I am so fucking sick of AI.

I don't want it writing my books. I don't want it drawing my art. I don't want it composing my music. I don't want it in our workplaces. I don't want it in our schools. I don't want it in our libraries. I don't want it transcribing my visits with my doctor. I don't want it drafting my legal contracts. I don't want it deciding my health insurance claims. I don't want it predicting crimes. I don't want it advertising my products.

I'm sick of tolerating this AI owner class, who are apparently above the law, stealing everything we make and profiting off it, then acting like we're the criminals for needing money to live. I'm sick of everything being so fucking financialized that the art and culture being suffocated by slop aren't even a part of the conversation for these people. I'm sick of them caring for nothing but money, by any means and at any cost. I'm sick of watching them burn tens of billions of dollars to make everything worse, while those of us who are trying to make literally anything better scrimp and save and barely scrape by.

There was a dust-up on Sunday where a bunch of people got mad at Bookshop.org for a Meta ad of theirs that appeared to be AI. But Bookshop.org doesn’t seem like the sort of place that would do that, so @overflowingshelf investigated:

Guys, before you attack @bookshop_org over the AI ads, THIS is the creative they uploaded (from the Meta ads library if you want to check for yourselves.) Meta is forcing AI into their business suite and is making it harder and harder to turn it off as they want AI to run the WHOLE ad process - from copy to creative to audience building. It is a nightmare for anyone who works in advertising. (Threads)

It appears that Bookshop.org didn’t use AI; Meta did, by automatically creating and serving at least one AI-made variation of the original, non-AI content.

Down-thread, @thehawthornelibrary posted a walkthrough on how to turn off Meta’s AI ad features. But Meta often silently re-enables features after updates, so you have to keep checking your ad setups. And they’re constantly adding new features, and changing and reorganizing things, and A/B testing different configurations with different groups of users, so any guidance is likely to be outdated by tomorrow and may not even apply if you’re in a different, secret testing group. And you don’t even get any kind of review or notification before your content is AI-ified and served to the public under your name.

So it turns you can bomb data centers and make the world a better place.

Last week, Ukraine bombed three Yandex data centers in Russia. Subsequently, the amount of right-wing nonsense and bad-faith engagement on social media cratered.¹

The reduction in fascist bot activity is good news, but it also proves something we've long suspected and which makes me terminally angry: the Internet we grew up on is dead, and it was killed—on purpose—by the greediest people alive. They enclosed the digital commons² and then flooded it with their bots and their bullshit, because they think free speech not only means they have a right to speak, but that they have a right to be listened to.

These fucking ghouls want to execute a man on live television (The Guardian):

Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defense department official later confirmed the execution will be livestreamed.

In an interview with Real America’s Voice, the Pentagon secretary said the firing squad will carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1pm on Thursday, 3 December. This would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years.

Hasan's crime was deplorable, but a livestreamed execution by firing squad isn't about justice; it's a sadistic carnival act that launders the end of a human life into a hollow promotional stunt for a fascist regime.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to be a professional on the internet and not be too obnoxious about all the everything that's been on fire since at least 2014… but it turns out, I just don't think I can do that.

I'm mad. We're all mad. Let's be mad together! We’re all out here white-knuckling our way through this hellscape—climate change, economic collapse, the rise of fascism, AI everything—and I think we've earned ourselves some solidarity, as a treat.

Who am I?