New piece from Brian Merchant: De-democratizing AI, which is primarily about the GOP's attempt to ban regulations on AI, but also touches on the naked greed and lust for power at the core of the AI bubble.
EDIT: Also, that title's pretty clever
The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. I'll let Dr. Abeba Birhane's horrified reaction do the talking:
this just started and i'm already losing my mind and screaming
Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan”
just fucking shoot me
Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.
It was me, I stole all the sexy robots
Okay, two separate thoughts here:
Musk says: “At times, I think Grok-3 is kind of scary smart.” Grok is just remixing its training data — but a stochastic parrot is still more reality-based than Elon Musk. [Bloomberg, archive]
If someone roasted me such such surgical precision like that, I'd delete my entire Internet presence out of shame. God damn.
I'm mentally filing this next to that clip of a black guy telling someone to just call him the N-word.
Sentiment analysis surrounding AI suggests sneers are gonna moon pretty soon. Good news for us, since we've been stacking sneers for a while.
Recently stumbled upon an anti-AI mutual aid/activism group that's being set up, I suspect some of you will be interested.
xAI has applied for permits for the first set of turbines. But it won’t install pollution controls unless and until its permits are approved. At that point, xAI will be “the lowest-emitting facility in the country,” allegedly.
Musk probably sees gassing black people as a free bonus for installing the turbines, I strongly doubt he's installing pollution controls.
As a famous swindler once said, there's a sucker born every minute.
New article from Jared White: Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill, aimed at sneering the shit out of one of Simon Willson's latest blogposts. Here's a personal highlight of mine:
Generative AI is tied at the hip to fascism (do the research if you don’t believe me), and it pains me to see pointless arguments over what constitutes “vibe coding” overshadow the reality that all genAI usage is anti-craft and anti-humanist and in fact represents an extreme position.
In somewhat lighter news, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the game, and gave him a "conversational AI" to let him talk to players in the voice of James Earl Jones (who I just discovered died last year).
To nobody's surprise, gamers have already gotten the AI Vader swearing and yelling slurs.