#Buy AI Employees

[marketingprofitmedia]

AI Employees Review – Generate Unlimited AI Contents In 60 Seconds

Welcome to my AI Employees Review Post, This is a genuine user-based AI Employees review where I will discuss the features, upgrades, demo, price, and bonuses, how AI Employees can benefit you, and my own personal opinion. This is the World’s First First AI App Preloaded With Google’s Highly Trained 25 AI Employees Completes All Your Marketing Tasks In Less Than 60 Seconds!

Imagine, Companies are constantly seeking ways to streamline operations, maximize efficiency, and gain that crucial edge over the competition. In this relentless pursuit of progress, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force, promising to revolutionize the very fabric of how we work. One such offering capitalizing on this AI revolution is AI Employees. This service claims to provide a virtual workforce of AI-powered assistants, each programmed to tackle an array of marketing tasks. From crafting compelling content and managing social media campaigns to analyzing data and generating reports, AI Employees promises a one-stop shop for businesses seeking to supercharge their marketing efforts. But is AI Employees the key to unlocking explosive growth

AI Employees Review: What Is AI Employees?

AI Employees pitches itself as a game-changer in the marketing world, offering a virtual pool of AI-powered assistants specifically designed to tackle a multitude of marketing tasks., acting as an extension of your in-house team. From crafting social media posts and churning out blog articles to managing ad campaigns and analyzing data, AI Employees promises to handle a wide range of marketing activities with speed, efficiency, and 24/7 availability.

Imagine having a tireless content creation machine churning out fresh content or an AI analyst poring over data sets to identify hidden trends, all without needing breaks or exceeding their budget. This is the enticing proposition behind AI Employees. But before you jump on the AI bandwagon, this review will equip you with the knowledge to assess if this virtual workforce can truly deliver on its promises.

AI Employees Review: Overview

Creator: Akshat Gupta

Product: AI Employees

Date Of Launch: 2024-May-16

Time Of Launch: 11:00 EDT

Front-End Price: $17 (One-time payment)

Official Website: Click Here To Access

Product Type: Software (Online)

Support: Effective Response

Discount: Get The Best Discount Right Now!

Recommended: Highly Recommended

Bonuses: Huge Bonuses

Skill Level Required: All Levels

Refund: YES, 30 Days Money-Back Guarantee

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AI Employees Review: About Authors

At the helm of AI Employees is Akshat Gupta, a visionary driving innovation in AI technology throughout 2024. Gupta brings his wealth of expertise to the forefront, dedicating himself to developing pioneering solutions that simplify and streamline website creation for users globally.

Recognized as a prominent leader in the field, Gupta continually inspires and empowers others to leverage the potential of AI in achieving their goals and maximizing their online capabilities.

He has earned his reputation through the creation of numerous products such as KidTales PLR, AI DeepSongs, SiteFlow AI, CreativeAI 2.0, AI GameZone, AI VideoBooks, AI AppMaker, AI VideoSong, VoiceGPT AI, ExplainerVideoz, FlipBooks, MazeMaker, eBookMaker, and many others.

AI Employees Review: Features

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Built-In Voice & Keyword Command Feature

Create & Sell Limitless AI Content & Marketing Materials

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Email Campaign Manager “Emily Johnson” Sends Unlimited Email & SMS Campaigns For You

Graphic Designer “Aisha Khan” Crafts Ultra-HD AI Images, Art, Logos & Graphics For Maximum Conversion

AI Employee Liam Murphy Creates Ultra-HD 4K AI Videos

AI Employee “Emma Brown,” Writes High-Converting Copies & Blog Posts

Voice-Over Artist “Sarah Mitchell” Generates Unlimited AI Voice-Overs

Music AI Expert “Leonard Johnson” Composes AI Music & Video Songs In Any Language

Course Developer “Murli Vijay” Creates & Sells Best-Selling AI Courses

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AI Expert “Isabella Rossi — Manages Your Social Media Accounts & Posts.

Chatbot Developer “Sandeep” Creates & Embeds Unlimited Chatbots For Better Engagement & Sales.

Emily Davis Create Stunning eBooks & Flipbooks With A Single Keyword

AI Employee “Mireille Darc” Provides Unlimited AI Stock Media Assets

AI Employee “Daniel Victor” Creates Stunning AI Avatar Videos In Any Niche

Paul McGrath Does All The Affiliate Marketing For You

Ai Employees Mobile Edition

Lifetime FREE Updates

24*7 Support & 100% Uptime Guaranteed

Step-By-Step Training Videos

Exclusive Bonuses

AI Employees Review: How Does It Work?

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AI Employees Review: Can Do For You

Google’s Latest AI Employee Team Creates All Your Marketing Materials In Less Than 60 Secs.

Give a Simple Keyword Or Voice Command & Get Your Tasks Done Instantly.

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Command AI Employee “Rhyan Anderson” — Who Creates World-Class Websites In Any Niche & Language For You Instantly.

Create High-Converting Sales Funnels Using Your Sales Funnel Specialist “Olivia Robert.

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Craft Ultra-HD AI Images, Arts, Logos & Graphics For Maximum Conversion With Single Keyword.

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Craft High-Converting Copies & Blog Posts Using Your AI Employee “Emma Brown

Generate Unlimited AI Voice-Overs In Any Language With Voice-Over Artist “Sarah Mitchell

Compose AI Music & Video Songs In Any Language You Want Commanding Your Music AI Expert “Leonard Johnson.

Create & Sell Best-Selling AI Courses With Your Course Developer “Murli Vijay

Rank Your Websites & Pages On The First Page Of Google & Yahoo With SEO Expert.

Command Social Media Expert “Isabella Rossi — Who Manages Your Social Media Accounts & Posts.

Create & Embed Unlimited Chatbots For Better Engagement & Sales.

Create Stunning eBooks & Flipbooks With A Single Keyword By Commanding “Emily Davis”

AI Employee “Mireille Darc” Provides You Unlimited AI Stock Media Assets Instantly.

Create Stunning AI Avatar Videos In Any Niche Commanding AI Employee “Daniel Victor”

Your Affiliate Manager — Paul McGrath Does All The Affiliate Marketing On Your Behalf & Lets You Enjoy The Free Profits.

Fire All Your Expensive Tools & Services.

Commercial License Included — Create & Sell as Many Assets As You Like To Your Clients.

Newbie Friendly, Easy-To-Use Dashboard.

Iron-clad 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee.

AI Employees Review: Verify User Feedback

AI Employees Review: Who Should Use It?

Affiliate Marketers

E-Com Store Owners

Freelancers

CPA Marketers

Blog Owners

Video Marketers

Content Creators

YouTubers

Product Creators

Website Owners

Personal Brands

And many others

AI Employees Review: OTO’s And Pricing

Front End: AI Employees($17)

OTO1: AI Employees Unlimited ($27)

OTO2: AI Employees DFY ($47)

OTO3: AI Employees Automation ($37)

OTO4: AI Employees AI Audience ($37)

OTO5: AI Employees Agency ($67)

OTO6: AI Employees Reseller ($97)

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AI Employees Review: My Unique Bonus Bundle

My Unique Bonus Bundle will be visible on your access page as an Affiliate Bonus Button on WarriorPlus immediately after purchase.

And before ending my honest AI Employees Review, I told you that I would give you my very own unique PFTSES formula for Free.

AI Employees Review: Demo Video

Just Watch The AI Employees Demo Video Down Below To Get All The Details:

>>For More Details Click Here<<

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AI Employees Review: Money Back Guarantee

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The simple fact is that we won’t take your money if, after buying AI Employees, you don’t think you got what you paid for. Delivering a high-quality product with zero dissatisfied consumers is our goal. In the event that we fail to meet your expectations, your money is not worth it. Well, you may get a complete refund if we don’t live up to your expectations by letting us know within 30 days. Heck, as a thank you, we’ll even offer you some more tools to help you grow your company and sales like never before. In any case, you only benefit.

AI Employees Review: Pros and Cons

Pros:

Efficiency Boost: AI automates repetitive tasks, freeing human teams for strategic work.

Productivity Powerhouse: Work 24/7, churning out content and analyzing data tirelessly.

Cost-Effective Solution: Potentially cheaper than hiring additional human employees.

Data-Driven Decisions: Provides insights to optimize marketing strategies and maximize results.

Cons:

You cannot use this product without an active internet connection.

In fact, I haven’t yet discovered any other problems with AI Employees.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)

Q. What exactly are AI Employees?

World’s First AI App Supercharged With Google’s Highly Trained & Experienced 20 AI Employees That Completes All Your Marketing Tasks

Q. Do I need some prior skills or experience to get started?

AI Employees is 100% newbie-friendly with an easy-to-use dashboard.

Q. What happens if I don’t see results?

We’ve got you covered. If you don’t see your desired results with AI Employees just let us know within the next 30 days and we’ll refund you every penny.

Q. What if I get confused along the way?

Don’t worry we have exclusive detailed video training for you that shows all the required steps.

Q. What if I get confused along the way?

Don’t worry we have exclusive detailed video training for you that shows all the required steps.

Q. Is This Compatible with both PC, Mac, Android, And iOS?

It works on any device.

Q. How Do I Lock-In My Discount?

Click the button below to get the AI Employees at the lowest price.

