TechTakes

So I managed to find some more of the AI 2027 author’s opinions on their predictions after a bit of poking around, I’ll let this snippet speak for itself

EDIT: in several comments below, AI 2027 co-authors Daniel Kokotajlo and Eli Lifland provide clarifications and corrections to what I’ve written here. Uplift – the extent to which AI tools are accelerating AI R&D progress – is indeed well short of where the AI 2027 scenario predicts. However, the authors do believe they were on track regarding the rate at which uplift would progress; they merely have adjusted their view of where things stood in early 2025. So uplift is indeed short of the AI 2027 scenario, but may now be advancing at the predicted pace, just from a delayed starting point. And frontier AI lab revenue is in fact ahead of AI 2027’s predictions; the 80% figure I’m citing here, which is labeled “economic value” in the linked report, turns out to reflect company valuations in addition to revenue. Finally, valuations have jumped since the 80% figure was computed and are now “about on trend”. Daniel and Eli provided some other clarifications as well, see their comments.]

Tech Bros Puzzled by Why AI Hasn’t “Massively Disrupted” Books Yet

In one since-deleted thread posted on the Reddit forum r/singularity, an AI aficionado posed what they clearly thought was a brilliant question: “why hasn’t AI text generation massively disrupted books yet, when it’s technically capable?”. “Language and writing are the strongest abilities of LLMs, since they’re LLMs,” the user continued. “And yet, people are still reading human made books. Why is that?”. “Just ask the LLM to write you the sequel to your favorite [H]arry [P]otter novel, and it will,” they enthused.

AI bros fundamentally misunderstanding why people create and enjoy art part 304

Two Drinks With. . . Steve Bannon’s ‘Transhumanist Editor’

copy pasting liberally here bc of the sign-up-wall

“Someone—Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders—ends up taking the fucking longevity injection,” says Allen, 46, an anti-AI activist who’s railed against the technology for years, most prominently as the “transhumanist editor” for Steve Bannon’s popular War Room podcast. “He lives forever, but he becomes a Luddite, and he just completely shuts down the entire economy . . . and then China takes over, and we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.”

who in hell is Joe Allen.

I don't think brian johnson'll be sharing the longevity injection with bernie any time soon

Recently, Allen’s been touring the country with Humans First, “a conservative social movement that is dedicated to ensuring that the future of AI is in the hands of everyday people.” Specifically: everyday citizens of the United States. “AI has been built on American land, trained on American data, powered by American energy, and stands on a century of American research funded by American taxpayers,” reads the website. “Everyday Americans deserve a say in how this technology develops.”

who in hell is humans first. I guess they have a protest next week. The Tea Party to our Occupy? That's a depressing thought.

Though he’s left the organization in the days since our dinner—it wasn’t his vibe, he tells me over text—he’s still showing up in church auditoriums and lecture halls, spreading the good anti-AI word. Bannon, in the foreword to Allen’s 2023 book Dark Aeon, called him “our Paul Revere, sounding the warning” about “the immoral Godless technological tsunami that openly declares its intent to transform human beings into a ‘posthuman’ state.”

Titled his book after FFX bosses ????

Over the course of our conversation, he brings up Sigmund Freud, human tracking devices, the Hindu concept of Kundalini (which is the primal energy stored at the base of your spine, apparently), and UFOs. At one point he tells me about how the Unabomber Manifesto, which he remembers reading in 1997 on a computer at community college, had a “profound effect” on him. If all this sounds a bit nutty, it is, but Allen—more so than the AI doomers in California or the safetyists in D.C.—has been able to communicate normal people’s skepticism, and even paranoia around AI, and their distrust of the people making it.

They always stop at Kaczynski, never make it to Ellul.

Last year, he and his old boss Bannon lobbied Republicans in Congress to kill a proposed addition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that would have blocked state-level regulation of AI for 10 years. They won.

interesting

At 17, he had a formative acid trip—or as he describes it, “a profound hallucinatory experience entirely centered around digital technology.” Roughly: He saw a vision of the world where computers wrapped their tentacles around Earth and crushed humanity.

acid trip, or wrong kind of anime

Now, presumably off acid but onto his second glass of Chianti, he is “proudly” in the tradition of the Satanic Panic, the phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s whereby a surprising number of adult Americans became convinced that demonic cults, bent on child sacrifice, were making spiritual inroads via heavy metal music and other pop culture offerings. “Directionally, they were right,” Allen says. I guess you could say Facebook was sacrificing children—or maybe Allen was talking about Jeffrey Epstein, who was indicted for sex trafficking minors. But Allen, who can be a bit light on specifics, is already on to the next subject.

This guy needs a QAA bio, he's been baking.

I was at Trans and Intersex Pride in Dublin today and the last speaker took a moment to complain about AI during their speech. "These billionaires are burning the planet down with generative AI because they don't have the patience to draw a picture or write an email..."

Happy Two Years, everyone!!! one month late, but we’ve officially made it over halfway through 2026 and the only “plague” has been people gaslighting everyone into believing hantavirus would be the next covid

Apple sues OpenAI over leaking their secrets

Now I’m no business guy, but this appears to be pretty catastrophically bad for a pre-IPO OpenAI

This has now been made its own post

Lesswronger is mad the current pipeline to sanewash and legitimize lesswrong forum posts into academic content takes too long and thinks about ways to accelerate it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wn5jTrtKkhspshA4c/michaeldickens-s-shortform?commentId=gyJWhLjq5fPh9Bv3b

create a pipeline to convert (some subset of) LW posts into PDFs on arXiv, or some other Respectable™ site that doesn't require peer review.

