genai

Over 2,000 years ago Ovid wrote about a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he carved, imputing the ability to love to an arrangement of rock. Today we impute the ability to think to an arrangement of silicon. Stories of breathing life into non-life have been with us for a very long time, yet somehow we're stuck in the same place.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AGI #Pygmalion #Golem #Pinocchio #Talos #Frankenstein

Got a website?

Feel like helping make unauthorized LLM scrapers choke on an infinite sea of garbage, potentially making their models collapse?

...Then take a look at:
https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

PS Do make sure to read the warnings, boost and have fun! 😈

.

Thanks to @dlatchx for reminding me where to find this!

#AI #LLM #Nepenthes #LLMPoison #GenAI #Markov

If you created a text corpus consisting only of true, declarative statements in English and trained a large language model on it, a generative AI system built with this trained LLM would still output false statements sometimes.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM

Several of my papers are in that LibGen database Meta used.

I feel a bunch of ways about it, but one way I feel is that it adds insult to injury. In all but two cases I was required to sign an onerous agreement to get the paper published, handing over rights to a publisher that is continuing to abuse this arrangement (in my view). I did that begrudgingly because I was early in my career and didn't think I had another option. Later I experimented with refusing to sign these agreements and publishers walked back the terms somewhat (I don't know if that's possible now).

I also feel that the Meta computer scientists responsible for this betrayed their own colleagues, which I find pretty scummy.

Anyway, I don't consent to any of this. It's been imposed on me and countless other authors.

#LibGen #meta #LLM #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

We were given a prompt as an invitation to participate in this newsletter: “How are you using AI in the classroom?” While we have accepted this invitation, we are engaging in the most humanistic act we can imagine—refusing the prompt.

From How We are Not Using AI in the Classroom https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53a4b792e4b073bf214c0e66/t/67ddcdb4e1ee531df076cb82/1742589366973/ICMA_MarchNewsletter_v7+FINAL.pdf#page=25

A nice articulation of why "incorporating AI" in the classroom is detrimental to education and learning, inducing longterm costs that no perceived benefit of doing so could outweigh.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ChatGPT #education #pedagogy

It suddenly struck me the other day that generative AI used in government and media has a very Memoirs Found in a Bathtub quality about it. One of the premises of Lem's (amazing) novel is that paper disintegrates for unknown reasons, leaving very few hard records of anything. The book is a mock diary of a person who lived through the disorienting chaos that ensued.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev #StanislawLem #fiction #SciFi #ScienceFiction #cybernetics

Nothing is more valuable than a clear-headed understanding of which particular lies are most likely to succeed in the present environment, and which are just evanescent byproducts of the generally mendacious atmosphere. Dodge the decoys, save the right kind of energy to counter the real blows. Turning up the heat in lamenting the current crisis risks mistaking a mere mirage for a more substantial threat.

From “LYING IN POLITICS”: HANNAH ARENDT’S ANTIDOTE TO ANTICIPATORY DESPAIR https://www.publicbooks.org/lying-in-politics-hannah-arendts-antidote-to-anticipatory-despair/

I found this to be an excellent and orienting read for anyone concerned about the US right now.

While folks are understandably worried about this administration, which has already inflicted significant harms, it's important to stay level headed and aligned with the actual facts and truths. That's our primary defense against what's happening which, as Arendt argued in the 1970s, hinges on a process of defactualization. Shouting "fascism!" and drawing analogies with the Nazis, as this essay argues, is going too far, turning up the heat about a mirage. Much as we wish they'd do better--and they could do better--in point of fact we do still have a functioning judicial system and media ecosystem, and there are significant numbers of people, including politicians and judges, fully willing to challenge every lie the administration emits. As dangerous as these times are we are nowhere near as far along the authoritarian trajectory as shouting "fascism!" makes it sound, and we should really stop doing that. Doing so grants bluffs and bluster more power than it actually has, which is ultimately a form of surrender. We should recognize our own strength and save it for real threats.

This is one of many reasons why I relentlessly call BS on generative AI and the claims about it coming out of the technology sector. There is a defactualization process at work there that plays into the broader political one; some of the individuals enacting this defactualization in tech are personally involved in doing the same in the federal government. If you've been watching you probably know some of their names and the companies they came from. Generative AI is itself a defactualization machine; that's one of its primary appeals to this crew.

Dodge the decoys and save your energy for the real blows.

#USPol #HannahArendt #authoritarianism #despair #tech #dev #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM

Bitwarden 发布用于操作 Bitwarden 密码库的 MCP 服务器。

此 MCP 服务器的功能包括锁定和解锁密码库以及对密码库进行增删改查等。

https://github.com/bitwarden/mcp-server

#GenAI #Bitwarden

Telegram 原文

I watched someone "vibe code" for an hour and now I think "slot machine coding" is a more appropriate name. "Let us pull the lever again and see if the code gets better with this prompt."

#AI #GenAI #VibeCoding #Programming

65% of Wikimedia's most expensive traffic comes from bots.

"Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models."

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/

#wikimedia #wikipedia #AI #GenAI

Anthropic will face a class-action lawsuit from US authors

A California federal judge ruled Thursday that three authors suing Anthropic over copyright infringement can bring a class action lawsuit representing all U.S. writers whose work was allegedly downloaded from libraries of pirated works.

From https://www.theverge.com/anthropic/709183/anthropic-class-action-lawsuit-pirated-books-authors-downloads

Even though I am probably one of the affected authors, lawsuits like this make me nervous. If the decision comes down in favor of Anthropic it sets a precedent for repeating what they and others have done. I am very skeptical that these issues would be appropriately settled in the courts; we need proper regulation of this industry as of two years ago. It's likewise worth noting that OpenAI claims at least 10x the traffic of Anthropic's various products.

Also, I've been in these kinds of lawsuits before. We'll end up getting a coupon for $1 off use of Claude if the class wins, or something comparably absurd. (*)

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #copyright #theft #lawsuit #Anthropic #Claude

(*) Years ago I was inadvertently part of a class action lawsuit against Poland Spring because I bought their water during the period covered by the lawsuit. They were found guilty of deceptive marketing because they were mixing tap water in with the "spring water" they claimed to be selling. I was awarded a $1, maybe $5, coupon to buy Poland "Spring" water.

⇒ Please help me find #GenAI truth-telling sites! ⇐
In the past I've come across several websites that effectively debunk #GenerativeAI hype.
However, now that I actually need them, to help me make the case at work for strong oversight of the company's GenAI use, I can't find any of them.
It seems like no matter what search terms and search engine I use, I get garbage search results (hype, indeed!).
What are your go-to websites for debunking #AI hype?
#tech #LLM

Here's my half-baked deep thought of the day.

The culture industry is in the business of producing "culture" and distributing it, unidirectionally, to consumers of culture (think movies, TV shows, albums, books). We had a brief respite with the internet and social media, which are bidirectional and therefore interactive, as companies experimented with co-opting user content for use in cultural products. That period looks to be ending now, and companies are back to the business of unidirectionally firing cultural products at us. Since they never really figured out how to turn what the masses produce towards their ends without incurring significant costs, they are instead opting to fill the internet with generative AI output, which they can control and manipulate, and whose costs are the "better" kinds of costs (labor costs to hire content moderators, even contractors, are far worse to e.g. Wall Street than capital expenditures for servers or, even better, rental costs for cloud services).

The fact that Google took a perfectly good and functional internet search engine that lots of people liked and started turning it into an AI slop generator makes more sense, at least to me, when viewed through this lens. Google's search engine was never really a search engine. It was always a cultural artifact, complete with "commercials" (ads), with web page creators as producers. At some point Google calculated that using an in-house generative AI to produce the content for this artifact made more sense, so they started experimenting with it.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #Google #Gemini #culture #CultureIndustry

It's worth bearing in mind as we read more and more news about "AI" being shoved into every nook and cranny of the US federal government:

The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy, disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression, right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year posters to ‘terrorwave’. Today it is slop, almost totally.

From AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism
https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/

I'm not finding the reference right now but I've read similar observations about writing as well: the political right used to have talented writers, but nowadays not so much.

(This is not an invitation for "duh, they're just MAGA idiots" responses or variations on that theme. I'm as frustrated as the next person about the political climate but I'm not here for that).

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #FarRight #RightWing

Atlassian decided to vomit AI all over Jira so I decided to mop it up with uBlock Origin. So far so good. One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to get it out of the context menus (right-click menus).

I also noticed a new Copilot button in GitHub so I zapped that one too.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Jira #Atlassian #NoAI #GitHub

Software "agents" were a hype-y topic when I was a graduate student 25 years ago. I wrote one for a class. I feel like what's being called "agents" or "AI agents" these days are even less capable than what seemed possible a quarter of a century (1) ago when I was in school.

What I thought then is still true today: to make something like a software agent legitimately useful for a lot of people would require a large amount of low-level grunt work and non-technical work (2) of the sort that the typical Silicon Valley company is unwilling to do. (3) The technology is the absolute easiest part of this task. Throwing a Bigger Computer at the problem leaves all those other pieces of work undone. It's like putting a bigger engine in a car with no wheels, hoping that'll make the car go.

By the way #AI companies and VCs, I'm available for contract work and have done due diligence research before if you ever want to stop wasting everyone's time and money!

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #agents #hype #SiliconValley #VentureCapital #dev #tech

(1) Which we've been told repeatedly is essentially infinite time in the tech world.
(2) Establishing semantic data standards and convincing a large enough number of people to implement them being an important component. LLMs do not magically develop protocols and solve all the ETL-style problems of translating among different ones. The Semantic Web didn't really stick for a lot of reasons, but one reason is that it's hard!
(3) Back when I was still in the startup world I was asked several times by VCs to tell them what I thought about some new startup that claimed to be able to magically clean and fuse data. I think they're still very keen on investing in this style of magic, because it requires an intense amount of human labor, but I think where companies landed was invisibilizing low-paid workers in other countries and pretending a computer did the work they did. Which has also been happening for well over a quarter of a century.

