TechTakes

I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than last year.

Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I don't usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his "entrepreneurial mindset", though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways ("Just ask it!"), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 "penicillin-events" in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.

It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadn't touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldn't matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didn't leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.

The Washington Post is driving straight into the portable toilets at a beer festival.

OT: I GOT THE JOB HOLY SHIT

For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.

https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/

There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.

As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it's clear that they're not aware of the issue enough right now.

There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.

It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.

Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we're not qualified and it never goes well.

AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.

hackernews enthusiast tpacek is filled with incredulity when some friends won't join his new religious movement. This of course has triggered a 1200 reply long thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063

Also, happy Pride :3

Yes, happy pride month everyone!

I've decided that this year I'm going to be more open about this and wear a pride bracelet whenever I go in public this month. Including for (remote) work meetings where nobody knows... wonder if anyone will notice.

another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with

Followup to this bit of news: 'Natasha Lyonne addresses backlash to her AI "hybrid" movie'

Link to interview: (variety) (archive)

relevant section from interview:

As the second season of “Poker Face” trickles out, Lyonne is shifting her focus to another project: her feature directorial debut, which she wrote with Brit Marling. Titled “Uncanny Valley,” the movie follows a teenage girl whose grip on the real world unravels when she is consumed by a popular augmented reality video game. The project will blend traditional filmmaking with AI, courtesy of what she describes as an “ethical” model trained only on copyright-cleared data.

“It’s all about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave,” says Lyonne, emphasizing that it is not a “generative AI movie” but uses tools for things like set extensions.

When the film was announced in April, many on the internet did not see it that way.

“It’s comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension,” says Lyonne. “Suddenly I became some weird Darth Vader character or something. That’s crazy talk, but God bless!”

“I’ve never been inside of one of those before,” Lyonne says of the vortex of backlash. “It’s scary in there, if anyone’s wondering. It’s not fun when people say not nice things to you. It grows you up a bit.”

She looks at Johnson, who, in 2017, felt the wrath of “Star Wars” fanboys when he subverted expectations on the critically acclaimed, yet divisive “Last Jedi.” His advice: shut off the noise and just make things. In a social media era where film and TV projects are judged before they’re even made, “any great art, during the process of making it, is going to seem like a terrible idea that will never work,” he says. “Anything great is created in a bubble. If it weren’t, it would never make it past the gestation period.”