#ai-hype — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ai-hype, aggregated by home.social.
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Emily M Bender and Alex Hanna’s book “The AI Con” (2025) is a highly accessible read for a general audience. I found it a much needed pick-me-up.
Three big takeaways:
* make jokes about it
* ask questions like: What is being automated, what goes in and what comes out? How is it evaluated? Is it being described as human-like? Who benefits, who is harmed?
* Both AI “boosters” and AI “doomers” are, counterintuitively, two sides of the same #AIHype coinBoth authors are active on Mastodon.
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@gvwilson Thanks for sharing this paper!
By the way, this thread got broken somehow so here's a link for folks looking for posts 2 & 3.
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Weekly output: DDoS attacks, Ed Zitron at Ai4, Delta WiFi spoofing, security perspectives from Black Hat’s NOC, AT&T’s Turbo Live
Having zero in-person work events on my calendar this week was a real treat after spending the prior week in Vegas bouncing between two conferences. That downtime also allowed me to finish two stories from those events.
8/11/2026: Major DDoS Attacks Are Booming, But US No Longer the Most Targeted Country, PCMag
I wrote up a Cloudflare report on trends in distributed denial-of-service attacks and closed it out with a reminder of how efforts to set security standards for the connected gadgets that are often enlisted into DDoS botnets continue to lag.
8/11/2026: This Tech Expert Thinks It’s ‘Time to Call Bullshit on the AI Industry’, PCMag
The easier thing to do with Ed Zitron’s talk at Ai4 would have been to write a scaffold of a post around his most memorable lines, but I wanted to provide some context for the numbers he threw out. The required research started feeling like an exercise in yak shaving, in part because the AI data-center news cycle did not stop.
8/12/2026: Delta Passenger Spoofs Wi-Fi in the Air (Pro Tip: Don’t Do This), PCMag
After seeing so many other places jump on this story, I decided I should do my part–and make sure that my own post, unlike so many others, would feature a photo of 757 in Delta colors instead of some other plane in DL’s fleet.
8/14/2026: At Black Hat, AI is helping security pros find threats—and creating new ones, Fast Company
This was a Black Hat meeting request that I enthusiastically obliged, because Black Hat network admins don’t hold back when they’re talking about unwise behavior they’ve seen on the conference’s WiFi. James Pope (outside this information-security conference, senior director of security product research at Corelight) had some forceful advice for people using AI to vibe-code their own software: “Stop having janky apps.”
8/15/2026: At Rush Concert, AT&T’s Turbo Live Rocked, With Dazzling Download Speeds, PCMag
This story ran almost a month after the concert in question; first I had to field various bits of breaking news, then I had to tell my AT&T PR contact to set aside my questions about this data-only power-up and instead answer a query about a round of retroactive rate hikes, then Ai4 and Black Hat monopolized my journalistic bandwidth. I may or may not have also needed additional time to see how many Rush song-title references I could sneak into this post.
#AI #AIHype #Ai4 #ATT #BlackHat #Cloudflare #cybersecurity #dataCenters #DDoS #Delta #DeltaWiFi #DeltaWiFi #DL #EdZitron #informationSecurity #infosec #NetworkOperationsCenter #NOC #Rush #TurboLive #UnitedCenter #vibeCoding -
Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?
Are they really booming? And, no. #AIHype
The article quotes the owner of Barter Books in Northumberland who had one extraordinary sale of a week's (!) worth of books. A quick check of BBC's source (see their barterbooks.co.uk) - they're not exactly a prime target for bulk buying. "Incoming books for Barter: Please note that we cannot handle more than 10 books (or 20 paperbacks) per visit." However the BBC article **is** good free publicity for their bookshop.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o
The BBC article rehashes a story of shredded rare and secondhand books. It continues a story that came out (at least) as early as January in the Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/ I did a quick read and it seems unknown how many, if any, secondhand books were bought and scanned. No mention of a rare book destroyed.
