r/WTFisAI

An artist on X posted a Claude Monet water lilies painting from 1915 and told everyone he generated it with AI, then asked to explain why it looked inferior to a real Monet.

Hundreds of confident people called it the kind of slop you'd expect from a high school art assignment. The painting actually hangs in a museum and has been there since long before AI existed.

This same reflex shows up everywhere online now. Write a normal post or a personal comment, and a chunk of people will scream "AI slop" without reading the second sentence. People flag a photo because the lighting looks too clean, an email because the writer used a colon, a LinkedIn caption because somebody happens to write in clear English without typos.

Most of the people doing it can't actually tell the difference, they've just decided in advance that anything they don't vibe with must be AI, and the label does all the work for their eyes. A lot of that anger isn't really about the writing or the picture either, it's about jobs and the quiet fear of AI taking over what you do for a living. Yelling "AI slop" feels like punching back at the thing that's threatening them, and it costs nothing.

Plenty of AI output really is lazy and forgettable, but if your slop detector pings on a Monet from 1915 or on a person who just happens to write in full sentences, then your detector isn't really a detector, it's a reflex dressed up in confidence.

Anyone else getting called AI lately for stuff you wrote yourself? Do you think this calms down once people realize how often they're wrong, or does it just get worse?

Original post from X: https://x.com/SHL0MS/status/2054280631807316329

Musk's entire mega lawsuit against OpenAI fell apart in less than two hours of jury deliberation, and from what I can tell the jury never even got to the actual question of whether OpenAI did anything wrong. They just decided he sued too late and that was the whole show.

For anyone who hasn't followed this circus, Musk was one of the original co-founders of OpenAI when it was a research nonprofit that was supposed to stay that way forever. He had a falling out, walked away from the board, and then watched from the sidelines as OpenAI converted to a for-profit structure, partnered with Microsoft, and somehow became the company that ate the AI industry. He's been furious about it for years, finally sued saying they basically robbed a charity, and his expert valued the wrongful gains at somewhere between 78 and 135 billion.

The judge wasn't subtle about her opinion either. During the damages hearing she told Musk's own expert that his entire analysis seemed to have nothing to do with the actual facts of the case, which is the kind of thing you don't want to hear from a federal judge while you're still on the stand trying to defend your number. Then the jury came back in basically a coffee break and said he waited too long anyway, so the damages question never really mattered.

His lawyer is talking appeal so this drags into next year probably, but appeals don't usually save you when the statute of limitations is the issue. Either the deadline had passed or it hadn't, not really a question of interpretation.

If this had gone the other way, OpenAI would have been on the hook for a massive damages judgment, Altman could have been pushed out, and the whole Microsoft structure that funds basically everything you actually use when you talk to ChatGPT would have been thrown into serious chaos. None of that is happening now.

Anyone here following the trial closely? Curious if I'm missing something on the appeal angle.

Trump came back from his China trip Friday and told reporters something nobody expected. Beijing isn't actually buying Nvidia's chips, and not because the US blocked the sale, this time China itself said no.

His own Commerce Department had cleared Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com and a few others to buy the H200. The companies placed their orders, then pulled them after Beijing told them not to bother. Trump's exact words about why: "they want to develop their own".

That basically means Beijing wants its money going to Huawei instead of an American company that could get cut off again next time the political wind shifts.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, said his China market share went from around 95% to essentially zero. That's the most valuable company in the world losing the entire Chinese market.

There's also a strange detail most people glossed over. Under the new export framework, every H200 sold into China comes with a 25% fee that goes straight to the US Treasury. America was about to collect a cut on every single sale, and China still said thanks but no.

To me this is the moment the AI chip war stopped being one-sided. For years Washington was the one deciding who China could buy from. Now Beijing is deciding it doesn't want to buy at all.

Anyone else surprised by how this played out?

The Musk vs Altman trial wrapped Thursday and the jury starts deliberating Monday. Musk wants 150 billion dollars clawed back from OpenAI for what he says was a stolen charity, but the case might not even get to the moral stuff. OpenAI's defense is mostly statute of limitations, and a forensic accountant testified that all of Musk's donations were already spent before the lawsuit was filed. If the jury buys that, the whole thing dies on a technicality.