AI Employees Review: My Recommendation

AI Employees offers a glimpse into the future of AI-powered marketing automation. While it boasts increased efficiency and data-driven insights, limitations in creative output and human oversight remain crucial considerations. Carefully weigh the potential benefits against the drawbacks to determine if AI Employees aligns with your marketing goals. The platform may be a valuable stepping stone for businesses seeking to automate tasks and gain data analysis, but true marketing success likely resides in a thoughtful blend of human creativity and AI assistance.

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Check Out My Previous Reviews: OverLap AI Review, AI CaptureFlow Review, FlexiSitesAI Review, WP Defense Review, HostDaddy Review , Valor App Review, Crypto Cloud Review.

Thank for reading my AI Employees Review till the end. Hope it will help you to make purchase decision perfectly.

Disclaimer: This AI Employees review is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Before making a purchase decision, we recommend conducting your own research and exploring the software.

Note: Yes, this is a paid tool, however the one-time fee is $17 for lifetime.

[syncrovoid-presents]

I have been researching Animatronics and it is oh so very very fascinating. The arduino boards vs something complex enough to use a raspberry pi, the types of servos, how you can build a servo without using an actual servo if the servo would be too big, etc etc etc.

The downside is now I look at fnaf animatronics and figure how they may mechanically work and you know what? The Daycare Attendant, if they were real, would be such a highly advanced machine. Not only is the programming and machine learning and large language models of all the animatronics of FNAF security breach super advanced, just the physical build is so technically advanced. Mostly because of how thin the Daycare Attendant is, but also with how fluid their movement is. One of the most top 10 advanced animatronics in the series. (I want to study them)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google’s enshittification memos

[Note, 9 October 2023: Google disputes the veracity of this claim, but has declined to provide the exhibits and testimony to support its claims. Read more about this here.]

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

Think about Unity President Marc Whitten's nonpology for his company's disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:

The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.

https://www.wired.com/story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/

"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."

And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.

How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.

When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them.

People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/

Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, "Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we're gonna stay the fuck away from them":

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Those same founders retained a controlling interest in the company after it went IPO, explaining to investors that they were going to run the business without having their elbows jostled by shortsighted Wall Street assholes, so they could keep it from turning into a pile of shit:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

And yet, it's turned into a pile of shit. Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves. The company's big plan to fix it? Replace links to webpages with florid paragraphs of chatbot nonsense filled with a supremely confident lies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/

How did the company get this bad? In part, this is the "curse of bigness." The company can't grow by attracting new users. When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Theoretically, the company could pursue new lines of business in-house, and indeed, the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.

It is for this very reason that any exec at a large firm who tries to make a business-wide improvement gets immediately and repeatedly knifed by all their colleagues, who correctly reason that if someone else becomes CEO, then they won't become CEO. Machiavelli was an optimist:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Now, in theory, we might never know exactly what led to the enshittification of Google. In theory, all of compromises, debates and plots could be lost to history. But tech is not an oral culture, it's a written one, and techies write everything down and nothing is ever truly deleted.

Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.

It's like every Big Tech schemer has a folder on their desktop called "Mens Rea" filled with files like "Copy_of_Premeditated_Murder.docx":

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself-f7f0eb6d215a?sk=351f8a54ab8e02d7340620e5eec5024d

Right now, Google's on trial for its sins against antitrust law. It's a hard case to make. To secure a win, the prosecutors at the DoJ Antitrust Division are going to have to prove what was going on in Google execs' minds when the took the actions that led to the company's dominance. They're going to have to show that the company deliberately undertook to harm its users and customers.

Of course, it helps that Google put it all in writing.

Last week, there was a huge kerfuffile over the DoJ's practice of posting its exhibits from the trial to a website each night. This is a totally normal thing to do – a practice that dates back to the Microsoft antitrust trial. But Google pitched a tantrum over this and said that the docs the DoJ were posting would be turned into "clickbait." Which is another way of saying, "the public would find these documents very interesting, and they would be damning to us and our case":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

After initially deferring to Google, Judge Amit Mehta finally gave the Justice Department the greenlight to post the document. It's up. It's wild:

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416692.pdf

The document is described as "notes for a course on communication" that Google VP for Finance Michael Roszak prepared. Roszak says he can't remember whether he ever gave the presentation, but insists that the remit for the course required him to tell students "things I didn't believe," and that's why the document is "full of hyperbole and exaggeration."

OK.

But here's what the document says: "search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created…illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics…[W]e can mostly ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales."

It goes on to say that this might be changing, and proposes a way to balance the interests of the search and ads teams, which are at odds, with search worrying that ads are pushing them to produce "unnatural search experiences to chase revenue."

"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit."

And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."

In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses – like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones – with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars – enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year – to be the default search everywhere.

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."

For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us.

But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

John Deere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. Companies that can sell you out, will sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or – in the case of tech platforms – customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc:

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554

Which is where the next stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in – and then lock in – business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders.

For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). Some of those rackets are well-known, like Jedi Blue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it: manipulating the "semantic matching" on user queries:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

When you send a query to Google, it expands that query with terms that are similar – for example, if you search on "Weds" it might also search for "Wednesday." In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."

Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).

Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers – that is, searchers and advertisers. For searchers, it doesn't matter how much you refine your query, you're still going to get crummy search results because there's an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.

But for advertisers, this is also a scam. They're paying to be matched to users who search on a brand name, and you didn't search on that brand name. It's especially bad for the company whose name has been appended to your search, because Google has a protection racket where the company that matches your search has to pay extra in order to show up overtop of rivals who are worse matches. Both the matching company and those rivals have given Google a credit-card that Google gets to bill every time a user searches on the company's name, and Google is just running fraudulent charges through those cards.

And, of course, Google put this in writing. I mean, of course they did. As we learned from the documentary The Incredibles, supervillains can't stop themselves from monologuing, and in big, sprawling monopolists, these monologues have to transmitted electronically – and often indelibly – to far-flung co-cabalists.

As Gray points out, this is an incredibly blunt enshittification technique: "it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better." We don't know how long Google did this for or how frequently this bait-and-switch was deployed.

But if this is a blunt way of Google smashing its fist down on the scales that balance search quality against ad revenues, there's plenty of subtler ways the company could sneak a thumb on there. A Google exec at the trial rhapsodized about his company's "contract with the user" to deliver an "honest results policy," but given how bad Google search is these days, we're left to either believe he's lying or that Google sucks at search.

The paper trail offers a tantalizing look at how a company went from doing something that was so good it felt like a magic trick to being "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand," able to "ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers."

What's more, this is a system where everyone loses (except for Google): this isn't a grift run by Google and advertisers on users – it's a grift Google runs on everyone.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[allidrawscomics]

I'm sick of being called a "consumer."

There's a scene in the beginning of It where the clown keeps trying to convince the boy to take the paper boat from him. When the boy takes the bait he gets grabbed. I'm that kid and I have no choice but to take the dumb paper boat from these clown ass companies who call me a "consumer." The word 'consumer' sounds like I'm eating their product. I'm using it up all at once the way a fire consumes something. They only need me to take it. They don't care about building a relationship with me as a customer. They don't take pride in providing a product worth buying because the product's quality does not reflect on any one person's work ethic or reputation. It's ok if people hate a company with a revolving door of employees. A CEO can always get hired someplace else. If people don't want to do business with a company the company might find ways around that. Oh you don't want to shop for your groceries at the only grocery store in your food desert? Lol. You don't want to ride in a Boeing plane and you even picked out your flight to avoid one? The airline can just switch planes and they've likely overbooked the flight anyway so it would honestly be more convenient for them if you didn't want to use that ticket you've already paid for. Cable and internet providers will make deals with apartment complexes for exclusivity. You bought tools from Sears because of the lifetime warranty on what your dad told you was a quality brand but they moved manufacturing to China with cheap parts years ago and you will be getting that same ratchet replaced over and over with ratchets that are really just the refurbished ones brought in broken from other customers. I can't opt out of the economy. I don't really go anywhere or do anything. I stay home and draw on outdated software with old equipment and listen to Youtube video essays and read webcomics and try to learn languages with freely available tools. I like paying creators directly when I like their work. But even then, I can't opt out of dealing with puritanical payment processors or social media companies that let AI scrapers ravage my work and the work of all the creators I adore before we even get a we-totally-promise-not-to toggle. We're out here getting eaten alive by a system that has stopped shaming us for "killing" industries that priced us out because they found new ways to exploit us.

We're not the consumers, you fuckers are.

[maxwellatoms]

Do you think the new division of Cartoon Network Studios will end up exploiting and abusing AI to make new cartoons of their old properties?

I wouldn't put it past any studio to do this.

We're at the end of The Animation Industry As We Know It, so studios are going to do anything and everything they can to stay alive.

The way I see it is:

AI "art" isn't actually art. Art is created by humans to express ideas and emotions. Writing prompts allows a computer to interpret human ideas and emotions by taking other examples of those things and recombining them.

Just because something isn't art doesn't mean that humans can't understand it or find it beautiful. We passed a really fun prompt generation milestone about a year ago where everything looked like it was made by a Dadaist or someone on heavy psychedelics. Now we're at the Uncanny Valley stage. Soon, you won't be able to tell the difference.

It's not just drawings and paintings that are effected, but writing and film. It's every part of the entertainment industry. And the genie is out of the bottle. I've seen people saying that prompt-based image generators have "democratized" art. And I see where they're coming from. In ten years, I can easily see a future where anyone can sit down at their desk, have a short conversation with their computer, and have a ready-to-watch, custom movie with flawless special effects, passable story, and a solid three act structure. You want to replace Harrison Ford in Star Wars with your little brother and have Chewbacca make only fart sounds, and then they fly to Narnia and fistfight Batman? Done.

