I always thought you could do interesting stuff with genAI, especiall when it goes into mangled, uncanny-valley territory. Though I can only think of examples for visual generators, like this album cover or the AI Pizza commercial.
The only text-based example that comes to mind is I forced a Bot to write this Book and that’s just a guy imitating LLM writing style. (Hillarious though!)
…pirating them at all instead of learning Inkscape & Krita.
Yes, deceitful corporations are truly a troubling new phenomenon, which brings them closer to the baseline for evil: democratic governments
High IQ politics hour over here.
18:30
[Reporter Dude] If you launch the coin, isn’t it unfair for you to snipe the coin?
[Shitcoin Wizard] ponders deeply I would say no.
[Reporter Dude] WTF did he just say that on the record?
For those who just can’t shake their Wordle habit:
32 times the Wordle and none of the NYT enshittification
While browsing the references of the paper, I found such a perfect evisceration of GenAI.
We have confused what we can write down with what we usefully know and compounded the error by supposing that because computers can help us write down more they can obviously help us know more.
The marks are on the knowledge worker - Kidd, Alison
That’s from 1994 folks, they were talking about the wonder of relational databases.
https://www.byom.de/trashmails/
Decent functionality, and it didn’t get flagged most of the time I used it.
can recommend YTDLnis, as others have. If web-based is important to you, cobalt dot tools seems great and trustworthy.
The pivot-to-ai writeup is out, they did seed! I assume it’s documented then.
Multinational corporations can act ethically after all.
Did they seed at least?
Not my place to tell you what to post, but I would have just made a link post to your blog. I found it more pleasant to read, and gave me an incentive to poke through your backlog. Entertaining stuff!
Less meta: you just prompted me to actually remember when my Internet journey actually began. Must have been early to mid oughts, mostly playing flash games on lego.com . I remember an elementary school buddy came over one day and helped me create the Email I’d use for 15 years, and introduced me to some regional forum that went offline many years ago.
Fits a pattern I’ve seen before. Kinda critical of OpenAI and not buying their PR wholesale, but also accepting the framing that AI is some kind of critical foundational tech instead of another shitty magic trick.
SmartTV is still a missing link for me too. A Kodi RaspberryPi hooked up via HDMI seems viable.
I wish I could just flash the firmware with a Linux and reinstall the Apps I need, but the whole ecosystem seems way too intransparent, and I’m not a passionate hardware hacker.
Can’t be done vs. won’t be done is a distinction. I said it was a nitpick.
The point would be, to roll it all into the ID issuing process. I think most EU IDs already have cryptographic identities built in. The certificate issuing should probably be a state service as well. The alternative would probably be, just mail your birth certificate and a 3D scan of your anus to the private age verification provider of your choice.
It of course all falls back to a central state authority. But the process wouldn’t have to be more centralized and privacy-invasive than state IDs already are. Control of resident data could be kept at municipality level, and you wouldn’t need a central approver, that gets a running feed of all my age-restricted activities.
Before I sound like I’m soying over ID verification, I’ll add that all this junk can become insidious very quick, if it becomes easy to implement and gets used everywhere. I also detest beyond measure that my ID currently stores a scan of my fingerprint, and I hope the court-ordered deadline makes that shit illegal again in 2027.
I’ll slightly nitpick the claim about the central ID register, because you can do a lot of this stuff decentralized with smart IDs.
I imagine it works like this: You somehow get your hands on a certificate that reads “yo, the controller of the key pair with public key a4c6… is over 18 - signed, new south wales records agency”. You hook up your smart card to pass some cryptographic test, and voilá: you proved you have the ID of an adult and know their PIN.
Not that I advocate for IDing everytime you visit a website, but I guess I’d be fine with it for ordering weed online. I expect we’ll get something like it in the EU, if we decide not to go full fucking surveillance state.
If the Youtube player is giving you trouble, check out this Android App (alternative FDroid Repo) or the tool it’s based on (GitHub).
Apropos Bruce, I have this writeup sitting around half-finished, where I go over the AI chapters of A Hackers Mind and try to pinpoint his naivité (however you spell that) of the subject. I really should dump that in a Snubstack.
After reading his older article, I can totally see how he fits into one of the middle layers of the diagram in the UAntwerp paper. He moved beyond basic followership and knows enough to stan EA to potential recruits. But he hasn’t advanced to the part where you score comfy research positions in backroom deals with rich benefactors. So AI doom is just one of those things he doesn’t really get, but a lot of people he respects take it super seriously, so it’s got to be something.
Amazing how well he it the nail on the head back then.
In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it’s becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a “rounding error.”
First I thought “Oh jeez, what a wall of text” but now you gave me my own thoughts that I want to share.
I don’t think callling genAI output “not art” is a very defendable statement. I believe art is ultimately a type of activity, and one that is very hard to draw a strict line around. If I find a cool piece of driftwood and frame it, did I do art? That’s kind of what that artist did when he picked his album cover.
But I also share your sentiment about “AI artists” pretending to work in a medium of which they understand 0% of the nuance. I think it makes more sense to call those people hacks instead of “not artists”, because that’s what you call people who use shallow, formulaic methods to dabble in a medium of which they are wholly incompetent.
And finally, AI as toolset does of course uniquely pander to hacks.