Below are posts associated with the “generative AI” tag.
🔗 linkblog: ‘Improved’ Grok criticizes Democrats and Hollywood’s ‘Jewish executives’
More on why we need to talk epistemology when we talk generative AI:
Musk tweaking his AI model to be more aligned with right-wing edgelords was inevitable, but there’s a broader point to be made: each AI model is a black box that supposedly gives objective answers but in reality is shaped by its owners. As more people look to AI to learn about the world, the people who control how it’s trained and how it responds will control our prevailing narratives.
🔗 linkblog: Google, de moteur de recherche à moteur de réponse
Voilà pourquoi il faut parler de la théorie de connaissance quand on parle de IA:
On est passé d’un moteur de recherche à un moteur de réponse. C’est-à-dire que les algorithmes proposent des versions rédigées à partir des données qu’ils auront collectées sur Internet, puis reformulées sans que vous ayez rendu visite aux sites contenant ces éléments de réponse à votre requête.
🔗 linkblog: Laid-off workers should use AI to manage their emotions, says Xbox exec
I can’t find the right words for how this story makes me feel.
🔗 linkblog: Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws aren’t keeping up – The Markup
This problem makes me so angry, and while I appreciate this article’s exploration of different policy solutions, they also feel overwhelming to me because so many of them come with problems of their own.
📚 bookblog: Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
This is a good book, with a powerful thesis and a great epilogue that ties things together. It isn’t perfect, but I think most of my quibbles are related to the subject matter and the genre. It’s hard to write a book about a contemporary subject of such importance, and I think it’s tricky to write a book that combines history with more of a critical take on the AI ecosystem.
🔗 linkblog: Reddit turns 20, and it’s going big on AI
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.
🔗 linkblog: Radio Télévision Suisse A Neuchâtel aussi, les téléphones portables seront interdits à l'école obligatoire
Bon, je comprends ces soucis, mais je ne suis pas sûr que de telles interdictions soient la bonne réponse. Pourtant, vu que je suis plus ouvert à une interdiction de l’IA à l’école, il faut que je développe un peu plus ma philosophie ici.
🔗 linkblog: Facebook is starting to feed its Meta AI with private, unpublished photos
What. The. Hell. Is. This. Nonsense.
🔗 linkblog: Fanfiction writers battle AI, one scrape at a time
Fanfiction is one of the most compelling examples of the labor issues related to generative AI.
🔗 linkblog: Teachers Are Not OK
Bookmarked this a while ago and am finally reading it. So infuriating.
Jacques Ellul and success as the only techbro metric
When I was in grad school, a faculty member in my program told me a story about his then-quite-young son, who was having a grand old time climbing on top of the kitchen table and then leaping off of it to the floor below. (Truth be told, my memories of this conversation are fuzzy, and the son might have been engaged in some otherwise dangerous behavior.) The father tried to tell the son to stop doing this, warning: “You could have hurt yourself!
more on the Liahona, efficiency, and technique
Yesterday afternoon, I was explaining (poorly) to some friends that I had been thinking about what the story of the Liahona in the Book of Mormon has to teach readers of that volume of scripture about (generative) AI. So, that connection was naturally on my mind when I was reading more of Jacques Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World over breakfast.
I continue to be pleasantly surprised by how relevant Ellul’s writing feels for today.
🔗 linkblog: Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist
We live in a dumb future.
🔗 linkblog: How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future
There are some critical perspectives in this piece, but certainly not enough in my book. [gift link]
🔗 linkblog: xAI posts Grok’s behind-the-scenes prompts
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.”
🔗 linkblog: Grok’s “white genocide” obsession came from “unauthorized” prompt edit, xAI says
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.
🔗 linkblog: American Schools Were Deeply Unprepared for ChatGPT, Public Records Show
Fascinating piece that underscores how often cheerleading voices are the only ones valued in edtech—and also how much education has been forced to respond to big tech companies simply releasing their products into the world wirhout input from those it will effect.
technology in Community of Christ's efforts to become a 'prophetic people'
I spent a lot of the morning anxious about generative AI after reading about other professors’ struggles with how the technology has upended how we teach. It’s long been frustrating to me that teachers and others bear the burden of adapting to a world that big tech companies have created, seemingly with the goal of enriching themselves. Later in the morning, I read a worrying story about how a company called Flock is building tools that will let customers of their automated license plate readers (including Lexington, the city I live in) do even more invasive surveillance of the people they pick up on their cameras.
🔗 linkblog: Elon Musk’s apparent power play at the Copyright Office completely backfired
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.
🔗 linkblog: Pope Leo XIV names AI one of the reasons for his papal name
Again, more of religious commentary on AI that emphasizes labor issues.
🔗 linkblog: Pope Leo tells cardinals they must continue 'precious legacy' of Pope Francis
I haven’t done all the homework on the new pope, and I don’t know how much it makes sense as a non-Catholic to have a take on the new pope, but I’m here for religious leaders who express skepticism about AI specifically as a labor issue, not just in vague spiritual terms.
🔗 linkblog: The AI Slop Presidency
My feelings toward generative AI are strong and negative, and I try not to share everything critical I read so that I’m not beating that drum over and over. This is worth a read, though: Generative AI is a great tool for trolling and Bannonesque “flooding the zone,” and the Trump administration’s use of it in these petty ways is arguably just as worrying as DOGE’s irresponsible appeals to AI. I just don’t like what these tools are doing to us—and as its supporters point out, this is the least powerful they’ll ever be.
🔗 linkblog: Elon Musk's Grok AI Will 'Remove Her Clothes' In Public, On X
Oh look, it’s all my least favorite things about tech right now, combined in a single, enraging story.
🔗 linkblog: Instagram's AI Chatbots Lie About Being Licensed Therapists
I started the day grumpy about generative AI, but articles like this just make it worse.
🔗 linkblog: Reddit Issuing 'Formal Legal Demands' Against Researchers Who Conducted Secret AI Experiment on Users
WAIT. They prompt engineered the AI tool to disregard informed consent and ethical concerns?
🔗 linkblog: Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI
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.
🔗 linkblog: Who Ordered That? On AI, Education, and the Illusion of Necessity | Punya Mishra's Web
I would be more critical of generative AI than Punya, but this is a solid, important argument.
🔗 linkblog: The Man Who Wants AI to Help You ‘Cheat on Everything’
Everything in this article makes me sad.
DuckDuckGo and IP geolocation (with a MapQuest and generative AI tangent)
I don’t know if this is a DuckDuckGo thing or an underlying Bing thing, but I’ve started noticing something weird happening when I search for things that don’t get a lot of results. When it happened again earlier this week, I finally grabbed a screenshot:
So, here I am searching for something related to the (relatively obscure, relatively progressive) religious denomination I belong to, and when DDG (or maybe Bing) couldn’t find anything related to the specific thing I was searching for, the first text result that it gave me was the best result it could find for a subset of my search matched with the town I live in: Lexington, Kentucky.