Below are posts associated with the “generative AI” tag.

🔗 linkblog: AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning.'


There are some important and interesting pieces of information in here.

do you want to be good or to be optimized?


This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level:

My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits. If my department started to use generative AI as a note-taking tool in faculty meetings (the specific focus of this survey), we would probably benefit from it!

🔗 linkblog: The job applicants shut out by AI: ‘The interviewer sounded like Siri’'


So, if employers save time from AI, and applicants save time from AI, where’s the net benefit? Or does it become a new burden for everyone?

🔗 linkblog: AI’s craving for data is matched only by a runaway thirst for water and energy | John Naughton'


Bookmarking for future reference. Are the purported benefits of generative AI worth these (and other) costs?

🔗 linkblog: Amazon Turkers Who Train AI Say They’re Locked Out of Their Work and Money'


Helpful reminder that it’s low-paid, underappreciated workers who contribute to AI as much as high-paid programmers and household-name executives.

🔗 linkblog: Fanfiction Community Rocked By Etsy Sellers Turning Their Work Into Bound Books'


This strikes me as illustrating the digital labor issues associated with generative AI. It’s someone else profiting off of one’s work.

🔗 linkblog: Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools'


Aw, geez, and I liked Automattic, too. I get that financing Tumblr is hard, but why this?


This week has enough writing (and deadlines!) that the utilitarian appeal of ChatGPT is finally clear to me; and yet, it’s also so much clearer that I would rather do fewer things well and on my own.

🔗 linkblog: Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base''


There are few phrases grosser than “monetizing our user base.”

🔗 linkblog: Reddit Signs $60 Million Deal to Scrape Your Online Community for AI Parts: Report'


Look, I’ve never been really into Reddit, but I’m still really disappointed in the company. This sucks.

🔗 linkblog: Reddit sells training data to unnamed AI company ahead of IPO'


C’mon, Reddit.

🔗 linkblog: University of Michigan Sells Recordings of Study Groups and Office Hours to Train AI'


This is straight-up awful. Shame on the university for doing this.

🔗 linkblog: Future data centres may have built-in nuclear reactors'


You know, instead of assuming that we must grow AI data centers and asking how we should power them, we could look at the costs in terms of power and ask whether we should grow AI data centers.

🔗 linkblog: Microsoft and OpenAI say hackers are using ChatGPT to improve cyberattacks'


Hmm. Unsurprising but all the more frustrating for it.

🔗 linkblog: The rise and fall of robots.txt'


Fascinating read on web crawlers and robots.txt

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: How I got scammed (05 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'


Fascinating post. Grateful for Doctorow’s honesty at his being scammed and interested in the idea that lowering quality of services through AI trains us to accept fraud.

🔗 linkblog: The Absurd One-Sidedness of the Ethics of AI Debate: A rant | Punya Mishra's Web'


Punya is a bit warmer on AI than I am, so I wasn’t sure what I would be reading based off of the title, but this is one of the best things I’ve read on generative AI in education. These companies have so much power and could use a little more Parkerian responsibility.

🔗 linkblog: Generative AI course statement – George Veletsianos, PhD'


George’s example statement is one worth bookmarking.

🔗 linkblog: The Taylor Swift deepfakes are a warning'


Good thoughts from Newton here. “Who could have predicted this?” indeed.

🔗 linkblog: X is being flooded with graphic Taylor Swift AI images - The Verge'


I don’t get what’s missing from a world without generative AI—and examples like this don’t make me any more convinced.

🔗 linkblog: OpenAI went back on a promise to make key documents public | Ars Technica'


If OpenAI is going to be an influential company, it would be nice for it to be more transparent.

🔗 linkblog: Cat and Girl'


Generative AI has a digital labor issue, and we aren’t paying enough attention to it.

🔗 linkblog: AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says'


Even if AI would be beneficial for humanity in the aggregate, it’s important to ask how that benefit would be distributed.

🔗 linkblog: Plagiarism is the latest weapon in the culture wars. But what even is it? - Vox'


Lots of interesting comments in this article. I haven’t been following this story as closely as I should, but it—and articles like this—are making me think that I need to think harder about plagiarism: what it is and how I should respond to it.

🔗 linkblog: I’m sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy - The Verge'


Yeah, but don’t worry, this is definitely the only way that generative AI will be used to overwhelm us with useless content.