100% this. "The number of ways in which firms like yours disrespect writers and other creative people are endless. And you require us — the people harmed — to put brakes on the harmful things YOU are doing, not just to us but to entire creative professions."
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neither is appealing or practical, imho. i’m more interested in adversarial work that surfaces the harms developers/vendors are causing, informing as many people as possible about the reality beneath the multibillion $$ marketing hype
3/
the unstated assumption in this type of thinking is that: 1) improving existing systems (not resisting or refusing) is the goal, and 2) appealing to developers/vendors is the way to change these broken or harmful systems
2/
people often ask me about my approach to impact and change. there’s also a common — though rarely stated —assumption that ai auditors or critics should work with developers/vendors to drive concrete changes... product retraction, guardrails, mitigations, etc...
1/
More and more I understand why Andre 3000 started taking up the flute
Blockity block block block
I’m not a math professor, but I’m pretty sure 1953 was more than 47 years ago.
At least they’re taking a break from reinventing phrenology, I guess.
It should surprise no one to know that this doesn’t really work. Synthetic participants don’t mimic the actual diversity of human thought and culture very well.
But I’m sure we’re going to use them anyway.
Thanks. I hate it.
Just leave your camera off. That’s completely within social norms.
Episode 82 is up. It features an interview with Dr Rianna Walcott of University of Maryland and BCaT Lab about her PhD thesis on Black Twitter, plus discussion of identity online and off, Black feminist theory and its influence and lots more... spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/8jHX15k0k1b
I used to waste years preparing gourmet meals. It was creative, an expression of my humanity, and fostered zen.
Thanks to McDonalds, I don't have to do that!
#Satire
But it’s clearly organized with subheadings. And it’s absolutely searchable.
The culture around syllabi has changed. They are now largely viewed in contractual terms. You are required to put in a lot of boilerplate university policy language now. Because if it’s “not in the syllabus” it’s viewed as unenforceable. Mine is now 20 pgs. (Including the full semester schedule)
LA Taco went from covering local culture and good tacos to doing some of the best on the ground community-embedded reporting about ICE. Well worth supporting.
I loved that show.
Correct. But then students would have to look at the syllabus or talk to me. Which I guess are things we don’t want them to do anymore?
This. My university keeps wanting me to make a “syllabot,” an LLM-based chatbot my students can query about the syllabus. And all I can think about is all the resources being consumed so no one has to use Ctrl+F.
How magnanimous.
OpenAI’s push to become crucial infrastructure in education should not and cannot be separated from its broader entanglements with the US military and mass surveillance that includes students and teachers.
It just means it’s a fully organic artisanal human-generated post!
This really puts the playbook to the front: As consumer you get to buy just enough storage for a terminal and all actual storage is rented from big tech.
We have spent decades using metaphors that teach us to equate computers with our minds. And now people are like “well, if it’s not a mind why does it seem like one??” And this is why we need humanities and social sciences.
A Berlin court has ordered X to grant researchers API access under the Digital Services Act. Daniela Alvarado Rincón, Simone Ruf and Jürgen Bering explain how they won the case, and why it’s a major step for researcher data access.
Excellent. I love when empirical evidence aligns with my own personal idiosyncrasies.
We’re grammatical gender swapping all the Romance languages. All tables will be boys. No mesa. MESO.
And every time people wring their hands and say “how could we have possibly known!”
I’ve started insisting that typos are proof something is an actual human-crafted thought and therefore should be welcomed. (Which has nothing to do with my own inability to write without typos, I swear.)
Poorly drawn sketch of a large computing machine connected to electrical wires and three stick figures kneeling in front of it. Text above the stick figures says: "O Deep Thought what is the ultimate answer to the problem of the climate crisis?"
Same sketch, now with text above the machine saying: "You should have stopped burning fossil fuels"
Same sketch, zoomed out to see three smoke stacks and text above the stick figures saying: "How could we have known?"
I'm no artist, but hopefully this gets the point across. A comic in three panels.
