Le sigh.

I’m glad we never started down this rabbit hole, but that’s not to claim that I’m a superior parent for not ever using YouTube Kids. As Johnson says, it’s capitalism all the way down, and all parents are stuck in scary media ecosystems in one way or another.

There are many terrifying things happening right now, but let’s not forget about this spectacularly dumb thing that is also, somehow, continuing.

Really enjoyed listening to this on my way in to campus today.

What. The. Hell.

Adding some nihilism to my Tuesday morning, just for fun.

Good interview, and yet another thing reminding me that I need to read my copy of the book!

No surprises here but still worth bookmarking.

Honest question: Is Grokipedia a wiki? Or just Grok output?

Who could possibly have anticipated this?

Something feels off here. An AI CEO who claims they genuinely didn’t anticipate copyright and deepfake concerns is either dumb or playing dumb. I can’t help but suspect the latter, which is arguably worse, since it suggests an effort to shift the discourse before complaints come in.

I think it was an episode of the Reply All podcast that opened my eyes to the fact that not listening to microphones and still placing creepily relevant ads is actually the worse possibility.

I’ve wanted to get a seminary degree for a while, and I’ve often wondered if my seminary thesis would be on theology and technology, but I never expected to be in dueling theologies with Peter Thiel.

Good overview of recent Grok nonsense.

Wild read. It’s as if the right is an alliance between the most dangerous coddling of Big Tech and the dumbest criticisms of it.

Ugh, this article makes it sound even worse.

I’m probably sticking with Day One for a while, but I think there are some good ideas in here.

Very interesting piece.

I genuinely think it’s useful to remember that non-AI datacenters are also contributing to the climate crisis, but that doesn’t let AI off the hook. It’s like saying “sure, we’re spending far beyond our means, but have you considered that we’re already in debt?

This sucks. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Reddit here, which has shown over the past few years a dedicated interest in monetizing its userbase.

I hadn’t thought about these two trends (cracking down on adult content, and Grok being Grok) being in tension with each other, and I appreciate what this article does to make that clear.

This seems performative to me, and this paragraph gets at why I think so:

AI companies are increasingly pushing into education — perhaps in part to try and fight the reputation that AI tools have acquired that they help students cheat. Features like Gemini’s guided learning mode and ChatGPT’s similar study mode, which was announced last week, could theoretically help with actual learning, but the question is whether students will want to use these modes instead of just using the AI chatbots for easy answers.

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

Quick question about this passage:

Trump … signed an executive order titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” directing government agencies “not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas.”

So, how does one determine what is true or accurate? Once again, we need to talk about epistemology when we talk about generative AI.

This emphasis on “objective truth” further underscores the need to talk epistemology when we talk AI.

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