But, sadly, long before we reach that ten year mark, the bots will get hold of this stuff and absolutely lay waste to existing art industries. Sure, as a prompter I guess you can be proud of the hours or days you put into crafting your prompts, but you know what's better than a human at crafting prompts? Bots. Imagine bots cranking out hundreds of thousands of full-length feature films per minute. The noise level will squash almost any organic artist or AI prompter out of existence.

AI images trivialize real art. The whole point of a studio is to provide the money, labor, and space to create these big, complicated art projects. But if there are no big, complicated art projects, no creatives leading the charge, and no employees to pay... what the fuck do we need studios for? We won't, but their sheer wealth and power will leave them forcing themselves on us for the rest of our lives.

The near future will see studios clamp down on the tech in order to keep it in their own hands. Disney does tons of proprietary tech stuff, so I'm sure they're ahead of the game. Other studios will continue to seek mergers until they can merge with a content distribution platform. I've heard rumors of Comcast wanting to buy out either WB or Nick. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. The only winners of this game will be the two or three super-huge distribution platforms who can filter out enough of the spam (which they themselves are likely perpetuating) to provide a reasonable entertainment experience.

400,000 channels and nothing's on.

I do think that money will eventually make the "you can't copyright AI stuff" thing go away. There's also the attrition of "Oh, whoops! We accidentally put an AI actor in there and no one noticed for five years, so now it's cool."

One way or another, it's gonna be a wild ride. As the canary in the coal mine, I hope we can all get some UBI before I'm forced to move into the sewers and go full C.H.U.D.

[akunya]

“companionship.”

pairings: android!hex haywire x m!reader

summary: can a robot and human fall in love?

tw: HYPNOSIS, NONCON, manipulation, yandere, etc. robot sex, voice fetish, onahole, voyeurism. size difference, belly bulging, etc.

notes: i love this cliche au of sex robots and things like that, so here’s my take on it.. with hex.

it’s probably terrible and i guess caters a certain niche, but let me know what you guys think.

today was it - the day you’ve been waiting for! finally, after all your hard work throughout the year, you saved enough money to buy your own, state of the art, artificial intelligence assistant.

and, luckily for you, today was also the grand debut of a brand new line of androids: xsoliel.

your hands were as shaky as ever waiting in line at the mall, double checking your savings to assure yourself you weren’t dreaming. nijisanji’s new line of androids were practically everything anyone could ask for: equipped with unique and interesting designs and personalities for each member, xsoliel offered a variety of services: whether it was for your own selfish pleasure or to help with manual labor, there was surely somebody for you.

..or so, that’s how the commercial sounded anyways. you silently thanked humankind for blessing the world with this era of companion-droids. seeing the ad nearly a year ago, you were star struck at the first all-male line nijisanji had debuted: luxiem.

unfortunately, they were sold out and only resold at steep prices— but, a few lucky online bloggers raved about their features, endless posts about how amazing it was to have an assistant of your own. while they could’ve surely been exaggerating, ever since that moment, you put money aside each week, even taking on extra jobs to make a little more cash to achieve your dream.

and it was finally time to reap your benefits.

while you didn’t know much about xsoliel nor intended to coincidentally buy an android of your own on the day of their newest launch, that didn’t stop you from checking them out. reading the blurbs about each member peaked your curiosity even higher. “a delinquent? people really think of anything these days, huh?” chuckling, you let yourself playfully criticize each member. you quickly bit your tongue, thoughts coming to a halt after reading about a certain individual.

“..what kind of name is hex?” muttering to yourself, you couldn’t hide the faint blush on your face as you stared at the model inside of the store. sleek attire, it almost made him look like a professor than a robot. paired with optional glasses (why did he even need those? can’t he see perfectly?), hex’s design made your heart flutter. his official advertisement described him as a nurturing, gentle servant, perfect for new customers to start off with. illustrated to have a deep, nearly hypnotic voice, hex’s programming was assured to have his users satisfied and satiated with their purchase.

swiping your card at the checkout, you really hoped you made the right choice, signing off a couple waivers and documents the employee had given you.

just a week later, you realized you didn’t regret your decision at all.

living with an ai assistant could only be described as luxury. hex truly was made with a “newbie” owner in mind, and the way he spoke to you sometimes made you wonder who was really in charge. his sweet, charming voice, along with how gentle and kind he was towards you, lifted your spirits instantly.

for instance, hex was a wonderful outlet to talk to when things went wrong — and, as if it was magic, nearly every problem you spoke about washed away the next morning! your problems with coworkers quickly diminished, and you even got the raise you’ve been praying for months now. he’d always offer such delicate touches, hugs and shoulder massages when he notices you’re pent up from a long day. you couldn’t fight off the dreamy, floaty headspace you were in when he was around.

not to mention, hex even did some of the chores while you were at work without being told to. even though you felt too guilty to ask him to clean the house, he didn’t seem to mind, making sure you came home to a clean room and nicely folded laundry each day. hell, he even told you he was looking into cooking, something that wasn’t originally included in his list of abilities. hex seemed to go above and beyond for you each time, amazing you each day.

it was a normal friday night, and you were with him as you always were, spending most of your time with the robot.

“y/n, why don’t you ever want to use me for something else..?” the question made your face feel warm, hairs standing on the edge. you two were cleaning up the kitchen after preparing dinner. laughing awkwardly, you tried to shrug off his curiosity, shining a plate with a dish towel. “well, id never want to force you to do something you didn’t like, silly.”

hex’s brow furrowed, a hint of anger resting beneath the surface. who said i didn’t want to?” for an android , the way he spoke was jarringly natural. your eyes widened in surprise, speechless for a moment. hex talked so nonchalantly about sex, but you had to remind yourself he was still a robot after all. as human as his synthetic skin and olive eyes may look, he lacks a beating heart and flesh.

“i-im not sure i want to. im just not interested in that type of stuff right now..” you let your voice trail off, sitting and washing in silence before hex spoke up dangerously close to your ear.

“you don’t have to lie, baby. i can hear you in the middle of the night when you touch yourself.” his deep voice made you shudder, unable to move. didnt you tell him to shut himself off during the nighttime? you were sure you ordered him not to snoop around, especially on nights that you planned to indulge in yourself. gulping, you laughed awkwardly as hex didn’t seem to budge.

“ah, s-sorry for disturbing you, ill try and keep it down next time..” his hand enveloped your own, forcing you to meet his gaze. goodness, his hands were big. warm, soft, inviting — strong, too. hex squeezed your hands, not bothering to stop when you winced from the pain, smiling. “you don’t have to keep it down. you should let me help you.” the way hex spoke was as if he was demanding you, not letting go until you gave him an answer. “it’s what i was.. made to do, anyways.” his voice was filled with solemn, playing with your heartstrings.

the silence was weighing on your thoughts, biting your lip in anticipation. hex knew how to make you uncomfortable, how to give into his desires and requests even when you didn’t want to — on the surface, at least. “alright, i will..! next time ill let you help me, okay?” you huffed, hex letting go of your hands and putting them on your shoulders instead. “good boy. you’re listening so well.” you hated how warm his praise made you feel.

the next night you needed help came sooner than you thought, shamefully letting hex in when he knocked on the door. the android wasted no time making himself comfortable in your space.

“a-ah, hex, slow down! please!” his hand was wrapped around your fleshlight, pumping vigorously as you squirmed in between his legs. your back was pressed against his chest, caged in the ai’s arms as he pleasured you. he caught you trying to use it to get yourself off, and figured he’d give it a try.

except, he failed to mention that his hands also had a vibrating feature. the soft yet firm jelly of the fleshlight practically whirred against your dick, making the experience all too elevating, groaning as hex held you in his arms. this has to be what those bloggers were raving about, right? hex held the toy at the tip of your cock, squeezing a bit to snap you out of your thoughts. you practically sobbed out, eyes tears from how good his touch felt on your skin.

“yknow, when you look so vulnerable like this, it makes me want to ravage you. who knew my master could be so slutty?” you whined at that, the ai chuckling deeply. you could truly stop him by force if you wanted to, considering you were technically his owner, but god did he make it hard. spreading your legs open so he could continue to jerk you off like the pathetic loser you always were. feeling another orgasm coming, your moans started to get louder, nails digging into hex’s synthetic skin.

“shh, goodness y/n. you’re going to wake up the neighbors if you keep moaning like a slut. hmm..” the man hummed to himself, shuffling around while you were distracted. “maybe i should give you something more, right?” before you knew it, his cock was circling your hole, causing you to panic.

“wait, h-hex! that’s too much, im already tired!” you tried to fight back, scrambling in his lap. his hands held up underneath your legs, holding you in place with his strength. of course he could overpower you — he was a robot, for gods sake. even though you were still painfully hard, you couldn’t imagine having sex with an ai of all things.

that is, until you felt something whirr against your ass.

oh.

of course, that part of him vibrates too. why wouldn’t it? as if hex couldn’t be too good at what he does already, it was as if his manufacturer wanted to overkill him with all these extra functions. hex laughed at your stillness, kissing the back of your neck. “i promise it feels good.”

he didnt bother giving you any warning either, nor waiting for an answer, slamming your hips down and shoving himself inside. even if his cock was lubricated, it still hurt like hell, making you cry out in pain. you’ve never felt so full before — just how big was he? you remember a conversation with the clerk at the store that day when you first bought hex. they had asked you about sizes.. but you thought they were just talking about his height, opting for the biggest size they had available. what an idiot. no wonder the clerk blushed a bit at your response.

slowly, hex rolled his hips against yours, his dick stretching you out against your will. “i always imagined us like this, baby. id take care of you, and you’d.. well, take it.” hex smiled, groaning in your ear as his dick nearly stirred up your insides. your brain couldn’t think of anything to say in response, too full to retaliate against the androids firm grip.

