Ad hominem is "you're evil therefore your statement is wrong", not "that statement is the mark of an evildoer". And they do "say why": "What right do you have to tell me what i do or do not need?"
Either way, it's no lower in quality of argument than the wild assertion that everyone affected is just "importing things we really do not need" (what does that even really argue or justify?)
It's entirely other humans that the lords offered protection from; peasants were near universally left to fend for themselves when it came to "animals and locusts". And they could handle nature just fine (for the technology level) and could very much move to more land "in the middle of nowhere", if local lords didn't complicate that issue.
The idea of the old farmer-peasants as single-task specialists in the same vein as us city-dwellers is an anachronism.
For sure and that doesn't decrease the value of the protection. There seems to be this somewhat quaint idea that the crops belong to the peasant because he/she planted and grew them.
That's a very modern concept. In the natural world they belong to whatever entity is able to take them.
Life has always been about grabbing as many macronutrients as you can by whatever means possible.
Such a world view will justify any belief, because the internet will give you ample supply of the dumbest, most ill-considered opposition to any belief you hold.
Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.
If I had seen the steel version I would have considered it. But all I see is strawmen, as far as the eye can see. An ocean of strawmen, with a few steel islands here and there.
The examples all look off because the author keeps using "Spring Fayre" as a lorem-ipsum for styles that do not match the vibe of "Spring Fayre at the brewery". Distant second is that they have this sterile "Microsoft Word Template" feel that needs to be sanded off another way.
I guess you can justify ignoring such "advanced" techniques if it's aimed at the literally-zero-effort crowd, but who from there is reading this?
I'm actually aware of that and know that you're right. At the same time, I can't help but think that the market response will be for someone else to bid up and capture the slot either way. And if Google would rather serve those ads than enforce their own policies, they could always just loosen the policy.
Speculated to be responsible for the "AI restaurant-menu gore" that made the rounds on social media. Restaurants AI-generate the entire menu sheet from whole cloth, and while it looks "good" at first with modern image models, repeated edits to the menu text/layout transform the passable food "photos" into trypophobia-inducing horrors. (And somehow they don't notice or care)
Notably, the recent ChatGPT Images 2.5 announcement claimed to address this issue specifically ("multi-turn editing consistency")
With local models it's always been easy to edit only a part of an image (inpainting), either by painting a mask or automatically using a small segmentation model. It's actually pretty strange that commercial models have resorted to redrawing the entire image even in cases where the requested change is localized.
If most people’s “latent” taste was as good as they thought it was, we wouldn’t have so much “AI slop” - AI generations that are so-labeled precisely because the act of publishing them demonstrates significantly below-average taste.
IME, most users of the term “AI slop” use it for all (identified) uses of AI because they believe that use of AI is itself inherently an indication of poor taste and low effort that invalidates the work independently of what quality the work would have viewed independently of the mode of creation.
There are definitely people who accept AI use generally who try to make “AI slop” a distinction within the universe of AI creation rather than a label for the entire universe of AI creation, but that seems to be a minority use of the term.
I'm not sure "most" people have taste (assuming taste isn't subjective).
I don't think AI slop is indicative of taste. A lot of work doesn't care about taste at all. And AI slop is problematic in that it churns out an awful lot of output that people don't really care to review.
I’d frame taste as a combination of both. People mindfully interacting with a domain will develop nuanced aesthetic preference within it, and while preference is subjective, there’s still plenty that can be agreed upon or respected. Much like morality and relativism.
Obliviousness and uncaring will have similar failure modes, all the more so if both lead to rubber-stamping AI outputs to vague prompts.
You can make that claim for the general case that genAI capabilities will plateau or fishy financing in the sector will cause trouble at some point, but not for the specific talking heads that haven't constrained themselves to that sort of "broad future trajectory" prediction.
FTA:
> Note that I didn't attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorrect statements at the time, such as his December 2024 claim that “Generative AI's products have effectively been trapped in amber for over a year.” January 2026 claim that "[models are] basically the same as they were a year ago. They have the same efficacy". Zitron has not only made forward-looking statements that AI capabilities will not improve, he's also consistently made backwards-looking statements that capabilities have not improved which, while obviously false at the time, seem to play well to his base (along with his other false statements). If you connect all his statements together, it's implied that AI had the same capabilities in January 2026 as they did in December 2023 (and if you connect later statements, it's actually implied that capabilities in August 2026 are the same as in December 2023, though to be fair to Zitron he frequently contradicts himself and has also admitted to limited improvement at times).
Yes. I was specifically referring to Zitron's circular-financing complaints. I can't defend his separate claims that AI just isn't that useful. If he were involved in the tech industry, he'd know how preposterous those claims are.
Either way, it's no lower in quality of argument than the wild assertion that everyone affected is just "importing things we really do not need" (what does that even really argue or justify?)
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