Notices by tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org), page 7

Tesla's Fahrzeuge setzen die Autopolitik der letzten Dekaden nahezu nahtlos fort. Wir brauchen weniger Autos. Viel weniger und kleinere Autos.

(Original title: Tesla als Symbol: Elektro-SUV als Teil des Problems)

http://www.taz.de/Tesla-als-Symbol/!5990649/

"Generative AI, where it is right now, is not totally dissimilar from what happened during the cryptocurrency bubble during the height of the pandemic: Hundreds of startups, flush with cash from a bull market, started trying to build crypto-backed consumer products after they had already decided the technology was the future — not the other way around."

(Original title: AI search is a doomsday cult)

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ai-search-doomsday-cult

"Why are you always so angry?"

Because I believe that people deserve more than they are getting. Because the way we take away people's dignity and ability to thrive makes me sick.

I do not enjoy being angry. I'd rather play video games and play the guitar. But given the state of the world anger is a gift.

OpenAI releases a new video generator that creates kinda mediocre scenes within very narrow margins and the whole LinkedIn (and probably Twitter) AI influencer scene goes apeshit. We just never learn.

I am not a big fan of the current copyright regime but compared to the file-sharing wars it's fascinating how quickly licenses and usage rights and "creators getting paid" get thrown out because "Innovation" and "but AI is the future!!11".

Like when people argued that the existing copyright regime would hinder cultural exchange and democratic discourse nobody gave a fuck but now that Microsoft might make a buck nothing matters anymore.

I wonder if it would be fun to set up a luddite event in Berlin.

Like maybe reading some pieces from relevant literature, talking to people in the context of things going on atm.

Not a big EVENT event with swag and shit but also more than "a bunch of people sitting in a bar drinking and feeling very ludditey" but with a bit more structure.

"When people feel like their backs are against the wall, that their voices are not being heard, that those who profit from the deployment of invasive technologies are being given free reign, well, it creates the kind of conditions in which we might not be surprised to see more drastic measures taken up directly against those technologies.

[...]

Over the last decade, from Uber to crypto to web3 to generative AI, Silicon Valley has offered not a vision of the future, but a series of increasingly desperate and disparate pitches — a patchwork of driverless vehicles for financial gain, if you will, that each uniquely fail to consider any prospective social cost."

(Original title: Torching the Google car: Why the growing revolt against big tech just escalated)

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/torching-the-google-car-why-the-growing

"I think about AI like I do plastics"
https://micro.anniegreens.lol/2024/02/08/i-think-about.html

Such a great metaphor. And the long term effects will be a bit similar I fear: Where we now find microplastics all over and in our body AI sludge will leave its traces all over culture and thinking.

(via @baldur )

I really enjoyed @molly0xfff's review of Chris Dixon's new book about #Web3.

What I found most fascinating was his ongoing claim that critics "just don't understand blockchain/tokenization". Like, my man, I could explain blockchains and smart contracts to a chimpanzee. It's not that complicated.

But we also have to stay vigilant: Dixon and a16z still sit on a bunch of worthless tokens they'd like to use to turn your money into theirs and for that they'll need a lot of new enthusiasm for their scam.

My gut feeling is that they'll try to attach themselves to the "AI" hype with dumb ideas like "blockchain to certify that an image was made by an artist" or something.

Study finds that Github Copilot lowers code quality and maintainability:

"We find disconcerting trends for maintainability. Code churn -- the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored -- is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of 'added code' and 'copy/pasted code' is increasing in proportion to 'updated,' 'deleted,' and 'moved 'code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don't repeat yourself] of the repos visited."

The paper concludes: "How will Copilot transform what it means to be a developer? There's no question that, as AI has surged in popularity, we have entered an era where code lines are being added faster than ever before. The better question for 2024: who's on the hook to clean up the mess afterward?"

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2024/01/25/copilot-research.aspx

"Most of the executives hoping to profit off AI are in a similar state of mind. All the free money right now is going to AI businesses. They know the best way to chase that money is to throw logic to the wind and promise the masses that if we just let this technology run roughshod over every field of human endeavor it’ll be worth it in the end.

This is rational for them, because they’ll make piles of money. But it is an irrational thing for us to let them do. Why would we want to put artists and illustrators out of a job? Why would we accept a world where it’s impossible to talk to a human when you have a problem, and you’re instead thrown to a churning swarm of chatbots? Why would we let Altman hoover up the world’s knowledge and resell it back to us?"

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-companies-advocates-cult-1234954528/

(The framing of AI as a religious cult isn't a new phenomenon. I wrote about it in 2018: https://www.boundary2.org/2018/08/tante/ , AI has always been a religious movement)

Startup Idee: Ich habe einen Detector entwickelt, der die Stellen sichtbar macht, an denen die Fußbodenheizung am besten funktioniert.

(Ja, er hat sich den Duschvorleger selbst dort hingezogen)

The most important thing about the whole distribution of nonconsentual nude/sexual images is that the scale of this issue comes directly from the "AI" hype, from startups flush with VC cash and Microsoft wanting to get everyone "to dance". "AI" systems are released with marginal testing, hardly any oversight and when shit hits the fan some CEO does a "I am sowwy" video.

Don't be sorry, stop fucking up the world.

(Original title: The Taylor Swift Deepfakes Disaster Threatens to Change the Internet As We Know It)

https://www.404media.co/taylor-swift-deepfakes-ai-generated-porn/

I think the EU AI Act has it backwards:

It's not that "Foundation Models" are low risk but specific applications can be high risk.

Foundation Models are by definition not optimized and tested for specific cases and domains, full of bias and errors that only finetuning and testing can mitigate at all. Which means that they are therefore by definition more risky than specialized systems.

Under the systematic of the AI Act Foundation Models should be in the HIgh Risk category.

@feld @drwho @tux0r docker was basically "let's make 'works on my machine' best practice"

As someone in software for a while that has been the most surprising thing that Open Source did: In massively increased complexity even for small projects because "that's how Google/Amazon/etc do it".

Yes Amazon does Microservice architectures. They also have a few people for every service that knows the ins and outs. You have a team of 5 that now not only has to understand the problem but juggle dependency chains from here around the moon and back so your React App that should have been plain HTML doesn't fail while showing a basically static page.

You won't grow to Google/Amazon scale. It's fine. Just build a simple solution you can maintain.

Working on React/K8s or whatever is mostly you training yourself on your own dime and time to be a potential hire for some Big tech company that will fire you to juice the numbers at he end of the next quarter.

The most exciting thing about Apple being forced to allow other browser engines for me is how suddenly WebXR might actually be usable without Apple locking people out of their devices' features

Our future as societies, communities and a species depend on more solidarity, more care for everyone, less exploitation and more freedom for expression and experimentation.

It's about building a world where humans thrive not corporations. Everything else is an inhumane distraction.

"AI will secure our economic future." is not a socially progressive position. It's less obscene when it is accompanied by "and we'll take all the surplus value generated by these systems and distribute it to the people", but in general "AI" is basically just Neoliberalism as a machine.