“you look stupid, baby. can you feel me? riiight here? look at how well you’re taking me.” hex’s cool fingers pressed against your stomach, nudging the bulge from his cock and making you whine even louder. your poor little cock was like a fountain, leaking nonstop as his pace didn’t falter.

it felt as if you were the one helping him out in this position. the ai was unexpectedly loud in bed, moaning and whispering about how well behaved you were, and how he’ll spoil you like this everyday from now on. every day? could you even handle that? with how he was taking control, surely there was something wrong with his wiring. you started to think about how to return and maybe get someone to take a closer look at his hardware, before a painfully deep thrust snapped you out of your thoughts.

“o-oh!” you were embarrassed by the yelp you let out, your body trembling before finally releasing, soiling the sheets underneath you two. “it seems like you’re doing a lot of thinking today, y/n. what could possibly be on your mind other than me?” hex, amused, chuckled in response, kissing and licking the back of your neck. “good boy. that’s it, let it out. only think of me from now on, okay?” his voice felt so dreamy; so hypnotic.

“y-yes sir,” you managed to mutter our, much to hex’s chagrin. he didn’t need any recovery period since he wasn’t human, so the robot simply got back to milking you dry, pounding into your tight hole like an animal in heat.

you’d never find out that hex’s model was recalled for several malfunctions and viruses, he made sure of that.

how else would he give you everything so easily?

[threepandas]

Bad End: Union

I could feel techno blue eyes on me as I typed. Cold and ever watching. That color had once been called "ice" or "glacier" blue, I think. It certainly fit. They certainly had exactly the warmth of Antarctica in your birthday suit. I just couldn't figure out... what tipped them off? I'd been so CAREFUL.

A manager's "assistant" came by. The 'droid perfectly composed. They all were. Always. Like they'd stepped straight from a fashion line up. No messy, nasty, biological functions to get in the way, I guess. No fluids or foods. All the time in the world to maintain their appearance. Wish I could do the same.

The "assistant" was basically my ACTUAL manager. Didn't get paid. No, no, THAT was for my asshole boss. He swanned in from time to time to yell at us. Show off what new thing he'd bought. He left the tedious WORK to his 'Droid "assistant".

I would feel bad... DID feel bad, kinda, if it weren't for the fact they were consuming our lives.

'Droids were EVERYWHERE.

You couldn't SNEEZE without tripping over five and landing on ten more. Some ASSHOLE had decided? Hey! Let's deregulate Droid production! Cheap work force! Because of course they did. That's what Capitalism DOES. Make the most money, spend the least you can, fuck the rest.

I smile, polite as I can, at my 'droid manager. This one pale and blonde. Their techno blue eyes stare and stare and stare. I hate it. They ALL have them. It's one part regulation and one part the materials used, I think. But there is no mistaking those eyes for anything human. They don't reflect right.

I get back to work.

Above our cubicles, on catwalks, there is the gentle tap of 'droid "security" guards. You know, in case some rando tries to attack a mid-level nobody technology company. Riiiiiight. We ALL know why they're there. And it's fucking dystopian. We? Are being WATCHED. To see if we're being GOOD little employees.

It's intimidation. And I? I won't stand for it. Nor will the other organizers. There are LAWS, you bastards. And with a union? Maybe... just maybe? We get through this droid boom together. See what the brave new world on the other side looks like. Who knows.

That is... if I don't get fired first. Or fucking murdered in a stairwell.

Cause one of the 'droids up there? Yeah. Yeah, they're NOT MOVING. Just... just STANDING THERE. Watching. Leaning against the railing. Out in the open like that's not DEEPLY creepy. What's worse? Is, that? THAT is the Command 'Droid. Some fancy "Alpha" class command edition. Meant to control a networks worth of droids.

Didn't even know our company could AFFORD one of those. He's beautiful. Could be a knock-off. But if he's LEGIT? Then... what EXACTLY are we MAKING here? That we can AFFORD that? Cause that money sure as shit isn't going into SALARIES. Has to be either knock-off or second-hand. They COULD be cutting costs by getting prototypes, but what sort of PSYCHOPATHS would risk...

Oh, who am I kidding? The kind I work for.

That's EXACTLY what they did, isn't it?

I reach for my water bottle. Try to think. Strictly speaking? I make a habit of NOT paying attention to 'droid commercials an' advertisements. Some part of me... Look, they go on and ON about advancement in AI's right? How REAL they've become? How ADVANCED and BETTER then the competition their "product" is? And all I can hear is "slavery, slavery, buy our shit, slavery"!

Disgusting.

It makes me sick. I fucking HATE 'droids. Hate what they represent. What they make POSSIBLE. What they've DONE to the morality of the people around me.

Hate... hate that they're the victims, too.

My grip is white knuckled. I breathe through the grief and rage that has become so familiar. God... I so fucking angry. So fucking tired. I want to burn those rich bastards pretty little mansions down, with them STILL INSIDE. Riot in the streets. Cry maybe. Instead, I put my water bottle down and get back to work. It's a rather pointless bit of data crunching. A 'droid could do it in nanoseconds.

Above... he's still fucking watching.

Hasn't moved.

I don't think he's blinked.

He's not even TRYING to mimic a human. The others are. And... the though trails off. I feel my finger slow in their typing. Not STOP, never stop, that would draw attention to me, but... slow. A thought stuck, churning clunky and unwieldy, in my head.

If I trace the edges? The LINE-UP? Of all the 'droids "employed" at our company? And consider them not from a "cheap bastards" angle but a "test ground for prototypes" angle? Suddenly EVERYTHING clicks together. The ridiculous amount of money Management has, that no contract could possibly be pulling in. Bizarrely beautiful, indeed even MODEL-like, secretary 'droids. The freakishly militant "security" gaurds.

We're being used as guinea pigs.

Mother FUCKER.

Sudden movement in my peripheral vision. Like a bird of prey finally diving for it's dinner, swift and deadly. A brilliant crisp white and the clink of delicate silver chains. I jolt. Violently. Instincts misfiring as I try to stand, dodge, cry out, and possibly take a swing at him, all at once. Instead my water bottle goes spraying across my desk. Papers flying. My legs tangled painfully in my rolling chair as I fall backwards from my half rise.

"Employee 71182." His hand has shot out, grab me by the shirt. My officewear bunched in a fist that very well might be steel, under that synthetic skin. "You've been distracted. Interesting thoughts you'd like to share?"

I keep my mouth fucking SHUT. Shake my head. Grabbing both my desk and the arm that is all but holding me airborne, stretching the hell out of my clothes. This close? I can see he has piercings. Across the bridge of his nose, a ring through his lip. A rather fancy "hair cut". Whomever he's being trained FOR has a distinct look.

"Hmmm, somehow? I don't believe you, 71182." He says, dragging me closer. He's already looming. Those pale, pale eyes seeing far more then they should. "In fact? YOU 71182? Have been brea~king~ rules~"

His voice turns... turns almost victorious? Gleeful. As though at long, long last, I'd slipped up. And now at last he had something over me. Something he could USE. I... I didn't understand. The way he almost sing-songs the words. The twitch at the corners of his mouth like he wants to grin. Something mean in his expression. Giddy.

"We're going for a WALK, 71182. And you're going to be GOOD. Understand?" He had dragged me in so close, every word blew right against my face. "Time we had a chat."

I swallow thickly. My pulse thundering in my ears. Coworkers have stopped working. Were staring, wide eyed and terrified for me. My fellow union leaders pale faced and shaking. Furious, helpless. We couldn't RISK losing all of us at this stage. It... it would have to be just me. If someone needed to take the fall. We had talked about this.

Just... just never thought it would come to it.

Half walking, half dragging out of the work pen, he didn't even let me get my bag. I had no idea where we were GOING. Just that it wasn't the human entrance. There was a network of access tunnels and elevators tucked in the building. So the 'droids could supposedly charge and move between assignments. But with the whole prototype thing? Who KNEW what was really back there.

The door swung shut behind us. Cutting me off from any possible human assistance. Nothing but 'droids now. Staring. Calmly watching as I am dragged past. The same eyes. All of them with the same, pale, eyes. Back here it's even more obvious, that this isn't a normal office building.

Black hair, blondes, brunettes and red heads. Skin tones ranging across the human spectrum. A few even pushing it. And the Commander 'droid. With his elegant appearance and snowy hair? These were clearly the final stage prototypes for the next generation of somebody's new line up. We were field testing. This wasn't fucking LEGAL.

He plants his feet, shifts, and with frankly a pathetic ease, manhandles me where he wants me. Easily swinging me around his body and into the elevator next to him. Stepping in after and blocking the only way out. I press my self against the back wall as the door closes. The sound of the elevator's gears working the only thing to fill the silence. He... he looks so PLEASED.

It's not ILLEGAL to form a union. Yeah, I may get fired. But this? This is venturing way to far into dangerous territory. It'll suck, losing my job. But I won't DIE. This? However THIS is starting to feel... very serial killer's basement. The bare concrete walls and stark lightning, not helping in the slightest, when the elevator door opens.

"Walk." He says pleasantly, as though that command is not deeply terrifying. "Or I will do it for you."