"AI" is Google's "pivot to video" moment:

Google AI Search Shift Leaves Website Makers Feeling ‘Betrayed’

The now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet, according to Bloomberg interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with them.

From https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-07/google-ai-search-shift-leaves-website-makers-feeling-betrayed

Remember when Facebook told everyone they should change all their content to video, because it got more traffic? And then that turned out to be such a blatant falsehood that companies went bankrupt trying to do this?

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Google #Gemini #AISlop

Cloudflare 发现 Perplexity 的秘密爬虫会伪装 User-Agent 爬取其它网站，并且不遵守 robots.txt。

- Cloudflare 注册了一个新域名，配置了禁止任何爬虫的 robots.txt，在 Cloudflare 上禁止 GenAI 爬虫访问。
- 在询问 Perplexity 关于一个此域名下子域名的详细信息的时候，Perplexity 依然可以做出一些回答。
- Cloudflare 发现 Perplexity 以 macOS 上 Chrome 的 User-Agent 伪装自己，通过未宣告在文档所述自有 IP 段中的，来自多个 ASN 的 IP 访问了此域名。
- Cloudflare 通过机器学习等技术尝试识别并拦截此类爬取行为。测试发现当爬取被拦截时，Perplexity 转用了其它数据源，说明拦截确有起效。
- 文章还提到，OpenAI 旗下的 ChatGPT 会访问并遵守 robots.txt，尊重了网站主对爬虫的要求。
- Cloudflare Bot Management 用户现已可使用相关规则拦截 Perplexity 的秘密爬虫。

blog.cloudflare.com/~

[感谢 Pop 提供此消息。]

#GenAI #Cloudflare #Perplexity

Telegram 原文

If you take the stance that technical debt is code nobody understands, then current LLM-based code generators are technical debt generators until somebody reads and understands their output.

If you take the stance that writing is thinking--that writing is among other things a process by which we order our thoughts--then understanding code generator output will require substantial rewriting of the code by whomever is tasked with converting it from technical debt to technical asset.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #CodeAssistant #AgenticAI #tech #dev #coding #TechnicalDebt

Bit of a content warning that I'm about to share some #LLM-generated slop. Just two short bits, to make a point.

I made an #OpenToWork post on #LinkedIn today partly as an experiment, and as before was immediately inundated with HR bots. I spent a few minutes from time to time stringing one along, out of curiosity. One way I know it's a bot is that no human recruiter would stick with me for that long a duration given the nonsense I was entering. Anyway, at one point it emitted that there was a job it was "recruiting" for, titled "Generative AI & LLM Remediation Consultant | United States (Remote/Onsite)" at a company named "Independent Consultant (Contract Role)". It's fairly clear to me that the bot was tasked with constructing fake job listings based off information people share. I can only guess what its actual purpose is.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #JobHunting #scams #AIScams #JobListingScams #JobScams

I like to poke LinkedIn once in awhile with an "AI" critique to see what I can stir up. One reason I do this is to keep an eye on the changing form of the booster rhetoric. Nowadays a lot of folks respond to critique with some form of "today's LLMs are bad but tomorrow's will be amazing", the true believer/quasi-religious response with a touch of false humility for flavor. Yesterday I got a "AI critics are just as bad as AI boosters" false dichotomy, which by my read was a variant of the "AI critics are hysterical and irrational" with the twist that the speaker was suggesting that boosters are too. That felt new-ish to me. Granted, the hubristic "we're the smart guys in the room, you should do what we say" framing is ancient in the tech industry. Suggesting the boosters are also not the smart guys in the room is an interesting move because it's an attempt to go meta. Neither the boosters nor the critics are the smart guys in the room; the smart guys in the room are actually the ones who can see that (and so you should do what they say, which is more LLMs always).

#LinkedIn #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLM

Béton, métal, chaleur, vapeur 🎵

Ce n'est pas un nouveau titre de Daft Punk, mais le titre de ma prochaine conférence sur l'IA générative. On peut se le dire, ça passe beaucoup moins bien en français 😁

Le contenu devrait toujours être d'intérêt:

- des vues aériennes de Datacenters, explications à la clef
- une visite (virtuelle) de l'intérieur
...

#ia #datacenter #genai #ClimateChange #environment #energy

Learning a new AI-related term: workslop.

"The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver."

https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity

#workslop #AI #slop #GenAI #technology #news #TechNews #study

If current-generation LLM-based chatbots can drive people to commit crimes or even take their own lives, what do you suppose Neuralink would do to people?

The first thing I said to the person who suggested to me that human brains might be directly hooked to a computer, whenever that was, was "everyone will go insane immediately". I still believe that, but now we're beginning to see evidence.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Neuralink #tech #dev #HCI #BrainImplants