#criti-hype

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine

There are only TWO MORE DAYS left in the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan

The stories of Hallowe'en poisonings were just that – stories. No one was poisoning kids on Hallowe'en – except this monstrous murderer, who mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that his murder would blend in with the crowd.

Last week, the dudes behind the "comedy" podcast Dudesy released a "George Carlin" comedy special that they claimed had been created, holus bolus, by an AI trained on the comedian's routines. This was a lie. After the Carlin estate sued, the dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) "comedy" special:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

As I've written, we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

AI systems can do some remarkable party tricks, but there's a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one. After the initial rush of astonishment, the stench of botshit becomes unmistakable:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

Some of this botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods: they're convinced that they can make a George Carlin special without any human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI.

This is an old technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to livecast the show.

Nevertheless, my friend's boss's ordered him to go on pretending to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by overheated narration from the show's hosts.

The weirdest part? The next day, my friend – and many others – heard from satisfied viewers who boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream. These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end – that they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence, they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the Emperor's New Livestream.

Perhaps that's what happened to the Dudesy bros. But there's another possibility: maybe they were captured by their own imaginations. In "Genesis," an essay in the 2007 collection The Creationists, EL Doctorow (no relation) describes how the ancient Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it must be true. They themselves weren't nearly imaginative enough to have come up with this super-cool tale, so God must have put it in their minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply

That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who falsely claimed that a "rogue AI-powered drone" had spontaneously evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

This never happened. It was – in the chagrined colonel's words – a "thought experiment." In other words, this guy – who is the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations – was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot it wasn't true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it had actually happened.

Maybe that's what happened with the George Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up, so they just cheated, assuming they would eventually be able to make a fully operational Battle Carlinbot.

That's basically the Theranos story: a teenaged "entrepreneur" was convinced that she was just about to produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who wanted to believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The thing about stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI's boosters and its critics. For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious: if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles, they'll invest in it. They'll even integrate it into their product offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects in these products a secret, because they'll assume that they've committed an operator error. After all, everyone knows that AI can do anything, so if it's not performing for them, the problem must exist between the keyboard and the chair.

But this would only take AI so far. It's one thing to hear implausible stories of AI's triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI's critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

There's a name for this kind of criticism: "criti-hype," coined by Lee Vinsel, who points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it constitutes an "academic business-model":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That's four reasons for AI hype:

to win investors and customers;

to cover customers' and users' embarrassment when the AI doesn't perform;

AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can't tell truth from fantasy;

A business-model for doomsayers who form an unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in warning form.

But there's a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify otherwise tedious and complex situations. As Jamie Zawinski writes, this is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the "autonomous cars" on the streets of San Francisco have no driver:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/

GM's Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one of its "self-driving" cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/

One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every one of its "self-driving" cars. In other words, they had replaced a single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators.

As Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there's a human being (or more than one human being) responsible for every one of these cars – someone who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property. Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can't be cited for moving violations because "no one is driving them."

But figuring out who which person is responsible for a moving violation is "complicated and annoying to deal with," so the fiction persists.

(Zawinski notes that even when these people are held responsible, they're a "moral crumple zone" for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in nonconsensual murderbot experiments.)

Automation hype has always involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the "mechanical Turk" hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its carapace.

This pattern repeats itself through the ages. Thomas Jefferson "replaced his slaves" with dumbwaiters – but of course, dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, they hide slaves:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

The modern Mechanical Turk – a division of Amazon that employs low-waged "clickworkers," many of them overseas – modernizes the dumbwaiter by hiding low-waged workforces behind a veneer of automation. The MTurk is an abstract "cloud" of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are called "HITs," which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks").

This is such a truism that techies in India joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians." Or, to use Jathan Sadowski's wonderful term: "Potemkin AI":

https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/

This Potemkin AI is everywhere you look. When Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, they made a big flashy show of it, promising a $20,000 automaton was just on the horizon. They failed to mention that Optimus was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Likewise with the famous demo of a "full self-driving" Tesla, which turned out to be a canned fake:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

The most shocking and terrifying and enraging AI demos keep turning out to be "Just A Guy" (in Molly White's excellent parlance):

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1751670561606971895

And yet, we keep falling for it. It's no wonder, really: criti-hype rewards so many different people in so many different ways that it truly offers something for everyone.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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#pluralistic #ai #absent indians #mechanical turks #scams #george carlin #comedy #body-snatchers #fraud #theranos #guys in robot suits #criti-hype #machine learning #fake it til you make it #too good to fact-check #mturk #deepfakes

[pissanddie]

... and psychological manipulation and human stupidity and criti-hype

#ai #extinction #criti-hype #mistification

[oathofkaslana]

i do really enjoy people telling me abt their hi3 thoughts i think its so sweetie that people think to come into my ask box to talk to me about it :'') <3

#waaaaa :''') #it also makes me feel like i need to criticize it more i feel like i hype it up too much bc im very not normal abt the good in it rn #please believe me its not perfect both morally and like. just in its writing/design. #early game writing especially can feel a lil odd. i dont necessarily think its either a good or bad thing #but i feel like its important to mention that based of the content in-game alone i only really started to get attached to the characters #around 5-6 chapters in #<- in part bc they just fumbled the wendy arc imo. #and even then it was only a slight attachment! a deeper attachment would only form later in i think 9-ex #bc of the connection that they didnt know hmeko was dead #<- STILL MAKES ME LOSE MY MIND BTW. #i do think the tonal change is necessary to understand how a honkai eruption changes the atmosphere and disrupts life yk #esp since it fits well w the military commentary when its revealed that HoV's awakening is because of otto #i also think it just lets players dip their toes in first #and sets up a world where kiana is actively devolping alongside her environment #but man it can feel. boring sometimes. #hnk3 #mhy criti #and this isnt even getting into the other writing issues and the things i have an actual moral issue with

[rgr-pop]

99 is done done DONE. i just need to work on the automating features for the second half so i can be free. it's like two hours long. and decide whether any of the gunshot songs are staying in. 00 has everything it's going to have, i think, but it has mysteries. i will doing a bunch of remixing in it. i want to be able to make white pony fit. it has most of my favorite songs and the best high points--such as for example slightly fast clinic - distortions. it's bounded but it needs work. and one more really clear bombing statement. 01 feels still like i missed a bunch of things, i need to sit down with something--m83, metro area, green velvet, mouse on mars, what is it--and figure it out. doing 01 earlier in the day so no one will be hyped enough for all this disco anyway -- weird mistake on my part. should have done love and theft hm! focused on the bottom two. 2001: delirium time (hyper - media - crity) 2000: the earthquake is making the house shake the house shake 1999: fall(s) apart (nothing going on but history) (welcome to weapon world) (give me action and drama) (we like the boys with the bullet proof vests) (more crackers please)

#1999 #2000 #2001 #still i have no steve albini pun dj name

[robhorninginternalexile]

for the automatic disappearance of the world

Some notes on Jean Baudrillard's "The Virtual Illusion: Or the Automatic Writing of the World" (1995):

(1) Baudrillard seems to be responding to the advent of reality TV in the 1990s, which he sees as an "innocent" depiction of an already established truth, that we are already living our lives as though we are being filmed. "Each existence is telepresent to itself," he declares. "We have interiorized our own prosthetic image and become the professional showmen of our own lives." This obviously anticipates a common critique of social media, that people let the need to create content for platforms begin to direct their lives.

