what's the dumbest shit in AI annoying everyone today, I need to write one up

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@bms48 @wordshaper yeah the legal arguments are entirely speculative and i would say "cool story, call me when you get it to stick"

i mean NOYB has had some spectacular GDPR successes! but again, call me when

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@jztusk @peter_mcmahan yeah those are hard AI doomsday cranks

[haverholm@radikal.social]

@davidgerard Maybe this bullshit: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/05/06/more-liability-will-make-ai-chatbots-worse-at-preventing-suicide/

Apparently, demanding provider liability for chatbots' potentially terrible suicide prevention advice is a "moral panic", and also somehow makes the chatbot responses even worse...? 🤨

[michael_w_busch@mastodon.online]

@davidgerard

There is the group of American Senators who want to spend government education funds on "K-12 AI curricula and teacher training".

By which they apparently mean "waste education funds on hyping the automated plagiarism machines"

[stuartmarks@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard Remember last week when Jer Crane of PocketOS wrote up the incident where Cursor deleted their production database and its backup? The incident has been covered ad nauseam but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone analyze Crane’s statements:

“It confessed in writing. … The Agent’s Confession … This is the agent on the record, in writing.”

This is so mind-bogglingly stupid I don’t know where to begin. Maybe you do.

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@haverholm Masnick will never not make excuses for slop

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@stuartmarks the guy is a far gone MAGA and very very very stupid

[stuartmarks@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard Heh, didn’t know about him being MAGA. Correlates with stupid I guess!

I wanted to point out though that saying an AI “confessed” to something is meaningless. It ascribes a bunch of human meaning (guilt, contrition, right vs wrong, etc.) that simply doesn’t exist in an AI. And having it “in writing”? An AI “writing” something doesn’t imply any commitment to the truth as it might with a human. And it’s not as if the AI had any choice about whether its output is written…

[jwz@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard Apparently Marca said a dumb thing that is riling people up but I think everyone should just stop talking about him

[jripley@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard The Google "Prompt API", which is omnibullshit. Everything from how it's being pushed into open standards, to how it's outsourcing their compute bill to users, and finding yet more ways to avoid actually writing software and making usable UIs.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard can you go meta with this? the need to respond to and pay attention to all the stupid shit feels like it has accelerated *dramatically* even in the last 6 weeks or so. literally everything is dumb shit right now, a fact much more remarkable than any individual piece of dumb shit

[dzwiedziu@mastodon.social]

@glyph
But, but the French want to put Musk on trial for CSAM…

@davidgerard

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard like don't get me wrong I appreciate the work you're doing on pivot to AI and I pay attention to it, but that's like the max amount I want to pay attention to it every day. I do not want every blog post, every toot, every podcast, every youtube video to be about the same dumb shit. like I just take a 10 minute break every day to figure out if we're still at war and every interaction that I have is some eye-wateringly stupid and evil AI thing or a reaction to same

[robinadams@mathstodon.xyz]

@davidgerard It's got to be Dawkins.

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@glyph so the whole premise is "Web 3 is Going Great But It's AI", originally in 250-word chunks. They're longer chunks now, but it's the same format. The think pieces are in there, but they're always riffs on the thing of the day. I do try to answer "so what does this meeeean". I mean, today's is just "dumb thing, the situation, here's what to do," so it varies. OTOH today's is real short.

thankfully my attention span is real low too

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@jwz The Defector nailed that one anyway https://defector.com/you-should-never-be-the-most-sycophantic-participant-in-a-conversation-with-a-chatbot

[benjaoming@social.data.coop]

@davidgerard can this robot buddhist munk ceremony qualify? https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2026/5/7/humanoid-robot-becomes-buddhist-monk-in-south-korea

[pb@chaos.social]

@davidgerard This was like six weeks ago, but the head of Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund is very high on AI. He’s mandated all developers to use AI, saying those who want it the least need it the most and “you need to be on them like a wasp”. His favourite pastime is walking around asking devs what they’re doing with AI and asking them to explain what’s on their screens. Really some smashing quotes in this article, unfortunately in Norwegian. https://www.kode24.no/artikkel/hvis-du-nekter-a-bruke-ki-er-du-basically-tjukk-i-huet/259609

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard yeah, and you've been killing it. but why isn't it a hint to anyone involved in the topic that "daily news, but only about this one single topic, and everything is bad and stupid" is a reliable business model, now over multiple domains. it really feels like if if I had a blog called "Nathan Sucks Today" and every single day I had a minimum of 5 topics about all the cataclysmically stupid shit that Nathan did that day, maybe Nathan should think about making some changes

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@davidgerard anyhow: sorry I didn't answer the question, I guess I will watch your video now