I need to step away from my PC – for a moment – because, although I have so much to write, the statements made in this video touch me too deeply and are too closely aligned to my own views and too close to the fundamental reasons underlying my own depression and disillusionment and burn-out.
Watch it.
Seriously. Watch it. If you are well briefed on the A.I. bubble and A.I. Hell, just skip to:
- ~ 34 minutes to miss the demonstration of the tedious issue.[1]
- ~ 38 minutes to reach the philosophical statements
- ~ 39 minutes to hear about deception – the universal “tell” of A.I. scammers
- ~ 41 minutes if you’re prepared for tears: to lament what we’ve lost, what we so nearly had, what humanity is losing, what is being stolen from artists ¬
(I need some space.)
I assure you this video is not about content farms, SEO or the death of search but one might be mistaken for thinking that, in the first half. Don’t. It is worth your patience. ↩︎
Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
I think a lot of the people that embrace genAI do so because they’ve been drilled to embrace all new tech or risk becoming obsolete. At least that’s what I feel from my workplace: non technical coworkers nervously grasping at it, trying to squeeze the advertised productivity out of it, with the fear the competition is already doing it, and better. The mediocrity of the results are then interpreted as a shortcoming on their end so they double down.
I’m thrilled to see someone like Freya, a passionate of maths & arts, weighing in on the matter and I agree wholeheartedly with her. GenAI is destructive in many ways, and attacking an essential part of the human experience, storytelling, is not mentioned enough.
Every person that speaks out creates opportunities for many others to give it a second thought and question this venture.
Oh shit. New Freya dropped?! On AI?!?!?!
Anything she uploads is well worth an hour or two of my time.
I was introduced to Continuity of Splines last month. Never thought I would watch a 73 minute video on methods for drawing curves, but I did and I loved it.
My favorite part of that video is the single moment of tone-shift when she describes how a point “yeets off to fucking nowhere”
There’s a huge gap in the market for just decent quality dumb web search right now.
The problem is filtering out the garbage from the results.
I use Kagi specifically because Google and DDG were too infested with AI garbage. There is no escaping it. I get less generated slop, but I still get plenty.
I’ll never forget the Kagi CEO tracking down a random blogger so he could “explain to her how she was wrong about Kagi” and harassed her for a phone conversation, and when she politely declined several times over, he just said fuck it and sent his arguments as a follow-up email because like hell was he going to take no for an answer.
I don’t trust any company from some psycho abusive asshole who thinks he needs to do that kind of shit to prove his product. Half stalking half harassment for someone merely expressing their opinion. Why would I trust any product from someone who clearly doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about ideas like consent. If he wants you to hear his opinion, he doesn’t care if you don’t consent to it, you owe him listening to his loud stupid voice saying loud stupid things, I guess, in his view. Sounds like another Elon Musk, to me.
So, in short, fuck Kagi.
Kagi was criticized for partnering with Brave as well. Vladimir Prelovac’s (CEO of Kagi) response adopts the flawed rhetoric that tech can ignore the social consequences of their actions and call this “neutrality”, as if this is a morally acceptable cop out.
So yeah, fuck Kagi.
And besides… aren’t AI features getting pushed in Kagi heavily?
Weird idea to use it as an argument against Google and DDG, but conveniently ignore it for Kagi.
Kagi has always felt suspicious to me with how many people advocate for it in any search thread. Surely any lesser-used thing that people enjoy will get talked about, but compared to others it feels like it gets way too many for the amount of users it has. Their site claims it has 35,696 paid users at the time of writing this (source), but you’d swear everyone and their cats use it every time search engines are mentioned.
I’m sure some people genuinely enjoy it enough to share it every chance they get but it just feels off to me. That paired with the CEO thing keeps me away from it.
I don’t think you need permission to send someone an email directly addressed to and written for them. I don’t have context for the claims about Kagi being disputed, but I’d be frustrated if someone posted a misinformed rant about my work and then refused to talk to me about it. I might even write an email. Doesn’t sound crazy. If there’s more to the “harassment” that I don’t know about, obviously I’m not in favor.
Not gonna watch it. I’m here for articles.
