Flock continues to suck.

Sometimes, AI news gets so depressing that it loops back around to hilarious.

Easy to dunk on Grokipedia, but this article gets at some ideas that I think are particularly important. If I had more time for blogging this semester, I’d write something up on Ellul’s image vs. word dichotomy and how it aligns with Koebler’s thoughts here.

Booooooo. That Wikipedia is being mined by AI scrapers and negatively affected by AI search is such a perfect encapsulation of my concerns about generative AI.

Look, maybe this is a genuine misstep on OpenAI’s part, but it still feels to me like the company started with the guardrails off so that it could use this kind of user backlash to push the Overton Window in conversations with rightsholders.

Also, remember that we small potatoes rightsholders will never be able to have our voices heard like Disney or Nintendo.

Wish I’d made more of a stink about Lexington adopting Flock cameras. It’s a creepy-as-hell technology, and we need to get rid of them.

Platformizing AI video generation in the way OpenAI is doing right now just makes me grumpier than I already am.

This never occurred to me, but distupting interlibrary loan is a mortal sin.

I continue to believe that cracking down on intellectual property is not the right way to resist AI, but Koebler does a great job of describing how maddening it is that big companies are going to get away with worse infringement than individual people taking advantage of fair use.

Don’t know if this is better or worse than what I worried about.

More money for libraries, less for LLMs.

Did not realize that dashcam surveillance was a thing. I hate that it is, and I hate that Flock is going here.

What a wild, depressing story. I feel like I ought to use this to teach the concept of platforms to my students—it neatly sums up the intervention in normal human activity by someone who thinks they have a buck to make.

“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.

This sounds fine.

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.

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.

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

Bookmarked this a while ago and am finally reading it. So infuriating.

So scary, so gross. Lexington needs to ditch Flock now.

Flock sucks, and I’m so mad that Lexington drank the Kool-Aid instead of resisting local surveillance. Just wrote my city council representative, the vice mayor, and the two at-large representatives.

I confess that I would have found this interesting in an earlier part of my career. Now, though, I’m reminded that I built that career on a methodological approach that’s uncomfortable close to surveillance, and I don’t love that.

We live in a dumb future.