“Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature, calling for its removal”
The idea that users want more “AI” in their existing software is an entirely unproven assertion.
It’s kind of worrying to see how many software developers are convinced that emergent behaviour in a complex system is evidence of sentience, when that’s just what happens in complex systems.
From John Gall’s Systems Bible:
The point is that real novelty in the world increases as complexity increases. As the necessary richness of underlying structure is attained, the new property emerges, seemingly out of nowhere.
“The Dark Side of the Mac App Store: How Scam Apps and Shady Developers Are Preying on Users”
App store are more of a liability than a benefit.
“Deno vs. Node: No One is Ready for the Move”
I actually prefer Deno these days, much nicer experience. But I also think that Node’s massive community is it’s biggest liability.
These sort of experiments are genuinely important research in terms of understanding animal cognition.
That AI is providing some companies with rhetorical cover for doing layoffs that they were planning on anyway does not mean those jobs will be replaced by AI, nor does it even mean that it’s genuinely the plan.
(AI is bloody expensive)
“Schumacher family planning legal action over AI ‘interview’ with F1 great”
What the actual fuck are people thinking? Just further proof that “AI” creates brainworms.
‘Discord’s New “AI” Chatbot Is a Useless, Miserable Nightmare’
“Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines”
On average, a mere 51.5% of generated sentences are fully supported by citations and only 74.5% of citations support their associated sentence
The difference between the AI crowd and the rest of us is that they’re going to think this is an excellent result
My friend, Tom Abba, has released a narrative experience that weaves together a website and a book of handmade collages. All for £25 (UK).
“OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it”
These methods, and the sheer size of the data set, mean tech companies tend to have a very limited understanding of what has gone into training their models.
“See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart - Washington Post”
This kind of documentation on AI training data should come from the companies themselves, not journalists.
“Is Critical Thinking the Most Important Skill for Software Engineers? - The Pragmatic Engineer”
“Google’s Rush to Win in AI Led to Ethical Lapses, Employees Say”
One former employee said they asked to work on fairness in machine learning and they were routinely discouraged — to the point that it affected their performance review. Managers protested that it was getting in the way of their “real work,” the person said.
I’ve put together a web page for my soon-to-be-released book on the business risks of language and diffusion models. First pass, but I think the page gets the points across
“Offline Is Just Online With Extreme Latency - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”
“Google CEO peddles #AIhype on CBS 60 minutes - by Emily M. Bender”
“The Calm Web: A Solution to Our Scary and Divisive Online World - Calibre”
“Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems - The New York Times”
If you had any doubt that these language models were biased as hell, turns out Reddit is a big part of their training data.
“Google calls for relaxing of Australia’s copyright laws so AI can mine websites for information”
Very few countries need new AI regulation. They just need to be less lax in enforcing the laws they already have.
“AI Users Are Neither AI Nor Users - by Debbie Levitt - Apr, 2023 - R Before D”
These are not users. Period, end of story.