That's Late Stage Capitalism for you:
"More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found.
The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.
Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.
The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop. One-third of the 500 videos were “brainrot”, a category that includes AI slop and other low-quality content made to monetise attention.
The findings are a snapshot of a rapidly expanding industry that is saturating big social media platforms – from X to Meta to YouTube – and defining a new era of content: decontextualised, addictive and international.
A Guardian analysis this year found that nearly 10% of YouTube’s fastest-growing channels were AI slop, racking up millions of views despite the platform’s efforts to curb “inauthentic content”."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/27/more-than-20-of-videos-shown-to-new-youtube-users-are-ai-slop-study-finds
#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedVideos #AISlop #YouTube
"On a Thursday in early September, more than 40 strangers logged in to Instacart, the grocery-shopping app, to buy eggs and test a hypothesis.
Connected by videoconference, they simultaneously selected the same store — a Safeway in Washington, D.C. — and the same brand of eggs. They all chose pickup rather than delivery.
The only difference was the price they were offered: $3.99 for a couple of lucky shoppers. $4.59 or $4.69 for others. And a few saw a price of $4.79 — 20 percent more than some others, for the exact same product.
The shoppers were volunteers, participating in a study published on Tuesday and organized by the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group, and Consumer Reports, a nonprofit consumer publication. In tests in four cities across the country, nearly 200 volunteers checked prices on 20 grocery items on Instacart.
On item after item, they found significant differences. In a Target in North Canton, Ohio, some shoppers were charged $3.59 for a jar of Skippy peanut butter that others could get for $2.99. At a Safeway in Seattle, some people paid $3.99 for a box of Wheat Thins while others paid $4.89. And at a Target in St. Paul, Minn., some people were charged $4.59 for a box of Cheerios that others could get for $3.99.
“Two shoppers who are buying the exact same item from the exact same store at the exact same time are getting different prices,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative. “The data really backs up how extraordinarily pervasive this is.”
(...)
Groundwork’s findings are the latest example of how the notion of a single price, offered to all customers for a predictable period, is breaking down in the digital age. Companies are using sophisticated algorithms to adjust prices quickly in response to competitors’ offers and consumer behavior."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/business/instacart-algorithmic-pricing.html
#USA #AlgorithmicPricing #DynamicPricing #Insatacart #Inflation #Algorithms
RT @RnaudBertrand
In a normal world, this should be an immense scandal in Europe.
Le Monde has a long article (https://lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/11/19/nicolas-guillou-juge-francais-de-la-cpi-sanctionne-par-les-etats-unis-face-aux-attaques-les-magistrats-de-la-cour-tiendront_6654016_3210.html) describing the hellish life of Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the ICC in The Hague, due to U.S. sanctions punishing him for authorizing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes in Gaza.
Guillou's daily existence has been transformed into a Kafkaesque nightmare. He cannot: open or maintain accounts with Google, Amazon, Apple, or any US company; make hotel reservations (Expedia canceled his booking in France hours after he made it); conduct online commerce, since he can't know if the packaging is American; use any major credit card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex are all American); access normal banking services, even with non-American banks, as banks worldwide close sanctioned accounts; conduct virtually any financial transaction.
He describes it as being "economically banned across most of the planet," including in his own country, France, and where he works, the Netherlands.
That's the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are:
- punishing a European citizen
- for doing his job in Europe
- applying laws Europe officially supports
- at an institution based in Europe
- that Europe helped create and fund
and Europe is not only doing essentially nothing to protect him, they're actively enforcing America's sanctions against their own citizen - European banks closing his accounts, European companies refusing him service, European institutions standing by while Washington destroys a European judge's life on European soil.
Again, in a normal world, European leaders and citizens should be absolutely outraged about this. But we've so normalized the hollowing out of European sovereignty that the sight of a European citizen being economically executed on European soil for upholding European law is treated, at best, as an unfortunate technical complication in transatlantic relations.
https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/11/19/nicolas-guillou-juge-francais-de-la-cpi-sanctionne-par-les-etats-unis-face-aux-attaques-les-magistrats-de-la-cour-tiendront_6654016_3210.html
"My gloss is that GPT-5 had become something of an albatross around OpenAI’s neck. And this particular juncture, not long after inking big deals with Softbank et al. and riding as high on its cultural and political trajectory as it’s likely to get—and perhaps seeing declining rates of progress on model improvement in the labs—a calculated decision was made to pull the trigger on releasing the long-awaited model. People were going to be disappointed no matter what; let them be disappointed now, while the wind is still at OpenAI’s back, and it can credibly make a claim to providing hyper-advanced worker automation.
I don’t think the GPT-5 flop ultimately matters all that much to most folks, and it can certainly be papered over well enough by a skilled salesman in an enterprise pitch meeting. Again, all this is clarifying: OpenAI is again centering workplace automation, while retreating from messianic AGI talk."
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/gpt-5-is-a-joke-will-it-matter
#AI #GenerativeAI #AGI #OpenAI #GPT5
"Remember, just last February Altman published an essay on his personal blog that opened with the line “Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity.” Suddenly it’s not a super useful term? Another bad joke, surely. If anything, it’s clear that Altman knows just what a super useful term AGI is, at least when it comes to attracting investment capital. But Altman tends to announce AGI is near when OpenAI is pursuing funding, and shrink from the term when the company is at a point of vulnerability."
"The United States crept closer to becoming a full-blown police state yesterday when President Donald Trump made good on a promise to further militarize the nation’s capital. Trump threatened to employ similar tactics in cities across the country as the Pentagon evaluates plans for a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops poised to surge into American cities.
