Screenshot of a Substack post by Dr Sam Illingworth: Training GPT-4 consumed roughly 150 million litres of water. Microsoft's carbon emissions have risen 23% since 2020, driven almost entirely by AI infrastructure. We are using the most energy-intensive technology ever created to summarise emails and write LinkedIn posts. Every prompt has an environmental cost. Who is asking whether the output was worth it?

Source: substack.com/@samillingwo...

Anyone who thinks woke liberal academics never criticize aspects of various cultures doesn't know shit there's just a way to do it where you have to be contextual, specific, and not a totalizing racist and these guys just wanna be totalizing racists

strange these op-eds about women being too angry have all come out the last few days when during the same time there's also been a massive investigation published on an online rape academy with millions of viewers a month and none of them have bothered to even cover it, even as news

I want to see this movie!!!!

They’re not people lacking skills. They’re people who have the skills to see specifically why the AI is degrading their specific work environments, productivity, and products and who are pushing back against AI enthusiasts who lack the skills and expertise to see the problems.

These same boards are the same ones pushing “AI literacy” into every corner of our institutions, so the convergence-effect Ted describes in this thread—increasingly powerful boards filled w/ rich ppl whose anti-intellectual, airport-book obsessions drive research & teaching—is also the story of “AI”

OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit

Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here

Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse

Media and universities: AI is here to stay

Counterpoint: I use em dashes with abandon and will not let "AI" steal them from me. I was overusing them first and will continue to do so long after "AI" is a crater in our financial system, or our merciless overlords, or both

“They’ve stolen all the works of humanity, the books, the art, everything we’ve ever put on Reddit, they’ve turned around and tried to monetize and sell it back to us and defund education, libraries, public health institutions,” Safiya Noble says. “People are not stupid."

You should be fine. (Went a few years ago.)

I study racism for a living and can still manage to be shocked by how institutionalized it is. What do you mean they were giving tax-breaks to white supremacists celebrating treason?

just a wild country

ChatGPT is a website. Claude is a website. I will never respect a website. You cannot convince me to treat LLMs as anything different to any other technology. If a website only gets things right sometimes, it's a bad website. I will not be told otherwise.
www.wheresyoured.at/i-will-never...

The point of the university as a concept is that it's been here for a thousand years and meant to be here another thousand. Turning education over to producing what the market needed five years ago is never going to work well.

As a medievalist whose work has spanned the 7th through the 16th centuries, it is genuinely wild to see the general public and the United States government in particular discovering just how involved the Pope can get in international politics.

“Universities are about engaging deeply with the subject matter. The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying & dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”

openletter.earth/open-letter-...

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

College Students Losing Ability to Participate in Class Discussions Since They Offloaded Their Thinking to AI "Everyone now kind of sounds the same."

This isn’t a lamentable side effect of these products. It’s the actual reason they exist.

I'm sure there will be no long-term consequences to all of us veering between hypervigilance over potential nuclear war and trying to go to work because none of us can afford to pay our bills and may still be trying to recover from health consequences from the pandemic we're pretending didn't happen

Personally I think when a world leader announces “Tune in tonight at 8pm Eastern to watch the world end” like it’s the fucking season premiere of Roseanne we should have a different leader the next day.

They can still learn them!

"we need kids to get an early start operating machines that are routinely wrong and may try to coax them into suicide and/or psychosis" is a fun education perspective i disagree with actually

So, thing that is apparently better understood inside academia than outside of it:

International students pay sticker price. Most domestic students do not. International students are subsidizing the education costs for domestic students, as per student governmental funding drops.

Highly recommend excising this trash from your life as much as possible.

I am a medieval historian!! The world always is in a state, it has never not been in a state, joy and delight and beauty is what humanity exists for

A copy of Reader's Digest magazine with a headline "Making Friends with AI". An ai image of a woman faces and ai image of an ai woman.

Honestly this is among the most depressing things I've seen in a while. Fundamentally anti-human, pro-loneliness.

It’s Time To Grow Up | Defector HBO’s new Harry Potter TV series is premiering this Christmas Day. Under current plans, it will last at least a decade. The trailer looks like the original films were run through an AI generator, but…

There is no way to watch the new 'Harry Potter' show subversively. If you're watching, you are buying in.

Shakespeare and Identity in a Divided World Shakespeare and Identity in a Divided World examines some of the most pressing issues about identity and so-called identity politics in the highly polarized twenty-first century. The book uses Shakesp...

www.routledge.com/Shakespeare-...

My publisher even forgot to tell me it was being published. I still haven't seen a copy.

As we approach America's 250th birthday, now is a good time for this reminder:

One of our Founders, Thomas Paine, suggested we have a universal basic income for all people 21 and over, funded by a tax on landed wealth and property.

Sounds like a hell of a birthday gift, don't you think?

As a Christian, I don't think federal agencies should be referring to "Christ, our Savior" in any context. I don't need my government to validate my faith. That's why it's called faith. More importantly, my government shouldn't be invalidating the religions of other Americans.

I'd like to find out.