Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social), page 4

I don't know anything about this instance or its community, but I like this section of its About page. It feels like a human being talking about what they're willing to do for other humans.
The way corporate platforms communicate (or fail to) has really skewed our understandings of what kinds of relationships we get into with them. Human communication like this feels like it's recalibrating that a bit, to something better and more like a future I'd like to live in.
https://artistalley.space/about

@BrendanSinclair quick with the coal mining lingo, i see

@Hoskingc oh and lots of this kinda shit, where AI doesn't "replace" but is used as justification for a boss to redefine the parameters of a job such that it's more precarious, less fulfilling and the end result is lower quality with no real time saved https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/109659636236055562

@lazerwalker this friggin' guy
https://bw.vern.cc/diablo/wiki/Creeping_Feature

@MrBerard the tech priests are absolutely complicit in this, the dynamic is just different from the golly-gee lay press who at least have the excuse of not knowing any better: the most powerful priests rely on a few of their number being wild-eyed acolytes (who play a key role in getting the lay press to start saying wild shit) and then playing the part of even-handed authority while making sure to not shut the zealots down completely. https://archive.is/J5J1T

And that's by design! Because companies like OpenAI and their investors stand to make a lot more money if people treat these things like The All-Seeing Oracle rather than "that one hyperconfident white dude acquaintance who claims to have read everything ever written, whose answers on anything important you always need to fact check".

https://blacktwitter.io/@bibliotecaria/109650353375080864 I would expect people like librarians and teachers to have a lot more stories like this in the near future. Text generators have been marketed in an incredibly irresponsible way and laypeople don't understand the most fundamental things about them: that they don't actually *understand* anything, have no concept of truth, are just as willing to tell you something completely fabricated, and increasing the % of truth isn't a simple matter of more compute or training data.

@emilymbender and as for factual questions, since you'd have to fact-check all of its output anyway (not that most users are rigorous about that!) how much time is it actually saving you from just doing the research? it almost feels like part of its appeal is to monetize the ongoing rot of web search engine results quality (itself caused by "AI" initiatives within google et al!) and if so those quality problems will continue to converge (as bad info feeds training data)

@emilymbender as a creative worker i haven't used it, mostly on personal moral grounds (specifically i do not want to add value to openAI's data hoard of "things people ask the oracle) but also because it doesn't seem like nearly as powerful a creative tool as people imagine it to be. everything i've seen people post from their sessions is this milquetoast, satisfying-the-requirements-of-the-assignment-and-no-more slop. people are mostly just amazed that the dog is talking.

https://archive.is/HAIuz relatedly, just a reminder that everyone who identifies with "the grey tribe" has basically galaxy-brained themselves into sharing intellectual company with neoreactionary ghouls. if someone you care about is getting into this shit, sit down with them and talk it out.

"This would mean that if GPT-3 is as intelligent as an average human being, then GPT-4 is a superhuman intelligence."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HguqQSY8mR7NxGopc/2022-was-the-year-agi-arrived-just-don-t-call-it-that great illustration of how iteratively disconnected from reality these people have become, how distorted their notions of "intelligence" are, and how psychologically and culturally invested in those notions they are.

@Hoskingc i expect it will feel as if some company, designing their GDC booth, just used a photo with a giant Shutterstock watermark over it, and everyone who sees it is like "really?", but there are various investors with 10-digit sums on the line who want everyone to do their art like that now and for that to be socially and aesthetically acceptable.

@Hoskingc it's not known what the creative process behind those images was beyond "they used MidJourney" but it seems like the right way to do it would have been to work with one of the many artists they already employ (costume & set people etc) or commission one same as any program, and then the tool used becomes a relatively minor detail. and they almost certainly would've gotten a better quality, more interesting result. i suspect there will be a lot of this kind of thing in the coming years.

@Hoskingc there are tons and tons of cases where something like a website, a marketing campaign, or an event "needs some art" and if the people running it are operating under the default shitty techie framing they will think, oh hey i don't need to pay an artist for any assets i can just whip something up and drop it in. despite being quite well funded the SF ballet's nutcracker production did that this year and the results don't look great. https://www.sfballet.org/tickets/2023-season/program-books/

@Hoskingc specifically, they generated the three key images of clara, the nutcracker, and the prince, which are also on huge banners out in front of the building. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/san-francisco-ballet-catches-heat-for-promoting-its-nutcracker-performances-with-a-i-generated-art-2236291

@Hoskingc replacing someone's actual talents vs replacing someone's place in a paid labor hierarchy are two very different things; i'm 0% worried on behalf of artists about the former and 100% worried about the latter. because we know how little capitalists care about quality when they can save a bit of $$.

@llamasoft_ox there is so much potential truth and beauty in a "homeostatic" society, that has figured out how to live on this planet in a truly long term sustainable way, loves its animals (human and non) and leaves no one behind, cherishes its history and its culture, ever seeks to improve itself but is always willing to learn from its past, gazes at the stars but doesn't try to conquer them, accepts its limits but not without questions.
that's the earth i want us humans to work towards.

@kissane any idea if this is true of other clients, eg @Tusky? i'm finding it hard to confirm just looking at my own browser vs this 3rd party app... (tbc my preference would definitely be to see an replies by default - and sorry in advance if this is answered elsewhere in this thread by this very issue!)

@deus_ex_txt ON IT

boutique handheld discourse has me really wishing there was a homebrew platform that excelled at:
- cheap, widely available, open (as much as possible) hardware
- SDK + simulator that runs on anything
- large community of people hacking on it & sharing knowledge
- diverse, welcoming culture that views games as an art form, doesn't care about the boundary between "game" and other stuff