(2) Echoing a point he frequently makes, Baudrillard suggests that critiquing things like reality TV or virtual reality tends to irresponsibly posit some "reality" that is somehow still preserved or protected from the effects of media and technology. "The reality shows are only side-effects and, moreover, mystifying, because in indicting them as manipulation, the critics assume that there is somewhere an original form of life, and reality shows would be only the parody and the simulation of it (Disneyland)." In other words, Disneyland is the alibi for the way reality is already a simulation of itself. In general, "all negative criticism, surviving itself, actually helps its object to survive." (The idea of "criti-hype" makes a similar point.)

(3) Baudrillard points out that "real time" is meaningless outside the context of mediatization. Real time means to be mediated immediately, so the term is oxymoronic in a way: Real time is media time; it is the forced equivalence of the real and the mediated. ("Real time is in fact a purely virtual time.") He presciently describes "immersive art exhibitions" (i.e. Immersive Van Gogh etc.) as a way of allowing viewers to feel like their consumption of the art is happening in "real time." This also compels their participation (since Baudrillard views the "silence of the masses" as a kind of threat the powers that be find intolerable).

(4) Baudrillard likens reality show contestants to Duchampian ready-mades: They short-circuit signification and representation; they are presented as being what they are, a proposition that becomes tautological and self-canceling. The distinction between art and life is nullified to the detriment of both. "Cloned to our own image by high definition, and dedicated by involution into our own image to mediatic stupefaction, just as the ready-made is dedicated to aesthetic stupefaction."

(5) Baudrillard defines "the virtual" as datafication:

What is the idea of the Virtual? It seems that it would be the radical effectuation, the unconditional realization of the world, the transformation of all our acts, of all historical events, of all material substance and energy into pure information. The ideal would be the resolution of the world by the actualization of all facts and data.

This would be one way of looking at LLMs, or the project of "AI": to map the "virtual" space of language or culture or any kind of experience that can be represented as data as a complete set of given probabilities. The "automatic writing of the world," Baudrillard calls it. Everything that can happen is calculated and anticipated and in that sense "actualized." This process, in his view, resolves and extinguishes those possibilities; enacting them becomes superfluous, they are automatically performed in simulation and no longer require human activity. Hence the project of AI is "accelerating the process of declining (in the double sense of the word), towards a pure and simple disappearance. The human species would be invested, without knowing it, with the task of programming, by exhausting all its possibilities, the code for the automatic disappearance of the world. This is the very idea of Virtuality."

(6) Baudrillard strangely proposes that "we all dream of perfect autonomous beings who, far from acing against our will ..., would meet our desire to escape our own will, and realize the world as a self-fulfilling prophecy." He states this as though it were self-evident, but it seems to me that the masochism intrinsic to AI fantasy is covert, disavowed. People warn of rogue AI because they yearn for it, yearn to be controlled by some entity like that, etc. Baudrillard argues that "All forms of High Technology illustrate the fact that behind his doubles and his prostheses, his biological clones and his virtual images, the human being is secretly fomenting his disappearance." This is reminiscent of Žižek's riff on videotapes watching the shows for us, and so on — that we want technology to perform the work of enjoyment and of desire — but Baudrillard also suggests that "most of these machines are used for delusion, for eluding communication, for absolving us of the face-to-face relation and the social responsibility." Technology promises sociality without the social, without reciprocity. This would mean "real time" is evoked to permit a universal asynchrony, in which no can be present with anyone else.

(7) Baudrillard sees high-definiton as "high dilution": the more something is datafied, the less it conveys: "The highest definition of the information corresponds to the lowest definition of the event," he writes, which raises the question of what an "event" consists of. It is that which can't be simulated or predicted in advance, can't be calculated and thereby made to disappear. For Baudrillard, virtuality entails a "world where referential substance is scarcely to be found anymore" — the "end of illusion" which is also the end of thought.

#jean baudrillard #AI

[asphaltapostle]

Summarize this for a high school graduate: Eighty days ago, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering ~~stood up in front of a crowd of~~... No!... It was just me... Alone, in my mother’s basement, on a Monday morning, contorted at stupid angles, typing to my phone with a physical keyboard and unapologetically scarfing as much as I possibly could of the Apple community’s unbelievably unreserved, almost spiritual volume of pure hype from as many simultaneous sources as I could manage. (Hilariously, all of said sources are/were Discord servers, now, as in that “gamer” communications service I launched my little indie mag on in 2015 and kept comparing to Slack, but like an actual madman.) Anyway, said Senior Vice President of Software Engineering (who we are encouraged to hold accountable for basically all technical changes to iOS) is named Craig, and these are his first few sentences: For many of us, our iPhone has become indispensable. And at the heart of iPhone is iOS. iOS powers the experiences we've come to rely on. This year, we were inspired to create even more meaningful ways iPhone could help you. Our new release is iOS 15. It's packed with features that make the iOS experience adapt to and complement the way you use iPhone... I’m dwelling on them because they are patently meaningless. Very little to nothing coming in iOS 15 is what I would call ease-of-use-centric. Some of it – namely controversial (and now backpedaled) changes to the user interface of Safari – feels almost maliciously quartered in the opposite direction. Most of the changes in the subheadings of the full feature list are simply irrelevant in the use for all but the dorkiest iOS users, like myself, and I find the fact unacceptable, at the very least. The Foundation Image This is why I would like to try something different, this year, and focus on an entirely different audience: my family, as representatives of the vast majority of the iPhone’s billion-something demographic (read: customers.) That is to say, who Craig should be referring to with the phrase “most of us.” Not because I believe them to be “dumb” or “end users” (in the tech bro derogatory sense,) but because they are busy, working people who depend on their iPhone as a utilitarian device, above all else. They don’t have the time to dive deep into Apple documentation or watch the whole WWDC presentation to gain an understanding of where to look for new features or (unfortunately) how to turn them off. Realistically, they don’t even have time to read this whole Post, though I hope they will (sorry fam.) Regardless of how we feel about it, Apple has made it clear that our phones are going to be further and further inundated with automated processes in the background. Whether you like it or not, your phone is going to be used to help find other users’ devices over the Find My network, your travel information is going to be used to inform Apple Maps’ live traffic statistics, and so on. For the more conservative members of my family, related truths about their phones are going to continue to feel like we are continuing to give up “ownership” of our devices. There are definitive alternatives, but they involve giving up a whole lot of conveniences. I will do my best to address this a bit later on, drawing from much more articulate criti…

#openai

[captain-lovelace]

Really don’t get the hype around Cae/nis and while I don’t have like a huge issue with them. Tbh I think I just heard too much about them and I don’t want to talk or think about them. The same way as I feel about like, St/ar Wars, or Mar/vel movies, or Criti//cal Role. I don’t think they’re Inherently Problematic Things, I just don’t care, and the fact that I don’t care and yet have to keep hearing about these things from whatever venue annoys me to no end

#feel like that shut up about the sun meme #I block tags! I do! but it doesn’t help

[vero-bdc]

Plus de nuance pour les technophiles et les technophobes?

