generativeai

If you turn the sink off when you're done using it to conserve water, or turn the lights off when you leave the room to conserve electricity, why do you use ChatGPT or other AI tools? Using those sorts of tools a few times a month negates whatever you've conserved by being prudent in other parts of your life.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #waste #environment

Resistance to the coup is the defense of the human against the digital and the democratic against the oligarchic.

From https://snyder.substack.com/p/of-course-its-a-coup

Defense of the human against the digital has been my mission for some time. Resisting the narratives about how #LLMs "reason", "pass the Turing test", "diagnose illnesses", are "better than humans" in various ways are part of it. Resisting the false narrative that we're on the verge of discovering #AGI is part of it. Allowing these false stories to persist and spread means succumbing to very dark anti-human forces. We're seeing some of the consequences now, and we're seeing how far this might go.

#USPol #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #AGI

Some argue that ai technology is more significant than electricity or the internet, and so it will spread fast. But there is little sign of this. Only 5-6% of American businesses said they used ai to produce goods and services in 2024, according to the country’s Census Bureau.

From https://www.economist.com/catch-up-rampage-in-new-orleans-tesla-cybertruck-explosion/2024/12/31/the-ai-productivity-puzzle , titled The AI productivity puzzle

What's the puzzle? It has its uses but generally this technology is not particularly useful for most people. Countless billions of dollars have been spent hyping it up to pretend that isn't the case. But reality matters.

Nowadays I think of generative AI as a power grab. It's not a useful tool for a lot of people, but it's exceptionally useful to people who want to grab and hold power, or restructure power in their favor.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

Simulated food does not nourish you any more than simulated thought educates you.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

Regarding the last couple boosts: among other downsides, LLMs encourage people to take long-term risks for perceived, but not always actual, short-term gains. They bet the long-term value of their education on a chance at short-term grade inflation, or they bet the long-term security and maintainability of their software codebase on a chance at short-term productivity gains. My read is that more and more data is suggesting that these are bad bets for most people.

In that respect they're very much like gambling. The messianic fantasies some ChatGPT users have been experiencing fits this picture as well.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev #ChatGPT #GPT #Gemini #GamblingAddiction #nihilism

One definition of the word "artifice" is: crafty device; an artful, ingenious, or elaborate trick. One would be fully justified interpreting the phrase "artificial intelligence" as an elaborate trick resembling intelligence.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM

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

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

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

Do you use AI?

#AI #ChatGPT #ArtificialIntelligence #GenerativeAI

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.

#introduction It was on my todo list for a long time and now I'm #newhere - writing in En and De, darum auch #neuhier

Interested in #Switzerland #swisspolitics #education #foss #digitalsustainability #gardening #SchweizerPolitik #Bildung #DigitaleNachhaltigkeit #gärtnern #AI #generativeAI #fediverse

I found some active accounts from organisations but it seems to be harder to find accounts representing persons.

Can you recommend me any accounts from Switzerland or accounts focussing on AI? :)

"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