Notices by tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org), page 6

@hagen 100%. The antropomorphization does basically only PR work for big tech

@gabrielberlin Shit.

@gabrielberlin okay, was muss ich tun, damit ich ein Upgrade bekommen kann?

I just read (in a comment on an article about how generated code creates outages etc.) a quote by a well-known AI expert (a professor who studies innovation and startups):
"The best prompters I know can’t code at all. They “teach” the AI."

And I keep wondering what his understanding of teaching is. Like: Can you teach something that you don't understand/know how to do?

OpenAI is threatening to ban everyone who tries to research what their new model is actually doing.

While OpenAI uses a lot of language about "safeguards" it's mostly about keeping the illusion intact that o1 is a big leap when in fact it is a marginal patch to what they have been doing for a long time now. But they are looking for money right now and need to keep the hype active.

(Original title: Ban warnings fly as users dare to probe the “thoughts” of OpenAI’s latest model)

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2049959

"A small, cloistered elite of not-especially-bright billionaires have decided that they are very, very special, and that the problem with society these days is that people keep treating them like everyone else. "

(Original title: Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder)

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/paul-graham-and-the-cult-of-the-founder

On “AI” Art

Is "AI" art impossible? Or is that just a way to exclude people from making art? I think both perspectives are wrong: It's about materials.

https://tante.cc/2024/09/06/on-ai-art/

Ted Chiang as eloquent as ever:

"The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

[...]

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

[...]

The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world."

Read the whole essay. It's brilliant. #ai

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art

DIE ZEIT schickt per mail einen Link auf "Blitzumfrage: Ist die AfD eine Gefahr für die Demokratie?" und die Frage, warum die Medien beim Widerstand gegen den Faschismus ihre Arbeit nicht machen stellt sich schon gar nicht mehr.

Hmm... just wondering what YCombinator is funding these days ...

"Hello, we’re Alex and Devan, and we’re building the low-cost cruise missiles the United States needs!"

Nope. Nopenopenope. Fuck this. And everyone involved. And their ancestors.

https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Ler-ares-industries-building-low-cost-cruise-missiles

Complaints about how some regulation on #AI might "slow down innovation" are a bit weird.
Sure maybe but the pace of innovation isn't a priority in how to structure a society and legal environment: It's about protecting _people's_ rights, wellbeing and thriving, about protecting the ecological, social and political environment that society rests on. Innovation is so far down the list that I wouldn't even have time to scroll down that far.

So yeah, if "you as developer of an #AI system will be responsible to a certain degree for abuse it's used for" is a problem for you, maybe do something useful with your time. Because of course you should be responsible for the tools you put out into the world and the affordances that they come with or the mitigations they lack. Grow up for fuck's sake.

(sparked by Fei-Fei Li's bad take in Fortune Magazine: https://fortune.com/2024/08/06/godmother-of-ai-says-californias-ai-bill-will-harm-us-ecosystem-tech-politics/ )

Silicon Valley is done with Democracy. Because they realized that they not only don't need it but that fascism probably is way more profitable.

https://mastodon.online/@parismarx/112813567860685169

If you really wanted to "democratize creativity" you'd argue for every human being to have paid time off to find, follow and develop their creativity, their perspective and their voice.

Creativity is the work that allows people to bring forth their own selves regardless of who pays for it. It's part of the essence of being human.

We know that many people just don't get the resources, the freedom, the time to explore that part of being human. And we're all poorer for it.

"What this means in plain English is that one of the largest financial institutions in the world is seeing what people who are paying attention are seeing with their eyes: Companies are acting like generative AI is going to change the world and are acting as such, while the reality is that this is a technology that is currently deeply unreliable and may not change much of anything at all."

(Original title: Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable)

https://www.404media.co/goldman-sachs-ai-is-overhyped-wildly-expensive-and-unreliable/

The interesting thing about OpenAI pleading that they cannot build their systems if they have exclude or license copyrighted materials isn't the fact that "if you can't afford to run your business while complying with the laws you have no business". It's the fact that they believe that creating their stochastic systems is such a good and human goal per se that they can throw it in against all the externalities and still come out winning.

Sam Altman is a cynic who only cares about getting richer and says whatever leads there. But many other people in that space are actual believers in the religion of #AI.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-copyrighted-material-parliament

"So the downward pressure on model size is putting upward pressure on training compute. In effect, developers are trading off training cost and inference cost."

Models need to shrink to make inference economically viable in the long term (we already see a focus on smaller models in the market). And capabilities don't seem to be increasing, they have basically plateaued

(Original title: AI scaling myths)

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-myths

The German state of Saxonia still has over 50k #Bitcoin (given current fictional valuation almost 3 billion EUR) which were seized from an illegal video streaming platform (the course of Bitcoin was a lot lower back then).

They are contemplating selling them and this could actually be interesting just to make it obvious how little actual liquidity there is. Because they wouldn't exchange for other Shitcoins but for hard cash. Could get interesting.

Today is a personal highlight because I was a guest in one of my favourite podcasts @techwontsaveus talking about tech in Europe and the topic of innovation.

It's been such a treat to get to speak to @parismarx, hope you enjoy it as well.

https://techwontsave.us/episode/225_can_europe_chart_its_own_path_on_tech_w_tante

"I used that example [...] to illustrate how pervasive the effects all these little examples of automation are.[...] But collectively they’re a corrosive force that erodes social bonds and spoils personal interactions and generally makes it less pleasant to go about our days as human beings."

(Original title: AI can't fix what automation already broke)

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-cant-fix-everything-automation

@anneroth immer noch auf der Roadmap