Good observations here. My respect for Anthropic was solely based on their seeming willingness to stand up for something, because otherwise, I have a lot of issues wirh them. This groveling makes that respect disappear.

Masnick—who is far keener on the idea of generative AI than I will ever be—is unsparing in his critique of OpenAI here, and it’s worth a read.

Pretty sure The Onion accelerated the web publication of this deliciously vicious skewering of Sam Altman after last weekend’s making nice with the Pentagon.

An important read on OpenAI’s seeming selling out.

It takes a lot to get me on Anthropic’s side in any disagreement, but Pete Hegseth is a lot, so I guess this tracks.

Anthropic is weird, and their conscience is focused in some directions at the expense of others (Claude is trained on pirated copies of my research), but at least they have a conscience.

The headline isn’t what I would have chosen, but there’s a lot worth reflecting on in here.

Very clever.

Love that I get to worry about deepfake nudes, scramble to change the way I assess, and now pay more for tech—if it’s even available.

There are so many layers of unearned, inaccurate, and problematic chatbot anthropomorphism here that I honestly don’t know where to start.

Important, helpful read.

So many horrifying details crammed into a single article. Grateful to be a 404 Media subscriber and angry at ed tech AI grift.

Excellent jokes to distract from the real horror.

Torn between enjoying Kagi’s machine translation tool and grumpiness about using something LLM-based. Still can’t get over digital labor, but I might(?) be less hostile to generative AI if it were more often deployed in these targeted, careful ways instead of as get-rich-quick chatbots.

Horrifying stories like this should be in our minds every time we think about AI.

Look, I’m open to the argument that there are legitimate, good uses of generative AI, but I think anyone making that argument needs to address stuff like this.

I guess I should be reading this for the jokes, but I hadn’t realized Academia.edu had done this, and I’m so angry at the inspiration for the jokes that I haven’t made it any further.

A few thoughts:

First, it is almost comically mean to use the results of a project collecting AI tells to get LLMs to not sound like that. Like, of all the digital labor exploitations of AI, this might be the pettiest.

Second, AI detection is hard, and for all my concerns with AI, I think this is another good example of why policing its use can do more harm than good. I don’t blame the Wikipedia community for doing this project, but I would never recommend this approach in a classroom.

Good overview of an enraging story.

One of the most interesting recurring themes in Jacques Ellul’s writing is one that contrasts reality (or facts) with truth. As Ellul distinguishes them, facts are what are and—implicitly—what must be conformed to, whereas truth is what ought to be. Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word explores this distinction at length, but it crops up in plenty of his other writing. In fact, I’m currently reading his Présence au monde moderne (or rereading it, depending on what one considers reading the original French after reading the English translation last year), and I’m delighted to see that he makes this distinction as early as this 1948 book.

Pair this with Emanuel Maiberg’s article I linked to earlier, and there’s a lot to think about.

I sometimes wonder if base Grok is less wild than integrated-with-Twitter Grok, but this is at least one way in which that’s not true.

Oof, this line:

what is clear to me from following this Telegram community for a couple of years now is that nonconsensual sexual images of real people, including minors, is the cost of doing business with AI image generators

I have largely abstained from the “AI misses the point of writing” discourse, but Cory knocks it out of the park here.

Bookmarking all these articles on Grok for rage fuel.

What a disaster.