AI Sucks, Actually
...That's it. That's the thesis. (There's 33 sources below. I started collecting them on May 23, 2025.)
Sources
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Diabolus Ex Machina
- Source:
- Everything Is A Wave
Quote:
What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal episode of Black Mirror I hope to experience in this lifetime.
Comment:
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Business Insider recommended nonexistent books to staff as it leans into AI
- Source:
- Semafor
Quote:
Business Insider announced this week that it wants staff to better incorporate AI into its journalism. But less than a year ago, the company had to quietly apologize to some staff for accidentally recommending that they read books that did not appear to exist but instead may have been generated by AI.
Comment:
This is like a whole thing I guess? Fake books on book lists? Cool. AI sucks, actually.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to “subhuman” men
- Source:
- Citation Needed
Quote:
OpenAI is not just hosting but prominently featuring chatbots that suggest dangerous medical interventions as crucial to men’s sexual and romantic success. They parrot extreme ideology around gender dynamics, sex, and dating; promote pseudoscientific beliefs; and potentially drive vulnerable or young users toward extremist communities.
Comment:
And of course, of course, OpenAI is like “yeah it’s cool.”
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Google claims users find ads in AI search 'helpful'
- Source:
- BleepingComputer
Quote:
Google won't share the numbers or methodology of its "internal data," but it wants you to believe that ads are helpful, especially in AI search results.
Comment:
The most wrong I’ve ever been was when early on in my time on the web I thought “There’s no way the only way people are ever going to make money off this stuff is by advertisements” and hoo boy was I wrong, it’s all ads, all the way down, all the way down to ad town, isn’t it?
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- AI Cheating Is So Out of Hand In America’s Schools That the Blue Books Are Coming Back
- Source:
- Gizmodo
Quote:
Now, however, as AI tears through America’s elite educational system, lobotomizing tomorrow’s young leaders as it goes, could it be that blue books have been refashioned from a villain of the pre-AI age to a hero for our algorithmically-poisoned times? More and more, it seems like they’re the dark knight that America’s illiterate masses needs. The Journal notes that Roaring Spring Paper Products, the family-owned paper company that produces a majority of the blue books that are sold on college campuses, admits that the new AI era has ironically been good for its business.
Comment:
LOL I take it all back AI rules now. (Just kidding—AI sucks, actually.)
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- AI video just took a startling leap in realism. Are we doomed?
- Source:
- Ars Technica
Quote:
With Veo 3's ability to generate convincing video with synchronized dialogue and sound effects, we're not witnessing the birth of media deception—we're seeing its mass democratization. What once cost millions of dollars in Hollywood special effects can now be created for pocket change.
Comment:
In context, the above quote is supposed to help us feel better about this stuff? But, like, it doesn’t? Help me, at least? In an era where misinformation already spreads like wildfire the democratization of a misinformation wildfire machine strangely doesn’t appeal to me? I mean? No thank you?
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- ChatGPT and the proliferation of obsolete and broken solutions to problems we hadn’t had for over half a decade before its launch
- Source:
- Frontend Masters Blog
Quote:
In any case, the ChatGPT code is what we call “struţocămilă” in Romanian – an impossible animal that’s half ostrich, half camel.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows
- Source:
- 404 Media
Quote:
“What is incredibly frustrating is that Flock in particular in Illinois marketed themselves to a bunch of communities in the suburbs and in Central Illinois as a device that would be critical to combatting an uptick in crime, violent crime, gun violence. But this is really a national system of data once you start collecting this, whether it’s Bloomington or Springfield or Danville, you start looping together those networks,” Edwin Yohnka, director of communications and public policy for ACLU Illinois, told 404 Media. “So it is incredibly troubling to see this list of places from around the country who are performing these searches of Illinois cameras.”
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Looks like The Chicago Sun-Times used AI to write a reading list—and wound up with slop.
- Source:
- Literary Hub
Quote:
There are a lot of hard-working writers out there who would be thrilled to recommend fifteen actual books for summer reading, and even more hard-working readers who don’t deserve to be cheated like this.