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How convenient for the #BigTech cartel: Use #AIhype to constrain supply, increase prices, then lure people into renting more and owning less of their tech... 😞💩
"...Apple Upgrade, a new product leasing program... with the option to easily upgrade at the end of the lease term."
https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/28/apple-upgrade-leasing-program-debuts-how-it-works/
"The program is an effort to make products more affordable as artificial intelligence sends some component prices soaring."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/technology/apple-leasing-program.html
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Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, Episode 83 - Rumors of a Singularity Have Been Grossly Exaggerated
https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/bWuMF4sfF4oeG55BdWXuTp
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📢 Behold the latest in AI alphabet soup: Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B! 🤖🔍 Because apparently, naming models like keyboard smashes makes them more advanced. 🥴 Dive into Hugging Face's endless buzzwords and acronyms, because who doesn't love a side of confusion with their daily dose of AI hype? 😂
https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B #AIModels #AIHype #TechBuzzwords #MachineLearning #HuggingFace #HackerNews #ngated -
@Ashedryden Kudos to the kid! 👏
It's sad to hear that a school curriculum includes AI slop which the teacher is either encouraged or forced (don't know which) to present.
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Always IPOing, never IPOed… #OpenAI #AIHype
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:qc6xzgctorfsm35w6i3vdebx/post/3msrqv4amec2w -
because that is exactly what they are. #datacentres suck money from local people in the form of increased costs for power and clean water, threaten their jobs, and give them slop in return.
the only people who benefit are billionaires and people who are addicted to slop -
“Keith Wilson, a philosopher of perception and cognitive science at UCD, said the media was committing the cardinal sin of doing ‘PR for the #AI industry’. ‘AI companies have a product to hawk,’ he wrote on Bluesky…” #GenAI #AIHype (h/t @[email protected]) www.reuters.com/technology/a...
NEWSLETTER: 'Going rogue' draw... -
“Keith Wilson, a philosopher of perception and cognitive science at #UCD, said the media was committing the cardinal sin of doing ‘PR for the #AI industry’. ‘AI companies have a product to hawk, ‘he wrote on Bluesky. ‘This kind of anthropomorphisation plays directly into their stock value. It’s part of their sales pitch’.” #GenAI #AIHype #philosophy #cogsci https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/going-rogue-draws-critics-amid-widening-ai-hacks-2026-08-05/
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Tech leaders say #AI means less work—their staff say they work up to 90 hours a week. And there’s the fundamental contradiction of AI use. We could have a four-day working week tomorrow if we wanted, no AI required. 🤷♂️ #GenAI #AIHype www.bbc.com/news/article...
Tech leaders say AI means less... -
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How far are we from realising that the primary applications of #LLMs are fraud and crime? #GenAI #AIHype www.macrumors.com/2026/08/07/o...
OpenAI Delays Next Major AI Mo... -
How far are we from realising that the principal applications of #LLMs are fraud and other crimes? #GenAI #AIHype https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/07/openai-astra-model-hacking-concerns/
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Data Centers - song by Elle Cordova
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdvUJ7idDuM
"There's no time for laws when you're building a god. Sign the bill and cut the tape and get out of the way."
But as she says at the end, it's not pre-ordained. We can fight back!
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@scalzi/117050577370979278
This is is a helpful analogy. And I loved this line:
"prompting a generative 'AI' makes one an artist exactly as much as pushing a button on an automated hotel pancake maker makes one a chef" 😄
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This is getting ridiculous… Does the US not have laws against cyberattacks? 🤔 #AIHype #Meta #Cybersecurity www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Meta says AI model accessed th... -
This is getting ridiculous… Does the US not have laws against cyberattacks? 🤔 #AIHype #Cybersecurity https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2kgdnyk2po
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@3TomatoesShort This is a pet peeve of mine.
