As more political problems get the artificial intelligence treatment (that the problem can be solved by the introduction/deployment of AI in some form), I think its safe to say that:
It now been elevated to the status of magic bullet;
the claims for its problem solving abilities have gone some way beyond what the existing evidence might actually suggest is plausible;
it looks like yet another big tech power grab.
As I've said before: if AI is the answer we're asking the wrong question.
A study by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School has found that increased reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) tools is linked to diminished critical thinking abilities. It points to cognitive offloading as a primary driver of the decline.
Repeat after me, not all #ML is #AI. This bothers me beyond belief these days. Even the big platforms deliberately muddy the lines here, by stating that anything "to large" for human processing is "AI".
Bit worrying that #AI is the now “the centre of the UK’s industrial strategy”. More inward investment from tech firms is all well and good, but to base the entire strategy around it seems foolhardy at best.
"If Silicon Valley is going to stave off another devastating AI winter — let alone usher us into an AI utopia — then it's going to need more than just the brute power of compute, data, and cash. It'll also need to exploit the power of belief.
We have plenty of recent examples that show even investing billions of dollars into a speculative tech may not be enough to guarantee the realization of a dream if people lose interest and stop feeding it with their attention. Metaverse? A distant memory. Web3? Sorry, wrong number. Google Glass? Never heard of it.
AI depends on vital support from people hard at work in the futurism factory. These are the executives, consultants, journalists, and other thought leaders whose job is the selling of things to come. They craft visions of a specific future — such as ones where AI models built by companies like OpenAI or Microsoft are undeniable forces of progress — and they build expectations in the public about the inevitable capabilities and irresistible outcomes of these tech products.
By flooding the zon
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"If Silicon Valley is going to stave off another devastating AI winter — let alone usher us into an AI utopia — then it's going to need more than just the brute power of compute, data, and cash. It'll also need to exploit the power of belief.
We have plenty of recent examples that show even investing billions of dollars into a speculative tech may not be enough to guarantee the realization of a dream if people lose interest and stop feeding it with their attention. Metaverse? A distant memory. Web3? Sorry, wrong number. Google Glass? Never heard of it.
AI depends on vital support from people hard at work in the futurism factory. These are the executives, consultants, journalists, and other thought leaders whose job is the selling of things to come. They craft visions of a specific future — such as ones where AI models built by companies like OpenAI or Microsoft are undeniable forces of progress — and they build expectations in the public about the inevitable capabilities and irresistible outcomes of these tech products.
By flooding the zone with an endless stream of new partnerships, new products, new promises, the tech industry makes us feel disoriented and overwhelmed by a future rushing at us faster than we can handle. The desire to not be left behind — or taken advantage of — is a powerful motivator that keeps us engaged in the AI sales pitch. The breathless hype surrounding AI is more than just a side-effect of over-eager entrepreneurs; it’s a load-bearing column for the tech sector. If people believe hard enough in the future manufactured by Silicon Valley, then they start acting like it already exists before it happens. Thus the impacts of technologies like AI become a self-fulfilling prophecy."
> The US is on the cusp of a natural gas power plant construction boom, as Big Tech turns to fossil fuels to meet the huge electricity needs of the #ArtificialIntelligence revolution — putting climate targets in peril.
> As many as 80 new gas-fired power plants will be built in the #US by 2030, said energy consultancy Enverus, adding 46 gigawatts of capacity — the size of the electricity system in Norway ft.com/content/63c3ceb2-5e30-4… #ClimateChange
‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of #AI - theguardian.com/politics/2025/… trouble is, politicians tend to be rather gullible about shiny new tech...
"In newly unredacted documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, recount Meta’s testimony from late last year, during which it was revealed that Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of a dataset called LibGen for Llama-related training.
LibGen, which describes itself as a “links aggregator,” provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. LibGen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and fined tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement.
According to Meta’s testimony, as relayed by plaintiffs’ counsel, Zuckerberg cleared the use of LibGen to train at least one of Meta’s Llama models despite concerns within Meta’s AI exec team and others at the company. The filing quotes Meta employees as referring to LibGen as a “data set we know to be pirated,” an
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"In newly unredacted documents filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, recount Meta’s testimony from late last year, during which it was revealed that Zuckerberg approved Meta’s use of a dataset called LibGen for Llama-related training.
