That anti David Gerard Wikipedia nontroversy from awhile back has made it to Elon Musk's twitter feed: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1849862303614894223

Update on LLM reviewer situation:

PM is down to let us pitch them our argument. Good news: PM seems like a cool person, is open minded, and is being pretty frank about the forces at work here. Bad news: taking action on this will open a whole can of worms, so any proof has to be ironclad. After conferring with our local grant wizards, the battle plan is to crank out a 15 minute pitch consisting of:

• a 2 min elevator pitch of our tech, highlighting what the reviews mangled
• intro to LLMs for people who know what glycosylation is
• intro to semiotics for the same
• show how transformer architectures transform symbols into symbols to produce text-shaped objects without actual intent, ideas, or context (and why "automated AI detection" is also bullshit).
• show a few examples of plausible-at-first-glance gen-ai slop (the nonexistant turkish fortress, mouse dck, etc)
• Highlight how our weird reviews (both good and bad) fit exactly into this bin (absolutely mis-interpreting a table, inventing a bacterial species we didn't use and talking shit about it, miscounting our team members, etc)

We'll be leaning on the Stochastic Parrot paper pretty hard, because it's a good entry into the field on the skeptical side and is just well constructed in general. I'm also on the hunt simplified diagram for how LLMs convert tokens to arrays to tokens from the original transformer literature. Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose, and I want to avoid falling into the "It can't be that stupid" trap. Any pointers in that direction are most welcome!

Wish us luck, heh!

Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.

A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI "hosts" (non-English link).

They're trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason they're firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be "an experiment to appeal to Gen Z". Fortunately, most people's response seems to be "fuck off with this crap".

I just... can't with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run "experiments" with AI media. Heads should roll for this.

has the era of active sabotage of the autoplag inputs begun? let's hope so

Update on the character.ai lawsuit:

Gizmodo just reported on the story - in addition to the suicide that kicked this litigation off, they've also discovered an hour-long screen recording where a test account (self-reported as thirteen years old) gets sexted relentlessly by the site's chatbots.

So, in addition to driving one specific teen to suicide, character.ai is also facing accusations that their bots are sexually harassing children.

The Bookseller: Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff

Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.

Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn't gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it's time to give Big AI a wedgie.

If your Wikipedia page contains as many random arXiv preprints for references as the "prompt engineering" article, consult your physician.

‘They wish this technology didn’t exist’: Perplexity responds to News Corp’s lawsuit

“There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist,” said the Perplexity team in the blog. “They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”

I wish the AI bros at Perplexity and elsewhere a very cope and fucking seethe.

Okay, quick personal sidenote:

With how much misinformation, manipulation, outright theft and other horrific shit this AI bubble has caused, I suspect we're gonna see some attempts at an outright ban on AI. How successful they're gonna be, I don't know, but at the bare minimum it'll enjoy some popularity on the political fringe.

this is peak AI. you might not like it, but it's how top of the bubble looks like

Radio station uses AI to interview the ghost of a dead Nobel-winner with 3 quirky zoomers who don't exist, seems baffled people don't like it starring three bots and deepfake of Wisława Szymborska

related notesfrompoland and onet article they probably referenced (in polish) and another. would you guess that they fired a dozen or so* people just before? (and somehow had money for whatever horseshit they were sold) small radio stations aren't probably bringing serious money either way now

homepage of that radio boasts about their "almost entirely created by AI" content. it looks like they tried to convince zoomers to get an FM radio and listen to it somehow. it's gonna go great

apparently this radio is in liquidation since january however this might be related to dislodging previous govt's propagandists from public media

*original report used very handy word that does not appear in english that one could translate as "fewteen" and can mean any number from 11 to 19 inclusive

Crypto mining firms based in Sweden are accused of withholding around $100M in unpaid taxes.

Mostly VAT fraud.

News in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/kryptoforetagen-lurade-staten-pa-en-miljard

US forest service cuts thousands of jobs. Not to worry, the bright hackernews are on it! just install an AI data center in the forest!. Seriously though, I can't tell if this is brilliant satire or not.

Character.ai is getting sued thanks to one of their users killing himself, and The New York Times is talking about it (there's also a piece by Gary Marcus talking about a previous incident if you're interested).

Like the copyright situation I previously mentioned, I suspect this is also gonna make potential investors wary of investing in AI post-bubble. Even if you manage to convince investors that you won't get DMCA'd into oblivion, they're still gonna be wary of the potential for a Dasani-level PR nightmare.

Of course, that's assuming that Section 230 protects you from being held liable for what your autoplag does - if Ms. Garcia, whose son's suicide prompted this entire mess, succeeds in court, the legal precedent set means you're likely gonna have to worry about being sued if/when someone ends up injured/killed/defamed/otherwise fucked up because of its output..

HEARTWARMING: Baldy McDickface to step back from podcasting now the Russian money has dried up

In other news, Disney's apparently planning some kind of "major AI initiative".

Whatever it is, I'm expecting large-scale boycotts/strikes to kick off as a result of it, alongside AI's lack of copyright protection getting exploited to troll the shit out of Disney.

Kendrick Zitron dropped - its mainly focusing on Prabhakar Raghavan's recent kicking upstairs, and Google's bleak future.