Face aux nouvelles technologies, les réactions sont généralement polarisées. On aime ou on déteste. À l’annonce d’une nouvelle techno, certains crient au progrès alors que d’autres craignent le pire. Qu’il soit question des jeux vidéo, de nos vies ultras connectées ou de l’intelligence artificielle, pour ne nommer que ces exemples, les critiques multiplient autant les affirmations dithyrambiques que les propos ultras alarmistes. Et s’il y avait un juste milieu entre ces deux façons de considérer les technologies émergentes et que l’on donnait plus de place à celles qui nous entourent vraiment? C’est ce que défendent de nombreux chercheurs et penseurs, comme entre autres Lee Vinsel, l’auteur du livre « The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession With The New Has Disrupted The Work That Matters Most ».

Dans l’un de ses derniers articles, You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype, il n’y va pas de main morte et affirme que la frénésie qui entoure les questions liées à l’innovation technologique contribue à la désinformation ambiante :

« [...] criti-hype helps create a lousy information environment and lends credibility to industry bullshit. »

Il pointe des firmes-conseils réputées, comme McKinsey, qui font miroiter des possibilités qui ne sont pas même sur le point d’arriver, pour justifier l’intérêt vis-à-vis leurs services. Leur approche crée ainsi un contexte favorable où il est nécessaire de s’entourer « d’experts » comme eux pour avancer dans un monde transformé ou à la veille de l’être.

Il dénonce aussi le fait qu’en donnant trop d’importance aux technologies émergentes, comme c’est le cas avec l’intelligence artificielle, souvent présentée comme une solution révolutionnaire dans des domaines prisés et susceptible de remplacer les humains dans d’autres, on oublie de s’intéresser à des faits de société plus concrets.

« Criti-hype distracts us from real world problems and suffering that are happening right now. […] economically-significant technological change has been slower since 1970 than in the preceding period, digital technology has never had the economic impacts its boosters said it would, and, for a variety of reasons including globalization, many people, especially those without college degrees, have little-to-no access to good jobs. Moreover — despite the hype about, like, apps — nothing about current technological change is likely to change any of these economic conditions soon. »

Cela rejoint les propos de Gordon Robert J. dans The Rise and Fall of American Growth, cités par Vincent Mosco, dans « Après l’Internet : le Cloud, les big data et l’Internet des objets », Les Enjeux de l’information et de la communication :

« Il y a une autre raison pour laquelle il est important d’aborder avec prudence l’impact de la technologie informatique sur les emplois et l’économie : ainsi que le montrent certaines recherches, l’emploi global a été beaucoup plus lié au PIB qu’à l’informatisation et, à l’exception de la fin des années 1990 où les investissements ont été massifs dans les matériels et équipements, les promesses de gains de productivité liés aux TIC n’ont pas été tenues», (Gordon 2016).

Beaucoup de ce qui est écrit en grosses lettres dans les manchettes sert avant tout à capter l’intérêt des décideurs et des consommateurs, mais ces titres ne traduisent pas nécessairement la réalité plus complexe qu’ils évoquent.

Comme on peut le constater dans l’épisode Doit-on prescrire des jeux vidéo?, tiré de l’excellente série documentaire Couple de nerds, quand vient temps d’évaluer les technos et leurs produits dérivés, la réponse n’est ni oui, ni non, mais plutôt «ça dépend».

Dans ce cas-ci, à travers leurs rencontres avec des chercheurs du domaine de la culture ou des sciences cognitives, Marianne Desautels-Marissal, journaliste scientifique, et son conjoint Mathieu Dugal, chroniqueur et animateur, démontrent que dans certains paramètres les jeux vidéo peuvent effectivement apporter de la valeur. Au même titre que le septième art, la culture des jeux vidéo est riche et mérite qu’on s’y intéresse, comme le souligne Bernard Perron, professeur en études du cinéma et du jeu vidéo à l’Université de Montréal.

De même que dans certaines conditions, certains types de jeux peuvent avoir des effets bénéfiques sans qu’on ait à jouer pendant des heures, tel que l’expliquent les différents chercheurs rencontrés par le couple de nerds. À l’inverse, les risques de dépendance sont réels et tous s’entendent pour dire qu’un bon équilibre de vie sociale est souhaité.

Contrairement aux discours tranchants, ça prend beaucoup de nuance pour se prononcer sur l’intérêt de ces passe-temps pouvant être abordés sous plusieurs angles.

Comme pour les jeux applicatifs, l’opinion face aux médias sociaux est aussi divisée. S’il ne nie pas leurs effets parfois néfastes, Lee Vinsel quant à lui amène une nouvelle perspective (et une touche d’humour) sur la prémisse de The Social Dilemma, un documentaire produit par Netflix qui a marqué les esprits depuis sa sortie en 2020 :

«[Tristan] Harris and the other people who appear in The Social Dilemma provide no evidence that social media designers actually CAN purposefully force us to have unwanted thoughts [and manipulate us like puppets].»

Et il ajoute, pour nous rappeler que les discours alarmistes n’ont rien de récent :

«[In] The Social Dilemma, Tristan Harris says, “No one got upset when bicycles showed up. Right? Like if everyone’s starting to go around on bicycles, no one said, “Oh, my God, we’ve just ruined society.”” Actually, the exact opposite is true. There was a moral panic around the threat of bicycles, a well-known fact amongst people who study the social dimensions of technology. An 1894 New York Times article told readers, “There is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy, and homicidal mania.”»

Pour plus de perspective sur les technologies émergentes, l’excellente infolettre Sentiers rassemble des articles de fond chaque semaine sur plusieurs sujets, incluant les enjeux de notre monde numérique.

Bibliographie

GORDON, Robert J., The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Princeton, NJ, Princeton, University Press, 2016, 784 p.

GOYETTE, Sébastien (scénariste et réalisateur). « Doit-on prescrire les jeux vidéo? », Couple de nerds, Urbania, 2012, 27:01, Canal Savoir, https://savoir.media/couple-de-nerds/clip/doit-prescrire-des-jeux-video, (page consultée le 12 avril 2021).

