Aside from the headline-grabbing parts of Grok’s recent freakout, this story does a really good job of emphasizing that AIs don’t “think”… and that “truth” isn’t really a valid concept either, no matter Musk’s marketing.

Gotta keep asking ourselves whether we truly own our computers.

4chan has led such an interesting life.

I don’t personally need research funding, but I work in an academic ecosystem that’s highly dependent on it. Things aren’t looking good.

NCII enrages me, but I’m skeptical of this as a solution.

Sure this looks bad, but heaven forbid the U.S. lose AI leadership or whatever.

This seems… good? So good that I’m suspicious I’ve missed something.

Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle continues to play out in real life.

This weekend, I visited family and complained to myself that their Amazon Fire sticks were emphasizing ad delivery over being a TV. I guess that’s the future for my Roku stick, too? What a sucky future we live in.

I believe that scraping the internet to profit off of generative AI is ethically problematic BUT I concede that it should be fair use BUT this is still a soulless and terrible argument.

Le sigh.

Government overreach is scary, but it can also be really, really petty.

Anyone who hasn’t should read one of two excellent books—Extremely Hardcore or Character Limit—on Musk’s takeover of Twitter, because I’m getting similar vibes here. Remember when Musk just refused to pay money Twitter owed because he didn’t feel like it?

What a mess.

More suckiness in the world of academic publishing.

What a stupid thing this whole “banning TikTok” thing has proved to be.

Well put: TCL plans to get more into original content, fueled by a dystopian strategy that seems largely built around minimizing costs and pushing ads.

Interesting stuff here. I think most complaints about OpenAI “censorship” are hogwash, but it’s still fascinating—and worrying—to see how much control the company exercises over its product.

Scary stuff. I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced that facial recognition tech does more good than harm.

In a roundabout way, I think this helps demonstrate why scraping data for generative AI isn’t a question of copyright. Even when there is a legal agreement, it can still be exploitative—it’s a question of digital labor.

Some better, broader coverage of complaints I made in a blog post earlier this week.

Interesting! I haven’t been into Catan for years, but this could bring me back.

We live in a dumb timeline. Why are we turning TVs into surveillance machines?

C’mon, Reddit.

Very interesting case.

Heck yes.

Bookmarking for later reference. I get that there are some complicated factors at play here, but this still seems wrong to me.

If OpenAI is going to be an influential company, it would be nice for it to be more transparent.

The phrase popped into my head before the article could even get to it: We are the product.

The headline obscures something important—that this is about research, access to data, and Terms of Service. Worrying stuff.

Welp, this is scary.

Content moderation is a good thing.

Team Firefox foreverrrrrr

Don’t love the idea of a fickle billionnaire having this much influence in world affairs.

This feels like a page out of Gab’s playbook.

I’m not thrilled about AI’s ability to do this, but let’s be clear: Amazon is as much to blame here, and I like them even less.