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Do we trust the Government on NHS Reform when they're talking like this?
We know AI is a hustle, why don't these Very Serious People?
Are they naive or crooked?
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#genai
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Imagine being a Government minister and asking a mindless machine a question like "why aren't Small to Medium businesses taking up AI?"
Because Peter, they haven't found a business use for it, that's why. It's a toy looking for a serious purpose outside of Fascism
Reading about Copilot and how to put guardrails on it. There are anecdotal reports that one of the most common questions to Copilot in organisations is, “What’s the salary of the CEO?”
Announcing the latest title in Open Humanities Press's MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series:
Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence by Gary Hall.
Available open access - to be downloaded for free:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/
If we want a socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? Unsettling received ideas of the author and the book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, Masked Media tests ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge enabled by media technologies, from writing through to GenAI. Thinking outside the black box that renders Euro-Western knowledge-making practices invisible – keeping the human ontologically separate from the nonhuman – it shows there’s no such thing as the human, the nonhuman already being in(the)human.
#newmedia #academicpublishing #experimentalwriting #humanities
#philosophy #ai #openai #genai
Yesterday, someone described to me a future in which most literature was AI-generated, and real books were "artisan".
I'm still trying to find all the words to explain why that wouldn't be okay.
The now-famous "why should I read something you couldn't be bothered to write?" line lands, yes. But deeper than that, writing is an essential part of thinking and imagination.
And human thought and imagination must never be outsourced or replaced.
A Moscow-based disinformation network has infiltrated Western AI tools worldwide, flooding them with pro-Kremlin propaganda, according to a new study.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/ai/ai-chatbots-infected-russian-propaganda
www.computing.co.ukAI chatbots are ‘infected’ with Russian propagandaA Moscow-based disinformation network has infiltrated Western AI tools worldwide, flooding them with pro-Kremlin propaganda, according to a new study.
The tech industry wants us to think generative AI is mostly upsides, but there are a bunch of harms they don’t want us to talk about.
Up next in the premium interviews from the #TechWontSaveUs DATA VAMPIRES series is @alex!
Become a Patreon supporter to listen: https://www.patreon.com/posts/harms-of-ai-w-122478911
The 10 leading generative AI tools advanced Moscow’s disinformation goals by repeating false claims from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network 1 out if 3 times.
https://open.substack.com/pub/newsguardtech/p/a-well-funded-moscow-based-global
NewsGuard's Reality Check · A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda
Some GOOD news on the AI front: AI app spots computational error in article that spurred black-plastic cooking utensil scare (details awaiting human verification): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00648-5 #genAI #misinformation #AI
www.nature.comAI tools are spotting errors in research papers: inside a growing movementStudy that hyped the toxicity of black plastic utensils inspires projects that use large language models to check papers.
Replied in thread
I've had lots of great conversations with AI skeptics. I definitely lean toward "AI is cool as heck!" so knowing people are out there doing more critical work on the topic is great. It leaves me to explore their actual non-terrible uses, carving out a space between the scammers and bosses. The screamers really aren't representative, but you wouldn't know it by how they've dominated the conversation.
Lot of good they've done. AI is still here, and it's making its way into more places. But as I've written, it's time to drown them out and have a real conversation about it: https://kyefox.com/ai-assisted-creativity/
Kye Fox · March 2025: AI-assisted creativity and the race to claim the futureIn this issue we grab the future by its shiny metal cranium and hold on for dear life while we look for the control panel.
Replied in thread
@TechDesk wow, "GenAI used by Fascists to destroy Democracy", such a wonderful invention that has embiggened all our lives! /s
Continued thread
The UK is embracing AI at any cost as it’s desperate to increase economic growth. But is that a good strategy?
On #TechWontSaveUs, I spoke with James Meadway to discuss what’s happening in the UK and the consequences of allowing US tech to dominate.
Listen to the full episode: https://techwontsave.us/episode/266_the_uks_misguided_embrace_of_ai_hype_w_james_meadway
It began as a bored probe of an LLM's neural network to see what vague prompts brought up. It turned into an art project.
Dear #NYC : I am hosting an event, please consider joining me. Philosophy & alcohol will be flowing...
