As with AI art, these bros fail to understand that creative writing isn’t a slop bucket that needs refilling by any means possible. The reason creative writing is beloved is because it gives us insight into the thoughts and imaginations of fellow humans, not homogenized and plagiarized slurry
“AI is constantly incorrect, environmentally damaging and such a stupid way of learning. I started studying so I could be taught by professionals, not a robot telling me slop gathered from hundreds of places on the internet,” the student said.
a lot of eugenicists in the early days, and then during the cold war when uni's got huge influxes of cash it was all from the DoD and related MIL, so the computing researchers who thrived were the ones who could stomach taking blood money. it arguably shaped that+later generations of researchers
after 4 years the "critical" tech community will be comprised of objectively uncritical computer scientists who "defiantly" use words like "ethical", "participatory", or "human-centered" in proposals to train hegemonic algorithmic systems, because that's the form & extent of their hashtag-resistance
the tech stack musk is using is incidental. computer scientists who happen to be interested in LLMs will make careers out of the next 4 years chasing the idiosyncrasies of the implementations of these systems, condescendingly dismissing the study of the political movement animating all of this shit
Newsletter: There is no AI Revolution. Consumer adoption of generative AI outside of ChatGPT is barely 100 million people, every single company in generative AI is deeply unprofitable, Microsoft is pulling capex, and OpenAI spent $9bn in 2024 to lose $5bn.
www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-m...
The circumstances are “we’re not sure if there is a Federal Trade Commission anymore and we’d like to try something”
This article - exploring how an economist at UChicago convinced Chicago sheriffs to implement ever more intrusive surveillance despite 80%+ error rates (!) - did not assuage my general feeling that economists are a plague
Court orders Musk out of the Treasury computer payment systems until it can sort out whether the DOGE is a legal government entity.
In irony too funny for words, Anthropic asks that you please don’t use AI in your job application.
No, really!
open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...
So it’s to be Maoism, then, is it?
Can't fix institutional design problems with "literacy" solutions. See this often in AI policy: public tech education, awareness, training programs proposed as solutions to low trust in AI, tech companies, & regulators - without addressing why the public mistrusts those institutions to begin with
When the Patriot Act was passed, libraries got requests for patrons’ borrowing history. We were prohibited from disclosing those requests.
We deleted and shredded those records and stopped tracking reading history for that reason.
ALSO.
Yup. Microsoft automatically switched me to the $99.99/year version with Spicy Autocomplete. You have to go all the way through "cancel subscription" to be presented these options and get the $69.99/year one you actually chose.
SHARE WIDELY.
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS.
With mass deportations starting today across the country, it is vitally important - for both citizens and non-citizens - to know your rights.
You have the right to remain silent. Assert it. You have the right to a lawyer. Ask for one.
(1/3)
Use Signal to talk about protests
Use Signal to talk about your wordle score
Use Signal to talk about abortion
Use Signal to talk about your mom's knitting club
Use Signal to talk about parties
Use Signal to talk about gender affirming care
Use Signal to talk about the weather
Use Signal
Discworld QOTD, from Snuff
“I tell you, commander, it's true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they're doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.”
... the only solution right now would be to spend another full day on chat/phone support. Otherwise, just wait. They rolled this out without permission, and they HAVE AN INTERFACE FOR USERS TO DISABLE IT, they just aren't letting most users access it without jumping through endless hoops.
"You also have confirmed that unless users go through a similar set of support, that took me six hours today, there will never be any way to turn this off."
Google: "Yes."
He later followed up/said instead that there eventually will be a way (no timeline).
I want to share my experience today with Google support, trying to get Gemini (their AI/plagiarism machine) turned off in my Google workspace account. That account is where I personally do all my work communication—I am an editor, and most of my work contracts explicitly ban any use of Generative AI
Congratulations to you and team
I've spent the past year obsessed with how police are using facial recognition. What I found: Police in 12 states have used these tools to find and arrest suspects when they have no other evidence, leading to wrongful arrests
wapo.st/4fQYlXn
🧵 what I learned from 1,000 docs & dozens of sources ->
Before people start whining about why they specifically need a cup of coffee to be delivered to them by a person scraping pennies to survive, let me remind you that the streets are public and cities have to deal with lots of expensive problems caused by your selfishness and laziness.
The huge excitement right now about AI in schools really needs tempering with some historical reality-checking. It won't be "different this time" because the tech is only one part of a bundle of financial and political desires, as tech in schools always has been.
TOP 5 EDTECH FAILS!
1 The LA schools chatbot,which it turned out couldn't do what its vendors claimed and possibly spilled student data everywhere after millions of public funding www.the74million.org/article/chat...
Jeff Bezos never wanted this cartoon to become public.
He killed it, and as a result, pulitzer prize editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit.
Make sure everyone sees this cartoon.
“The only clue that users seemingly had of Siri's alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden,”
What a colossal gaslight that was.