Main highlight was this snippet:

I am hypothesizing here, but I think that Google is desperate, and that its earnings on October 30th are likely to make the street a little worried. The medium-to-long-term prognosis is likely even worse. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Google's ad business is expected to dip below 50% market share in the US in the next year for the first time in more than a decade, and Google's gratuitous monopoly over search (and likely ads) is coming to an end. It’s more than likely that Google sees AI as fundamental to its future growth and relevance.

More AI generated shite from Ireland: Transport for Ireland decided, for some reason, to use AI for its Hallowe'en themed ads. This was roundly complained about online. Then someone decided, for genius reasons, to ring Liveline and complain about it.

For those who are unfamiliar, Liveline is a national phone-in show presented by JOEEEE DUFFY, who could start a fight with a brick wall. Every episode is about either a petty grievance or a real horror story. It's like a national whinge-in. I am going to listen to the episode (available here) and see if there are any highlights.

Forget Gladwell

All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories? For years, my loose feeling about Gladwell was that he writes like someone who doesn’t care about being correct, which is not a way I would describe any other author I've encountered. There is something uniquely odd about his work.

This is both old news and kinda… not that surprising when you think about it, but I searched and didn’t see any commentary on this here.

“Meta has hired a former Project 2025 staffer and Ron DeSantis chief of staff as its director of public policy in the South.”

Look out, professional Nix crybaby Jon Ringer is back with his fork.

In other news, I have my own as well called Borkfan, absolutely not a ban fork due to my having threatened multiple people, but instead dedicated to the idea that a technology that lacks chud approval must necessarily not be in the true hacker spirit.

Update on the state of AI drug discovery companies: AI Does Not Make It Easy by Derek Lowe

OpenAI's business model:

Star Citizen, but for billionaires.

I don't think there's a hell of a lot there that we don't already know and discuss at length, but it's cool to see Abby Thorne's new video at Philosophy Tube get into surveillance capitalism, neo-reaction/tech fascism, and how much of the discussion historically on and around social media misses the point.

It might be a decent overview reference for anyone in your life who isn't in as deep as we are, since you could do much worse in ~40 minutes.

Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers

A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google's AI Overview.

Anyways, personal sidenote:

Beyond putting another blow to AI's reliability, this will probably also make the public more wary of user-generated material - its hard to trust something if you know the masses could be actively manipulating you.

Quick update: The open letter on AI training (https://aitrainingstatement.org/) has reached 15k signatures:

Bad feelings today. Google announced that an artist I like, Jacob Collier, has been working with them to develop an LLM based tool for music autoplag.

A little context: Collier has like 5 grammies, and is an incredibly creative artist that is able to take ideas and influence from disparate sources and synthesise something interesting (it’s not always good though…). Likely the greatest musician of his generation!

I don’t want to catastrophise too much here but I’m not looking forward to this being used as a cudgel from the promptfondlers.

The only open question I think is: to what extent is the music generation autoplag? (My guess, 100%)

The age of book shovelware has arrived: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2024/10/ai-audiobook-narrators-in-overdrive-and-the-issue-of-library-ai-circulation-policy/

Edit: TIL about the US copyright office website’s ai generation info on works. That’s a thing we will be making a bunch of use of, I imagine.

Not a sneer, but perhaps interesting even if less so as we are focusing a bit less here on the Rationalists. Twitter thread on race science bullshit popularized on the various Rationalism extended forums.

Vivaldi Browser has an important teaser AI announcement: https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi/113351393167122198

Parents Sue School That Gave Bad Grade to Student Who Used AI to Complete Assignment

An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.

The tabloids are gonna be going nuts over this.

ketamine of the masses / pulling this from my asses

guest star of recent sneers kache is at it again

When I hear about tech companies going all in on AI as a hedge against the future, I'm reminded of this scene from Ice Age:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7B-1mLMpHw

Australian post-industrial is my favorite genre atm thanks to David, and I have a recommendation: https://moose-mouse.bandcamp.com/album/oxide an Australian kid that plays drums in restaurants around Melbourne and has produced delightful solo electronic albums.

I don’t go here but seeing these two posts come up within an hour on lobsters feels telling

https://devenv.sh/blog/2024/10/22/devenv-is-switching-nix-implementation-to-tvix/

https://determinate.systems/posts/announcing-determinate-nix/

A friend of mine keeps suggesting Cursor to me. God damn I am sick of autoplag.

In other news, there's been a statement on AI training that's racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:

Now, I'm way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so I'll whip one out:

Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artists' work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghman's run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.

I just want to share this video because I think it is a work of art

"I'm gonna replace AI" by Olivia Squizzle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh_J7VI94g

sorry for yt link, invidious didn't like it

I was reminded of a particular anecdote I need to get out of my system.

There was a time on a particular fiction series' fan forum's IRC channel when I had to convince a very enthusiastic teenage fan that the instructions they found on 4chan to open a portal to a parallel world of that particular work of fantasy fiction was actually a method for synthesizing and inhaling poison gas.

The weird part was that they admitted they knew it was probably just a cruel prank, but were still willing to try just in case it was real. We had to actually find and link articles where the same reaction was exhibited as an actual documented suicide method, if an unreliable one at that, to convince them not to go for it.

By my estimate that person was about high school age, almost certainly over 13 and probably over 15. Mostly their behavior seemed normal for the age, certainly overenthusiastic about the fandom and with obvious signs of teenage ennui, but both of those are typical for someone in their mid-teens. It was just this strange incident of extreme gullibility and self-destructive devotion to a fandom that really stuck with me.