HARRIS, Tristan (réalisateur). The Social Dilemma, États-Unis, Netflix, 2020, 94 min, couleur, https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/.

MOSCO, Vincent, « Après l’Internet : le Cloud, les big data et l’Internet des objets », Les Enjeux de l'information et de la communication, 2016/2 (N° 17/2), p. 253-264. https://www.cairn.info/revue-les-enjeux-de-l-information-et-de-la-communication-2016-2-page-253.htm

TANGUAY, Patrick, Sentiers Media, https://sentiers.media.

#technologies #technologie #pensée critique #environnement numérique

[mitchipedia]

Cory Doctorow: Don't believe Obama's Big Tech criti-hype: They're not evil geniuses (they're not geniuses, period).

Obama, like many tech critics, blames algorithms for radicalizing Americans. But algorithms are not as effective as these critics believe—they are not very effective at all—and critics espousing these opinions are buying into Big Tech’s hype.

This is one of Cory’s best essays. He notes that the reason people believe in crazy anti-vax and Qanon conspiracy theories is not because people are stupid or crazy, but because government and Big Business have betrayed people’s trust time and again.

Clarification: I have been vaxxed and boosted. I have received pretty much every recommended vaccine. And I mask when indoors in public, although I admit I have become sloppy about that. Government and Big Business are untrustworthy in a million other ways, but not about vaxxing.

#Cory Doctorow #Facebook #Obama #Barack Obama #Big Tech

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Studio execs love plausible sentence generators because they have a workflow that looks exactly like a writer-exec dynamic, only without any eye-rolling at the stupid “notes” the exec gives the writer.

All an exec wants is to bark out “Hey, nerd, make me another E.T., except make the hero a dog, and set it on Mars.” After the writer faithfully produces this script, the exec can say, “OK, put put a love interest in the second act, and give me a big gunfight at the climax,” and the writer dutifully makes the changes.

This is exactly how prompting an LLM works.

A writer and a studio exec are lost in the desert, dying of thirst.

Just as they are about to perish, they come upon an oasis, with a cool sparkling pool of water.

The writer drops to their knees and thanks the fates for saving their lives.

But then, the studio exec unzips his pants, pulls out his cock and starts pissing in the water.

“What the fuck are you doing?” the writer demands.

“Don’t worry,” the exec says, “I’m making it better.”

- Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain: The US Copyright Office offers creative workers a powerful labor protective

THIS IS THE LAST DAY FOR MY KICKSTARTER for the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

#labor #copyright #public domain #ai #creative workers #hype #criti-hype #enshittification #llcs with mfas #solidarity #collective power

[daisyishedwig]

Klaine Advent Day 12: Limited

Title: A Place To Call Home Part 3

Summary:  In a matter of days Blaine's whole world falls apart and everything he does to try and stay afloat only seems to make matters worse. A call to Sebastian Smythe is his last resort, and maybe the one that actually starts to make things better. 

A/N: If you like Blangst topped off with some semi fluffy Blam, Warbler bros, and Seblaine. You will love this chapter.

Blaine jolted awake the next morning to find Sebastian lounging on the king sized bed next to him scrolling through his phone. He was dressed in his Dalton uniform excluding the blazer which was draped over the desk chair a few feet away.

Blaine rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock, it was nearly noon.

“It’s Saturday,” he mumbled, “why are you in your uniform?”

“I have Warbler practice in an hour,” he said, not looking up from his phone, Blaine could hear the tell tale sounds of candy crush emanating from the speaker. “Hunter requires us to be in our uniform, even for weekend practices. I thought you might like to come.”

“I’m pretty sure that would be considered spying,” he pushed himself up, rolling his neck as he stretched.

“Or just visiting your friends. You know the rest of the guys miss you, right? They’d be really excited if you came.Though Hunter might try to steal you away from New Directions if he hears you sing at all.”

Blaine stood and made his way over to his backpack, shaking out his last clean polo and sliding it on. “Who is Hunter anyway?”

“New head Warbler. Transferred from some uptight military school. He’s got a killer voice and fantastic dancing abilities even if he is a bratty little dictator sometimes. We might even make it to Nationals with him this year.”

Blaine scoffed, “You’ll have to beat us first, and we are the defending national champions, so…”

Sebastian grinned, finally setting his phone aside. “There’s that cocky little minx I know.”

Blaine rolled his eyes and walked into the en suite to brush his teeth. He was almost done fixing his bed head when Sebastian came in, adjusting the lapels on his blazer in Blaine’s mirror.

“I’m serious though, you should come with. You need friends right now--”

“I have friends,” he bit out, suddenly defensive.

“Then why are you living with me and not one of them?”

Blaine opened his mouth to say something, but then he realized he didn’t really have an answer. At first he’d just been biding him time, hoping his step father would let him back in at some point. When it became obvious that wasn’t going to happen everyone had basically found out about his and Kurt’s breakup and the reason behind it. Sam was the only one who hadn’t started to cut him off but he… well his parents were mostly back on their feet, but barely. He couldn’t add any more pressure when they already had three kids of their own to feed.

“Nick, Jeff, and Trent would be ecstatic to see you, Blaine. Just come by for a little while, okay?”

Blaine nodded, “Sure, I’ll come say hi.”

----

Walking back through the halls of Dalton was a surprisingly painful experience. Dalton had once been his home, the place he met the love of his life, a safe space away from all the bullying of public school and the shit show that was his home life.

He hadn’t been back since the whole Michael Jackson debacle the year prior and his heart ached for the stained glass and ornate wall panels. Sebastian seemed to sense his mood and kept quiet on the walk to the Warbler commons, allowing Blaine to gather his thoughts. He couldn’t, however, protect him from the chaos of excitement he was thrown into the second they stepped into Warbler practice.

Blaine was immediately enveloped in a group hug that was lead by Trent, but quickly all of the remaining warblers from his sophomore year were in on it, while everyone else looked on in confusion as to who he even was.

“We don’t want to suffocate him, do we?” Sebastian asked when it had been a good few minutes and Blaine was still lost in the mass of navy and red. When that didn’t work he started picking people out of the group with a sharp tug to the collar of their blazer until he had reached the final four. Blaine, Trent, Nick, and Jeff. Admittedly the closest of their year, he allowed them a few more minutes to cling to each other before pulling them away as well and slinging his arm around Blaine’s shoulder.

“Yes, yes,” he said in a loud and sarcastic voice, “Blaine Warbler has returned in all of his glory. Even if he refuses to sing even one song with us, it is good for him to know that he will forever be a missing link in our choir.”

Blaine rolled his eyes and pushed Sebastian away. “What I think Sebastian meant to say, is that I don’t plan to stay long, I just wanted to drop in and say hi before I skedaddle on back to my team.”

