Some quality wordsmithing found in the wild:

Found two separate AI-related links for today.

First, AI slop corpo Apiiro put out a study stating the obvious (that AI is a cybersecurity nightmare), and tried selling its slop agents as the solution. Apiiro was using their own slop-bots to do the study, too, so I'm taking all this with a major grain of salt.

Second, I came across an AI-themed Darwin Awards spinoff cataloguing various comical fuck-ups caused through the slop-bots.

there was a post shared out there recentlyish (blogpost? substack? can't find it. enjoy vagueposting) that was about how ai companies have no clue what they're doing, and compared them to alchemy in that they also had no idea what they were doing, and over time moved on to more realistic goals, but while they had funding for these unrealistic goals they invented distillation and crystallization and black powder and shit. and the same for ai would be buildout of infra that can be presumably used for something later (citation needed).

so comparison of this entire ea/lw/openai milieu to alchemists is unjust for alchemists. alchemy has that benefit on its side that it was developed before scientific method was a proper thing, modern chatbot peddlers can't really claim that what they're doing is protoscience. what is similar is that alchemy and failed ea scifi writers claim that magic tech will get you similar things. cure for all disease (nanobots), immortality (cryonics or mind uploading or nanobots), infinite wisdom (chatbots), transformation of any matter at will (nanobots again), mind control derived from supreme rationality (ok this one comes from magic), synthetic life (implied by ai bioweapons, but also agi itself). when chinese alchemists figured out that mercury pills kill people and don't make them immortal, there was a shift to "inner alchemy" that is spiritual practices (mental tech). maybe eliezer &co are last alchemists (so far) and not first ai-safety-researchers

Why progressives should care about falling birth rates

2 weeks old, but regardless. The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch wrote a very EA-adjacent article basically making the case for “progressive” eugenics. The studies he cites all derive from a behavior-genetic model of intergenerational value transmission, i.e. conservatism is “in the genes” & progressivism is literally getting bred out of the gene pool.

A masterclass in baiting liberals. Take note, NYT & Atlantic!

EDIT: The post's been deleted, and the Substack's been seemingly abandoned.

Starting this Stubsack off, I found a Substack post titled "Generative AI could have had a place in the arts", which attempts to play devil's advocate for the plagiarism-fueled slop machines.

Pointing to one particular lowlight, the author attempts to conflate AI with actually useful tech to try and make an argument:

While the idea of generative AI “democratizing” art is more or less a meme these days, there are in fact AI tools that do make certain artforms more accessible to low-budget productions. The first thing to come to mind is how computer vision-based motion capture give 3D animators access to clearer motion capture data from a live-action actor using as little as a smartphone camera and without requiring expensive mo-cap suits.

For those of you in the (West) LA area, there's a panel with Brian Merchant happening tomorrow. Probably no food this school year but still looks good.

https://law.ucla.edu/events/democracy-technology-salon

If anyone does turn up, codeword is banana bread, otherwise I'll assume you're a lawyer (not derogatory).

Belgian AI fails. So there is a big kids pop group popular in Belgium/The Netherlands, called K3. They used genAI images for their show. And apparently it created images of them with with both bikinis and headscarfs at the same time. According to this article https://www.nu.nl/muziek/6368424/k3-geschrokken-van-ongepaste-ai-beelden-tijdens-optreden-jammere-fout.html (in Dutch sorry) lot of people apparently were mad. (I have not seen mad people myself, so not sure if it actually was a problem, and how many people are mad over the four main reasons to be mad possibly (being, 'islamisation', immodesty, being insulting to Muslims, and feeding genAI crap to kids while you are one of the biggest acts around (and can certainly afford professional artists), so take into account this is likely a nothingburger))). I was amused to read first that they had shown inappropriate images, and then read it was just headscarves and bikinis.

e: also note for context, nu.nl is a news site, but usually the quality of their articles isn't the greatest, not a lot of actual journalism, and a lot of bias towards the establishment and a tendency to mainstream pro the current social order stuff no matter how out there. (They had articles going 'no the inflation isn't due to companies rising prizes, as not all inflation is because of that) and a tendency to post a lot of gossip like shit. (nos.nl is our big main news site). And their source, shownews is worse. It is basically on our fox news style tv channel. (they have an eveningshow 'vandaag inside' which is basically causing the people who watch it to become nuts in the fox news style way, esp elderly people. Weird transphobic rants, anti-woke shit, contrarian idiots who don't realize they are idiots but are brave truthtellers, all brought in a 'bar style' sort of setting. Watched some of it (really funny to hear them say leftwingers don't watch their shows) and every hour of it would require several ours to explain why almost everything they say is wrong)). I'm trying to provide context for where my poor country is going.