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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Good overview of backlash to AI.

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.

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

I dislike how true this rings.

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

I feel like we need to talk more about epistemology—and especially the social construction of facts—in the era of chatbot LLMs.

It was a real choice to start this dystopian comic the same day I got to the chapter in Karen Hao’s Empire of AI about Silicon Valley outsourcing the worst jobs to the Global South in the name of providing economic opportunity.

Bookmarked this a while ago and am finally reading it. So infuriating.

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!

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.

We live in a dumb future.

There are some critical perspectives in this piece, but certainly not enough in my book. [gift link]

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh look, it’s all my least favorite things about tech right now, combined in a single, enraging story.

I doubt I have time today for a longer, more nuanced post, so please enjoy this subtweet: Anyone whose takeaway from the University of Zurich Reddit study is “AI is good at convincing people!” and doesn’t even mention the HUGE ethical issues in passing is missing the point.

Today, a student from across campus explained that they used ChatGPT to identify me as a potential thesis committee member, and I am shallow enough to have had a very brief flicker of positive feeling toward the technology.

I started the day grumpy about generative AI, but articles like this just make it worse.

WAIT. They prompt engineered the AI tool to disregard informed consent and ethical concerns?

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.

Chilling read. gift link

I would be more critical of generative AI than Punya, but this is a solid, important argument.

Everything in this article makes me sad.

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.