Nick, Jeff, and Trent shared a look. Nick and Jeff came to a rest on either side of him, taking one arm each and Trent causally closed the door to the common room.

“Um…” Blaine started.

“Don’t think you’re getting off that easy, Blainers,” Nick said as he and Jeff started marching him to the center of the room.

“You yourself should know the rules,” Jeff said with a teasing shake of his head.

“No Warbler may exit the practice room...” Trent started.

“Without signing at least one song,” they all finished together.

“But I’m not…”

“Once a Warbler always a Warbler, Killer,” Sebastian said with a grin.

----

One song however turned into two songs and then into three until finally Hunter managed to call enough of the boys to order to get started with the real practice. As everyone else warmed up for their dance rehearsal, Hunter approached Blaine.

“Well, I guess I now understand all of the hype over you, Blaine Anderson,” he said and Blaine smiled, face flushed from exertion and pride. “If you ever wanted to come back, there would definitely be a place for you on the team again.”

Blaine laughed as he sipped at his water bottle, “Uh, thanks. Huh, my uh… my family is going through some stuff right now and funds are limited, so…” he looked down with a sad smile, “even if I wanted to come back, I just can’t afford too. Thanks though. I know as we get closer to competition season you probably won’t want a New Directions mole hanging out, but if you wouldn’t mind it would be fun to come back everyone once a while. Maybe help with your warmup and dash before the actual rehearsing starts.”

Hunter nodded, “I think that would be alright, Blaine. I’ll tell Sebastian to bring you around more.” He patted Blaine on the shoulder and returned to his team to start practice.

Blaine said his goodbyes to his friends with quick hugs, talking to Sebastian last, telling him he was going to get coffee from a shop down the street and then maybe walk back home. He’d let Sebastian know if he didn’t and wanted a ride once he was finished with practice. Sebastian subtly slipped him a twenty and Blaine blushed.

“I don’t need this, Seb. I have enough money for coffee.”

“I know, but you should get yourself some lunch too. You only started eating like a normal person again last night. You’re still far to thin and if you’re going to be any sort of competition at Regionals you need to be at healthy weight within two months, okay?”

Blaine sighed but conceded, “Alright, alright. I’m making your family dinner tonight though. Text your parents and let them know not to cook anything. It’s the least I can do to say thank you.”

“Sounds like a plan, go get ‘em, Killer.”

Blaine waved his final goodbye to the group, noticing Hunter watching him with a considering expression on his face as he headed out of the school.

Not more than five minutes after he had left Dalton’s grounds Blaine’s phone rang through with a call from Sam.

“Why were you at Dalton?” Sam asked as soon as Blaine answered.

Blaine paused mid step. “Um… are you watching me or the Warblers?”

“The Warblers, obviously. Ryder said he saw you singing with them.”

“Yeah, I went to say hi and they roped me into a few warm up songs. They are still my friends, you know.” Blaine pushed the door open to the coffee shop and stepped into the line to wait.

“He said you walked in with Sebastian.”

“How does Ryder even know any of the Warbler’s by name?”

“He doesn’t, he described him as tall, posh, and weasley. Sure sounded like Sebastian to me.”

Blaine rolled his eyes, “That’s a very rude description of him, Sam. Sebastian isn’t a bad guy.”

“The last time I saw him he nearly blinded you!” Sam shouted in exasperation.

Blaine’s right eye twinged with the memory, “He’s since apologized for that. And if I remember correctly, you all accepted an apology from the rest of the Warbler’s on my behalf while I was still in the hospital. If it weren’t for Sebastian reaching out I might have never gotten to actually forgive them for myself.”

“Blaine,” Sam sighed.

“Hold on a sec,” Blaine stepped up fully to the counter. “A medium drip and a cinnamon roll, please.” He handed the barista the twenty Sebastian had give him and accepted his change, stepping off to the side to wait for his drink. “Now, what offensive thing were you about to say?”

Sam made an indignant noise but didn’t actually deny it. “A little while ago you messaged me about someone sending you inappropriate texts.”

Blaine tensed. “I recall this situation and I know where you’re going with this. No, those texts were not from Sebastian.”

“It just… it seems suspicious you know. You cheat on Kurt and then suddenly you’re all buddy buddy with Sebastian? Artie saw you two leaving the Waffle House together last night, Blaine!”

Blaine sat down heavily with his coffee. “There’s been a lot of shit going down lately, Sam. Sebastian is just helping me through, okay? And if you’re really my best friend, you’ll believe me on that.”

“Even if I do, the rest of the team is going to be furious without an explanation. I know this breakup with Kurt is hard, but you can turn to us--”

Blaine scoffed, tears pricking at his eyes. “Have you noticed that Finn doesn’t speak to me unless it’s to criticize my performance? Artie rolled over my foot during practice yesterday and I swear it was not an accident. Even Tina and Brittany will barely look at me. And for some reason all of the newbies have decided to side against me as well despite barely even knowing Kurt. You are the only one who doesn’t seem to be actively hating my guts, so yeah. When shit got hard, I turned to the Warbler’s because at Mckinley I’ve been outcast because I made a fucking mistake and everyone else has decided they need to try and hate me more than I hate myself.” Blaine choked on a sob, squeezing his eyes shut.

“Let them be furious at me, but I need Sebastian’s help right now, okay? They don’t need to know why, let them assume I’m fucking him, let them assume he’s who I cheated on Kurt with. I honestly don’t care anymore. Because if this is the thing they’re going to take note of after the shitstorm that my life has been for the past month, they don’t deserve to know why.”

Sam was silent for a moment. “Do I deserve to know why?”

Blaine thought, and sighed. “I can’t tell you over the phone. It’s too… it’s too serious. I need to tell you in person.”

“Do you wanna come over? We can talk and play some Mario Cart?”

Blaine huffed out a soft laugh. “I would love to, but I don’t have a car and am currently stuck in Westerville. Sebastian is kind of my ride, right now.”

“Okay,” Sam said, “what if I came to you?”

“That… yeah. That would work. I’ll text you the address to Sebastian’s house, ‘kay?”

“Sounds great. I’ll see you in a bit.”

Blaine finished up his coffee and took his cinnamon roll to eat as he walked the mile back to the Smythe residence. He texted Sebastian letting him know he’d gone ahead and walked and sent Sam the address as he went.

When he entered the house, Marie was sitting in the living room floor working on a puzzle on the coffee table.

“Hello, dear,” she said with a smile, “did you have fun at practice with Sebastian?”

“Yeah,” he replied, returning here grin. “It was great to see the guys, it's been awhile. Um… I was curious though, would you mind if I had a friend over. We just needed to talk about some stuff…”

“Of course not, sweetheart. Do you want the living room?”

“Oh no, no, we can just talk in my room, it’s fine. I was gonna make some tea though, would you like some?”