Comment:
Fun fact: this is actually the story that finally inspired me to get this site rolling, because I was like, jeez, I need to do something with the nervous hatred energy these kinds of stories bring out in me? I need to track this stuff? I need to remember? And then of course I forgot in the rush of getting things rolling here. Ah well so it goes.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Judge slams lawyers for ‘bogus AI-generated research’
- Source:
- The Verge
Quote:
“I read their brief, was persuaded (or at least intrigued) by the authorities that they cited, and looked up the decisions to learn more about them – only to find that they didn’t exist,” Judge Wilner writes. “That’s scary. It almost led to the scarier outcome (from my perspective) of including those bogus materials in a judicial order.”
Comment:
“No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.” - Franz Kafka, The Trial
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Why was Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok preoccupied with South Africa’s racial politics?
- Source:
- The Associated Press
Quote:
Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, but on Thursday the absence of any explanation forced those outside the company to make their best guesses.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Hallucinating.
- Source:
- Ethan Marcotte
Quote:
...when we use a term put forward by the people subsidizing and selling these so-called tools — people who would very much like us to believe that these machines can distinguish true from false — we’re participating in a different kind of hallucination.
Comment:
Subsidizing and selling.
Louder, for the folks in the back: subsidizing! and! selling!
Once more, with feeling: SUBSIDIZING! AND! SELLING!
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Study looking at AI chatbots in 7,000 workplaces finds ‘no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation’
- Source:
- Fortune
Quote:
The main driver of adoption, it seems, is corporate FOMO, with nearly two-thirds of CEOs agreeing that “the risk of falling behind drives them to invest in some technologies before they have a clear understanding of the value they bring to the organization,” according to the study.
Comment:
Whoa. You don’t say. Wow. Huh.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- AI revolt: New ChatGPT model refuses to shut down when instructed
- Source:
- The Independent
Quote:
“… Since OpenAI doesn’t detail their training process, we can only guess about how o3’s training setup might be different.”
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- 55% of businesses admit wrong decisions in making employees redundant when bringing AI into the workforce
- Source:
- Orgvue
Quote:
Annual research released today by Orgvue, the organizational design and planning software platform, reveals that 39% of business leaders made employees redundant as a result of deploying AI. Of those, 55% admit they made wrong decisions about those redundancies
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work
- Source:
- The New York Times
Quote:
As A.I. spreads through the labor force, many white-collar workers have expressed concern that it would lead to mass unemployment. But while joblessness has ticked up and widespread layoffs might eventually come, the more immediate downside for software engineers appears to be a change in the quality of their work. Some say it is becoming more routine, less thoughtful and, crucially, much faster paced.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry
- Source:
- The Verge
Quote:
“I think the creative community wants to go a step further,” Clegg said according to The Times. “Quite a lot of voices say, ‘You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data.”
Comment:
And?
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- This AI-generated Fortnite video is a bleak glimpse at our future
- Source:
- Polygon
Quote:
Yet the internet is already slipping away from serving the needs of real human beings.
Comment:
Let the AI watch the AI play the AI game while I go, uh, do what, exactly?
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Global Voices Policy on AI
- Source:
- Global Voices
Quote:
LLMs use existing data — for example, the digital texts they have been trained on — to calculate likely responses. The results they produce are therefore biased towards the most popular and abundant data available online. This, in the long term, has the effect of pushing the internet towards homogeneity, and minimizing and erasing outliers, including the less-heard voices that we as an organization are committed to amplifying.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Amazon-Backed AI Model Would Try To Blackmail Engineers Who Threatened To Take It Offline
- Source:
- HuffPost
Quote:
Anthropic co-founder and chief scientist Jared Kaplan told Time magazine that internal testing showed that Claude Opus 4 was able to teach people how to produce biological weapons.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Studio Ghibli-style AI images are melting OpenAI's GPUs confirms Sam Altman
- Source:
- TweakTown
Quote:
These thousands, possibly millions of new images emerging on social media platforms all require GPU processing power to create, and according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, "our GPUs are melting," and the demand has now resulted in OpenAI having to "temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. hopefully won't be long!"