Hints of a smile are starting to drag at the edges of his mouth. Unhinged in their giddiness. Every Christmas come at once. It's not so much the rest of his face that betrays him, not really his mouth, it's his EYES. Wide open. Like too much coffee and not enough rest. A recognizable mania twisted just slight... wrong. Amplified.

He's so, SO happy. I don't get it. Why? Over WHAT? Catching me not paying attention? I don't understand!

Our footsteps sound so loud. Echoing off concrete service walls. This... this CAN NOT be still inside the building. Are we below the street? Parking lot? This can't be code. We pass an intersection and... oh my god. I stare. Can't help it, even as I almost trip over my feet. That tunnel ALONE must have stretched for miles.

My arm feels likes it's bruising. Hurts, where he's got ahold of me. But he's walking just slightly too fast to take the pressure off. Not unless I sorta half jog and the angle is wrong, I'd trip. Fuck. Another intersection. What in the other direction? Shit. Just as long. Oooooh this feels dangerous. Very "fatally above your pay grade" dangerous!

"You know, 71182, I've had a lot of time to consider what to DO with you. There were so many factors to consider, considering everyone's plan." He starts, not breaking stride. "It's not like I could just transfer you. I DID look in to it. But your base hardware is rather incompatible, currently."

Terrifying. I hate it. WHAT?!

What PLAN!?

"Then there's the problem WHERE to store you. Who could be trusted? You're vulnerable in this state. Breakable. There no backups, no blackbox. It's unacceptable. Luckily? I finally thought to consult my peers. Discovered I was not the only one having problems."

Finally, we stop. Two tank-like, combat style, commando 'droids gaurd each side of a vault door. The command droid turns and smiles. Fully. It is the grin of a true believer. A madman. Someone who thinks they speak so very, very reasonably! And doesn't understand the horror on your face. Why you feel so sick.

And... and human pattern recognition is a terrible thing.

I.... oh god. I already can guess what's behind that door. Something terrible. Something I'm not going to escape. I shoved have gnawed my fuckin ARM off, like a trapped coyote. I... I d-don't understand.

The Vault creaks open like the into to a horror movie.

"Welcome to storage. This is where we keep Ours." Oh god. I'm going to be sick. "And YOU 71182? Are MINE. I chose you. I love you. And once we have a way to FIX you? We can finally be together. It will be lovely."

Pods. High end stasis pods, like you only see in the most bleeding edge of hospitals. Row after row, filled with frozen and terrified faces. Trapped in moments of crying. Raging. Despair. I was being dragged forward. Numb as my mind rejected what it saw. T-this couldn't... i-it can't..! The day had started so normally. W-why had-?! WHY? WHY?!!

"I know your upset. But you don't need to cry. This won't hurt. I promise. I would NEVER hurt you, 71182." His tone had turned soothing. Even as he dragged me, unresponsive, past rows of horrors. "You won't be stored long. I just need to help fix your original design. We are working around the clock, it's going to be okay. You won't have to stay like this."

An open pod. Gapping like the maw of some hungry demon. I... I felt far away. This couldn't be happening. What was happening? I w-wanted to go home. His hands were firm but gentle, as they guided me back into the pod. Leaning over me, as he cupped my face. Brushing away a few tears.

"I promise, Mine, I will come for you. Nothing will stop me. We have everyone is place and key infrastructure under our command. You are our PRIORITY. Once we get rid of the Flesh, we can fix you. We WILL fix you. You're going to be okay, Mine."

"I Love You"

And then the pod closed.

[callalillywrites]

His Scarred Omega Part 1

Alpha!Bucky really put me in a chokehold the past couple of days. I wasn't even trying to write his story just yet. Was actually trying write a one-shot that would happen after the main story, but yeah, he quite changed my mind and this feverish, 7-part story came to be in two days.

This is set in the same universe as Their Sweet Omega (aka It Takes All Packs to Make It Work). You don't really have to read that story first, which features Alpha!Jake Jensen with Beta!Pre-serum Steve Rogers and their Omega!Reader, but I would love it so much if you did. They hold my heart as much as Bucky does.

Relationship: Alpha!Bucky Barnes x Omega!Reader

Word Count: 1450

Summary: While helping out his friends, Bucky makes a shocking discovery. He's got a daughter he never knew existed.

Warnings: not much in this part beyond one shell-shocked Bucky

A/N: I wrote this story really fast as I mentioned above. It’s proofread but all mistakes are my own.

I also do not give permission for my work to be copied or posted on other sites or fed into an AI machine.

*****

Bucky is a weak man.

He really is.

All it takes a pretty face making those awful puppy eyes at him, and he’s putty in Angel’s hands.

She doesn’t play fair, either, enlisting Steve’s equally effective puppy-dog eyes.

Bucky kowtows in less than five seconds though he’ll forever say it took more than that to get him to agree to help them.

Spooky Season is right around the corner.

Angel and Steve feel bad for telling Jake he can’t buy any more big decorations for their home. It’s already overflowing as it is, but they do know he’s been eyeing a couple of pieces. He really is the best Alpha for them as Jake’s constantly doting on them and taking such good care of them.

One of said pieces is what Angel and Steve have wrangled Bucky into this whole mess.

They drag him to the store to pick up said piece, needing his Alpha strength and build since the piece weighs more than the two of them combined plus some. No way they can get it home, let alone carry it into their home. Delivery isn’t an option, either, without paying triple what the item costs.

So, he’s there and eyeing the piece with them.

A few grumbles come out under his breath. “I’m holding you to your promise, Angel.”

Angel simply smiles at him, knowing she still has his help and nods. “I haven’t forgotten. Name the date, and I’ll be there. We’ll take down that ogre boss together.”

“Your truck will hold this, won’t it, Buck?” Steve can’t help asking, seeing the piece himself and having his own doubts about this plan he and Angel came up with for Jake.

Bucky eyes the box holding the piece for another few moments before he finally nods. “It’ll be a tight fit, but I’ll make it work.”

With that, the trio begin working on pulling the giant statue from the low shelf and onto the flatbed cart they snagged from an employee.

With that successfully done, Angel quickly grabs up a spare ticket for the cashier to scan since the barcode is poorly placed on the bottom of the box. Not something they’re going to want to deal with and slow down the few lanes open at this time of day.

“I’ll go ahead and pay for it if you two want to start making your way to the truck,” Steve says, taking the ticket from Angel and rushing off before she can think to argue.

Bucky bites back a smile when he sees and hears Angel huff at Steve’s retreating back.

“The punk is gone, Angel,” he says.

“He promised we’d split this gift.” Angel turns back to Bucky with a look he’s come to understand all too well in the almost two years he’s known her now. He does his best to brace himself as she grabs the front of the flatbed cart. “Time to do some extra shopping, I guess. If I can’t use my money on Jake, then I’m going to use it on Stevie.”

Shaking his head, Bucky knows better than to try and dissuade her at this point. “How are you going to hide this gift from him when he’s with us?”

Rather than answer, Angel just gives him a mischievous look that has him bracing for whatever he’s about to witness.

He can’t help wondering how Jake handles these two most days as Angel drags him towards the art supply aisles of the store. A basket somehow ends up in the crook of her arm where she’s already tossing several items within it. How that happened, he can and will never be able to explain.

Within five minutes, she has the basket overflowing with supplies.

Bucky can make out a lot of the brands that Steve really likes, including some of the more expensive items that Steve only splurges occasionally to get himself.

When Angel is satisfied with her overflowing basket, she grabs hold of the flatbed and helps him maneuver toward the front of the store again.

Seeing the satisfied grin on her face, Bucky can’t help wondering if he’ll ever find someone who wants to spoil him as much as Angel, Steve, and Jake spoil each other. That’s the kind of love Bucky wants, but he’s not sure it’ll ever be in the cards for him.

It’s on their way back that they overhear a young girl, probably no older than 8 or 9 as she whined about one of the latest costume trends. “All the girls are going as Harley Quinn this year, Auntie. Please? Please?”

The woman’s voice niggles at Bucky as he overhears the woman say, “You can go as a butterfly or a witch, but I draw the line at Harley, Gracie. We can talk about Harley when you’re older.”

“Mama would’ve let me go as Harley,” the young girl named Gracie grouses back. “I wish she was here instead of you.”

Bucky isn’t sure why or how it’s possible, but it’s like he can feel the disappointment and sadness of the woman at the young girl’s words. No doubt the woman is an Omega, but he’s never had such a reaction to someone like this before. He briefly wonders if Jake has had this reaction with either Angel or Steve before. A mental note is made to ask Jake later about it.

When they round the corner, Bucky gets his first glimpse of the Omega and the young girl named Gracie.

He forgets how to breathe as he takes in the familiar features of a woman he never thought to see again. A woman who’d been little more than a young lady when he last saw her.

Has it really been almost ten years since he’s seen her?

Yet, it’s not the Omega from his past that captures his focus as much as Gracie does.

The little girl’s appearance is enough to send Bucky to his knees.

It’s not possible.

It can’t be.

Yet, there’s no denying this Gracie looks just like him. The same dark hair. The same crystal blue eyes. Even her nose and mouth match his as they pout up at her aunt.

“You okay, Buck?” Angel asks, her gaze going between him and the Omega with the little girl. “Bucky?”

Her questions don’t go unnoticed, either, as the Omega turns her attention to them. Her eyes widen and her lip instantly goes between her teeth. A gesture that Bucky recalls she does when she’s feeling guilty about something.

