genai

I think it must not dawn on living folks how, in a very real sense, overwhelming use of artificial intelligence would make the human world effectively dead. It is a necrotechnology.

The fact it's rapidly made its way into warfare is not a coincidence nor a matter of economics. That's what this technology and its precursors have always been for. Economics provides a means for recruiting the entire population to produce it. Our economic activity is the means of creation of necrotechnology whose existence we then protest when it pushes beyond our comfort zone.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

OK let's try this:

"The belief in the indispensability of LLMs is not entirely mistaken. LLMs become an indispensable component of any structure once they are so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that they can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure. That is virtually a tautology. The utility of this tautology is that it can reawaken us to the possibility that some human actions, e.g., the introduction of LLMs into some complex human activities, may constitute an irreversible commitment."

Riffing on https://merveilles.town/users/mccd/statuses/116725032393633581

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLMs #Weizenbaum

Something I've learned from Ruth Ben-Ghiat: aspiring authoritarians purposely engineer situations in which people are invited to give up their values and morals and make decisions that compromise their sense of right and wrong. Moral decay, moral injury, and subsequently moral collapse become so intolerable that afflicted people will blame anything else but their own choices or the leader they threw in with, which of course are the only proximate causes it would be helpful to implicate. The more compromising decisions they make, the more they are drawn into the authoritarian's orbit.

There is no question that it is indefensible to use generative AI systems as they are currently constituted, especially the commercial ones, once one becomes aware of how they are made and operated and the destructive consequences they have already had and will surely continue to have. Among the many reasons using these tools is indefensible is that they represent an authoritarian invitation. You're invited to trade your morals and ethics for a bit of convenience, a reduction in friction, a learning experience, a rhetorical flourish, or maybe (a kind of) status. You thereby align yourself more and more with people who say things like "water is fake" or "fuck earth" as they make the computer systems enabling the horrors we're watching unfold on social media. You start to tell yourself stories, complexifying stories that explain why it's OK you did this thing that you know is not OK. You move in the direction of people who are already telling themselves stories like this. Maybe their stories have superior analgesic qualities to yours.

Nobody needs to go down this path.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ethics #morality #authoritarianism

I think we've reached a point, at least in STEM here in the US, where we should default to thinking of positive comments about AI by high-profile scientists and university professors as celebrity endorsements.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

A potentially interesting question: how much would the appearance of sentience or intelligence that LLMs can generate for some users explode if they were forced to have deterministic output?

In principle you could add a single "freeze the random seed" toggle to any of the major chatbots, and with that setting toggled on they would always return precisely the same output for a given input. Organisms and by extension humans cannot behave like this---no matter how stereotyped an organism's response may seem, it always differs, in however small a way, from a previous response---and the LLM's illusion should immediately be obvious by contrast. But, perhaps more interestingly for the folks who do think LLMs exhibit some form of sentience or intelligence: are we really meant to believe that a random number generator is the source of sentience or intelligence? You could hook up a random number generator to a machine that is otherwise deterministic and clearly not sentient or intelligent, and it suddenly becomes so? How do you explain that?

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs

Re-reading The Soul Gained and Lost: Artificial Intelligence as a Philosophical Project by Phil Agre as catharsis. Here.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

I think it is meaningful that Marvin Minsky, sometimes called the "father of AI", seemed to hold human beings in low regard.

Here's John Searle in 1983:

Marvin Minsky of MIT says that the next generation of computers will be so intelligent that we will ‘be lucky if they are willing to keep us around the house as household pets.'

Here's Joseph Weizenbaum in 2007:

Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’

He goes on to note that meat is dead and might be eaten or thrown out. Flesh is what's alive. He also draws attention to the word "merely", as in "nothing more than".

I share with Weizenbaum the belief that Minsky has clearly expressed a disdain for human intelligence. We're on the order of household pets. Our brains are no more than food or trash. Obviously Minsky doesn't speak for all AI researchers then or since, but his "meat machine" language is all over the place, and this disdain or even contempt for human intelligence and achievement is also common.

It definitely doesn't speak to a curiosity about intelligence, which I think requires at least a little bit of love and esteem.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #intelligence #GenAI #GenerativeAI

RE: https://mas.to/@zzt/117072277420358205

I studied computer science and deep learning at university, and I wrote my thesis about deep learning and Transformers (the "T" in ChatGPT). The Transformer architecture was proposed in 2017.