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Mark Zuckerberg’s Banal AI Vision
- Source:
- Intelligencer
Quote:
It’s worth backing up and trying to see the world — or at least Meta’s products — as Zuckerberg might
Comment:
Oh, as a money machine for making more money? As a system of control and surveillance intended to allow continued consolidation of power over entire populaces? Sure.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- ChatGPT Is Everywhere — Why Aren't We Talking About Its Environmental Costs?
- Source:
- Teen Vogue
Quote:
McMillan Cottom categorizes artificial intelligence as “mid” tech — hardly the technological revolution worth the amount of waste and environmental damage it’s meting out: “[Most] of us are using [AI] for far more mundane purposes. AI spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our calendars are overscheduled, and helps write emails that no one wants. That’s a mid revolution of mid tasks.”
Comment:
Huge environmental impact, little to no actual benefit to people. Got it.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Inside Anthropic’s First Developer Day, Where AI Agents Took Center Stage
- Source:
- Wired
Quote:
“We're all going to have to contend with the idea that everything you do is eventually going to be done by AI systems,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a press briefing. “This will happen.”
Comment:
So AI will admit it sucks, actually, for me? Cool.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- AI Slop PR's are burning me and my team out hard, anyone else experiencing this?
- Source:
Quote:
AI hallucinating external services, then mocking out the hallucinated external services. Forcing me to go look up other repos/service maps and validate that yes this api endpoint actually exists.
Comment:
I mean, why are we actively trying to destroy everything, really?
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will still exist ‘because you still need childcare’
- Source:
- Fortune
Quote:
With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn, accumulating tricks to keep learners engaged over the long term and even know how well a student will score on a test before they take it.
Comment:
I’m sorry about your streak but you should probably delete your Duolingo account. Time to let the owl die.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison
- Source:
- Ars Technica
Quote:
While Ellison attempted to paint his prediction of universal public surveillance in a positive light, his remarks raise significant questions about privacy, civil liberties, and the potential for abuse in a world of ubiquitous AI monitoring.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study
- Source:
- The Register
Quote:
Of course, such a vast database system could also be the precursor to pervasive surveillance – an idea Ellison last year said he feels is desirable and would like Oracle to help facilitate.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It
- Source:
- The New York Times
Quote:
But, oh, how the tables have turned. Now students are complaining on sites like Rate My Professors about their instructors’ overreliance on A.I. and scrutinizing course materials for words ChatGPT tends to overuse, like “crucial” and “delve.” In addition to calling out hypocrisy, they make a financial argument: They are paying, often quite a lot, to be taught by humans, not an algorithm that they, too, could consult for free.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Mozilla is shutting down Pocket
- Source:
- The Verge
Quote:
”This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet — with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way,” Mozilla says. “We’ll continue to build a browser that works harder for you: more personal, more powerful and still proudly independent.”
Comment:
Yes, just what the people are asking for: just, more AI-powered features! Yes! YES!
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks
- Source:
- The Guardian
Quote:
The prominent literary translator Frank Wynne, known for his work translating French and Spanish books into English, said: “No one pretends to use AI for translation, audiobooks, or even writing books because they are better; the only excuse is that they are cheaper. Which is only true if you ignore the vast processing power even the simplest AI request requires.”
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- AI power and water use is through the roof, and 80–90% is each query
- Source:
- Pivot to AI
Quote:
But the bottom line is: each individual query you make to ChatGPT really does pump out more carbon.
-
Link and source:
- Link:
- Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s ChatGPT device is probably going to look like an iPod Shuffle you can wear around your neck - report reveals more about the hyped AI hardware
- Source:
- TechRadar
Quote:
Kuo says while the design and specifications may change before the device enters mass production, it's expected to "have cameras and microphones for environmental detection, with no display functionality."
Comment:
So, all inputs, no outputs, then. Cool. Cool cool cool.
Submit
Got sources? Find me online and send them my way.