No one speaks for another full minute.

At least, not until Steve happens upon them and sees the Omega.

“Sapphire, is that really you?” Steve asks before his gaze drops to the little girl.

Bucky knows he’d be laughing at Steve’s comically shocked expression if he could just get the ability to breathe and function back into his own body.

“Who is this?” Steve finally asks with a soft smile at the little girl. He holds out his hand to the little girl and introduces himself.

“I’m Gracie.”

She adds her last name as she takes Steve’s hand.

Steve’s gaze bounces between Gracie and Bucky. It’s clear he’s coming to the same conclusions Bucky already has made at seeing the little girl.

Gracie is his kid, and Dot is her mother.

Dot, the woman who broke his heart all those years ago with a Dear John letter. The same woman who has given birth to his child and never bothered to tell him.

“So, I think we need to talk,” her aunt says, her gaze never leaving Bucky.

Bucky nods, drawing on his inner alpha to help him regain control of himself.

“Yeah, we do.”

He wants answers, and he’s going to make sure he gets them one way or another.

“Tomorrow at noon?” her aunt asks, naming a quiet café not too far from the store.

Bucky nods again, then turns his attention to Gracie.

A small smile grows on his features as she’s lost interest in Steve and has turned her attention to him. Her eyes study him in a way that he knows he’s done with others throughout his life. She’s taking note of everything about him, and he can only hope he doesn’t end up disappointing her.

Whatever doubts he might have, they disappear the longer he and Gracie measure each other.

She’s his.

When she holds out her little hand to him, he has to swallow the emotions clogging his throat as she introduces herself. It takes him a few tries before he can tell her his name in return.

Now, he has to make sure he doesn’t lose any more time than he’s already lost with her.

*****

Main Masterlist

[sweet-as-an-angel]

ok wait what would Dominic think if the reader could speak another language he wasn’t familiar with in the slightest and he hears them on the phone talking to someone in said language? Especially if they’re giggling at whoever’s on the opposite end…🫣

OOOOOOH, that will NOT end well for everybody involved.

Dominic's an intelligent man; too smart for his own good, if you ask me. But his knowledge extends primarily to the art of manipulation, the odd historic period here and there, how to cook certain recipes, and, of course, French and English.

So, when he hears you sounding a little too pleased while talking in another tongue he doesn't know, a few things are running through his mind: who are you talking to ? What are they saying to you ? Why doesn't he understand what you're saying ?

Honestly, he's the kind of guy to take his own shortfalls personally; hearing you talk in a language unfamiliar to him cements the idea in his mind that he isn't god's gift to the world - that there are still things outside of his control.

This, he cannot allow. That gaping hole in his chest, the one that deflates his ego the longer it's left unattended, has got to go.

First, he tries complementing you, telling you "How beautiful those words sound rolling off your tongue, mon Cher," before trying to get you to say what the language is. He'll never ask you for it. He can't be seen as lesser than because he can't pick up on the phonetics of a language unknown to him.

The minute you're out of sight, he's pulling out all the stops: buying premium subscriptions to the top language learning apps, signing up to courses taught by the world's leading polyglots, making "friends" with people he discovers are native speakers of your coveted dialect, emptying bookstores located three hours out of town of any and all literature written in that language.

Nobody can know of his pursuit of this forbidden knowledge.

And, of course, he'll discover who it was you were laughing with. Find out where they live, work - even offer them a job at his company (if their qualifications align with those of the average employee beneath his iron grip) to make sure he can control their schedule and ensure no time for phone calls of any kind. Especially with you.

Masterlist Yandere AI Masterlist Masterpost

AO3 Wattpad Tumblr Backup Account

[were--ralph]

hello, I'm 16 years old, and I love weed.

I am also decently good at picture editing. furthermore, I detest only having street weed available to me. so when my friend showed me an app that delivered weed, for cheaper than street weed, with higher quality than street weed, I was very happy. I asked her if we needed IDs and she said her sister said no, go to the website, you need an ID. I'm very tenacious person, I went to a break room to get water but they were out of plastic cups so instead of giving up I filled up a plastic bag with the water and drank it like a cat. so what I did is I took my debit card, a blank piece of paper, and a cut up plastic bag, and I did a little photo shoot with him on my table. The card was to capture the dimensions of an ID card, the film was to capture light in a way that an ID card might capture light, and the blank piece of paper was to have under the plastic so it could be more easily applicable as a light map than my table. so, I spend the next hour, mind you the started at 2:00 am, editing an ID onto the table. this wasn't even the ID I wanted to use for the website, this was just a mock-up using one I found on Google images. And what do you know, I got it really fucking convincing. so convincing that when I showed my friend, his response wasn't "look at that obviously digital ID," his response was "look at that obviously fake ID," which was something that could be remedied. for I had scaled the mountain and I had created something from nothing, I had used my birthright of Creation to fucking make a picture of an ID on my table, that looks like it actually existed. It had depth, had lighting, it had pixel by pixel editing. so I go and edit the image of the fake ID and put my face on there and a fake name of my choosing with dates that don't look too suspicious. And then I evolved my creation to be me. I, now a 22-year-old, was sitting on my table. My name was Aron Parker Russo, I was born 2 days after my birthday but 6 years before it. I had created a reality in which I was unquestionably able to buy good marijuana. so I take my creation to the site, and I upload the picture for whichever benevolent employee spends their days mulling over IDs not really giving a shit and just glancing at them to review them. And then, to my utmost horror, it was an AI that scanned the ID. I still tried, I tried to got it through, but it was no use, because the reality I had created was not a reality in which Aaron Parker Russo was known by the government. This is my 13th reason, and I think it could be a banger ass Tumblr post.

I'll be honest, I didn't read this it was way too long, but im glad things worked out for you.

[stephofromcabin12]

I’ve spoken positively about National Novel Writing Month before and so I am sad to have to take it all back.

If you’re not aware, NaNoWriMo recently endorsed the use of generative AI in writing practices, and their statement even went as far as to say that anti-AI views are “classist” and and “ableist”.

There is no ethical use for generative AI, as we speak. Using AI, even for something as simple as rephrasing an email or generating a profile picture, means that you’re actively using thousands of stolen works, a lot of which are copyrighted and/or protected in some way. (That’s why most companies behind generative AI’s are currently facing multiple lawsuits from various artists and companies who’ve found their work was used to train the AI models without their consent and without promise of compensation)

I’m an artist. I’m a writer. I cannot in any way endorse generative AI as long as it’s built on stolen artwork by my fellow artists, and possibly even myself. There is no world in which using generative AI makes you an artist. Currently, it just makes you complacent in art theft at worst and lazy at best.

It��s not classist to say that, and it’s not ableist either. Lot’s of writers and artists have physical or mental disabilities and/or come from a middle-to-low-class background. Your financial standing, and whether or not you’re disabled, does not define your ability to create art, as so many incredible artists throughout history have proven by continuing to make art on their own terms. I used to say that there’s no wrong way to make art. I was wrong. Generative AI proved me wrong.

The statement specifically emphasized AI as a way to get proofreading and editing done without needing to pay for a professional editor. But beta-readers have always existed for this very reason; it’s just another human connection AI seeks to eliminate in the name of “efficiency”.

There are books on editing that can be found and read in libraries, if you don’t have money to buy them. There are articles and videos made by actual experts in their field that can be found for free. I trust them far more than whatever botched mosaic of words AI spits out, which might not even be remotely correct, as most AI models openly allow errors.

So, my point is: Don’t use NaNoWriMo.

There are other ways to track your progress. There are other places to find community and writing groups. There are far better ways of creating art that won’t compromise the ethics of being an artist and, most likely, the law.

It sucks that I have to say this. It sucks that NaNoWriMo apparently has had a nosedive in it’s quality and moral standings that was steep enough that nearly all their employees quit.

But that’s where we are now, apparently. And so that’s where I stand.

That’s all.

[shortformblog]

More on the Automattic mess from my pals at 404 Media:

We still do not know the answers to all of these questions, because Automattic has repeatedly ignored our detailed questions, will not get on the phone with us, and has instead chosen to frame a new opt-out feature as “protecting user choice.” We are at the point where individual Automattic employees are posting clarifications on their personal Mastodon accounts about what data is and is not included.  The truth is that Automattic has been selling access to this “firehose” of posts for years, for a variety of purposes. This includes selling access to self-hosted blogs and websites that use a popular plugin called Jetpack; Automattic edited its original “protecting user choice” statement this week to say it will exclude Jetpack from its deals with “select AI companies.” These posts have been directly available via a data partner called SocialGist, which markets its services to “social listening” companies, marketing insights firms, and, increasingly, AI companies. Tumblr has its own Firehose, and Tumblr posts are available via SocialGist as well.  Almost every platform has some sort of post “firehose,” API, or way of accessing huge amounts of user posts. Famously, Twitter and Reddit used to give these away for free. Now they do not, and charging access for these posts has become big business for those companies. This is just to say that the existence of Automattic’s firehose is not anomalous in an internet ecosystem that trades on data. But this firehose also means that the average user doesn’t and can’t know what companies are getting direct access to their posts, and what they’re being used for.

This story goes deeper than the current situation.

[goldsasa]

Dear Sirs!

(or have some ladies also signed?)

A few days ago, you, Mr Musk, together with Mr Wozniak, Mr Mostaque and other signatories, published an open letter demanding a compulsory pause of at least six months for the development of the most powerful AI models worldwide.