“That would be lovely, Blaine. The kettle is just under the stove.”

Blaine didn’t really need tea after his coffee but the repetitive process of brewing it calmed him enough for the oncoming conversation that by the time he was setting a mug down in front of Marie and the doorbell rang, he felt about halfway to almost ready to talk.

He opened the door for Sam and ushered him inside. After a quick introduction to Marie they both took their tea and went upstairs to Blaine’s room. Sam lounged on the bed as he drank and studied the decorations. “Is this Sebastian’s room?” he asked, “Seems kind of bland to me.”

Blaine took a deep breath to bite the bullet with. “No… um, this. This is my room. Sebastian’s is down the hall.”

Sam froze mid sip and Blaine was ecstatic that he hadn’t done a spit take. “You’re… what?”

Blaine slowly eased himself onto the mattress beside Sam. “My step father kicked me out. For the time being I am going to be living with Sebastian and his family until I can work out a better situation. I might end up staying here through graduation, however. Everything is kind of up in the air right now.”

“Wh-why?” Sam sputtered.

“Why…?”

“Why did he kick you out? I mean… why now?”

Blaine twisted his hands in his lap. “Mom left on a bit of a sabbatical a few months back and after awhile we both kind of realized she just… might not be coming back. Of course the fighting between us without her around escalated. Everything I did was apparently a personal attack to him, Glee practice, student council, college applications, pining over Kurt because he was so far away. You name it, we probably ended up in a screaming match over it. And I guess, with the realization that he’d basically already lost his wife, he had no real need to keep her son around, so he threw me out.

“At first I hoped he might change his mind, decide he was too harsh on me or maybe he could try and fix things with mom. But he never called and I never wanted to risk going back.”

Sam was silent, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well… frankly I was ashamed. There’s something very… I don’t know how to describe the feeling of being disowned by the only father you’ve ever known. I really didn’t want to tell anyone about it for hopes that it would just fix itself, and when it didn’t… I ended up here.”

“But, you could have moved in with me. We’re best friends, Blaine!”

“Sam, I love your family you know I do. But you live in a one bedroom apartment with two younger siblings and your parents can still barely afford to feed you all. You do not need the pressure of another teenage boy to clothe and feed. The Smythe’s are clearly not hurting for money. I certainly don’t like mooching off anyone, but I’d rather mooch off of a family with plenty to go around.”

Sam slouched on the bed, clearly still unhappy with the situation but conceding. “I still don’t understand why it had to be Sebastian. Surely one of the other Warbler’s would have been just as rich and glad to take you in. But you chose the one who threw a rock salt slushie at you?”

Blaine shrugged, “I don’t really know either. When I realized I had not option at McKinley, Sebastian was the first one to come to mind and I just kind of went with it before I could second guess myself. I’m really glad I did though, his… well his mom is pretty great. I haven’t spoken to his dad much yet, but Marie is enough of a reason for me to want to stick around right now. Some of the other Warbler parents are… well think of beauty pageant moms and that's really how most of them act.”

There was a short knock on the door and then it cracked open and Sebastian peeked his head inside. “Oh,” he said, “when mom said you had a gentleman caller I was worried I might walk in on a heavy petting session. Good to see it’s just the straight one with the mouth.” Sebastian invited himself in and joined them on the bed.

“Straight one with the mouth? That’s really the best insult you have for me?”

Sebastian shrugged, “I’m too tired after practice to be truly witty. Come again tomorrow and I’ll have something better.”

“Well, with that kind of an invitation, how could I ever refuse,” Sam said with an eye roll.

“Are you just always going to invite yourself into my bed?” Blaine asked with a cock of his head.

“Only on the days that end in a Y. I’m hoping one of these times you’ll invite me yourself and it will be for more fun things that lady chats.”

Blaine’s bright smile faltered and his gaze shuttered and Sebastian was unsure as to whether to retract his statement or just let it go.

“So,” Sam said when he felt the awkward tension in the air, “what video games do you have, Sebastian?”

#klaine advent 2017 #klaine advent: limited #blaine anderson #seblaine #sebastian smythe #blam #sam evans #warblers #nick duval #jeff sterling #trent warbler #hunter clarington #klaine #monica writes #daisyishedwig writes

[213hiphopworldnews]

Kanye West Fans Are Losing It Over A Possible ‘Yeezus 2’ Teaser The Rapper Posted On Twitter

Getty Image

Following Kanye West online is always a bit of a rollercoaster ride. One minute he’s posting cute videos of his kids or oddball musings on art and design, the next he’s trolling us all with “Make America Great Again” hats and shout-outs to Candace Owens. Every so often, though, he composes a tweet that sends a thrill through music fans, making the collective peanut gallery sit up at attention as he captivates our interest with teases of new music.

pic.twitter.com/GwCcmAe1WN

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) September 17, 2018

Fans are in a positive tailspin over his latest, cryptic post. Kanye tweeted out an image of a Mini Disc (remember those?) with no label and fans immediate drew a correlation between the nondescript, obsolete tech and the cover art of his incendiary (and controversial) 2013 opus, Yeezus. Responses ranged from enthusiastic rapture to understandable skepticism, as his most recent release, the disappointing Ye, left plenty to be desired with its rushed delivery that undercut its overly bombastic hype cycle.

Roc-A-Fella Records/Def Jam

Of course, there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic as well; whenever Kanye does anything particularly egregious in his ongoing quest to be the center of the world’s attention, he’s been known to follow up with huge artistic statements aimed at redeeming his bruised reputation. The last time he was in as much hot water as he was in this spring, it was after the infamous 2009 MTV VMA moment where he snatched the mic from a shocked Taylor Swift to declare that “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!” The resultant backlash sent him into exile in Hawaii where he crafted the game-changing, culture-shifting, critically acclaimed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. If ever there was a time he needed some of that energy, it’s now that his Wyoming-inspired antics have put off even the staunchest Yeezy fans.

Check out some of the responses below.

