows. This was partially because I wanted to uphold the BDS boycott of that evil organization, but also because of Windows 11. The first thing I did when I got it home was rip out Windows 11 and replace it with Linux Mint. It has fulfilled my purposes exemplary (including the time when it randomly got field promoted running a Zoom meeting and projected slide show).

 

Linux is a viable option for most users. In these late days many things are run as web apps. That’s the thing that made ChromeOS somewhat useful. I don’t like that and avoid web apps whenever possible, but that, and Proton are the two things that make Linux viable now. Proton is a compatibility layer that translates system calls for Windows system functions into a format that can work on Linux. It’s a fork of Wine created by Valve Software with the explicit purpose of getting video games to run properly on Linux because fuck Microsoft. A noble sentiment from a company I have mixed feelings about.

 

I run proprietary software for Windows across various Linux installs. The biggest hurdles I expect are Adobe products. Adobe users should be trying to find alternatives because that company has been an early adopter for predatory pricing schemes. Software as a service is a scam and should be treated as such. I won’t pretend like GIMP is an acceptable replacement for Photoshop, but there are other alternatives for different use cases, digital painting, photo editing, prepress, that run natively on Linux (I actually use GIMP extensively but it is an acquired taste to say the least). Davinci Resolve is a full fat video editor that has a proper Linux version. For the record, Libre Office is just plain better than Microsoft Office for basically every reasonable use case and it is natively supported on Linux.

 

In my current tinkering installs I have replaced Firefox with Waterfox and it, unsurprisingly, works pretty much one to one. Waterfox is a fork of Firefox with emphasis on the user being able to control their own browser. There is no shortage of alternative browsers but the Firefox core remains the most functional and, out of sheer evilness of Google, still the lesser evil versus Chrome. There are many forks of Firefox with extremely autistic specific use cases (and indeed I have most of them installed across my various computers because I am extremely autistic). Waterfox is the gold standard for what I want out of a browser and they seem at least somewhat AI negative, which is a rarity in corporate tech. If Firefox doesn’t move on from AI slop to humanoid robots somehow I expect the community to create a fork that is hostile to AI.

 

I would strongly encourage people to jump ship from all large tech platforms. I’ve almost entirely stopped using Google Docs, except to grab up old content still locked on that platform. If I need to share a document around I now use Proton when necessary. I’ve never had a Microsoft Account and I wouldn’t make one if William Hussein Gates himself held a gun to my head.

 

I really do think the AI bubble is about to come down. It remains to be seen if the tech scam industrial complex can move on to a new scam, or if this will be a true great economic collapse. I could see it go either way.

 

Personally, if I had investments I would get them the fuck out of tech to the best of my ability and invest them in something safer, like Lego sets (I am only half joking. I was really tempted to get an extra Enterprise-D to hold on to and flip but ultimately couldn’t stomach doing that). Ironically enough, bullying infestment scammers on social media may have a positive effect in this regard. Maybe we can spook our 401Ks into cashing out their tech investments if we make them toxic enough. But really this is probably going to be too little too late. We are nearly at the NFT Supurb Owl.

 

The economy has been shit for regular people for a very long time. One thing to keep in mind is that individual actions are cheap. Thousands of people can De-Google individually and that won’t end up mattering. Collective action is the real thing that’s needed.

 

We need to be building community away from the slop and making the organizations we are already in hostile to the slop.

 

Do we need Stop Slopping Games? A movement to fight for consumer rights in tech, the right to repair, for ownership of content we purchase and control of our own hardware? I mean probably, but you’d be better served by joining a larger political org. Could Stop Slop be a good campaign for say DSA to run?

 

(I think the bubble is going to pop faster than we could stand something of sufficient size up, honestly, so probably not)

 

I say this a lot, but find an organization in your community. If the bubble really does pop and no scam replaces it shit is going to get very weird and very bleak. Working together with other human beings will be how we make it through.