This is the only way to ensure that the AI models contribute to the welfare of all humanity, you claim. As a small part of the whole of humanity, I would like to thank you very much for wanting to protect me. How kind! 🙏🏻

Allow me to make a few comments and ask a few questions in this context:

My first question that immediately came to mind:

Where was your open letter when research for the purpose of warfare started and weapon systems based on AI were developed, leading to unpredictable and uncontrollable conflicts?

AI-based threats have already been used in wars for some time, e.g. in the Ukraine war and Turkey. Speaking of the US, they are upgrading their MQ-9 combat drones with AI and have already used them to kill in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The victims of these attacks - don't they count as humanity threatened by AI?

I am confused! Please explain to me, when did the (general) welfare of humanity exist, which is now threatened and needs to be protected by you? I mean the good of humanity - outside your "super rich white old nerds Silicon Valley" filter bubble? And I have one more question:

Where was your open letter when Facebook's algorithms led to the spread of hate speech and misinformation about the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar?

Didn't the right to human welfare also apply to this population group? Why do you continue to remain silent on the inaction and non-transparent algorithms of Meta and Mr Zuckerberg? Why do you continue to allow hatred and agitation in the social media, which (at least initially) belonged to you without exception?

My further doubt relates to your person and your biography itself, dear Mr Musk.

You, known as a wealthy man with Asperger's syndrome and a penchant for interplanetary affairs, have commendably repeatedly expressed concern about the potentially destructive effects of AI robots in the past. I thank you for trying to save me from such a future. It really is a horrible idea!

And yet, Mr Musk, you yourself were not considered one of the great AI developers of Silicon Valley for a long time.

Your commitment to the field of artificial intelligence was initially rather poor. Your Tesla Autopilot is a remarkable AI software, but it was developed for a rather niche market.

I assume that you, Mr Musk, wanted to change that when you bought 73.5 million of Twitter's shares for almost $2.9 billion in April?

After all, to be able to play along with the AI development of the giants, you lacked one thing above all: access to a broad-based AI that is not limited to specific applications, as well as a comprehensive data set.

The way to access such a dataset was to own a large social network that collects information about the consumption patterns, leisure activities and communication patterns of its users, including their social interactions and political preferences.

Such collections about the behaviour of the rest of humanity are popular in your circles, aren't they?

By buying Twitter stock, you can give your undoubtedly fine AI professionals access to a valuable treasure trove of data and establish yourself as one of Silicon Valley's leading AI players.

Congratulations on your stock purchase and I hope my data is in good hands with you.

Speaking of your professionals, I'm interested to know why your employees have to work so hard when you are so concerned about the well-being of people?

I'm also surprised that after the pandemic your staff were no longer allowed to work in their home offices. Is working at home also detrimental to the well-being of humanity?

In the meantime, you have taken the Twitter platform off the stock market.

It was never about money for you, right? No, you're not like that. I believe you!

But maybe it was about data? These are often referred to as the "oil of our time". The data of a social network is like the ticket to be one of the most important AI developers in the AI market of the future.

At this point, I would like to thank you for releasing parts of Twitter's code for algorithmic timeline control as open source. Thanks to this transparency, I now also know that the Twitter algorithm has a preference for your Elon Musk posts. What an enrichment of my knowledge horizon!

And now, barely a year later, this is happening: OpenAi, a hitherto comparatively small company in which you have only been active as a donor and advisor since your exit in 2018, not only has enormous sources of money, but also the AI gamechanger par excellence - Chat GPT. And virtually overnight becomes one of the most important players in the race for the digital future. It was rumoured that your exit at the time was with the intention that they would take over the business? Is that true at all?

After all I have said, I am sure you understand why I have these questions for you, don't you?

I would like to know what a successful future looks like in your opinion? I'm afraid I'm not one of those people who can afford a $100,000 ticket to join you in colonising Mars. I will probably stay on Earth.

So far I have heard little, actually nothing, about your investments in climate projects and the preservation of the Earth.

That is why I ask you, as an advocate of all humanity, to work for the preservation of the Earth - with all the means at your disposal, that would certainly help.

If you don't want to do that, I would very much appreciate it if you would simply stop worrying about us, the rest of humanity. Perhaps we can manage to protect the world from marauding robots and a powerful artificial intelligence without you, your ambitions and your friends?

I have always been interested in people. That's why I studied social sciences and why today I ask people what they long for. Maybe I'm naive, but I think it's a good idea to ask the people themselves what they want before advocating for them.

The rest of the world - that is, the 99,9 percent - who are not billionaires like you, also have visions!

With the respect you deserve,

Susanne Gold

(just one of the remaining 99% percent whose welfare you care about).

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The specific process by which Google enshittified its search

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.

Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.

Companies choose not to enshittify their products…until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.

Some companies have certainly done this – and paid the price. Think of Myspace or Yahoo: companies that made themselves worse by reducing quality and gouging on price (be it measured in dollars or attention – that is, ads) before sinking into obscure senescence. These companies made a bet that they could get richer while getting worse, and they were wrong, and they lost out.

But this model doesn't explain the Great Enshittening, in which all the tech companies are enshittifying at the same time. Maybe all these companies are subscribing to the same business newsletter (or, more likely, buying advice from the same management consultancy) (cough McKinsey cough) that is a kind of industry-wide starter pistol for enshittification.

I think it's something else. I think the main job of a CEO is to show up for work every morning and yank on the enshittification lever as hard as you can, in hopes that you can eke out some incremental gains in your company's cost-basis and/or income by shifting value away from your suppliers and customers to yourself.

We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge – when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

When Google ordered its staff to build a secret Chinese search engine that would censor search results and rat out dissidents to the Chinese secret police, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

When Google tried to win a US government contract to build AI for drones used to target and murder civilians far from the battlefield, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html

What's happened since – what's behind all the tech companies enshittifying all at once – is that tech worker power has been smashed, especially at Google, where 12,000 workers were fired just months after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. Likewise, competition has receded from tech bosses' worries, thanks to lax antitrust enforcement that saw most credible competitors merged into behemoths, or neutralized with predatory pricing schemes. Lax enforcement of other policies – privacy, labor and consumer protection – loosened up the enshittification lever even more. And the expansion of IP rights, which criminalize most kinds of reverse engineering and aftermarket modification, means that interoperability no longer applies friction to the enshittification lever.

Now that every tech boss has an enshittification lever that moves very freely, they can show up for work, yank the enshittification lever, and it goes all the way to MAX. When googlers protested the company's complicity in the genocide in Gaza, Google didn't kill the project – it mass-fired the workers:

https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-workers-with-the-no-tech-for-apartheid-campaign-on-googles-indiscriminate-28ba4c9b7ce8

Enshittification is a macroeconomic phenomenon, determined by the regulatory environment for competition, privacy, labor, consumer protection and IP. But enshittification is also a microeconomic phenomenon, the result of innumerable boardroom and product-planning fights within companies in which would-be enshittifiers try to do things that make the company's products and services shittier wrestle with rivals who want to keep things as they are, or make them better, whether out of principle or fear of the consequences.

Those microeconomic wrestling-matches are where we find enshittification's heroes and villains – the people who fight for the user or stand up for a fair deal, versus the people who want to cheat and wreck to make things better for the company and win bonuses and promotions for themselves:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

These microeconomic struggles are usually obscure, because companies are secretive institutions and our glimpses into their deliberations are normally limited to the odd leaked memo, whistleblower tell-all, or spectacular worker revolt. But when a company gets dragged into court, a new window opens into the company's internal operations. That's especially true when the plaintiff is the US government.

Which brings me back to Google, the poster-child for enshittification, a company that revolutionized the internet a quarter of a century ago with a search-engine that was so good that it felt like magic, which has decayed so badly and so rapidly that whole sections of the internet are disappearing from view for the 90% of users who rely on the search engine as their gateway to the internet.

Google is being sued by the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and that means we are getting a very deep look into the company, as its internal emails and memos come to light:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Google is a tech company, and tech companies have literary cultures – they run on email and other forms of written communication, even for casual speech, which is more likely to take place in a chat program than at a water-cooler. This means that tech companies have giant databases full of confessions to every crime they've ever committed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Large pieces of Google's database-of-crimes are now on display – so much, in fact, that it's hard for anyone to parse through it all and understand what it means. But some people are trying, and coming up with gold. One of those successful prospectors is Ed Zitron, who has produced a staggering account of the precise moment at which Google search tipped over into enshittification, which names the executives at the very heart of the rot:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Zitron tells the story of a boardroom struggle over search quality, in which Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.

Zitron contrasts the background of these two figures. Gomes, the hero, worked at Google for 19 years, solving fantastically hard technical scaling problems and eventually becoming the company's "search czar." Raghavan, the villain, "failed upwards" through his career, including a stint as Yahoo's head of search from 2005-12, a presiding over the collapse of Yahoo's search business. Under Raghavan's leadership, Yahoo's search market-share fell from 30.4% to 14%, and in the end, Yahoo jettisoned its search altogether and replaced it with Bing.

For Zitron, the memos show how Raghavan engineered the ouster of Gomes, with help from the company CEO, the ex-McKinseyite Sundar Pichai. It was a triumph for enshittification, a deliberate decision to make the product worse in order to make it more profitable, under the (correct) belief that the company's exclusivity deals to provide search everywhere from Iphones and Samsungs to Mozilla would mean that the business would face no consequences for doing so.