Yeezus just rose again https://t.co/otHbHq3BZl

— Kris (@_TrippyGodd) September 17, 2018

I don't even know what Yeezus 2 would sound like at this point, definitely not as inventive or smart or defiant…

…but Yeezus is my favorite Kanye album and my heart definitely skipped a beat when I saw this https://t.co/bIEJBpfN6o

— Andrew Reiver (@reivey) September 17, 2018

WHEN KANYE TEASES YEEZUS 2 AND WATCH THE THRONE 2 IN THE SAME MONTH pic.twitter.com/08LMvFA2Yn

— Kanye Source (@KanyeSource) September 17, 2018

Unpopular opinion: I think Yeezus was good and would welcome Yeezus 2 with open arms https://t.co/J472IEN6Uy

— BIG RICH (@rickyj1998) September 17, 2018

To everyone saying it’s yeezus 2 , just know … it’s not pic.twitter.com/iYpRX8k5wp

— criti (@CritiCAL401) September 17, 2018

Kanye’s dropping yeezus 2 like the first yeezus wasn’t trash pic.twitter.com/JLo8tGUTX2

— killy’s whore (@SWEETENORMANl) September 17, 2018

YEEZUS 2?! don’t play wit my heart kanye. pic.twitter.com/cUDsT6fObb

— rap is stupid (@ottergawd) September 17, 2018

Kanye could punch your mother and spit on your lunch and some of you would still be tweeting about the possibility of a Yeezus 2. pic.twitter.com/OPaAyhGTFh

— Dank Archer (@NavoSchmavo) September 17, 2018

me listening to yeezus 2 after swearing kanye off for the rest of his life pic.twitter.com/sovqeMvNxy

— malik (@_Mahlick) September 17, 2018

Yeezus 2 will almost certainly be a mess, a disappointment, a disaster, etc. my expectations after ye are lower than they’ve literally ever been.

…

But if this album slaps even 80% as hard as yeezus im gonna strip naked and howl at the moon for about 24 hours straight

— jackson (@Horse_Jeans) September 18, 2018

Kanye alluding that he's dropping Yeezus 2 but with the way he's been moving i'm not trying to hear Smokepurpp and Tekashi over a sped up Nina Simone sample. I aint gonna be excited until i see the tracklist.

— Ahmed/Plz Give Me Coochie (@big_business_) September 17, 2018

YOOOOOOOO IF KANYE DOES YEEZUS 2 IMAGINE 69 OVER YEEZUS PRODUCTION OH MAN A TEKASHI OVER YEEZUS PRODUCTION Please Kanye

— Dick Math (@dances) September 17, 2018

If y'all think I'm gonna listen to Yeezus 2 with all this bullshit Kanye has done in 2018 then you are absolutely correct

If this man gives me Blood On The Leaves Pt. 2 he can throw my cat out the window fuck it

— Sprinkles The Trap Lord (@TrappinSprinkle) September 17, 2018

If Kanye drops Yeezus 2 y'all won't see me for a week unless you're coming through to my place to listen to it on repeat with me.

— James Healey (@SwedishLincoln) September 17, 2018

In the infinitesimal chance that this is indeed a “Yeezus 2” of some variety, I will run a lap around the common, bare cheeks to the wind, while doing a solo a cappella rendition of “Blood on the Leaves.” https://t.co/NwhWBqoL3S

— Mateo Rispoli (@MateoRispoli) September 18, 2018

source https://uproxx.com/hiphop/kanye-west-yeezus-2-teaser-twitter/

#hiphop #hip hop legend #hip hop history #hip hop #music #trending #hip hop news #ballin #hip hop scen

[mostlysignssomeportents]

That means that for a work to be eligible for copyright in the USA, it must satisfy three criteria:

1. It must be creative. Copyright does not apply to non-creative works (say, a phone book listing everyone in a town in alphabetical order), even if the work required a lot of labor. Copyright does not protect effort, it protects creativity. You can spend your whole life making a phone book and get no copyright, but the haiku you toss off in ten seconds while drunk gets copyright’s full protection. 2. It must be tangible. Copyright only applies to creative works that are “fixed in a tangible medium.” A dance isn’t copyrightable, but a video of someone dancing is, as is a written description of the dance in choreographers’ notation. A singer can’t copyright the act of singing, but they can copyright the recording of the song. 3. It must be of human authorship. Only humans are eligible for copyright. A beehive’s combs may be beautiful, but they can’t be copyrighted. An elephant’s paintings may be creative, but they can’t be copyrighted. A monkey’s selfie may be iconic, but it can’t be copyrighted.

The works an algorithm generates —be they still images, audio recordings, text, or videos — cannot be copyrighted.

For creative workers, this is huge. Our bosses, like all bosses, relish the thought of firing us all and making us homeless. You will never love anything as much as your boss hates paying you. That’s why the most rampant form of theft in America is wage theft. Just the thought of firing workers and replacing them with chatbots is enough to invoke dangerous, persistent priapism in the boardrooms of corporate America.

- Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain: The US Copyright Office offers creative workers a powerful labor protective

THIS IS THE LAST DAY FOR MY KICKSTARTER for the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Going to Burning Man? Catch me on Tuesday at 2:40pm on the Center Camp Stage for a talk about enshittification and how to reverse it; on Wednesday at noon, I'm hosting Dr Patrick Ball at Liminal Labs (6:15/F) for a talk on using statistics to prove high-level culpability in the recruitment of child soldiers.

On September 6 at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

#labor #copyright #public domain #ai #creative workers #hype #criti-hype #enshittification #llcs with mfas #solidarity #collective power

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Take away every consequential activity through which AI harms people, and all you’ve got left is low-margin activities like writing SEO garbage, lengthy reminisces about “the first time I ate an egg” that help an omelette recipe float to the top of a search result. Sure, you can put 95 percent of the commercial illustrators on the breadline, but their total wages don’t rise to one percent of the valuation of the big AI companies.

For those sky-high valuations to remain intact until the investors can cash out, we need to think about AI as a powerful, transformative technology, not as a better autocomplete.

We literally just sat through this movie, and it sucked. Remember when blockchain was going to be worth trillions, and anyone who didn’t get in on the ground floor could “have fun being poor?”

At the time, we were told that the answer to the problems of blockchain were exotic, new forms of regulation that accommodated the “innovation” of crypto. Under no circumstances should we attempt to staunch the rampant fraud and theft by applying boring old securities and commodities and money-laundering regulations. To do that would be to recognize that “fin-tech” is just a synonym for “unlicensed bank.”

The pitchmen who made out like bandits on crypto — leaving mom-and-pop investors holding the bag — are precisely the same people who are beating the drum for AI today.

-Ayyyyyy Eyeeeee: The lie that raced around the world before the truth got its boots on

#AI #Artificial Intelligence #Pump and Dump #Evil Sorcerers vs Ordinary Mediocrities #criti-hype

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, 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.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

#pluralistic #ai #ml #machine learning #artificial intelligence #chatbot #chatgpt #cryptocurrency #gartner hype cycle #hype cycle #trough of disillusionment #crypto #bubbles #bubblenomics #criti-hype #lee vinsel #slow ai #timnit gebru #emily bender #paperclip maximizers #enshittification #immortal colony organisms #blurry jpegs #charlie stross #ted chiang

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The real AI fight

Tonight (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Last week's spectacular OpenAI soap-opera hijacked the attention of millions of normal, productive people and nonsensually crammed them full of the fine details of the debate between "Effective Altruism" (doomers) and "Effective Accelerationism" (AKA e/acc), a genuinely absurd debate that was allegedly at the center of the drama.

