I’m glad that someone is doing this white hat work, but I hate that we live in a world where someone has to.

Glad to belong to a church that takes positions on moral issues like this one.

Je connaissais pas cette partie de l’histoire.

Not impressed with Substack, and Masnick does a good job of explaining why.

You don’t have to use Substack to have a newsletter.

I don’t think copyright is the best argument against generative AI (strengthening copyright law will benefit big companies more than small creators), but “can’t make an AI omelette without breaking a few copyrighted eggs 🤷🤷🤷” is still a depressingly cynical national policy.

“Traffic apocalypse” is a scary idea—not only for the threat it poses to smaller websites but also for the way it could further cement the influence of a few big companies in shaping the world.

You know, I skipped over this story when it come out in a couple of other outlets, but seeing the headline again here got me thinking about how good/scary of an example this is of LLMs shaping (rather than reflecting) reality.

Some wild details in here—all of which seem more important to me than the application details.

Some horrifying details in here.

Personally, I’m not sure why anyone needs to be this rich.

Je trouve utile de lire les médias étrangers, pour savoir comment on réagit à notre folie.

Good article. I’m not here to defend CEOs who have affairs with executives in their companies, but the tech ecosystem that allowed for this will do more harm to everyday people than it will ever hold CEOs to account.

Yes, but AI will also save us time writing emails, so this seems like a fair tradeoff.

Musk leans into the bro in tech bro.

Gonna keep posting (almost) every article I read on NCII and generative AI.

This line (from a study quoted in the article) stood out:

The open-source nature of TTI technologies, proclaimed as a democratizing force in generative AI, has also enabled the propagation of models that perpetuate hypersexualized imagery and nonconsensual deepfakes.

Open sourcing generative AI solves some problems but creates others.

On, look, it’s two of my least favorite things about generative AI (NCII and raking in money without concern for ethics) IN THE SAME STORY.

A relatively short comic with good art and a compelling story. In some ways, I would have liked a written memoir more, but this was a good read.

Good read and worth bookmarking for later.

Love—don’t love—how all the constitutional and democratic dangers of our time are so closely married to low-grade scammishness.

Surely this is a reasonable price to pay for the Nazi-praising Grok to “discover new physics” within the next year, as Elon promised last night.

This kind of thing is why I hate “the genie is out of the bottle” arguments. I can’t help but hear them as “yes, people are going to create more CSAM, but all we can do is instead teach people to use these tools more responsibly.”

There’s a genre of news story that I actively avoid following the discourse on but end up reading about once Mike Masnick writes on it, and then I get angry with everyone else. This fits nicely in that genre.

Karen Hao’s Empire of AI really emphasized for me how much stock is being put in AGI—especially as a motivator for AI companies. I am fine wirh concepts being hard to define, but I do think things get tricky when you can’t articulate how you’ll know when you’ve met the goal that serves as your raison d’être.

Disgusting and deliberate.