LibGen, which describes itself as a “links aggregator,” provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. LibGen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and fined tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement.
According to Meta’s testimony, as relayed by plaintiffs’ counsel, Zuckerberg cleared the use of LibGen to train at least one of Meta’s Llama models despite concerns within Meta’s AI exec team and others at the company. The filing quotes Meta employees as referring to LibGen as a “data set we know to be pirated,” and flagging that its use “may undermine [Meta’s] negotiating position with regulators.”"
AI steals art. Swedish museum has an exhibit about witches. Uses AI to generate pictures. Sells those pictures. I had no idea #promtography is a thing. I know so many artists who could have drawn amazing art with a witchy theme, but I guess AI is cheaper. #ai
Can Zuck actually pull this off in 2025? Probably not. But that’s not going to stop him from laying off engineers again this year, and forcing the remainder to rely on #AI to get work done that their ex-colleagues would have helped with. AI is still going to suck, but Zuck is going to force it to “work”.
“Probably in 2025, Meta, as well as other companies, will have an AI that can effectively be a mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code. In the beginning that will be very expensive to run, then at some point a lot of the code we have in our apps will be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers. In my opinion that will augment the people working on it. My view is that in the future people will be so much more creative and freed up to do crazy things.”
I state again: to most capitalists pouring money into #AI, THE CORE VALUE PROPOSITION FOR AI IS DISPLACEMENT OF HUMAN LABOR. What capitalists want are slaves that replace workers.
Robots have replaced a lot of *repetitive* human work, and capitalists have hoarded all the profits from their increased productivity. Now they want AI to replace *intelligent* human work, and capitalists want to hoard those profits too.
Ok, let's see if this is easier to setup than any of the #activitypub / #mastodon clones ... Which tbh seems to need an #ai assistant to even get started. Oh, and no, I don't like using docker and such.... That just creates it's own set of issues... Like learning docker. (;
"On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company’s e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack.
He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site.
“We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page,” Tomchuk told TechCrunch. “Each page has at least three photos.”
OpenAI was sending “tens of thousands” of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions.
“OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it’s way more,” he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site.
“Their crawlers were crushing our site,” he said “It was basically a DDoS attack.”
Triplegangers’ website is its business. The seven-employee company has spent over a decade assembling what it calls the largest
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"On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company’s e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack.
He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site.
“We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page,” Tomchuk told TechCrunch. “Each page has at least three photos.”
OpenAI was sending “tens of thousands” of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions.
“OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it’s way more,” he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site.
“Their crawlers were crushing our site,” he said “It was basically a DDoS attack.”
Triplegangers’ website is its business. The seven-employee company has spent over a decade assembling what it calls the largest database of “human digital doubles” on the web, meaning 3D image files scanned from actual human models.
It sells the 3D object files, as well as photos — everything from hands to hair, skin, and full bodies — to 3D artists, video game makers, anyone who needs to digitally recreate authentic human characteristics."
I think #VLC leaning into the “AI” branding for their on-device transcription and translation service is a #marketing blunder. The services offered by the models can be useful, especially for accessibility reasons. But calling it “AI” is tone-deaf, and plays right into the (righteous) anti-AI sentiment which I suspect is shared by much of their user base.
In any case, they’re using OpenAI’s models AFAICT, which were probably created through questionable means, and that gives me pause. AI’s ethics are dubious, even when used for noble ends. Legitimizing #OpenAI as a supplier is problematic, given their high likelihood of proving to be a big net negative to society in the long run.
If you find the feature useful for accessibility, by all means use it. But I don’t think I’ll be enabling it. Hopefully that also saves me several gigaby
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I think #VLC leaning into the “AI” branding for their on-device transcription and translation service is a #marketing blunder. The services offered by the models can be useful, especially for accessibility reasons. But calling it “AI” is tone-deaf, and plays right into the (righteous) anti-AI sentiment which I suspect is shared by much of their user base.