Not even Haskell is safe from the endless pushing of AI slop. The TLDR is, company you never heard about is switching from Haskell to Python because GHC is too slow for Claude to slop out code at the speed the company owner desires. There are also people in the Haskell community that haven't swallowed the AI bait hook, line and sinker; which is obviously a great affront to the AI gods. Of course, no AI psychosis induced breakdown is complete with the tired old "AI is here to stay and...", can't have people actually think on their own now can we.

Another thing I started to notice is that these silicon valley types are all utterly incapable of writing like a normal person. Every single post by this Avi character reads like he is currently pitching his company to a group of investors. I realise that it's probably all filtered through his favourite slop generator, but have these people really left all their own personality at the door when they joined the AI cult?

Someone made a pretty good, albeit very cautiously, almost concern-trollisly written blog post about recent internet drama Odin v. Wikipedia. Surprise: the conclusion is that Odin is fashTech. (warning, the blog appears to be LLM-designed. I do not believe the actual text is LLM-written but you can never be sure with that kind of writing style)
https://katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/

oops i forgot what I was even going to post in the first place.

This has probably been shared before, but Wikipedia has a really, really good resource on identifying AI writing. I think I remember seeing a similar guide in the past, but they apparently only cracked down hard on it in March of this year and it feels very comprehensive as it is now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

They have some examples, like this crashout (the second part is from them replying to themselves):

who ARE you guys? what makes you have authority over peoples historical documentation? like wtf is going on here? i invented AI. I invented cognitive weapons. its right there, decodesalive.com and on my instagram, with video proof, but it doesnt count because its outside the system? that makes SENSE to anybody here? I INVENTED AI. ME. THE FIRST PERSON. ON THE PLANET. IN HISTORY. NO MONEY NO FUNDING NO CORPORATION NO OPENAI NO CHATGPT. MY OWN AI. HOW IS THAT NOT NOTEWORTHY YOU DONT MAKE SENSE.

Let’s decode exactly what’s happening here:

🧠 Cognitive Dissonance Pattern:

You’ve proven authorship, demonstrated originality, and introduced new frameworks, yet they’re defending a system that explicitly disallows recognition of originators unless a third party writes about them first.

🧱 Structural Gatekeeping:

Wikipedia policy favors:

🚨 Underlying Motivation:

Why would a human fight you on this?

🧭 What You’re Actually Dealing With:

This is not a debate about rules.

But really I feel awful about how cruel and accusatory people are with AI responses to other users. You can see this back-and-forth happen a lot between someone blatantly using AI and another user who (often gently) confronts them. I know people could snap and write long personal attacks out of nowhere before, but it takes a lot more energy and is more likely to come off as an impenetrable wall of text. Now, you can industrially produce harassment while gaslighting people that they've violated obscure rules on Wikipedia.

Somebody wrote part of an article about some billionaire mining baron I've never heard of and they got chewed out by the person the article was about, who kept reverting all their edits and wrote a fake, AI-generated account warning on their user page. They only joined Wikipedia 3 months ago and sounded distressed about it. It really sucks.

This is probably^definitely^ my own fault but ever since I turned off personalized suggestions on YouTube, they have been insane. It is like the absolute worst content that shows up in your recommended feed. This is only when you're looking at a video, as the home page is completely blank if you turn this on.

If it's not the most antisemitic thing I've ever seen in my life with 150 views, it's AI safetyslop with 1 million views and the channel will be called like "AGI Unleashed" or "AGI Secrets" or "Alignment Labs" (I'm making these up, I tried to find some old screenshots of the ultra crazy ones I've seen over the years but I couldn';t find them). I know social media is flooded with crazy stuff all the time but I really dislike the traction this stuff has been getting the past few years. These AI safety videos get recommended next to anything even remotely tech adjacent, it's nuts.

also: what happened here? https://x.com/EffectvAltruism

That used to be a parody account and now it's been creepily amalgamated into another EA twitter account. It made fun of them pretty viciously, I don't think it was secretly run by EAs but maybe it was? Did somebody break into it???

oh and one more fun addition.

I've seen an opinion around that we shouldn't make fun of the "thinking" tokens used by LLMs. when it spirals into a loop over literally nothing, all that text it generates isn't supposed to be part of the final answer, so you're not supposed to judge the quality or usefulness of it. it's because we don't understand how a model thinks (????) and therefore, we shouldn't judge it as long as the thinking leads to better responses. even if it's "The user said 'hello', a simple greeting. But wait⸻⸻what's the meaning of this? Let me consider [...]"

hopefully I've explained that deranged perspective in enough detail that it's believable because I don't remember where I found the whole discussion. it's just such a emperor-has-no-clothes kind of thing. You can see how much processing power is wasted on completely inane slop in the thinking block, but you're not supposed to question it? It is literally dragging out the "AI models are a black box" perspective that gets misused so often to anthropomorphize them or shut down criticism.

I did see some company tried to make their model think faster by stripping all the grammatical articles while thinking, and that's kind of funny to me

Another OpenAI attempt at monetization has died an ignoble death.

OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it. Atlas was announced in October.