https://www.wheresyoured.at/news-openai-had-a-negative-122-operating-margin-in-q1-2026-and-chatgpt-growth-has-stalled/

5/22/2026 11:54:55 AM

Is anyone watching The Audacity with Zach Galafianakis? Kinda relevant to this thread.

5/22/2026 12:21:25 PM

Quote :

"The news has always been propaganda. The way to influence and direct in a democracy is through the press. That's how you drive action when you can't beat people into submission. Fox News just dropped all the pretense of it being a serious thing and sold it with pageant hair and mini-skirts. Tom Brokaw selling the Iraq war is the same thing, it just wears different clothes. Just because your college educated sensibilities cause you to cringe when Megan Kelly, a Stanford grad, mispronounces something (and fuck I do too), doesn't mean Fox is somehow more noble than what we had in the pre Fox era."

Do you think all propaganda is created equally? I mean, do you think one piece of propaganda has the same impact on society as any other piece of propaganda? Or that delivering one piece of propaganda is as responsible/irresponsible as delivering any other piece of propaganda? Because it definitely sounds like that is what you are saying....

5/22/2026 4:51:38 PM

Of course not which is why I use the Iraq war 1 as an example. Putting a 15-year-old girl up to talk about babies in an incubator being put on a floor until they die to justify killing 1 million people is pretty much the worst thing you could do. There are countless examples of horrific propaganda that predate Fox.

The only way to stop a bad propaganda with a microphone is a good propaganda with a microphone.

My favorite:

Quote :

"The U.S. opioid epidemic killed roughly 806,000 Americans from opioid overdose between 1999 and 2023 — orders of magnitude more than the post-9/11 risks (terrorism, Ebola, plane crashes, school shootings) that received saturation coverage — yet documented content analyses, journalism criticism, and the public reflections of the very reporters who broke the story show that corporate/mainstream U.S. media systematically under-covered and misframed the crisis for roughly its first 15 years (c. 1996–2011), and continued to misallocate attention long after. • The undercoverage was not random. It was driven by (a) successful Purdue Pharma/Sackler PR operations that planted an “anti-story” and intimidated outlets like the Orlando Sentinel; (b) the racialized framing inherited from the crack era, which made a largely white, rural/suburban drug death wave initially illegible as a “national emergency”; (c) editorial preferences for novel, dramatic risks (terrorism, Ebola, plane crashes) over a slow-moving, stigmatized public-health catastrophe; and (d) the structural displacement of drug coverage by terrorism after 9/11 — Pew documented a 66% drop in network coverage of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco in 2002–2005 versus 1997–2000. • The story was finally broken not by the national networks or front pages but by a small-paper reporter (Eric Eyre at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, 2016 Pulitzer), a handful of dogged book authors (Barry Meier, Sam Quinones, Beth Macy, Patrick Radden Keefe), academic content analysts (McGinty/Barry at Johns Hopkins; Netherland/Hansen), and the Washington Post/60 Minutes 2016 DEA exposé — by which point hundreds of thousands of Americans were already dead."

[Edited on May 22, 2026 at 5:35 PM. Reason : A]

5/22/2026 5:13:04 PM

Quote :

"https://www.wheresyoured.at/news-openai-had-a-negative-122-operating-margin-in-q1-2026-and-chatgpt-growth-has-stalled/"

Zitron used to be really good at understanding things, but he seems to have lost his mind when it comes to AI stuff. He's been posting moving goalposts about why AI is going to fail for the past year or so, and it's shocking how circular his logic is. I really used to respect him when he spoke on things that he actually understood- PR, Advertising, the pre-AI web economy. I think the fundamentals of what AI is have escaped him completely. I think he has zero clue what he's talking about in general, and he only talks about things that he can use to paint a poor picture of AI with.


Like, I get it. You read that it's damaging the environment, that makes you react in a way that instantly makes you think it's bad. Do some research, find out that that talking point is actually misinfo from a woman who doesn't understand orders of magnitude and posted a retraction. Companies are spending tons of money on it, tokens are expensive. Yeah, bad... but do some research on how that's being mitigated. Own up to the counterbalancing points. He's not even bothering to read the actual easy to source data. He's just writing immense screeds of shitposts about something he can’t even understand and won't bother to look in to.

TLDR, everything is bad to Zitron like everything was bad to Alex Jones or any other conspiracy nut - if you keep going down the psychosis hole into things that only confirm what you believe, you'll end up like this, too.

5/23/2026 3:05:06 PM

"Nobody wants this shit"

5/24/2026 11:02:42 AM

I'm not the one who made that argument, nor do I particularly agree with it, but I would argue that most do not want this shit injected into their lives 24/7 like companies are trying to do.

Just because I use agents at work, doesn't mean I want AI slop filling the internet, tv, or movies. Nor do I want my operating system, my browser, or any other devices/software to have any links to AI unless I explicitly grant it.

I think an appropriate analogy might be sportbooks. Yes, some people did ask for legalization of online sports betting, but did they necessarily ask for it to become so prevalent everywhere in ads or the sports watching experience in general? Did they ask for betting opportunities and discussion to be damn near everywhere (stadiums, ads, sports shows, etc). What about the people that didn't ask for it? It's still slammed in their faces constantly

5/24/2026 11:37:56 AM

^

Quote :

"it is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that. Nothing could be more obvious, of course, especially to those who have given more than two minutes of thought to the matter. Nonetheless, we are currently surrounded by throngs of zealous Theuths, one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. "

5/24/2026 11:47:51 AM

I started this thread with, and have reiterated a great many times, the idea that AI is a useful tool and demands more research and investment.

I have stronger concerns with the companies currently competing for marketshare and the lengths they're willing to go to achieve that end.

I have milder concerns about AI slop filling the internet/forms of media I enjoy and how those models were trained. I think dead internet theory is extremely real and think that ai produced 'art' is bereft of any true creativity and is ethically dubious.

5/24/2026 11:55:35 AM