The news media should be careful to never attribute consciousness or intent to software. It's just sloppy writing to say that "AI models have tried to deceive humans"
Edit: I attached an image from a paper to show an example with and without anthropomorphized language
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From Nikhil Suresh's Hermit Tech site: "I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and it’s impossible to have rational conversations with them about it. I can’t name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
--Mitchell Hashimoto, of HashiCorp and Ghostty fame"
https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking #AIpsychosis #AImania #AIhype #GAI #AI #genAI #Bubble #EconomicBubble #USeconomics #AIBubble
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The Guardian (which has a partnership with #OpenAI) repeating the same bullsh*t framing of AI cybersecurity issues. The culprits here are AI firms for following inadequate security protocols, not models ‘going rogue’. #AIHype #GenAI #Anthropic
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vovinwhtulbsx4mwfw26r5ni/post/3msd5tjshph26 -
"Last week’s tech earnings saw outlet after outlet claim that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s AI bets were “paying off” as their respective cloud segments reported record revenue growth, casually ignoring that none of them have broken out their AI revenues
(...)
To be clear, all three of these companies’ cloud platforms have many other customers paying for many other things other than generative AI services or AI GPUs, and they’ve all engaged in a combination of multiple outright price increases and changing their core subscriptions to force AI features on them as a means of boosting revenues and conning the street into believing that “AI is paying off” every time they non-consensually thrust it on their customers, framing higher prices as “better value” in a way that fucks the user to appease Wall Street.Yet the biggest con of all is that a vast majority of this revenue growth comes from the compute spend of Anthropic and OpenAI, both of whom account for the vast majority of AI revenues and overall cloud growth we’ve seen in the last few years.
Every publication you read right now will tell you that AWS and Azure and Google Cloud are growing like wildfire as a result of the hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve invested in AI GPUs and data centers, when the truth is far simpler: their revenues are being buoyed by two unprofitable, unsustainable AI labs that cannot exist without being funneled tens of billions of dollars each year.
And a decent chunk of that money is coming from the hyperscalers themselves. In the last seven months alone, Google has sunk $10 billion (and up to $30 billion more) into Anthropic, with Amazon funnelling $5 billion to Anthropic within a week of that investment and a total of $50 billion into OpenAI."
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-demand-bubble/
#AI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #AIHype #BigTech #OpenAI #Anthropic
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"It seems as if we are in what often happens toward the final phases of a speculative time in the markets, what might be called a bubble, which is characterized by absolutely wild, insane swings in stock prices. These are not penny stocks; these are humongous massive cap tech stocks. Apple is down 10% today simply because they warned that their next quarter might not be as good as expected because memory and other component prices are so high. You have IBM losing more value in a single day after its last earnings warning than it had lost since Black Monday 1987. You have these massive tech stocks, which represent most of the value of the stock market, acting like penny stocks, and that tends not to be a great sign. That's usually when investors don't know what to make of the current state of things and are trying desperately to figure out where to put their money. There's a lot of tea leaf reading. It has varied widely. Meta, investors didn't like what Meta was saying. Their cash flow decreased dramatically because of the capex spending they're doing to build new data centers. Everybody freaked out on that and there was a big sell-off."
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""How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves:
(...)
Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput:
(...)
An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn't going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don't "100x" your code this way, at least, not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It's a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It's not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost.That is why some individual coders report such delight with their AI tools. They engage with those tools on their own terms, to improve their work in the ways that they, in their expert judgment, consider beneficial. No one ranks them on a "token-maximization" scoreboard. No one tells them they can't do a project if it isn't "sufficiently AI." When they set out to do a project, no one makes them prove that it couldn't be "done by AI."
As ever, the most important fact about a given technology isn't "what it does," but "who it does it for" and "who it does it to.""
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#AI #GenerativeAI #Chatbots #AIAgents #LLMs #AIBubble #AIHype #SoftwareDevelopment
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Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, Episode 82 - Who's Responsible for "Responsible AI"?
https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/2By327fcUi38xBSGpWas84