AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

Yeah some ram and enterprise SSDs at bargain prices. Can’t wait to buy bulk lots for next to nothing

Hopefully the skulls of the goons that benefitted from it.

If someone salvages the RAM chips, HMU, because Jesus Christ the inflated cost of PC/laptop hardware is getting out of hand.

That’s a great article, tanks for posting.

Cory has a way for getting right to the heart of things, and does so marvellously here. Great explanation of why the investments continue despite the dogshit economics of this industry.

Cory Doctorow is an international treasure

So what is the alternative? A lot of artists and their allies think they have an answer: they say we should extend copyright to cover the activities associated with training a model.

And I am here to tell you they are wrong. Wrong because this would represent a massive expansion of copyright over activities that are currently permitted – for good reason.

He goes on to say that prohibiting AI works from being copyrighted and worker collective bargaining are better solutions, and I really agree with the arguments for this. I also liked this bit about how some of what remains past the bubble could be useful:

And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images; summarizing documents; and automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing – such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of.

Not just something but a ton of used RAM sticks and GPUs.

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I agree with your choice to include the author’s name. Even without reading the article, it seems significant that Doctorow is writing in such a mainstream publication. I’m glad to see it

Doctorow writes:

After more than 20 years of being consistently wrong and terrible for artists’ rights, the US Copyright Office has finally done something gloriously, wonderfully right. All through this AI bubble, the Copyright Office has maintained – correctly – that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because copyright is exclusively for humans. That is why the “monkey selfie” is in the public domain. Copyright is only awarded to works of human creative expression that are fixed in a tangible medium.

And not only has the Copyright Office taken this position, they have defended it vigorously in court, repeatedly winning judgments to uphold this principle.

The fact that every AI-created work is in the public domain means that if Getty or Disney or Universal or Hearst newspapers use AI to generate works – then anyone else can take those works, copy them, sell them or give them away for nothing.

Genius.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

The guardian has a paywall over Cory Doctorow’s writing. I don’t like that, so I found the article on his blog instead.

Take radiology: there is some evidence that AI can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss. Look, I’ve got cancer. Thankfully, it’s very treatable, but I’ve got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible.

Let’s say my hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 X-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 X-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”

If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: “Look, you fire nine out of 10 of your radiologists, saving $20m a year. You give us $10m a year, and you net $10m a year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed – and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop’. It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

I admire Cory’s perennial optimism, but the more billions the governments pump into this scheme, the less likely it’s going to be. “Too big to fail” and whatnot.

This is a good read even if you’re not a fan of doctorow yet.

Like another commenter said, his thoughts about centaurs and reverse centaurs are cool (basically whether you use technology or technology uses you).

Also his thoughts about copyright and if it would be good to reinforce it are interesting - he says that artists won’t be paid well if their art can’t be stolen for AI training, their contracts will be adjusted and that’s it. He says what gives bargaining power is the fact that the output of LLMs can’t be copyrighted, which means that human artists have to be in the loop of making tomorrows media.

I’ve seen multiple articles over the past few days, I seriously hope we are now seeing the downfall of AI. I seriously hope we can return back to creating meaningful technology.

im happy Microsoft dumped all their chips into AI. gonna be fantastic when it goes sideways

The point about centaurs is good too

For someone who is engrossed in SCIFI what he is presenting will be salvaged from the wreckage is terribly optimistic.

If society doesn’t wake up and organize itself the data centers will likely be used as the operational epicenter of the dystopian police state.

One could easily argue that is the expected end use of the data centers by their owners and the AI hype cycle is deliberare con forcing the plebs to forge their own chains with their retirement accounts.

Western AI companiess will fail*

Let them burn. I don’t believe this is true or will actually happen. But, one can hope I guess.

They are burning down the planet to put slave harnesses on the masses. Fuck the billionaires.

spending billions to hype the pivot to video or cryptocurrency or NFTs or the metaverse or AI.

Thats just the descending staircase of my interest in new technology

RAM