Midjourney is an AI image generator and copyright violation machine. What’s the weirdest and dumbest business pivot an image generator company could possibly make? Yesterday, Midjourney CEO David Holz announced Midjourney Medical! No, they didn’t call it “Medjourney.” They’re goi … | Continue reading
Unreal Engine is a video game engine produced by Epic Games. It’s what Fortnite is written on top of. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is convinced the slop machine is the future. In November, he was claiming the Steam store — Epic’s direct competitor — should stop tagging games using AI, be … | Continue reading
Chatbots are a security hole the moment you let them do real work — because you can always prompt-inject a chatbot. And if Microsoft does this stupid thing, you can break in and get confidential company information. This one comes from Varonis, who found the “reprompt” attack in … | Continue reading
Last September, programmer Mike Judge asked: if AI’s so good for coding, where are all the little AI apps? Where are the widgets someone just vibed? Where’s all the AI shovelware? He worked out the numbers — and there had been no uptick in apps going to the Apple or Google stores … | Continue reading
Google’s AI overviews are accurate 91% of the time! Which means 9% of the time, the AI is just making stuff up. [NYT, archive] That’s not good enough when the AI hallucinates that someone’s a crook. Two publishing houses in Munich sued Google for defamation when the AI overview m … | Continue reading
Rodrigo Ghedin translates “rsync goes AI slop, breaks your backups” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário] | Continue reading
We are moving house from London to Glasgow over 10–11 June! Current plan is no Pivot to AI for 4–12 June. I should be back Monday 15 June. You’re on your own until then. Get out there and be rude to a computer today. | Continue reading
rsync is a program for copying entire file folders from one computer to another, doing incremental updates if there’s only a few changes. You can keep a continuous backup copy. Rsync is super reliable for this job. Until recently. On 28 May, Jeremiah Fieldhaven posted about how h … | Continue reading
In March, Meta started using chatbots for customer service — the Meta AI Support Assistant. [Meta] With the Support Assistant, Meta has a new workflow for Instagram account recovery: Work out where the owner of an Instagram you want to get into lives in. Log in to a VPN with an e … | Continue reading
You can prompt-inject ChatGPT by asking it to summarise a web page for you. Andi Ahmeti from Permiso got ChatGPT to display his chosen phishing link or QR code in ChatGPT’s own output to the user — so an evil link looks like it’s a system message from ChatGPT itself. [Permiso] Ho … | Continue reading
Rodrigo Ghedin translates “The SpaceX IPO works like a crypto fraud, but with AI” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário] | Continue reading
Jqwik is a test engine for Java programs. Jqwik does not welcome AI coding: [GitHub, archive] the copyright consequences of training an LLM with mostly public code repositories have not been clarified. Moreover, hyper-scaled GenAI is a fundamentally unethical technology that shou … | Continue reading
We’ve seen this film before. Before our pivot to AI, we wrote about cryptocurrency fraud. A crypto initial coin offering would start with a white paper made of impossible lies. Nobody cared because the entire value proposition was “number go up.” The crypto coin would launch, the … | Continue reading
McClatchy Media runs newspapers around the US. But the management have fallen to the AI. Their exciting new plan is called “content scaling”. From Eric Nelson, vice-president of local news: [Wrap, archive] Nelson was promoting the company’s new “content scaling agent,” an AI summ … | Continue reading
Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical letter to the Vatican on Monday. Titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or Magnificent Humanity, the 43,000 word missive specifically takes aim at AI — and the AI bros. [Vatican] It’s a book-length writeup on the AI bubble and why it’s terrible. … | Continue reading
WEB PAGES WERE NOT MEANT TO BE FOUND YEARS OF SEARCHING yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for PAGES of SEO-OPTIMISED AI SLOP Wanted to find things anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called WIKIPEDIA “RANDOM ARTICLE” “Yes please give me ONE HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION of my … | Continue reading
