The singularity of stupid
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Geoff Brumfiel, "Kiss reality goodbye: AI-generated social media has arrived", All Things Considered 10/3/2025:
A fascist SpongeBob SquarePants, a dog driving a car and Jesus playing Minecraft – these are just a few of the things you can see as you flip through OpenAI's new app populated exclusively with short-form videos generated using artificial intelligence.
And if you can't find what you're looking for, don't worry: you can make it with ease using a small text-based prompt window in the app. The result is a highly addictive stream of sometimes funny and sometimes strange 10-second videos.
The conclusion?
Sora is just the latest in a slew of tools that can generate images, video and audio at will.
"We're really seeing the ability to kind of whole-cloth generate incredibly realistic, hyper-realistic content in any kind of different way you want," said Henry Ajder, the head of Latent-Space Advisory, which tracks the evolution of AI-generated content.
As concerned as he is with people being duped, Ajder said he's also very concerned about the consequences of nobody trusting what they see online.
"We have to resist the somewhat nihilistic pull of, 'we can't tell what's real anymore, and therefor it doesn't matter anymore,'" he said.
Traditional news media have never been exactly trustworthy, but things are arguably getting worse in that space as well. Among many other reasons, we can cite the loss of the copy desk, as John McIntyre argues in "What we have lost", 10/1/2025:
The key thing, the fundamental thing about the traditional copy desk, is that it was set apart. It was not connected with the desks that generated stories, and it played no part in their processes. Instead, it was independent, and its members looked fresh at each story, much like a reader.
Reporters work with their editors on stories, on which they come to an understanding of what should be in them and how the material should be treated. The back-and-forth between editors and reporters carries an inherent hazard of developing groupthink. The copy editor, traditionally understood, has not been a part of groupthink and can raise questions of importance about the focus, tone, and structure of the story.
That gives, as former Baltimore Sun publisher Mike Waller once said, the opportunity to raise the most important question that a copy editor can ever articulate: Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really sure?" […]
But as the newspaper business declined, the sharp-pencil people determined that copy editors were an expensive frill. The Sun's last copy editor departed in 2019, and some years ago The New York Times, once famed for its copy editing, disbanded its copy desks and assigned survivors to the respective originating desks, where they can resist groupthink, or perhaps not.
A month ago, William Gibson (who invented the word cyberspace) proposed a catchy title for these various trends, riffing on the old idea of a technological singularity:
We’re quite deep within the Singularity right now, though it’s turned out be the Singularity of Stupid (SoS), which effectively prevents the original concept of the Singularity from happening.
— William Gibson (@greatdismal.bsky.social) September 7, 2025 at 10:20 PM
Update — The originator of the "intelligence explosion" idea was I.J. Good, in a 1964 article with the title "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine". The start of his Conclusions section:
It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make, since it will lead to an “intelligence explosion.” This will transform society in an unimaginable way. The first ultraintelligent machine will need to be ultraparallel, and is likely to be achieved with the help of a very large artificial neural net. The required high degree of connectivity might be attained with the help of microminiature radio transmitters and receivers. The machine will have a multimillion dollar computer and information-retrieval system under its direct control. The design of the machine will be partly suggested by analogy with several aspects of the human brain and intellect. In particular, the machine will have high linguistic ability and will be able to operate with the meanings of propositions, because to do so will lead to a necessary economy, just as it does in man.
This is appropriate because Good worked with Alan Turing on the design and implementation of the world's first "language model", used in the WWII Enigma decryption. See here for a description of the machinery, and here and here for discussions of the mathematics. The result was an ngram model of possible German plaintexts, which could be used for automatic output checking for very large numbers of possible Enigma-machine settings.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
October 4, 2025 @ 10:43 am
Rather than a Singularity of Stupid, I would say there is a plurality.