The power grab in the District of Columbia, which bypassed the city’s elected leaders, follows deployments of federal troops from coast to coast, surges of masked federal agents around the United States, and consistent tyrannical use of executive authority in ways with little precedent in modern U.S. history.
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” Trump said at a White House news conference on Monday, painting the city as a hellscape filled with “drugged out maniacs” and “caravans of mass youth” who “rampage through city streets” day and night. “I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order and public safety in Washington, D.C.,” he declared."
https://theintercept.com/2025/08/12/trump-washington-dc-national-guard-deploy-federalize/
#USA #Trump #NationalGuard #PoliceState #Authoritarianism
RT @jasonhickel
The story of solar energy development in Spain reveals something important about our current crisis and how to resolve it.
Spain has achieved a massive increase in solar capacity in recent years, outpacing the rest of the EU.
As a result, energy prices have dropped. The FT reports that, during some parts of the year, energy prices are negative.
This is great for citizens, and great for the planet, but bad for capitalist profits.
Remember, capital does not care about prices, it cares about profits. Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, but they are not as profitable.
So, capitalists are slamming the brakes on new solar investments in Spain, potentially threatening the government's targets.
This is likely to happen elsewhere too. As long we leave the energy transition in the hands of capital, we are hostage to its logic.
There's an obvious solution to this problem: nationalization. Spain should create a national solar energy company and undertake the necessary development directly, totally irrespective of profits.
All countries should do this. This can enable much faster decarbonization, with less chaos and more stability.
https://www.ft.com/content/089487d5-dee0-4c38-b423-ce6802f1059d
Idiocrats' solution: Build more nuclear!! BOOM !! BOOOOOMMMM
"In 2023 and 2024, Spain added more solar power capacity than any other European country except Germany, whose economy is more than twice its size. Aggressive bidding between competitors in the M&A market drove prices for existing projects ever higher.
At some times in spring, as much as 60 per cent of Spain’s electricity comes from the sun. That has enabled Spain to slash its use of gas and coal-fired power stations. Consumers have reaped the rewards, as cheap electricity frees the country from the angst elsewhere in Europe over utility bills.
Sánchez calls his country a “global benchmark” in the transition to greener, carbon-free energy as Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent, bears the brunt of climate change. But the sunlit uplands of solar have begun to overheat.
Spain has built so much solar capacity that at certain times of day it produces far more electricity than it needs. Prices have plunged as a result, dragging down owners’ profits with them. Over the past year, “day ahead” wholesale electricity prices were zero or even negative 10 per cent of the time, according to data from grid operator Red Eléctrica. In May, they were at zero or below for one-third of the entire month.
Free power is gratifying for customers, but bad for generators. Some solar operators are told to shut down by Red Eléctrica to curb oversupply, via “curtailment” orders for which they are not always compensated.
The hit to profits has been compounded by another blow: the Iberian blackout in late April, which began in Spain and left 58mn people without power for at least five hours, and in many places for much longer.
The government has concluded that solar power did not cause the outage, but its prevalence in the energy mix is important context for what went wrong.
Investors and power companies said their doubts about the adequacy of the Spanish electricity system had been confirmed by the blackout."
RT @jasonhickel
The story of solar energy development in Spain reveals something important about our current crisis and how to resolve it.
Spain has achieved a massive increase in solar capacity in recent years, outpacing the rest of the EU.
As a result, energy prices have dropped. The FT reports that, during some parts of the year, energy prices are negative.
This is great for citizens, and great for the planet, but bad for capitalist profits.
Remember, capital does not care about prices, it cares about profits. Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, but they are not as profitable.
So, capitalists are slamming the brakes on new solar investments in Spain, potentially threatening the government's targets.
This is likely to happen elsewhere too. As long we leave the energy transition in the hands of capital, we are hostage to its logic.
There's an obvious solution to this problem: nationalization. Spain should create a national solar energy company and undertake the necessary development directly, totally irrespective of profits.
All countries should do this. This can enable much faster decarbonization, with less chaos and more stability.
https://www.ft.com/content/089487d5-dee0-4c38-b423-ce6802f1059d
"My gloss is that GPT-5 had become something of an albatross around OpenAI’s neck. And this particular juncture, not long after inking big deals with Softbank et al. and riding as high on its cultural and political trajectory as it’s likely to get—and perhaps seeing declining rates of progress on model improvement in the labs—a calculated decision was made to pull the trigger on releasing the long-awaited model. People were going to be disappointed no matter what; let them be disappointed now, while the wind is still at OpenAI’s back, and it can credibly make a claim to providing hyper-advanced worker automation.
I don’t think the GPT-5 flop ultimately matters all that much to most folks, and it can certainly be papered over well enough by a skilled salesman in an enterprise pitch meeting. Again, all this is clarifying: OpenAI is again centering workplace automation, while retreating from messianic AGI talk."
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/gpt-5-is-a-joke-will-it-matter
#AI #GenerativeAI #AGI #OpenAI #GPT5
From the comments: "First it was third-party apps and the API, now it's the Wayback Machine. This is more about control and being able to disappear anything they want than AI scraping."
https://www.theverge.com/news/757538/reddit-internet-archive-wayback-machine-block-limit
#Reddit #SocialMedia #InternetArchive #AI #GenerativeAI #WebScraping
RT @xriskology
Let me get this straight: The explicit aim of OpenAI from day #1 has been to create AGI. Hence, the explicit aim of OpenAI from day #1 has been to create something the term for which is "not super useful." LOL. What a complete joke these people are.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/sam-altman-says-agi-is-a-pointless-term-experts-agree.html
Miguel Afonso Caetano