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.

Look, I really will stop posting about Grok and epistemology, but the news stories keep coming.

Yesterday, I wrote my thoughts on how Grok’s “Nazi meltdown” helps illustrate some of my concerns about AI and epistemology.

This coverage of Grok’s latest demo only reinforces that—Musk’s tinkering with the LLM to get the results he wants is at odds with his states naïve epistemology that an LLM can be “maximally truth-seeking,” as though there is a self-evident truth that an LLM can deliver in a straightforward way (that is, without all that mucking about behind the scenes).

I can’t find the right words for how this story makes me feel.

Reddit is a really interesting example of digital labor issues as they relate to both social media and AI. I wonder how things will go over the next few years.

What. The. Hell. Is. This. Nonsense.

Fanfiction is one of the most compelling examples of the labor issues related to generative AI.

The sheer hubris of this attitude! The AI industry must exist, even if it means that it will put others out of business, and therefore any moral standard that would put the AI industry out of business must be abandoned. Very Ellulian.

The “You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media” system prompt is raising questions already answered by the system prompt. Also, lol that they have to explicitly tell Grok not to call it “Twitter.”

None of this is good, and I think there are dangers in using copyright as the bulwark against AI. Conversely, I will take a bit of pleasure in administration infighting, especially if it gets in the way of the AI companies.

Again, more of religious commentary on AI that emphasizes labor issues.

Some really good reflections in here.

Look, I have some sympathy for Mozilla because it’s Mozilla… but Mozilla’s dependence on Google is a real problem.

I have already been skeptical about Duolingo (as a company—the app is mostly not bad) for a while, but this is the sort of thing that makes me want to find an alternative for kiddo to use fast.

I haven’t paid much attention to gestures at all this before now, but this critique convinces me.

This video has been on my mind all morning, and it makes me so sad.

This sort of thing reminds me why I’m so entrenched in my skepticism of generative AI. There’s an uncritical insistence that the world needs AI, that America should be first in AI, and that we’re just going to have to increase energy production instead of ask ourselves if that’s worth the cost. Credit to Trump, I guess, for illustrating just how dangerous all these attitudes are.

Feeling optimistic!

Is this story ever going to get less dumb?