I knew that was Kaze Emanuar before I even clicked the link.
BlueMonday1984
joined 1 year ago
New piece from Brian Merchant: DOGE's 'AI-first' strategist is now the head of technology at the Department of Labor, which is about...well, exactly what it says on the tin. Gonna pull out a random paragraph which caught my eye, and spin a sidenote from it:
“I think in the name of automating data, what will actually end up happening is that you cut out the enforcement piece,” Blanc tells me. “That's much easier to do in the process of moving to an AI-based system than it would be just to unilaterally declare these standards to be moot. Since the AI and algorithms are opaque, it gives huge leeway for bad actors to impose policy changes under the guide of supposedly neutral technological improvements.”
How well Musk and co. can impose those policy changes is gonna depend on how well they can paint them as "improving efficiency" or "politically neutral" or some random claptrap like that. Between Musk's own crippling incompetence, AI's utterly rancid public image, and a variety of factors I likely haven't factored in, imposing them will likely prove harder than they thought.
(I'd also like to recommend James Allen-Robertson's "Devs and the Culture of Tech" which goes deep into the philosophical and ideological factors behind this current technofash-stavaganza.)
”… wait is it autoplag?
...I mean we're talking about a product made by techbros, for techbros, they most likely used autoplag in lieu of getting anyone with a shred of artistic talent involved
TV Tropes got an official app, featuring an AI "story generator". Unsurprisingly, backlash was swift, to the point where the admins were promising to nuke it "if we see that users don't find the story generator helpful".
Scholar proposes legal solutions to regulate cryptocurrency mining’s energy consumption in a climate-friendly way.
Here's a good solution: a total ban on crypto-mining
Ran across a short-ish thread on BlueSky which caught my attention, posting it here:
the problem with a story, essay, etc written by LLM is that i lose interest as soon as you tell me that’s how it was made. i have yet to see one that’s ‘good’ but i don’t doubt the tech will soon be advanced enough to write ‘well.’ but i’d rather see what a person thinks and how they’d phrase it
like i don’t want to see fiction in the style of cormac mccarthy. i’d rather read cormac mccarthy. and when i run out of books by him, too bad, that’s all the cormac mccarthy books there are. things should be special and human and irreplaceable
i feel the same way about using AI-type tech to recreate a dead person’s voice or a hologram of them or whatever. part of what’s special about that dead person is that they were mortal. you cheapen them by reviving them instead of letting their life speak for itself
The “legal proof” part is a different argument. His picture is a generated picture so it contains none of the original pixels, it is merely the result of prompting the model with the original picture. Considering the way AI companies have so far successfully acted like they’re shielded from copyright law, he’s not exactly wrong. I would love to see him go to court over it and become extremely wrong in the process though.
It'll probably set a very bad precedent that fucks up copyright law in various ways (because we can't have anything nice in this timeline), but I'd like to see him get his ass beaten as well. Thankfully, removing watermarks is already illegal, so the courts can likely nail him on that and call it a day.
In other news, Ed Zitron discovered Meg Whitman's now an independent board director at CoreWeave (an AI-related financial timebomb he recently covered), giving her the opportunity to run a third multi-billion dollar company into the ground:
As an added bonus, its clear he's getting trolled for his terminal startup brain:
EDIT: Found some dipshit trying to defend the guy in the wild, rehashing the arguments used for AI art:
The most generous reading of that email I can pull is that Dr. Greg is an egotistical dipshit who tilts at windmills twenty-four-fucking-seven.
Also, this is pure gut instinct, but it feels like the FOSS community is gonna go through a major contraction/crash pretty soon. I've already predicted AI will kneecap adoption of FOSS licenses before, but the culture of FOSS being utterly rancid (not helped by Richard Stallman being the semi-literal Jeffery Epstein of tech (in multiple ways)) definitely isn't helping pre-existing FOSS projects.
Update on the Vibe Coder Catastrophe^tm^: he's killed his current app and seems intent to vibe code again:
Personally, I expect this case won't be the last "vibe coded" app/website/fuck-knows-what to get hacked to death - security is virtually nonexistent, and the business/techbros who'd be attracted to it are unlikely to learn from their mistakes.