I wish this weren’t as relevant as it is to my work on Mormon Twitter, but here we are.

Welp, all the more reason to leave birdsite behind.

Headline overstates things a bit, and I’m on team “change the assessments,” but it’s still worth asking if AI developers are appropriately anticipating the disruptions these tools are causing.

Glad this story is still getting attention, because it so neatly demonstrates why facial recognition is scary. We shouldn’t tolerate this level of surveillance—by private or public actors.

Looks like the job of AI training is as awful as the job of content moderation.

A couple of months ago, I spoke to Education Week about the Gas app. I thought it had an exploitative business model then, and its being acquired does nothing to calm that fear.

Ah, the kind of answer that only raises more questions.

Here, as with autocorrect and citation managers, my personal opinion is that any human who knows enough to use the tool critically knows enough to do the job themself. Maybe slower, sure, but slower isn’t always bad.

Seems like good news, but while I’ll be happy to join others’ D&D games, I think my preferences are locked into Paizo games and indie titles.

Fascinating read on potential threats posed by AI—and potential solutions.

Lots of respect for Paizo for doing this. I think my TTRPG future is more in rules-light, story-first indie titles, but if I want something more classic, I wouldn’t mind privileging Pathfinder.

Ashamed to admit that until this week, I ’d never really thought about the origins of this name. This seems like a pretty straightforward argument, though, and I can’t think of any compelling reason not to change the name.

Once again, the more I read about this, the more worried I get. I also appreciate the thesis of this particular article: D&D could lose its status as the ur-TTRPG over this.

Libraries are perhaps the most important public institution out there. We can’t afford to cut their budgets.

Glad to see more coverage of this so I can be more upset by what’s going on.

Il y a quelques années, j’ai découvert Thimas Römer grâce à un entretien sur le podcast « Le rayon bd ». C’était peu après que j’ai découvert ses leçons sur les milieux bibliques données au Collège de France. J’aime bien écouter ces leçons comme podcast même si elles n’ont rien à voir avec la BD. Ça semble tout réunir d’entendre Römer présenter Benoît Peeters pour des leçons sur la BD au Collège de France, et j’en suis bien content.

Hey, look, workplace surveillance doesn’t work.

I’m skeptical of many technologies, most of which I can concede have some real value. In contrast, I have a lot of trouble seeing any value in facial recognition that outweighs the obvious, large-scale harms that can come from it.

So this is the OGL kerfuffle I’ve heard a bit about recently. This would be a bad move by WotC, but I’m also intrigued by what the EFF has to say here.

Repeat after me: Content moderation is a good thing.

It’s a long interview, so I didn’t read the whole thing, but what I did read made me want to read this book even more. I have a copy, I just need to open it up.

A good reminder that analog is often better. Digital often benefits others (including bad actors) more than ourselves.

I’ve been making a real effort to be less pessimistic about ChatGPT, and I imagine this makes a better headline than actual threat, but this is still the sort of thing that makes me wonder about AI. What is missing from our world that ChatGPT fills? And is it worth these increased risks?

See, as worried as I am about ChatGPT use in education, this actually worries me more, because it’s basically plagiarism detection, which I’m opposed to.

Two years later, and we’re still learning just how bad this event was. Only two years later, and large parts of the country are ready to sweep it all under the rug.