In any case, they’re using OpenAI’s models AFAICT, which were probably created through questionable means, and that gives me pause. AI’s ethics are dubious, even when used for noble ends. Legitimizing #OpenAI as a supplier is problematic, given their high likelihood of proving to be a big net negative to society in the long run.
If you find the feature useful for accessibility, by all means use it. But I don’t think I’ll be enabling it. Hopefully that also saves me several gigabytes of disk storage for not downloading the models.
Adapting Your Teaching to Generative AI Tools Short link to this handout: bit.ly/teachchatgpt | LibGuide | Video | Slides | Short Course Chatbots: ChatGPT | Gemini | Claude | HuggingChat | Other AI Tools 5 Strategies for Adapting Your Assessments to …
Anyone know of a site or resource that's tracking copyright claims against AI/LLM companies? I know there's a bunch of these — and some large ones — but following progress (and resolutions) isn't the easiest.
The enshittification of AI has lead to the choice of AI used by VLC to be groaned at. I even saw a post cross my feed of someone looking for a replacement for VLC.
VLC is working on on-device realtime captioning. This has nothing to do with generating images or video using AI. This has nothing to do with LLMs.
(edit: There's claims VLC is using a local LLM. It will use whisper.cpp, and not be using OpenAI's models. I don't know which models they will be using. I cannot find any reference to VLC using a LLM.)
While it would be preferred to use human generated captions for better accuracy, this is not always possible. This means a lot of video media is inaccessible to those with hearing impairment.
What VLC is doing is something that will contribute to accessibility in a big way.
AI transcription is still not perfect. It has its problems. But this is one of those things that we should be hoping to advance.
I'm not looking to replace humans in creating captions. I think we're very far from ever being able to do this correctly without humans. But as
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The enshittification of AI has lead to the choice of AI used by VLC to be groaned at. I even saw a post cross my feed of someone looking for a replacement for VLC.
VLC is working on on-device realtime captioning. This has nothing to do with generating images or video using AI. This has nothing to do with LLMs.
(edit: There's claims VLC is using a local LLM. It will use whisper.cpp, and not be using OpenAI's models. I don't know which models they will be using. I cannot find any reference to VLC using a LLM.)
While it would be preferred to use human generated captions for better accuracy, this is not always possible. This means a lot of video media is inaccessible to those with hearing impairment.
What VLC is doing is something that will contribute to accessibility in a big way.
AI transcription is still not perfect. It has its problems. But this is one of those things that we should be hoping to advance.
I'm not looking to replace humans in creating captions. I think we're very far from ever being able to do this correctly without humans. But as I said, there's a ton of video content that simply do not have captions available, human generated or not.
So long as they're not trying to manipulate the transcription using GenAI means, this is the wrong one to demonize.
As if scraping free content to train #AI models wasn’t enough (and #Meta already has plenty of free content created by billions of users on its platforms), as if refusing to pay a fair share to those content creators wasn’t enough, imagine working in a place where AI engineers send emails asking for clearance to use LibGen or BitTorrent in the office, in order to download GBs of pirated copyrighted work that can be fed to those models, and getting thumbs up from the CEO himself.
The next judge who harshly punishes a teenager for downloading his favorite movie or TV series (or worse the next judge who states that scraping is a crime) deserves to be hit with a rubber hose under his feet. No single user of pirated content ought to be punished until the tech giants that in the past couple of years have played all kinds of dirty games with user content in order to get the best AI model are punished.
I seriously dislike my operating system giving me suggestions for replies to text messages or anything else. It makes a mockery of trust and sincerity. This whole thing is a bad idea.
From interactive funeral experiences to digital chatbots of the deceased, technology is blurring the line between life and afterlife. Marketing professors weigh in on the implications for #grief, memory, and immortality: theconversation.com/logging-of… #AI #death #estateplanning
Ethical and legal issues around death in the digital age are thorny enough dealing with social media accounts. AI puts the notion of a digital afterlife into overdrive.
What if we can crowd sourcing our computing power to train #AI model that is truly open to all?
