Attenuated Presence 🔭

@dizzly.bsky.social Curious about your read here.

Sweeney tries to make out he's saying this in defence of the beleaguered indie devs who want to use AI, but remember that his company laid off 1000 people earlier this year before pivoting to AI. He's taking this stance for one reason: he loves money

Guillermo Del Toro dropping another one liner that’s exactly how I feel about AI slop, the “punishment” is built in

When we talk about the harms of LLM chatbot products, boosters often point out that "AI" has important research uses. And that's true. But these boosters are often referring to types of machine learning that have absolutely nothing to do with LLM chatbot products. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Just ran across yet another "[a food you buy] has weird ingredients in it that you can't pronounce." As the kids say, skill issue. If you'd paid attention in your various science classes you'd be able to pronounce them, and also know that few (likely none) of them are weird.

As we approach the midterms, remember that the Alt National Park Service is a merch sales operation claiming without evidence to be a group of federal employees, and is not a genuine source of news about elections of any kind. Please get your election info from a local, reputable source.

Honestly, I find I do not really want to read anymore 'look how good the polls are for democrats!' takes. Expectations are getting out of hand; a world where you get R+2 correlated polling error and thus miss on Maine, Alaska and Texas is possible. Of course, so is D+2 polling error. 🤷‍♂️

One thing I've learned from a depressing number of experiences with creeps in professional spaces: we'd be better off if we all accepted that we are, by and large, terrible judges of character

Here's a direct link to opt out of eBay training AI models on your personal data: accountsettings.ebay.com/ai-preferences

“The internet is a store but it used to be a library” hits me like a slug to the chest

This is so cool! White dwarfs are so much more colorful than their name would suggest. Pink and green stars!

Uh, yikes. Paul Krugman making some new (to me) points about the AI boom with some terrifying math. "AI taking over all jobs" is alarmist bullshit, but "AI boom sucking up all capital causing a job crash" is distressingly plausible. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/will-ai-cr...

HOODED HORSE IS PUBLISHING BELTFED! DETAILS: store.steampowered.com/news/app/487...

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon

Vote early and in person, folks. If you're in a "vote by mail" state and can deliver your mail-in vote directly rather than relying on USPS this year, do it. Otherwise get it into the mail at the earliest possible date. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

what I had to say turned out not to be a column

Hot news for the sea lion in my comments bothering everyone about how training data is fair use www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-...

This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead

Something AI is responsible for that doesn't get enough talk: How, when it scrapes a website to illegally steal everything on it, it uses up a ton of its bandwidth allotment, crashing it or racking up massive fees for site owners.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

The rush to accuse, without anything approaching due diligence, artists of using "AI," should be treated with contempt. An artist gets their work *ripped off* to train a plagiarism machine, which then shits out inferior versions of that work, so then you accuse the artist of using "AI"? Fuck you.

For my part, if I am going to invest the time into reading a book - fiction or non-fiction - I want to know that a human invested the time into writing it. That's part of the deal. Even if our current machines could produce Hamlet, I would not want robo-Hamlet. I suspect I am not alone in this.

Yes, there have been real, substantial improvements! Acid rain and ozone depletion are distant memories. Renewable energy is now *cheaper* than fossil fuels. Global poverty numbers have collapsed. It really is a much better world.

Any cognition you perceive in "AI" is your own. That's it. You built your concept of its intelligence, the same way you understand fictional characters as people. The same way you can see an octopus in a towel hook. They are using your mind to sell their product. The human is you.

It seems to me that a solution to encouraging AI 'alignment' would be to hold AI companies and their executives legally liable - criminally, if relevant - for what their AI agents do.

It's hilarious that Huang things not knowing his address, zip-code and phone number are a mark of how he is cognitively off-loading to technology and Klein doesn't seem to press him that what he's actually obviously doing is using the fact that he's rich to off-load onto other humans.

Higher Education is not just about training workers, but also about training citizen leaders and good citizenship in part means thinking that the details matter, that getting them right matters, because it impacts some of your fellow citizens. "It only matters if job" is poison to citizenship.

They knew this 1,000-year-old archaeological site was here. It had been mapped, published, and reported to the agencies responsible for the land. Trump's border-wall contractors bulldozed right through it /1 Link: youtu.be/A4U6q76eqUM

been thinkin about how robots are gonna kill us

This is why I think it's so important to push back against the personification of LLMs. If a person shoots someone while wearing a hand puppet, they can't claim the hand puppet did the murder.

Every now and then I see myself referred to as an "AI Denier" and I want to be clear I acknowledge "AI" exists, it's just I think it's a massive energy drain, created from theft, implemented poorly for inappropriate tasks by loathsome tech executives who get hard at the idea of the rest of us dying

This man objected to my warning that apocalyptic "AI extinction" talk is corporate ploy for regulatory capture, marketing, and side stepping accountability. He said he left DeepMind, like the Anthropic "whistleblower." So lets have a brief history lesson about DeepMind's origins in doomer cults🧵

🚨 BEWARE of VoteSafe.org 🚨 While it bills itself as a “safe” way to register to vote, it is actually a digital surveillance machine created by Elon Musk’s super PAC.

I’m going to need everyone who’s reporting on AI psychosis and how it’s making people, especially men, come up with theories of everything to please talk with the scientists who have been getting multiple emails from “theory of everything” guys for decades

Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe.

I think I should be additionally compensated for my stolen work each time someone asks me what’s so bad about AI.

The deleted post was the founder of Outlier explaining how Outlier uses AI.

On the flipside, the pop-up, "this looks like a long document, do you want to summarize?" thing on Adobe Reader annoys me with intensity, because that's not a feature I want. I want to *read the article.*