Below are posts associated with the âgenerative AIâ tag.
đ linkblog: Laid-off workers should use AI to manage their emotions, says Xbox exec
I canât find the right words for how this story makes me feel.
đ linkblog: Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws arenât keeping up â The Markup
This problem makes me so angry, and while I appreciate this articleâs exploration of different policy solutions, they also feel overwhelming to me because so many of them come with problems of their own.
đ bookblog: Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI (â€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïž)
This is a good book, with a powerful thesis and a great epilogue that ties things together. It isnât perfect, but I think most of my quibbles are related to the subject matter and the genre. Itâs hard to write a book about a contemporary subject of such importance, and I think itâs tricky to write a book that combines history with more of a critical take on the AI ecosystem.
đ linkblog: Reddit turns 20, and itâs 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.
đ linkblog: Radio TĂ©lĂ©vision Suisse A NeuchĂątel aussi, les tĂ©lĂ©phones portables seront interdits Ă l'Ă©cole obligatoire
Bon, je comprends ces soucis, mais je ne suis pas sĂ»r que de telles interdictions soient la bonne rĂ©ponse. Pourtant, vu que je suis plus ouvert Ă une interdiction de lâIA Ă lâĂ©cole, il faut que je dĂ©veloppe un peu plus ma philosophie ici.
đ linkblog: Facebook is starting to feed its Meta AI with private, unpublished photos
What. The. Hell. Is. This. Nonsense.
đ 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.
đ 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: âYou 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 Ellulâs Presence in the Modern World over breakfast.
I continue to be pleasantly surprised by how relevant Ellulâs writing feels for today.
đ linkblog: Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist
We live in a dumb future.
đ 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]
đ linkblog: xAI posts Grokâs behind-the-scenes prompts
The âYou do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or mediaâ system prompt is raising questions already answered by the system prompt. Also, lol that they have to explicitly tell Grok not to call it âTwitter.â
đ linkblog: Grokâs âwhite genocideâ obsession came from âunauthorizedâ prompt edit, xAI says
Aside from the headline-grabbing parts of Grokâs recent freakout, this story does a really good job of emphasizing that AIs donât âthinkâ⊠and that âtruthâ isnât really a valid concept either, no matter Muskâs marketing.
đ 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 edtechâand 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 professorsâ struggles with how the technology has upended how we teach. Itâs 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.
đ linkblog: Elon Muskâs 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.
đ 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.
đ linkblog: Pope Leo tells cardinals they must continue 'precious legacy' of Pope Francis
I havenât done all the homework on the new pope, and I donât know how much it makes sense as a non-Catholic to have a take on the new pope, but Iâm here for religious leaders who express skepticism about AI specifically as a labor issue, not just in vague spiritual terms.
đ 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 Iâm not beating that drum over and over. This is worth a read, though: Generative AI is a great tool for trolling and Bannonesque âflooding the zone,â and the Trump administrationâs use of it in these petty ways is arguably just as worrying as DOGEâs irresponsible appeals to AI. I just donât like what these tools are doing to usâand as its supporters point out, this is the least powerful theyâll ever be.
đ linkblog: Elon Musk's Grok AI Will 'Remove Her Clothes' In Public, On X
Oh look, itâs all my least favorite things about tech right now, combined in a single, enraging story.
đ 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.
đ 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?
đ linkblog: Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI
I have already been skeptical about Duolingo (as a companyâthe 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.
đ 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.
đ linkblog: The Man Who Wants AI to Help You âCheat on Everythingâ
Everything in this article makes me sad.
DuckDuckGo and IP geolocation (with a MapQuest and generative AI tangent)
I donât know if this is a DuckDuckGo thing or an underlying Bing thing, but Iâve started noticing something weird happening when I search for things that donât 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) couldnât 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.
đ linkblog: Theyâre putting A1 in the classrooms.
This video has been on my mind all morning, and it makes me so sad.
moral surrender, the environment, and generative AI
Last week, I blogged about how the purported inevitability of generative AI gets used to sidestep moral concerns about it. Earlier this morning, I shared a link to a story from The Verge that illustrates that perfectly, and so I wanted to write just a little bit more about it.
First, letâs quote some more from Jacques Ellul, whom I referenced in the last post (and whom Iâve just been referencing a lot in general recently).