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.

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.