I never studied Natural Language Processing (NLP) or language models, therefore I'm not an expert in that particular subfield of deep learning, but I studied the underlying technology (the Transformer architecture) that is also used in Computer Vision, which is what I studied and the subfield I was an expert in, at the time. (I haven't read deep learning literature in years because I changed careers after I recognized the harms of these technologies, so I'm no longer up to date with the state of the art.)

As the quoted comment says, you don't need to have studied Transformers to recognize a grift or a gambling addict when you see one.

I am a human with empathy and enough intelligence to recognize a grift.

I also happen to have the technological understanding to know what the technology sold to us as "AI" is capable of and, more importantly, will never be capable of.

Yet somehow, my coworkers and other people I have to deal with in my life—neither of whom studied computer science nor deep learning nor has the same technological understanding I have—never believe me when I am skeptical of "AI". I recommend them books like "The AI Con" or Golumbia's "Cyberlibertarianism" or McQuillan's "Resisting AI" to support my skepticism and they handwave this away with, "Have you also read AI-friendly books?" Yes, I have. "Deep Learning" by Goodfellow, "Designing ML Systems" by Huyen, and I studied it, damnit.

Apparently they lack not only the technical knowledge that comes from studying these concepts but also the basic intelligence of a common human being to recognize a grift when it spits in their faces, despite everyone else shouting from the rooftops.

Even when the bubble bursts and we cleaned up all the sloppy code, we will still have the fallout that are mindless selfish people who refuse to listen to experts and rather fall for the snake oil vendors because they lack not just a moral compass but also the wits to detect a grift.

Edit: Since this is gaining traction, here's a bit more about my background:
https://hachyderm.io/@davidculley/115157940835134223

#GenAI

French first lady Brigitte Macron and other spouses of world leaders. "It will be formed in the shape of humans. Very soon, artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility. Since our environment is designed for people, humanoid systems are uniquely suited to navigate and operate within our world. They fit well."

"Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato," she continued. "Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous. Literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics and history. Humanity's entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home. Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student. Plato is always patient, and always available. Predictably, our children will develop deep critical thinking and independent reasoning abilities. The AI-powered Plato will boost analytic skills and problem solving and adopt in real time to a student's pace, prior knowledge and even emotional state. The byproduct — a more well-rounded lifestyle for our children, freeing up time for being with friends, playing sports and developing interests beyond school. A more complete person."

From Melania Trump pitches robots as potential educators for American schoolchildren https://www.cbsnews.com/news/melania-trump-robots-educators-kids-humanoid-systems/

The horrors and clowns of the bread and circus.

#AI #GenAI #GeneartiveAI #robotics #education #MagicalThinking #dystopia

¡VICTORIA LEGAL! 📢 El Tribunal Regional de Múnich falla en favor de los creadores: «Los modelos de IA basados en el robo de propiedad intelectual no están protegidos por la ley»

SUNO pierde la demanda por haber violado derechos de autor y deberá pagar una indemnización por daños y perjuicios 🔥

FUENTE: https://www.reuters.com/world/german-court-rules-ai-music-firm-suno-broke-copyright-rules-2026-07-31/

#AI #genAI #SUNO #gema #german #court #copyright #music #tech #technology #generativeAI #author #creators #creation #art #germany

RE: https://mastodon.online/@parismarx/116372697459719963

One of the worst things about this is that Big Tech corporations like Google, Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI have become so disproportionally wealthy and powerful that they can unleash this shit show upon the world without being held accountable… 😖

#tech #technology #BigTech #IT #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #LLMs #ML #MachineLearning #GenAI #generativeAI #AIAgent #AISlop #FuckAI #Fuck_AI #enshittification #google #gemini

I recently reread Fred Brooks's 1986 classic No Silver Bullet, which you can find here: https://www.cs.unc.edu/techreports/86-020.pdf . I think it is useful to re-consider Brooks's distinction between the essential complexity versus the accidental complexity of software development in light of the recent mania behind using LLMs for coding. Which of these types of complexity does LLM use address? Does it introduce more of either class of complexity?

In light of what I've seen, LLM use seems to provide the illusion of addressing both kinds of complexity in the short-term while it increases essential complexity in the long-term. It may or may not reduce some accidental complexity; the verdict is still out, as far as I can tell. Judging from the recent leak of the Claude Code front end source code, LLMs seem to introduce an enormous amount of new accidental complexity.