Shivon Zilis, who happens to be Musk's adviser and the mother of several of his kids, sat on OpenAI's board and voted to approve contested transactions Musk is now suing over. She allegedly didn't tell the other board members about her personal relationship with him for years. So part of Musk's case rests on deals his own ally on the board approved while keeping a major conflict of interest quiet.

Then there's Musk himself, who skipped closing arguments and flew to China with Trump while the trial was wrapping. The judge had explicitly told him he was still subject to recall and could be brought back at any moment. He left anyway without asking for permission. OpenAI's lawyer used the empty chair in closing, basically pointing out to the jury that his clients showed up while Musk did not.

The verdict is technically advisory, and the judge has the final call. But if the jurors side with Musk, that could mean the end of OpenAI as a for-profit company.

Anyone else following this, and how do you think the jury votes Monday?

Last October OpenAI quietly let over 600 of its employees cash out $6.6 billion in stock. What can be interesting isn't the money itself, it's what 600 newly rich AI staffers tend to do with their next decade.

When PayPal got sold to eBay back in the early 2000s, a small group of its early employees walked away with serious money. They went on to build SpaceX, YouTube, LinkedIn, Palantir, and Yelp. They later helped fund a lot of the major Silicon Valley startups that came after. People called them the PayPal mafia.

OpenAI just did the same thing on a much bigger scale. And this isn't your average tech crowd. The group includes the engineers and researchers who built ChatGPT, trained the latest models, and figured out how the most advanced AI systems actually work on the inside.

This pattern has already started, even before this share sale. There are already around 18 startups out there founded by ex-OpenAI people: Anthropic (now one of the most valuable AI companies in the world, co-founded by former OpenAI execs Dario and Daniela Amodei), Perplexity (the AI search tool), Safe Superintelligence (Ilya Sutskever's new project), Thinking Machines (started by Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO), Periodic Labs (AI for finding new materials), plus a long tail of smaller ones. And this is before the deal that just made hundreds more of them generationally rich.

Now imagine hundreds of them have life-changing money in the bank, full insider knowledge, and a real choice to either stay or leave. Most will stay because the work is the most exciting thing happening in tech right now. But a meaningful chunk of them will leave. Those leavers will spread out and start the next generation of AI companies. That means more options for users, and real competition coming from outside the usual handful of labs.

If you've been frustrated by the same handful of AI tools dominating everything, this share sale is actually good news. The next wave of AI products is probably being planned right now by people who used to ship features inside OpenAI.

Anyone here watching the OpenAI alumni founder list? Anything specific you're hoping comes out of this?

Greg Brockman is the president of OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. Back in 2017 he kept a private journal on his computer where he vented about Elon Musk, who at the time co-chaired OpenAI's board and was one of the early funders backing the project. That journal just got dragged into the open in federal court in Oakland, where Musk is suing OpenAI for $150 billion claiming they betrayed the nonprofit promise the whole project was built on.

Musk's lawyer pulled it up on a screen and read entries out loud to the jury. One line from a November 2017 entry: "the true answer is that we want him out". Another from the same entry: "it'd be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that'd be pretty morally bankrupt". And this fragment from the same page: "cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit".

So the president of the company is on the record, in his own private diary, naming the exact move they were thinking about and saying out loud that it would be wrong to do, and then a few years later that's basically what happened. OpenAI did restructure last October into a for-profit public benefit corporation, though a nonprofit foundation technically still sits on top. Musk eventually walked away from the OpenAI board entirely. The "nonprofit lab to save humanity" pitch from the early days turned into a Microsoft-backed company now bigger than most public corporations on earth.

The trial is still going for a couple more weeks, Brockman's diary was just one piece of evidence. The former CTO of OpenAI also got pulled in via video deposition and the gist there was no kinder. So there's probably more of this coming.

Anyone else been following this trial? What's been the most damning thing read out so far?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/09/elon-musk-sam-altman-openai-trial