BF2S Forums AI is going to kill us all.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

What about the AI deconstructing you that makes you uncomfortable?

it should make everyone uncomfortable.

habits i formed in the 90s will probably serve me well during this age of data-scraping slop. poisoning the well of personal info. it's gratifying to see adbots and junkmail fumble for something relevant and come up short. that said, nobody wants to get muckraked and robodoxxed. much potential for real info harm out there!

my friends who've ignored pre-ai precaution, forwent data hygiene, are constantly geting nail-on-the-head adverts, seemingly pulled directly from idle conversation even. it's apparently a very creepy experience being surveilled to that extent. bUt At LeAsT wE'rE fReE.

side note, it also bothers me how much the ecosystem of my phone can change just by jumping service plans. "here let's install all these apps without your approval and there's nothing you can do about it!" delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. i want a dumb flip phone again, but these ungainly bricks have insinuated themselves into work. i don't want to read emails on a tiny screen. i'd rather not read emails at all if i'm not at a computer. smartphones have destroyed so much work/life balance that it feels like a war crime. these mobile devices were initially advertised as letting you call emergency services in a jiffy, not pull people from vacation back to the office. ruin your weekend because a little screen tells you to. this crap used to be handled on mondays, but now every business roleplays high stress stockbrokers or something. being able to disconnect from your work phone off hours needs to be a right, like in actual civilized countries.

"we were trying to get a hold of you for fifteen minutes! why didn't you pick up the phone?!" "i was on the freeway. it could wait." or the person who knows you're on the road, was just calling to chat and, and made you add another 30 minutes to your drive just finding a place to pull off to return their missed call. thanks! fw: fwp

dead horse anyway, i've been on about this before.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2026-07-20 11:09:47)

i chatgpt'd fm, oh, ken, un14. it came up with a whole backstory for unnamednewbie14. when i told it i threw it a curveball, it now refuses to believe there's an unnamednewbie13.

Nice try. 😄

This time I'm not taking the bait.

I don't know of a BF2S user named unnamednewbie13, and I'm not confident one existed.

i beat the ai. it's not that hard.

uziq wrote:

for e.g. all that stuff about me expressing an emotional wish to be real friends with users. lol. it sets up this ‘cold snob but with real emotional attachments hidden beneath’ psychological profile. sounds very plausible! but actually i wasn’t desperate to make friends with dauntless - we are friends off the forum and have met in person hahaha. of course it doesn’t know that, so instead it infers this weird picture about my state of mind.

It inferred exactly what happened, spooky no?

I think it did a moderate job of analysing the Dilbert persona, not yet inciteful enough to detect self-parody and absurdism, use of shields etc but it was close.
At this point I don't actually know if I have become the Dilbert persona or if the persona is me.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2026-07-21 03:35:30)

Relic went indie and they made the "definitive" edition but aren't making 4 so idk wtf they're doing besides patching dow de and making shitty dlc for company of heroes 3.

I got the DE cause it was like $20 and the mods actually work now. Played campaigns for the first time and holy cow the expansions suck ass

for awhile now:

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models
Company hired Google’s book-scanning chief to cut up and digitize “all the books in the world.”
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anth … ai-models/

While destructive scanning is a common practice among some book digitizing operations, Anthropic’s approach was somewhat unusual due to its documented massive scale. By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned. For Anthropic, the faster speed and lower cost of the destructive process appears to have trumped any need for preserving the physical books themselves, hinting at the need for a cheap and easy solution in a highly competitive industry.

Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company’s earlier piracy undermined its position.

Buying used physical books sidestepped licensing entirely while providing the high-quality, professionally edited text that AI models need, and destructive scanning was simply the fastest way to digitize millions of volumes. The company spent “many millions of dollars” on this buying and scanning operation, often purchasing used books in bulk. Next, they stripped books from bindings, cut pages to workable dimensions, scanned them as stacks of pages into PDFs with machine-readable text including covers, then discarded all the paper originals.

The court documents don’t indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers—but archivists long ago established other ways to extract information from paper. For example, The Internet Archive pioneered non-destructive book scanning methods that preserve physical volumes while creating digital copies. And earlier this month, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they’re working with Harvard’s libraries to train AI models on nearly 1 million public domain books dating back to the 15th century—fully digitized but preserved to live another day.

Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books, Secret Documents Reveal
"We don't want it to be known that we are working on this."
https://futurism.com/future-society/ant … ying-books

If this sounds ethically dubious to you, you’re not alone. Anthropic itself sounded self-conscious about how its destructive practice might look, a ready-made symbol of how many perceive the industry’s tech to be destroying the arts.

“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this,” a recently unsealed internal planning document from 2024 stated, as quoted by WaPo.

Before it turned to physical books, the company first relied on digital ones. In 2021, Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann took it upon himself to download millions of books from LibGen, an online “shadow library” of freely available, pirated texts. The next year, Mann praised a new website called Pirate Library Mirror, which was upfront about the fact that it “deliberately” violated copyright law in most countries. Sending a link to the website to other employees, Mann enthused about the site’s launch, “just in time!!!” per WaPo. (Anthropic denied using the pirated books to train any of its commercial models. But while Anthropic’s shredding of used books was deemed legal, the use of pirated ones was not, leading to the $1.5 billion settlement.)

i don't believe for one minute that they're making efforts to preserve rare and one-of-a-kind books.

nothing quite underscores my disdain for techbro ai industry than the wholesale destruction of print. plundering the sum of human knowledge, suing for every natural resource they can get their grubby hands on, operating with astoundingly low transparency, failing to deliver on infrastructure promises while disrupting communities with impunity. we are clinging to flotsam on the high seas of slop. but at least macbeth can save a few minutes writing an email.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2026-07-30 12:21:26)

i hate project managers. they formed an insular caste of gibberish spouting prelates in my last publishing house, ate up all the budget, and kept adding to their own ranks. it basically became obligatory to do project manager adjacent work in editorial with a view to getting 'promoted' into it. a total load of nonsense. people spending months getting accredited for crispr sigma cas-9 hadouken just-in-time vorsprung durch technik NONSENSE.

Last edited by uziq (2026-07-31 03:44:27)

i can kind of understand the value of a good PM if you're doing highly technical work with thousands of moving parts, hundreds of suppliers, multiple teams, etc. while god knows there's more 'under the hood' to publishing books than putting type on a gutenberg press and pulling a wooden lever, the PMs really fuck up what is essentially a 400-year-old trade with a load of faddish, business-book-section crapola. i promise you we do not need to all adopt this methodology developed by honda to make cars or by some SaaS company in seattle in order to continue making books.

AI is of course the bright New World for these morons, terra nullius. now i have to contend with 101 harebrained ideas to foist AI onto every part of the book production and editing process. i promise you, we don't need a highly costly 'AI assistant' to help with language editing. just hire fucking highly literate graduates and train them the same way editors have been trained to do developmental, line, and copy-editing for the last 50 years.

the worst thing is all the companies responsible for developing software solutions for publishing are now located in places like chennai, india. we are not working with the best, because the industry is running on fumes and the market has been financially gobbled up already by tech giants like amazon. the result is that we're trying to develop totally overengineered online proofing applets with AI that're buggier than a delhi dungpile. i don't know if you've started outsourcing torpedo design and nuclear sub reactor CAD to india yet, but i don't recommend it.

Last edited by uziq (2026-07-31 05:48:31)

lol "we don't use any of them". gulp.

I feel like those are positive uses of AI. The small merchant selling AI art printed on T-shirts are still at least shifting through different designs and bringing it to the place you can buy it. Sure, you could do it yourself through online stores but that still means having to do more work than just buying it there. Food truck menus being AI is also great time saving.

...

Again, my position is that this tech has a lot of uses. A lot of the things around it are the problem.

And fuck that why would I support a bunch of shitty overpriced ai shirts

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I feel like those are positive uses of AI. The small merchant selling AI art printed on T-shirts are still at least shifting through different designs and bringing it to the place you can buy it. Sure, you could do it yourself through online stores but that still means having to do more work than just buying it there. Food truck menus being AI is also great time saving.

...

Again, my position is that this tech has a lot of uses. A lot of the things around it are the problem.

it all looks like shit. and selling t-shirts and merch was a way for budding artists to pick up a side income. now it’s all total slop. what’s the point?

aesthetic despoliation should be viewed as a crime in the same way that illegal deforestation or habitat destruction is criminalised. keep all that ugliness out of the world please.