Very broadly speaking: the Effective Altruists are doomers, who believe that Large Language Models (AKA "spicy autocomplete") will someday become so advanced that it could wake up and annihilate or enslave the human race. To prevent this, we need to employ "AI Safety" – measures that will turn superintelligence into a servant or a partner, nor an adversary.

Contrast this with the Effective Accelerationists, who also believe that LLMs will someday become superintelligences with the potential to annihilate or enslave humanity – but they nevertheless advocate for faster AI development, with fewer "safety" measures, in order to produce an "upward spiral" in the "techno-capital machine."

Once-and-future OpenAI CEO Altman is said to be an accelerationists who was forced out of the company by the Altruists, who were subsequently bested, ousted, and replaced by Larry fucking Summers. This, we're told, is the ideological battle over AI: should cautiously progress our LLMs into superintelligences with safety in mind, or go full speed ahead and trust to market forces to tame and harness the superintelligences to come?

This "AI debate" is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we'll get a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As Molly White writes, this isn't much of a debate. The "two sides" of this debate are as similar as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Yes, they're arrayed against each other in battle, so furious with each other that they're tearing their hair out. But for people who don't take any of this mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics seriously, these two sides are nearly indistinguishable, sharing as they do this extremely weird belief. The fact that they've split into warring factions on its particulars is less important than their unified belief in the certain coming of the paperclip-maximizing apocalypse:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/effective-obfuscation

White points out that there's another, much more distinct side in this AI debate – as different and distant from Dee and Dum as a Beamish Boy and a Jabberwork. This is the side of AI Ethics – the side that worries about "today’s issues of ghost labor, algorithmic bias, and erosion of the rights of artists and others." As White says, shifting the debate to existential risk from a future, hypothetical superintelligence "is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI."

After all, both sides plan to make money selling AI tools to corporations, whose track record in deploying algorithmic "decision support" systems and other AI-based automation is pretty poor – like the claims-evaluation engine that Cigna uses to deny insurance claims:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims

On a graph that plots the various positions on AI, the two groups of weirdos who disagree about how to create the inevitable superintelligence are effectively standing on the same spot, and the people who worry about the actual way that AI harms actual people right now are about a million miles away from that spot.

There's that old programmer joke, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't." But of course, that joke could just as well be, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't understand either":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/11/the-ten-types-of-people/

What's more, the joke could be, "there are 10 kinds of people, those who understand hexadecenary, those who understand pentadecenary, those who understand tetradecenary [und so weiter] those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't." That is to say, a "polarized" debate often has people who hold positions so far from the ones everyone is talking about that those belligerents' concerns are basically indistinguishable from one another.

The act of identifying these distant positions is a radical opening up of possibilities. Take the indigenous philosopher chief Red Jacket's response to the Christian missionaries who sought permission to proselytize to Red Jacket's people:

https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5790/

Red Jacket's whole rebuttal is a superb dunk, but it gets especially interesting where he points to the sectarian differences among Christians as evidence against the missionary's claim to having a single true faith, and in favor of the idea that his own people's traditional faith could be co-equal among Christian doctrines.

The split that White identifies isn't a split about whether AI tools can be useful. Plenty of us AI skeptics are happy to stipulate that there are good uses for AI. For example, I'm 100% in favor of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group using an LLM to classify and extract information from the Innocence Project New Orleans' wrongful conviction case files:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

Automating "extracting officer information from documents – specifically, the officer's name and the role the officer played in the wrongful conviction" was a key step to freeing innocent people from prison, and an LLM allowed HRDAG – a tiny, cash-strapped, excellent nonprofit – to make a giant leap forward in a vital project. I'm a donor to HRDAG and you should donate to them too:

https://hrdag.networkforgood.com/

Good data-analysis is key to addressing many of our thorniest, most pressing problems. As Ben Goldacre recounts in his inaugural Oxford lecture, it is both possible and desirable to build ethical, privacy-preserving systems for analyzing the most sensitive personal data (NHS patient records) that yield scores of solid, ground-breaking medical and scientific insights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eaV8SWdjQ

The difference between this kind of work – HRDAG's exoneration work and Goldacre's medical research – and the approach that OpenAI and its competitors take boils down to how they treat humans. The former treats all humans as worthy of respect and consideration. The latter treats humans as instruments – for profit in the short term, and for creating a hypothetical superintelligence in the (very) long term.

As Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax reminds us, this is the root of all sin: "sin is when you treat people like things":

https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html

So much of the criticism of AI misses this distinction – instead, this criticism starts by accepting the self-serving marketing claim of the "AI safety" crowd – that their software is on the verge of becoming self-aware, and is thus valuable, a good investment, and a good product to purchase. This is Lee Vinsel's "Criti-Hype": "taking press releases from startups and covering them with hellscapes":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Criti-hype and AI were made for each other. Emily M Bender is a tireless cataloger of criti-hypeists, like the newspaper reporters who breathlessly repeat " completely unsubstantiated claims (marketing)…sourced to Altman":

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464030855880383

Bender, like White, is at pains to point out that the real debate isn't doomers vs accelerationists. That's just "billionaires throwing money at the hope of bringing about the speculative fiction stories they grew up reading – and philosophers and others feeling important by dressing these same silly ideas up in fancy words":

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464024432217299

All of this is just a distraction from real and important scientific questions about how (and whether) to make automation tools that steer clear of Granny Weatherwax's sin of "treating people like things." Bender – a computational linguist – isn't a reactionary who hates automation for its own sake. On Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 – the excellent podcast she co-hosts with Alex Hanna – there is a machine-generated transcript:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417

There is a serious, meaty debate to be had about the costs and possibilities of different forms of automation. But the superintelligence true-believers and their criti-hyping critics keep dragging us away from these important questions and into fanciful and pointless discussions of whether and how to appease the godlike computers we will create when we disassemble the solar system and turn it into computronium.

The question of machine intelligence isn't intrinsically unserious. As a materialist, I believe that whatever makes me "me" is the result of the physics and chemistry of processes inside and around my body. My disbelief in the existence of a soul means that I'm prepared to think that it might be possible for something made by humans to replicate something like whatever process makes me "me."

Ironically, the AI doomers and accelerationists claim that they, too, are materialists – and that's why they're so consumed with the idea of machine superintelligence. But it's precisely because I'm a materialist that I understand these hypotheticals about self-aware software are less important and less urgent than the material lives of people today.

It's because I'm a materialist that my primary concerns about AI are things like the climate impact of AI data-centers and the human impact of biased, opaque, incompetent and unfit algorithmic systems – not science fiction-inspired, self-induced panics over the human race being enslaved by our robot overlords.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #criti-hype #ai doomers #doomers #eacc #effective acceleration #effective altruism #materialism #ai #10 types of people #data science #llms #large language models #patrick ball #ben goldacre #trusted research environments #science #hrdag #human rights data analysis group #red jacket #religion #emily bender #emily m bender #molly white