We have the flat in Glasgow! My life is money-with-wings 💸 emojis. The BIG MOVE is 10–11 June. Current plan is no Pivot to AI for 8–12 June. I should be back Monday 15 June. Cross fingers! Thanks for all the $5/month Patreon signups and Ko-Fi donations — they’ve been vita … | Continue reading
Rodrigo Ghedin translates “GitHub Copilot AI token charges to go up 10×–100×” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário] | Continue reading
OpenAI is running out of other people’s money. Time to hit the public markets! OpenAI hopes to IPO in September. [WSJ, archive] SpaceX’s IPO is set for June 12. That’ll mess things up for OpenAI and suck a lot of the IPO money out of the broader market. [SEC] The other problem is … | Continue reading
Amazon still wants to go full corporate AI. Despite the February Amazon Web Services vibe-outage, which didn’t slow them down for a moment. Amazon managers were wowed by OpenClaw. So Amazon made MeshClaw, which has been deployed across the company over the past several weeks. Ama … | Continue reading
You might remember a company called Google. In 1998, they came up with an amazing product — a web search that didn’t suck! And it could find things! With the state of search in 1998, this was incredible. Google got so good at searching the internet that the word “google” became a … | Continue reading
Beale Infrastructure is a data centre developer, owned by Blue Owl. One of the companies Beale develops for is Amazon Web Services. One of Beale or Amazon thought it would be a good idea to build a water-sucking data centre in Tucson, Arizona — in a desert. Beale and Amazon have … | Continue reading
We’ve known for years that the chatbot vendors run at a massive loss. OpenAI was spending $2.35 for each $1 of revenue in 2024, and it’s only got worse since then. Anthropic keeps pushing its prices upwards. We knew that one day the prices would go way up. We mentioned in April h … | Continue reading
Rodrigo Ghedin translates “GitLab announces AI layoffs, stock goes down 9%” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário] | Continue reading
Pivot to AI comes out every weekday to brighten your life with the joy of AI bubble foolishness! If you enjoy what we do, please do support our work: Put your $5/month into the Patreon! This is the best way to support Pivot to AI. If you prefer YouTube, you can join there as a [… … | Continue reading
arXiv is a preprint server. It’s a place for academics to post papers before they reach the peer-reviewed journals — if ever. It’s where you get news out quickly. Science runs on the arXiv. Any paper on arXiv is equivalent to a blog post. Ideally, they should be serious papers an … | Continue reading
Kevin O’Leary is a TV star rich business guy. Not quite a billionaire. He calls himself “Mr. Wonderful.” Everyone loves TV star rich guys, right? O’Leary saw the AI bubble pumping up and he thought: I want in on that. O’Leary found a space in Utah and started buying up land and r … | Continue reading
The great thing about AI is how desperate and repetitious the companies’ alleged use cases are. Let’s make a to-do-list! Let’s make a recipe generator! Let’s make a travel planner! And they keep saying it’ll have a voice interface. I guess they all have individual offices. Not op … | Continue reading
Microsoft’s GitHub code repository is a central dependency for open source software. Corporate development teams love it too. But GitHub’s been having serious reliability problems lately — 86% uptime over the past 90 days. [Missing GitHub Status] We don’t have direct smoking gun … | Continue reading
An asset bubble is an opportunity. By late 2024, financiers were already constructing collateralised GPU obligations, lending against video cards. CoreWeave borrows against its Nvidia GPUs — which have a useful life of maybe two years. CoreWeave then uses the loan to buy more Nvi … | Continue reading
Rodrigo Ghedin translates “Microsoft VS Code says Copilot AI wrote all your code” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário] | Continue reading
The trouble with a stock market IPO is you have to bare yourself to the world and show everything about your horrible business numbers. OpenAI’s numbers have always been hilariously terrible. Just last month, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar thought the numbers were bad enough the IPO shou … | Continue reading
