Now I wonder how Duolingo is doing, the first company that wanted to go “AI first” that I know of/was in contact with. I deleted their app, but I guess so far their output is up and they made up for the customers who left.
On the topic of Duolingo, they are briefly mentioned in this, the latest rebuke of AI over at Aftermath:
Everything is going great!
The sarcasm is strong with Riley MacLeod 
I remember having read his Duolingo article, which I stole the word “AI brainrot” from:
Again, these people are literally admitting AI won’t work, but are still asking engineers now laboring under heightened productivity expectations to spend their even-more-precious time managing this sub-par tech. “That’s how you build skill” puts the AI tools’ failing back on the user, the “have fun staying poor” of the AI world, and asks engineers to troubleshoot AI when they could instead be using their real live human skill to do the jobs they were hired for.
That Duolingo execs can write all this and still insist the company prioritizes humans, whether that’s workers or users, is a staggering level of AI brainrot.
Like developer Embark’s The Finals , its newest shooter uses text-to-speech voices alongside actual recorded voice lines for much of the spoken dialogue in the game. That hasn’t stopped Arc Raiders from quickly becoming one of the most popular multiplayer shooters around, either because players don’t care about the use of AI, didn’t know it was there, or were perhaps confused by the game’s AI disclosure on Steam, which like many such disclosures, seems calibrated to convey the least amount of meaning possible.
The Forced Meme is a useful concept not just for understanding the tech industry and its AI obsession, but as a mirror of global fascism as a whole. As a political ideology, fascism by definition depends on the use of force. Fascists seek to impose their warped reality by “flooding the zone”—overwhelming a populace both through the physical manifestation of violence and the nonstop dissemination of propaganda. Heavily-armed ICE agents kidnapping peopleand racist AI-generated videos depicting fake Black women complaining about losing SNAP benefits work toward this same end. The goal is to destabilize and disorient political opposition by short-circuiting our ability to discern fact from fiction, which just happens to be the one thing “AI” is very good at.
I know this isn’t strictly AI but there a big overlap between crypto bros and AI bros so here we go (video in link):
I think this is absolutely spot on. This could be the normalization that execs need to see to push even harder on this front. A game with Gen-AI winning awards could be the horse cosmetic moment for AI.
AI being powerless - I am not complaining. The question is whether all this money invested in data centres is being burned on nothing, because where can the required amount of power come from in the short term? Trump has killed any effort in renewable energy, and nuclear power takes forever to build. No one wants to invest in something that will take 11 years longer than expected to build and cost triple the original estimate.
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/peter-thiel-dumps-top-ai-stock-stirring-bubble-fears
One can also dream this means something.
Valve has a fantastic refund policy. Glad they’re allowing us to push back against false advertising.
(Video in post)
I mean, who is buying EA games at this point anyway?
AI subtitles are going to have a huge impact on access to media in languages other than one’s own:
Google suspended a mobile app developer’s accounts after he uploaded AI training data to his Google Drive. Unbeknownst to him, the widely used dataset, which is cited in a number of academic papers and distributed via an academic file sharing site, contained child sexual abuse material. The developer reported the dataset to a child safety organization, which eventually resulted in the dataset’s removal, but he claims Google’s has been "devastating.”
It was Google’s training data, but Google punished the dev. Maybe someone at Google should be the one who feels the heat instead.