TechTakes

Via, prob posted here already "Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code", as the article is a month old.

New Public Good newsletter, talking about YouTube editing users' uploads without their permission/knowledge.

TIL that "Aris Thorne" is a character name favoured by ChatGPT - which means its presence is a reliable slop tell, lol

like the dumbass-ray version of Ballard calling multiple characters variants on "Traven"

what to do with this information

I regret to inform you all that Elon Musk appears to be completely addicted to AI-generated anime porn..

The deaths just keep coming: the Wall Street Journal's just reported on a murder-suicide caused by ChatGPT.

https://www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-evil-of-ai-safety

Once again shilling another great Ben Recht post. This time calling out the fucking insane irresponsibility of "responsible" AI providers to do the bare minimum to prevent people from having psychological beaks from reality.

"I’ve been stuck on this tragic story in the New York Times about Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who took his life after months of getting advice on suicide from ChatGPT. Our relationship with technological tools is complex. That people draw emotional connections to chatbots isn’t new (I see you, Joseph Weizenbaum). Why young people commit suicide is multifactorial. We’ll see whether a court will find OpenAI liable for wrongful death.

But I’m not a court of law. And OpenAI is not only responsible, but everyone who works there should be ashamed of themselves."

Found a couple articles about blunting AI's impact on education (got them off of Audrey Watters' blog, for the record).

The first is a New York Times guest essay by NYU vice provost Clay Shirky, which recommends "moving away from take-home assignments and essays and toward [...] assessments that call on students to demonstrate knowledge in real time."

The second is an article by Kate Manne calling for professors to prevent cheating via AI, which details her efforts in doing so:

Instead of take-home essays to write in their own time, I’ll have students complete in-class assignments that will be hand-written. I won’t allow electronic devices in my class, except for students who tell me they need them as a caregiver or first responder or due to a disability. Students who do need to use a laptop will have to complete the assignment using google docs, so I can see their revision history.

Manne does note the problems with this (outing disabled students, class time spent writing, and difficulties in editing, rewriting, and make-up work), but still believes "it is better, on balance, to take this approach rather than risk a significant proportion of students using AI to write their essays."

Mark Cuban is feeling bullied by Bluesky. He will also have you know that you need to keep aware of the important achievements of your betters, as though he is currently the 5th most blocked user on there, he was indeed once the 4th most blocked user. Perhaps he is just crying out to move up the ranks once more?

It’s really all about Bluesky employees being able to afford their healthcare for Mark you see.

And of course, here’s never-Trumper Anne Applebaum running interference for him. Really an appropriate hotdog-guy-meme moment – as much as I shamelessly sneer at Cuban, I’m genuinely angered by the complete inability of the self-satisfied ‘democracy defender’ set to see their own complicity in perpetuating a permission structure for priviliged white men to feel eternally victimized.

RE: (meta?)speculation about the quantum bubble. So the preceding two tech bubbles tried to worm their way into the arts: NFTs, and slop. How do we think the quantum hucksters are gonna try co-opt craativity?