“’We Shouldn’t Regulate AI Until We See Meaningful Harm’: Microsoft Economist to WEF”
AI discourse coming out of the tech industry is getting more unhinged by the day.
Looks like a genuinely useful addition to web dev documentation.
“Pluralistic: Two principles to protect internet users from decaying platforms”
“On Generative AI and Satisficing - by Dave Karpf”
There is not $100 billion+ of revenues to be found in Clippy-but-awesome.
I share Dave’s scepticism about AI’s productivity benefit
This was inevitable. Tech broke the web’s social contract.
“MEPs to vote on proposed ban on ‘Big Brother’ AI facial recognition on streets”
All of this research and writing has gone into a book, on the risks of using generative AI at work: “The Intelligence Illusion: a practical guide to the business risks of Generative AI”
The latest link post that gathers up the links I posted last week is here: “Poisonings, Corporations, and other links”
I put together an overview of all of my writing on AI here: “My writing on AI; the story so far”
“Word Count 47: Why we should all care about the WGA writer’s strike — Chocolate and Vodka”
I wonder how long it’ll take for fans of AI art to discover that it both has a specific aesthetic and that aesthetics eventually fall out of popular fashion?
“That looks soooo 2023”.
“AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are - Naomi Klein”
Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge
Always fun to see AI art enthusiasts siding with fascists in denouncing abstract artists like Barnett Newman. It’s like they’re speed-running through all the worst takes from the last couple of centuries of art discourse
“Patterns, Prophets and Priests
For a good chunk of the past 10 or 12 years, it’s felt to me like we were stuck in an age that shoved genuine attention to human-ness and care to the margins.
“The World Wide Web became available to the broader public 30 years ago : NPR”
“Meredith Whittaker: Consciousness isn’t AI risk—it’s the corporations”
“AI is already writing books, websites and online recipes - The Washington Post”
The last one is “AI code copilots are backwards-facing tools in a novelty-seeking industry”
There is a fundamental tension between programmer culture, software development, and how language models work
The second is about how incredibly common pseudo-science and snake oil is in AI research.
“Beware of AI pseudoscience and snake oil”
You need to be very careful about trusting the claims of the AI industry.
I’ve been publishing extracts from The Intelligence Illusion as essays.
The first and most important, was “Artificial General Intelligence and the bird brains of Silicon Valley”. It’s about the AGI myth and how it short-circuits your ability to think about AI
I just published “AI code copilots are backwards-facing tools in a novelty-seeking industry”
Where I argue that there’s a fundamental tension between programming culture and how language models work.