Well, the "open model" part might still be a dream for now, at least it is seemingly feasible to crowd sourcing computers for training. Training can be done without millions of hardware investments after all (if you have people on your side).
"- the most exciting part of the "internet in the '90s" was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn't dominated by large companies – indeed, it had them running scared.
The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to "This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves"..."
The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they're doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto - trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:
this is a very interesting article by ted chiang about the quality of LLM like chatgpt a.o. the LLM's "hallucinations" as inevitable effects of data compression
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.
"Meta has repeatedly deleted our articles, incl. ones about IGs censorship & disproportionate moderation against trans ppl -put a "fact check" warning on an article we did about hurricane Helene AI spam proliferating on the platform.
Our findings suggest -although Meta has the tech to automatically detect pornographic content, it doesn't apply it to enforce its community standards on advertisements as it does for non-sponsored content."
Instagram, Facebook, and Threads are removing 404 Media stories for “nudity” as the company is paid to put ads with explicit pornography in front of its users.
"significant negative correlation between frequent #AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities"
Interesting contrast between tools for distributed cognition VS offloading your critical thinking. The value of, for example, Miro is not text in rectangles - it's *making sense* of data through the work of arranging it into richer constellations of meaning. Generating that output on your behalf would actually make it worse at doing its job.
The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has transformed numerous aspects of daily life, yet its impact on critical thinking remains underexplored.
"Instagram has begun testing a feature in which Meta’s AI will automatically generate images of users in various situations and put them into that user’s feed."
All this said, being part of a decentralized web, as pointed out in this toot, our publicly visible interaction lands on other instances and servers of the #fediVerse and can be scrapped there. I wonder if this situation actually might lead, or should lead, to a federation of servers that share the same robots.txt "ideals".
As @Matthias pointed out in his short investigation of the AI matter, this has (in my eyes) already unimagined levels of criminal and without any doubt unethical behavior, not to mention the range of options rouge actors have
All this said, being part of a decentralized web, as pointed out in this toot, our publicly visible interaction lands on other instances and servers of the #fediVerse and can be scrapped there. I wonder if this situation actually might lead, or should lead, to a federation of servers that share the same robots.txt "ideals".
As @Matthias pointed out in his short investigation of the AI matter, this has (in my eyes) already unimagined levels of criminal and without any doubt unethical behavior, not to mention the range of options rouge actors have at hand.
It's evident why for example the elongated immediately closed down access to X's public tweets and I guess other companies did the same for the same reasons. Obviously the very first reason was to protect their advantage about the hoarded data sets to train their AI in the first place. Yet, considering the latest behavior of the new owner of #twitter, nothing less than at least the creation of #AI driven lists of "political" enemies, and not only from all the collected data on his platform, is to be expected. A international political nightmare of epical proportions. Enough material for dystopian books and articles for people like @Cory Doctorow, @Mike Masnick ✅, @Eva Wolfangel, @Taylor Lorenz, @Jeff Jarvis, @Elena Matera, @Gustavo Antúnez 🇺🇾🇦🇷, to mention a few of the #journalim community, more than one #podcast episode by @Tim Pritlove and @linuzifer, or some lifetime legal cases for @Max Schrems are at hand.
What we are facing now is the fact that we need to protect our and our users data and privacy because of the advanced capabilities of #LLM. We basically are forced to consider to change to private/restricted posts and close down our servers as not only the legal jurisdictions are way to scattered over the different countries and ICANN details, but legislation and comprehension by the legislators is simply none existent, as @Anke Domscheit-Berg could probably agree to.
Like to say, it looks like we need to go dark, a fact that will drive us even more into disappearing as people will have less chance to see what we are all about, advancing further the advantages off the already established players in the social web space. Just like Prof. Dr. Peter Kruse stated in his take about on YT The network is challenging us min 2:42 more than 14 years ago: "With semantic understanding we'll have the real big brother. Someone is getting the best out of it and the rest will suffer."
It was chilling to hear ‘my voice’ repeating lies – and to discover that deepfake audio is a growing threat to democracy, says writer and presenter Georgina Findlay
