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I don't know if it's because I skip most AI conversations, but I think you guys might have failed to discuss some things that have been happening for the last several weeks.
Reverse engineering with AI has gotten really, really good, somehow. It's so good that you can reverse engineer Microsoft Office and host it online for free. It's so good that you can submit your tokens to the Machine God and get World of Warcraft open source. You can now play the original Xbox Halo, but with 32 player coop (seemingly most of the players being Mexican). On your Nintendo 64. In fact, you can play Halo in your browser now. You can play lots of stuff in your browser now. I looked up an old game called Apeiron for old Macintosh, released in 1990 something, just a Centipede clone developed by Ambrosia Software, long since abandonware. There are two ports of it that I found in comments sections on Macintosh Garden. The classic decompilation site is shutting down due to sheer volume. And yes, there's also mods. Flying my Banshee across the Mojave almost makes me wish for a nuclear winter. My Foundry in Warcraft 3 just told me that my AWP research has completed, so I went on a tear across Lordaeron.
On the other side of this, AI can now shut down 70% of the Internet. This bug was in PHP for a long time, and only now discovered, because someone pointed a technological superweapon at it.
What the hell even happens from all this? Can Apple really continue to have a closed ecosystem? Are we going to wake up with no money in our bank accounts? Does proprietary code even exist anymore? How is Steam going to cope with having tens of thousands more games submitted to it? And why now? AI was good for several months up to now. Was it the release of tools that work with agents effectively? This seems a bit more significant than hundreds of mathematical proofs being published at once to me, especially because you can verify it works yourself, on your machine, and see the effects on the world right in front of you.
The economy and way-of-life of the first world as we know it might be ending. But at least we can play Bloodborne natively on PC.
Yeah, I was thinking of starting a post about all this, but couldn't quite muster the motivation to collect all the links, so thanks! I don't recall how it was phrased, but I remember someone saying "Everybody is using AI, and everybody's saying how capable it is, so howcome nobody has done anything with it", at the time I agreed and decided that was going to be my personal benchmark / canary. Well gents, I think we're here, even if you're skeptical of these examples, those clones of the Microsoft/Adobe suite are insane. If you're calling that canary alive, I'm going to say you're re-enacting Monthy Python's dead parrot sketch.
I think we're going to to see a lot of disruption, but despite my pessimistic nature, I somehow don't feel like "the economy of the first world is ending". Somehow this feels more like the Industrial Revolution, or how Photoshop wrecked the world of hand-drawn art, but we're still in the early stages so it's hard to tell how things will develop. I'm also pleasantly surprised by centralization not immediately elevating Big Tech to all-knowing dictators. Even though technology favors centralized control, it seems like the pressure from open source / open weight models is real, and puts a hard limit on how hard the Silicon Valley creeps can cuck us.
I can't make sense of the Culture War angle though. When @DaseindustriesLtd said that AI is going to be the next big Culture War issue, I thought he was nuts. I still think he's nuts, he has no right to be right about this! This is the dumbest culture war issue I've ever seen, and yet... Not that I'm complaining, watching the same people who have been meticulously taking over institution after institution, and purging all dissidents, self-quarantine themselves from tech that can 10x your productivity, and thus leaving themselves and their institutions in the dust, is quite satisfying. On the other hand, I might need to intensify Aldeaposting. Even the innovations of the digital / social media age had a tangible negative impact on me, that I haven't figured out how to fully mitigate yet, and with AI the temptation to outsource my thinking to the quartz god is real.
The problem with most of these examples is that they boil down to plagiarism in one form or another. The AI are not being used to create new stuff, they're being used to automatically reconfigure existing stuff either for the purposes of IP evasion (the Photoshop clone stuff) or for cheap gimmicks (juxtaposing consumer icons together in video games). Chomsky had dubbed chatbots plagiarism machines all the way back in 2023, so yes, I'd make the claim that in a sense nothing's really changed since then. They're still just prediction software recreating what they're trained on with increasing fidelity, which isn't the same thing as designing or engineering things that are new. The utility of this is overstated. If something already exists, why would you need an AI to create clones of it? It circles back to IP evasion and gimmickry.
Automatically reconfiguring existing stuff is an incredible demonstration of capability. Smashing Counter Strike and Warcraft 3 together would never have been done before this because it's really difficult. Decompilations had been done before this, but they took years of effort. That Diablo 1 decompile was done by one guy, who said it took him over 1000 hours. This isn't something you can wave away as "gimmickry" and "plagiarism". If it can do these really difficult things, it can certainly create really good new things, too.
A bulldozer can do really difficult feats of moving vast masses of earth about, too, but its potentials are still limited.
If all AI ever is is a digital bulldozer, then, not unlike real bulldozers, it's still going to reshape the whole world.
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