To the extent that LLMs are in the category of what Brooks calls automatic programming, this quote he shares from David Parnas is important:

Automatic programming always has been a euphemism for programming with a higher-level language than was presently available to the programmer.

The "higher-level language" LLMs trade in is English, which Dijkstra has strongly argued makes for a poor programming language. But even if, contra Dijkstra, it turns out LLMs somehow change that equation, we are still stuck with Brooks's argument that higher-level programming languages largely only address accidental complexity. They do not get at the essence of what makes creating software systems difficult.

Taken together, all this seems to suggest that LLM use in coding is a net negative, and if the above is to be believed it will result in worse outcomes, not better, over the long haul. Definitely re-read Brooks and see if you agree.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLMs #ClaudeCode #software #tech #dev #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment

I realized that if I was writing a program and it didn't always work, I had a choice: I could either fix it, or call it AI.

--David Parnas

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLMs #Claude #ClaudeCode #ChatGPT #tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering

quick reminder

there's zero necessity to use "#genai" when building things.

that's a false premise and a con: we did fine* before that nonsense was foisted on the world.

the fact that it has been constructed (at our expense) doesn't change that.

it's the cutting edge of the war of capital and the #tescreal cult against the people.

the speed of "generating" stuff isn't the benchmark.

* maybe we didn't overall, but the way one "democratizes" creation is via education.

La IA generativa estará prohibida en los colegios de primaria de Noruega a partir del próximo curso 🔥 El ejecutivo laborista ha justificado la decisión en una caída sostenida de los resultados académicos y en el temor a que la IA termine reemplazando el aprendizaje en lugar de apoyarlo.

🔗 Noticia completa: https://www.elmundo.es/tecnologia/2026/06/19/6a3597b8e9cf4a3d118b459b.html

#AI #education #school #Norway #genAI #generativeAI #ban #tech #technology #books #books #learn #learning

I thought the Ronan Farrow/Andrew Marantz New Yorker article on OpenAI and Sam Altman in particular reveals many important details and helps settle several speculations (e.g. about what happened when Altman was briefly fired from OpenAI). The overall portrayal of Altman as frankly a compulsive liar is much needed.

However, like many Farrow and Marantz seem to take the so-called "existential risk" framing of AI seriously. I really wish people would stop doing that. In this case it makes the article feel incoherent in places.

This technology by itself does not pose a unique risk. It's the people, organizations, and governments around it, and their behavior with respect to it, that generate risk. Treating the technology alone as uniquely existentially risky provides cover for a wide variety of bad actors to both continue doing their work as well as to shrug and say "oops" if something goes catastrophically wrong or if smaller harms accumulate into intolerably large ones. The very framing provides an accountability shield, which by my read contradicts what Farrow himself suggests is needed, namely more accountability. I take this from this article, his previous work, and comments he makes in interviews (e.g., this one with Decoder.

We need to stop catastrophizing. It's thought and action terminating.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #SamAltman #RonanFarrow #AndrewMarantz #NewYorker #xrisk #ExistentialRisk #AISafety

#PSA: if you don't want any images in your Google photos to be used to train GenAI, you need to OPT OUT.

"“Take a moment to think before you dive in. That’s the best advice for Google Photos users, as the company confirms its latest update can scan all your photos to “use actual images of you and your loved ones” in AI image generation.”"

#GenAI #Google

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/04/18/google-starts-scanning-all-your-photos-as-new-update-goes-live/

La «democratización» es un eufemismo de vulneración de la privacidad y de robo de la propiedad intelectual. La ilegalidad de la IA generativa no es una opinión, es una realidad que Amnistía Internacional documenta en su último informe y que reafirma lo que otros muchos colectivos y asociaciones hemos sostenido desde su irrupción en 2022.

El informe completo en: https://arteesetica.org/la-ia-generativa-es-ilegal-por-diseno-informe-de-amnistia-internacional/

#iagenerativa #ilegal #GenAI #unlawful #amnistiainternacional #amnestyinternational

Because of #genAI, many #researchers around the world now believe they don't need #editors to get their writing into good shape so their papers pass muster with swamped #peer #reviewers at #journals. But they *do* need editors.

https://tinyurl.com/4nerak9j

https://tinyurl.com/35zu5b63

https://tinyurl.com/pdjfpya5

Amnistía Internacional finalmente llegó a la misma conclusión que nosotros planteamos desde fines de 2022: se deben prohibir los modelos de IA generativa basados en la extracción de datos de la web porque son ilegales por diseño, independientemente del uso que se les dé 🎯

🔗 Toda la INFO + el informe completo: https://arteesetica.org/la-ia-generativa-es-ilegal-por-diseno-informe-de-amnistia-internacional/

#AI #tech #technology #genAI #generativeAI #unlawful #Amnesty #Amnistia #Midjourney #OpenAI #ChatGPT #Gemini #Google #StableDiffusion

The proliferation of AI tools in science risks introducing a phase of scientific enquiry in which we produce more but understand less.

