Quantum Fax Machine

Irresponsible Ai Reading List - October 2025

This month's Irresponsible AI Reading List for October 2025 explores fundamental brittleness and power consolidation. Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji? investigates bizarre failure modes where specific Unicode characters trigger catastrophic model behavior - temperature spikes, gibberish output, or complete breakdowns. These aren't edge cases but symptoms of architectural fragility: systems processing billions of parameters can't robustly handle a single emoji. The technical deep-dive reveals how tokenization choices and training corpus artifacts create invisible landmines throughout the input space.

Industry consolidation accelerates as major players move to lock in advantages. Hollywood AI battle deepens as OpenAI and studios clash over training data documents escalating conflicts between AI developers and content creators over copyright, compensation, and control. Studios want to license their libraries whilst blocking competitors; OpenAI claims fair use whilst seeking exclusive partnerships. Both sides seek monopolistic positions - the battle isn't about principle but about who captures value from automated content generation.

October crystallizes tensions present throughout 2025: systems simultaneously too brittle for production use yet powerful enough to restructure industries and labour markets. The seahorse emoji exposes technical immaturity; Hollywood battles reveal economic stakes driving deployment despite those limitations. We're watching an industry race toward dominance in technologies that fundamentally don't work as advertised, betting that market power will matter more than technical competence.

As always, the Quantum Fax Machine Propellor Hat Key will guide your browsing. Enjoy!

irresponsible-ai-propellor-hat-key.png

Links

Regards,
M@

[ED: If you'd like to sign up for this content as an email, click here to join the mailing list.]

Originally published on quantumfaxmachine.com and cross-posted on Medium.

hello@matthewsinclair.com | matthewsinclair.com | bsky.app/@matthewsinclair.com | masto.ai/@matthewsinclair | medium.com/@matthewsinclair | xitter/@matthewsinclair |