A lot of people just found out that Google’s Chrome web browser happily downloads a four-gigabyte AI model. For all users. The model is “Gemini Nano”, which is a smaller, distilled version of Gemini. Gemini Nano first showed up in Google Pixel phones in December 2023. Google put … | Continue reading
OpenAI released its latest chatbot model, GPT 5.5, in April. It has a habit of talking about goblins. A lot. One OpenClaw user was using GPT 5.5 and their bot would say things like: [Twitter, archive] “helpful minion in a power suit” was taken, so I evolved into goblin mode with … | Continue reading
AI agents are the future of commerce! Listen to the payment guys, they’re over the moon for the idea! So many thinkpieces theorycrafting the fabulous AI future, where your bot talks to the merchant bot and you just get nice stuff show up on your doorstep! They’re picturing a worl … | Continue reading
Microsoft Visual Studio Code is a text editor for computer programming. In versions 1.117 and 1.118, if you use any autocomplete, including tab complete, it marks your code commit with “Co-authored by Copilot”! Even if you don’t use Copilot. Even if you’ve got “chat.disableAIFeat … | Continue reading
Rodrigo Ghedin translates “Tokenmaxxing: ‘How much did you spend in tokens?’ — CEO of tokens” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário] | Continue reading
I did an interview with BJ Mendelson for the Stupid Sexy Privacy podcast, and it came out well! [podcast] The title is “AI bubble a multi-company Enron waiting to happen,” one of my favourite rants as you know. Go listen. It’s 47 minutes. | Continue reading
Today’s Pivot to AI is a podcast interview with Kim Crawley of StopGenAI, who we’ve had on previously, about her book Technofascism Survival Guide, which is coming out in June! [YouTube; podcast] Here’s the kickstarter and here’s Kim’s home page. $5-and-up patrons can also see th … | Continue reading
In 2019, OpenAI got a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft. Back when a billion was a lot of money. Since then, OpenAI’s hosted its servers, rooms full of GPUs, with Microsoft on their Azure cloud. With a few exceptions. The OpenAI hosting deal has been one of the big numbers … | Continue reading
OpenAI has been doing ads in ChatGPT in the US since February and just launched in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. This surprised people who’d never encountered Sam Altman. Here’s Altman at Harvard Business School in May 2024, answering an audience question about whether he’d … | Continue reading
Let’s just marvel at the AI jargon word “toxenmaxxing” — when you’re AI coding at work, run up as absolutely high an AI token bill as you possibly can. Why? Because it’s the future! And not just stupid. The idea’s been hot with the AI bros for a while now. But tokenmaxxing really … | Continue reading
It’s time to rattle the tin again. I need you to send money to Pivot to AI. Help keep the stories coming daily! Here is how to send Pivot money: The Patreon is here. Sign up for $5 a month today! Less than a beer! This is the most effective way to support Pivot to AI. For casual … | Continue reading
Armin Himmelrath at Der Spiegel writes up German publisher Kohl-Verlag’s wonderful new line of textbooks for kids with learning disabilities! Kohl’s been promoting these just in the last month or so. [Spiegel, in German, archive] The authors and illustrators don’t seem to exist. … | Continue reading
Every month on the podcast and YouTube, I do a patron name read. This month’s is Thursday 30 April. You can be in the list! Just join the Patreon, then go to this post and comment with how you’d like to be mentioned. If you joined as a YouTube member rather than on Patreon, email … | Continue reading
Rodrigo Ghedin translates “Claude Code rate limits: Anthropic AI squeezes the customers” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário] | Continue reading
Ghost In The Machine is a great new anti-AI documentary. I’m in it, so you know it’s good stuff. [home page] Summary: the field of AI is not just coincidentally loaded with race scientists and eugenicists, its entire history is olde timey colonial race science all the way down an … | Continue reading
OpenClaw is a vibe-coded personal assistant. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was enraptured with OpenClaw in January: [Information, archive] Nadella told colleagues he has started testing Clawdbot, an open-source AI product powered by Anthropic models, to automate tasks on a user’s c … | Continue reading