March 26 at Little Honey in Brooklyn: "Creativity is Dead, Long Live Creativity!: Generative AI and the Artistic Mind"
This is a public philosophy salon. A participatory lecture, some thought experiments, my first time teaching in an establishment that sells liquor (at least officially)
More info here:
#genAI #AI #philosophy #art #Brooklyn
Boosts will help- thx!
lu.maCreativity is Dead, Long Live Creativity!: Generative AI and the Artistic Mind · LumaThe concept of creativity has a surprisingly short history. While ancient philosophers expounded on imagination and free will, theorizations of creativity as a…
A surprising Stanford study concludes AI-assisted writing tends to be highest in less-educated areas. Is that bridging gaps or creating dependence? Gaining opportunities or losing skills?
Waking up to more deluge of crazy from the US, not only in #uspolitics but the crazies in #Bigtech. I'm almost ready to quit academia bc I'm so tired of all the #genai hype and bs. I didn't get into academia to endlessly sing the praises of text or clip art image generators. It was bad enough when learning analytics hit (what bs that was). I love human communication and collaboration, bring humans back to education! Why is everyone so under the #AI spell?
Replied to Tim Bray
Arguably big but definitely not a "smart piece"
by Byrne Hobart on writing and blogging and LLMs: https://www.thediff.co/archive/ais-impact-on-the-written-word-is-vastly-overstated/
@timbray: Let me deconstruct this. The author's bias (Byrne Hobart's) is for,
"some algorithm guessing the next word based on statistical distributions."
That is the very definition of average and mediocre. Economically, the author argues,
"...printed books had lower production values, because of that marginal cost argument. But there were many more [books common people could read]
... keeping in mind, *written by humans who could afford the costs of learning to write them, writing them, printing them, and distributing them. Of course, progress to electronic media meant,
"What blogging meant was that people could participate in the discourse, in the medium that the most influential people prefer, without any vetting whatsoever."
Emphasis mine. True! Worse,
"Pajama-clad or not, bloggers stuck around, and they forced other news organizations to adapt to their norms."
Exactly.
This, in fact, inevitably draws the reader to the deductive conclusion that—contrary to the author's argument that LLMs are an improvement on human-gen writing—instead genAI is as disruptive to truth-in-journalism (to the extent that a person or displaced journalist could be or want to be unbiased) as is blogging, but on steroids. This is especially true when you factor in the statistics at the bottom of the article:
"We already implicitly opt out of the overwhelming majority of what we could read. And whether we read .01% or .001% of what theoretically interests us doesn't make much of a practical difference."
Why not opt out more by embracing genAI output? Interesting thesis.
The problem here is sorting out the genAI regurgitated hash of trending opinion and alternative facts when such writing is rarely marked as AI generated. Remember,
"Tools like Grammarly take this a bit further, and at this point LLMs make it so that everyone who wants to can write whatever [without learning how or why] [what] they need to in whatever tone they want ... [They] can move [their] writing a little closer to 90th percentile...elevate basically any coherent thought into a message that reads like it was produced by a college-educated professional [but could have been written by a 1st grader who has no idea what they are talking about].
"Eliminating the ability to judge people based on how well they write is a social shift that, at least for the Extremely Online, is an act of linguistic egalitarianism."
I'm all for the best tools, but my hammer doesn't build my house by itself.
In other words, genAI using LLMs devalues educated writing, argument, and rhetoric to something maybe a person can recognize as good, but makes it something not worth learning to do, or monetarily worth investing in. This blithe attitude reminds me of how art is often devalued, especially in schools in favor of STEM and rote learning—displacing critical thinking and learning to be creative.
Sturgeon's Law states,
"Ninety percent of everything is crap."
It's true! The author agrees on that, but if you displace human writing by making it worthless by teaching that genAI use is on par, or better than learning to write, don't you end up multiplying the statistical occurrences the author-cited algorithm chooses from 90% to 99% to 99.99% ad infinitum until we have machines talking to machines? Creativity evaporates. Laziness dominates.
The ability of bad actors to control people through algorithms increases by orders of magnitude when people cease to write by themselves. Free words are too expensive.
The Diff · AI's Impact on the Written Word is Vastly OverstatedPlus! VC IPOs; Sovereign Wealth Funds; The Return of Structured Products; LLM Moderation; Risk Management; Diff Jobs
TechCrunch · Jolla founders take the wraps off an AI assistant to power up their push for privacy-friendly GenAI | TechCrunchJolla, the erstwhile mobile maker turned privacy-centric AI business — via sister startup, Venho.ai — has taken the wraps off an AI assistant that's