brian

recently my friend's comics professor told her that it's acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can't generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister's screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won't be able to generate a script that's any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best. It's only ever the jobs we're unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don't.

it’s come to my attention that my tumblr post has been crossposted to bluesky, so I’m posting it on my account here #AntiAI #GenAI

I’m consistently stunned how many of my colleagues are using these tools! Your ideas and how you investigate and follow them are your work! The way you write about it is the work! What are you doing outsourcing the very thing you were trained for?! It’s the whole point of us!

In my current role I’m mostly a serial collaborator and so I have to trust my coauthors are being diligent and not filling our manuscripts with bullshit, but I’ve already caught several using LLMs to write and cite and it just makes me want to give up.

I feel so hopeless about this, it really feels like it’s just bringing down the whole enterprise. Science publishing is a nightmare industry but it’s how we share our work, and it’s the currency we use to advance. Generative AI is a plague.

As someone who has graded a lot of undergrad writing assignments, I feel like I spot a lot of similarities in AI writing. It has a real “didn’t really understand the assignment” energy, to me.

ME: team rocket will never steal these rare Pokémon! Not unless they wanna take on me and my fully evolved Miss Cigarettes!
MISS CIGARETTES: miss cigarettes

I’m fighting with this every day at work with fellow scientists! Who should know better!! The whole point of us is our ideas and the way we implement them, what do you mean you asked chatgpt?! Crazy making.

Hegseth: We'll need to figure out a solution to the kurdish territory with Yurkey
Hegseth: *Turkey
Vance: Yurkey
Waltz: Yurkey
Jeffrey Goldberg: Get his ass

Oh what sad news, but thank you for sharing. She was the first person to invite me to give a symposium talk early in my career, for which I felt truly honored. What an incredible loss.

I’m having a similar experience, it can be really frustrating and makes me feel dumb a lot, but doing math problems takes total focus so it’s been a very effective distraction from…all of this. It’s been well timed.

I’ve been reviewing high school math recently too, and I found khan academy to be hugely helpful because there’s a ton of exercises, and the explanations for the correct solutions really helped me start to see the patterns/tricks I was missing.

But today I want to write about what I think the TikTok ban means for Americans and the Balkanization of the internet, or the “Splinternet” more broadly. The “open internet” is a wonderful concept, but in practice not everyone on the internet can see everything there is to see. Many countries—most notably China—have government-level censorship of certain parts of the internet, certain services are banned in certain countries, some ISPs and some governments around the world take a very hardline stance blocking, say, piracy sites. Until very recently, Americans by-and-large could pretty much access anything we wanted to on the World Wide Web. This has always felt to me like an immense privilege, and, honestly, one of the things that makes the United States a great place and a “free” place. I went to Indonesia last year, for example, and some very important parts of the internet—such as Reddit and also www.404media.co—were blocked and were only accessible via VPN. I went on a reporting trip to Cuba when it was first getting widespread access to “the internet,” and it was easier to find sites that were blocked than sites that were not, in addition to the widespread surveillance of what users actually are looking at and doing. That’s not something I think about when I’m in the United States, though surveillance of our browsing habits is something that’s becoming far more commonplace. All of that has changed recently. Americans no longer really have unfettered access to the “open internet.” PornHub is blocked in nearly a third of the country. Age verification laws are putting up barriers to accessing “adult sites,” which, as Sam’s reporting has shown, encompasses all sorts of things.

The Balkanized Internet / Splinternet is here for Americans

www.404media.co/behind-the-b...

It really is such a sad midlife crisis. Seemingly no one in his life who cares enough to talk him out of this incredibly self destructive behavior.

Best Day Brewing has a kolsch that I really like. I also enjoy Paulaner’s NA radler, though it’s not bitter it’s more like a malty Arnold Palmer.

Peer reviewers are ALSO usually told not pay attention to these things, so who exactly is going to? A 3rd party non-expert, an LLM, or no one I guess. And they charge $3990 in Article Publishing Charges.

Scientific publishing is a racket, it makes me so angry. Society journals or bust, I guess.

The ed board of the Journal of Human Evol resigned. “Elsevier’s response to our repeated concerns about the need for a copy editor has been to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.”

I remember thinking last year how nice it was to see people like you whose work I enjoy being able to post here normally without tormented by annoying replies. Sad that ended, but inevitable I guess.

This seems like an empirical question, and I’m excited to hear the results!

Cameron, Ariz. Living on one of the largest swaths of land in America without electrical power, Thomasina Nez's entire life is a scramble to complete basic tasks. To take a hot shower, she must wait for buckts of water to come to a boil on a small propane stove outside her wood framed roundhouse. To make meals, she relies mostly on canned goods because unfridgerated produce rots qucikly in the Arizona heat. Its a struggle to stay warm at night, because she refuses to use her coal-powered heate after its fumes killed her two dogs.

A fierce battle for electric power is being waged across the nation, and Nez is one of thousands of people who have wound up on the losing end. Amid a boom in data acenters, the energy intensive warehouses that run supercomputers for Big Tech companies, Arizona is racing to increase electricity production. In February, the state utility board approved an 8 percent rate hike to bolster power infrastructure throughout the state, where data centers are popping up faster than almost anywhere in the US But it rejected a plan to bring electricity to parts of the Navajo Nation land, concluding that electric consumers should not be asked to foot the nearly $4 million bill.

I know academics who use AI regularly, for work and play, and I'd really like them, and universities, to tell me how they contend with AI's bottomless appetites for power and water.

Is asking ChatGPT to interpret a Xmas song or making it write your syllabus worth this to you?

This is also my position.

I would say “no,” but I guess it depends on school policies and the course syllabus. I feel like I don’t really have a good sense anymore for how people are using genAI, honestly. My colleagues tell me that we should be teaching students how to use this to be competitive in the future job market 🫠

I keep having testy exchanges with people in my department about this, I feel so alienated. So many of my colleagues seem to be using these tools for research and teaching prep uncritically, and they treat me with pity and scorn when I raise objections.

The Atlantic has done tons of great work. Works with some great writers. But it is compromised by an editorial vision that basically equates to: violence and oppression is when important accomplished people like me suffer, virtue and pragmatism is when important accomplished people like me dominate.

It’s so wild! I was dumbstruck one morning this week trying to find the pic with my workout routine on it the day it updated. It feels actively hostile. Why does it insist on chaining photos together into a “video?!”

Searching for some version of “what does this mean” I think would break me. Shoutout to the posters, people have been so annoying in replies the last few weeks.

the big bad wolf, writing for the Atlantic: building brick houses might be popular with insular academics afraid of intellectual debate, but in practice they are a stifling barrier to free speech

bsky.app/profile/pfra...

I haven’t used it in forever but I’m keeping mine because I have a few papers that have my Twitter handle on them in the by-line and I’d rather that not get co-opted by some nightmare person

Burn it down: a license for AI resistance (opinion) Resistance is not futile, Melanie Dusseau writes.

“Writing faculty have both the agency and the academic freedom to examine generative AI’s dishonest training origins and conclude: There is no path to ethically teach AI skills. Not only are we allowed to say no, we ought to think deeply about the why of that no.”