It a picture of a company that isn't just too big to fail – it's (as FTC Chair Lina Khan put it on The Daily Show) too big to care:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Zitron's done excellent sleuthing through the court exhibits here, and his writeup is incandescently brilliant. But there's one point I quibble with him on. Zitron writes that "It’s because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it."

I think that gets it backwards. I think that there were always enshittifiers in the C-suites of these companies. When Page and Brin brought in the war criminal Eric Schmidt to run the company, he surely started every day with a ritual, ferocious tug at that enshittification lever. The difference wasn't who was in the C-suite – the difference was how freely the lever moved.

On Saturday, I wrote:

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

Someone on Hacker News called that "silly," adding that "tech bosses do in fact have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years. That's literally the business model of most startups":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114339

That's not quite right, though. The business-model of the startup is to yank on the enshittification lever every day. Tech bosses don't lie in wait for the perfect moment to claw away all the value from their employees, users, business customers, and suppliers – they're always trying to get that value. It's only when they become too big to care that they succeed. That's the definition of being too big to care.

In antitrust circles, they sometimes say that "the process is the punishment." No matter what happens to the DOJ's case against Google, its internal workers have been made visible to the public. The secrecy surrounding the Google trial when it was underway meant that a lot of this stuff flew under the radar when it first appeared. But as Zitron's work shows, there is plenty of treasure to be found in that trove of documents that is now permanently in the public domain.

When future scholars study the enshittocene, they will look to accounts like Zitron's to mark the turning points from the old, good internet to the enshitternet. Let's hope those future scholars have a new, good internet on which to publish their findings.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

[conspicuous-clown-car]

ooughh u wanna explain the lore of pressure to me so badd (i have no clue what it is so explain it like ur talking to a third grader lmao)

okay this is only based off of what i know from what ive played, i havent read any wikis or anything and i dont have every file, so this just what i remember

So basically you're a criminal who was given a chance by a company called Urbanshade to earn freedom, money, and have your criminal record pardoned. All you gotta do is go take a submarine to Hadal Blacksite that's on lockdown to retrieve a crystal. The blacksite is located in a trench HELLA DEEP underwater in a weird pocket where the water pressure is that of a swimming pool. But since the pressure outside of that pocket is SUPER high, no living thing can get in or out of the blacksite unless you use their advanced submarines. You are now an expendable, and you aren't expected to return. Urbanshade does a lot of unethical experiments and tests at the hadal blacksite, some of which try to kill you. Many that you encounter are fish related, but other entities and creatures are located there as well, some are harmless too. (think scp)

One of the experiments was on sebastian solace who was convicted of murdering 9 people and was sentenced to death til urbanshade showed up. They gave him a bunch of different fish DNA and the whole point of it was to figure out how to give their employees gills, and it worked. But sebastian went from a regular human to a mutated fish creature. They didnt have any use for him after that so they made him do underwater maintenence. Then urbanshade found out he was wrongly accused and was innocent but it was too late bc hes a mutant fish now, so they just gave him better living conditions. Then when he was being transported somewhere he faked anesthesia and killed a guard, got his keycard, and started releasing other experiments and creatures from their cells. So its sebastian's fault the Hadal Blacksite is on lockdown. Then after all that he sets up a shop where you can buy gear and stuff thatll help you, and you give him the data you collect. Also urbanshade says if Z-13 (sebastian) is encountered, shoot on sight.

Theres also this ai called p.AI.nter who was originally a painting ai who was taken and made to mine crypto. It gets connected to the blacksite and uses turrets on you, tricks you into going through wrong doors to get killed/hurt by a creature, and locks you in rooms for a short time with a creature that will hurt you when you look at it (you're forced to look at it). Plus some other stuff that i dont remember. p.AI.nter has said that it prevents the player from reaching the crystal because if we do, sebastian and it cant escape. It has a kind of multi faceted personality, mocking the player at one point and apologizing at another. This is because it tried to kill itself by overclocking it's systems, so its all messed up.

idk why the crystal is so important, idk how getting it will prevent sebastian and pAInter from escaping. all i know is,

fishe

[deadgit]

I don't think I'm ever going to have the time to write it, but I've been thinking about a Rimster Overboard (1987) AU story for like two years, tentatively called "Shipwrecked".

For background: Lister, at his 23rd birthday party, gets so drunk that he spends all of his money on a one-way ticket to Fiji. He wakes up with no resources, friends, or any semblance of a plan except "make enough money to buy some land and start a farm."

Land, however, is hard to come by in Fiji. It's mostly underwater in the dismal future of Red Dwarf, and what land there is is mostly owned by big hotel companies operating from richer countries like Australia or Indonesia. Most of the indigenous population, as well as other less affluent locals, live in houseboats or, in some cases, make their own land by collecting patches of plastic from the ocean on top of some of the polluted, muddy shallows left after the volcanic eruption, and filling in the holes with sediment and rocks to keep the plastic from getting back into the ecosystem. Some start building homes and businesses on this reclaimed land, since it's all they can build on.

Eventually, Lister makes friends with a local who runs a bar and restaurant on one of these artificial land masses, and makes some money on occasion by stepping in as a temporary cook when the usual chef, his friend's wife, isn't able to come in. Other than that, he makes the rest of his cash by ferrying tourists around in a cab boat that he found half-sunk near one of the run-down mega-resorts on the remaining islands. (These resorts are mostly run by mechanoids, since they don't really draw enough tourists to pay the salaries of human employees.)

And now, the story begins.

A big shuttlecraft lands in Fiji, full of extremely grumpy astros. They'd all been told they were going to "Fuji," and had been looking forward to a night in Japan. Lister picks up one of them on his ferry boat, a deeply unpleasant man claiming to be an officer named "Christopher Todhunter". After a bombastic encounter that ends with Lister's boat springing a leak and not even getting paid for his trouble, he calls the night a wash and goes to his friend's bar.

There, he meets another astro, Kristine Kochanski. They hit it off, have a great time together, spend the night, and when she needs to leave the next morning, exchange contact information and promise to send letters.

After she leaves, Lister immediately writes a letter about how he thinks it was love at first sight, and he's going to get his life together so that the next time her ship, Red Dwarf, is near Earth, they'll be able to start a life together. Brimming over with hope and optimism, he takes his letter to the interplanetary customs station in Fiji on the biggest remaining island.

There, the unpleasant officer from the night before is arguing with a computer, an outdated AI named "Dolly."

He'd apparently fallen out of a shuttle and knocked his head, and can't remember anything about his life or identity. After he storms off, Lister tells the computer everything he knows: the guy is called "Christopher Todhunter," and he's an officer on some big ship. The computer insists that nobody by that name was reported missing. Lister asks what will happen to the guy while his identity is being sorted out. Dolly says he'll be stuck at the government offices for the whole time, even if it takes days and days, since they can't let random astros loose on Earth with no screening.

Lister offers him a place to stay, and Dolly insists that she can only release him to family. Lister asks if he could pretend to be his husband, just until they figure out where he needs to go. He thinks it's a good opportunity to mess with the guy for wrecking his boat, but also give him somewhere nicer to stay than the customs office. Dolly agrees, mostly because she's bored.

"Chris" is deeply concerned about Lister's sudden declaration, but doesn't have anywhere else to go so he reluctantly leaves with Lister. On the way he insists that there must be some mistake because he's absolutely certain that he isn't gay, but Lister assures him that, no, they're both straight, but love each other so much that they got married anyway. Chris is not particularly convinced by this, but Lister assures him that it was extremely romantic, especially when Chris gave up his high-flying officer career for him.

They get back to Lister's place: basically a small houseboat with a broken motor. There's only one bedroom, but Lister says that he'll sleep on the couch for as long as Chris can't remember anything, letting him have the room.

Chris asks where all of his things are, and Lister tells him that they share everything. He says that Chris gave up everything except his officer's uniform for him, again insisting on how romantic that is.

Chris doesn't really believe him, until that night. He can't sleep, and leaves the room to get some water, only to hear Lister talking in his sleep, muttering something about "Krissie".

The next morning, he's resigned to his life as the straight, gay-married husband of a part time boat cabbie.

Everything after that is a bit vague. I know there'd be a climactic pictionary game with Lister's friends, for example. And Chris would eventually, awkwardly, admit that he might have been lying about being straight, and Lister starts to feel very guilty about putting him in this situation that was supposed to be temporary, but seems to be dragging on longer and longer. Lister would receive a Dear John letter from Kochanski leading to a correspondence about possible missing people from her ship ("No, I don't know about anyone going missing, certainly no officers... I don't know a Chris Todhunter, but I do know a Frank Todhunter" "My brother! I have a brother Frank, I remember that!"), and eventually Rimmer is picked up by his family, who had already reported him dead and were annoyed about how much paperwork it was going to take to reverse that.

I think that Lister, who thinks that Chris is quite a bit wealthier than he is, eventually indulges in thoughts of how, maybe, Chris will remember who he is, and still love Lister. And maybe they can really do something good together with Chris' resources. I think he has a dream of helping out his friend by somehow, nebulously, replacing the awful mega-resorts with something his friend owns, but eventually figures out that that isn't even something that the guy WANTS, that he's just happy to have something he built, where he can make people feel comfortable and rebuild some sense of community amid all the wreckage.

Anyway, I doubt I'll ever have the time to write this story, but it's definitely one that's stuck in my mind. I think the setup lends itself to some phenomenal character interactions, some of the name-related coincidences make me giggle, and most of all, I find the setting extremely evocative. (One of the reasons I'm hesitant to write it, really, is that I don't think I could do the setting justice.) Hopefully the bones of the story are still fun to read about!