From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07146-0

There are good points in this article, but the framing of the risk above is broken, to my way of thinking. In adopting the economic metaphor of production, it's taking for granted that there is a scientific process that leads to products, and that we can quantify how many of these products are produced. "We produce more".

I would argue that if we do not understand whatever is coming out of this process, then they are not products in any reasonable sense of that word. In fact I'd say this of any putative commodity: if a factory spits out a widget nobody knows how to use, then the factory has not produced a commodity, it has made an object. Commodities are commodious, adapted to a use or purpose, and human beings are the entities that have uses and purposes.

So, if we create machines that make knowledge-objects resembling the products of science that fewer and fewer people understand, we are not engaging in "scientific enquiry" or "knowledge production". In this view the phrase quoted above ought to be re-cast as "The proliferation of AI tools in science risks science". What exactly is enquiry for if not understanding more?

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #science

Re: https://infosec.exchange/users/lcamtuf/statuses/116901998490591428

I don't find it surprising that people send LLM-generated docs, publish LLM-generated blog posts, etc. Writing is a chore and there's this big button labeled "get it done".

Writing can be many things, but a chore? That's not something I entirely understand. I don't mean to sound like I'm hollering at this single point from this person's post, but it's a sentiment I've seen expressed before and this was a convenient example (and what I say next is in the spirit of and amplifies the further point they make!)

There's an emerging theme in my last few posts today concerning means vs. ends. Science as a production process that spits out knowledge products. Writing as the necessary chore sitting between a person and "having another blog post" or "citation count go up".

Overfocus on the ends can lead one to think of the means as chores. Science is slow and boring, let's use AI to spit out the Good Science Stuff faster. Writing is a chore, let's use the AI to spit out Documents. Heck let's chain them together and have the machine do Good Science Stuff and then spit out Documents about it that we feed back into the machine and hey we can send the Documents to Funding Agencies to get Funding for our Good Science Stuff and spit out even more Documents so that...and...to...so...[infinite random string]. Wait what were we doing again?

Personally I think it's poisonous to focus mostly on ends. The absurdity is a clue. If I believed in souls I'd say it's bad for them. I guess I find the mindset confusing because long ago I came to think that the means are the ends. There are no other ends but the means.

Yes, I well understand there are certain kinds of mandated writing that are tedious and unwanted.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #writing

Should you boycott generative AI? But what if your hyped-up boss starts pressuring you?

Worry not, there’s a middle ground.

A tech worker shares their manifesto for responsible agentic AI coding: https://www.techwerkers.nl/en/posts/manifesto-responsible-agentic-coding/

#LLMs #genAI #tech #work

To #Debian community: "Responsible Use Of Generative AI" is an oxymoron. GenAI is irresponsible and pernicious. Your voting means whitewashing Big Tech ecocide, destruction of Free Software & Culture and their agenda against the marginalized communities.
PS: A huge thank you for those Debian members that proposed and voted NoAI options.
Now, there are alternatives:
https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index
https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware
#NoAI #LLM #slop #GenAI

#PassionSondages ☝️😐

[ANNONCE SONDAGE]

SUJET : L'IA 🦾🤖 et vous 💪😡

Ce futur sondage aura pour objectif de vous laisser voter pour divers sujets et items sous la forme de sondages à 4 choix (parfois choix unique, parfois choix multiples).

Le thread sera en anglais afin d'en assurer une large diffusion.

Si vous avez des idées de questions, je prends ! 🤗 (Et crediterai)

#AI #NoAI #AISlop #LLM #MachineLearning #Algorithms #GenAI #AIArt #AIAds #Hallucinations #Dev #Code #AIMaths #AiMusic #AIResearch #DeadInternetTheory #MassSurveilance #AINeutrality #ChatGPT #Gemini #Suno #Midjourney #Prompts #IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream #RokosBasilisk #EndOfWork #DeepFake