#ai (123 links)
- Neal Stephenson's Most Stunning Prediction - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
About a year ago, I worked with a start-up that makes AI characters in video games. I found it rewarding and fascinating because of the hallucinations: I could see how new patterns emerged from the soup of inputs being fed to it. The same thing that I consider to be a feature is a bug in most applications.
- Pluralistic: Sympathy for the spammer (15 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow pluralistic.net
This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.
None of the available AI devices overcomes all three challenges. Those that look pretty, like the r1, the Pin or Meta’s Ray-Bans, seem to be peripherals more akin to AirPods than the iPhone. Independently useful ones like the Vision Pro or the Quest are dorkier than Google Glass, and much clunkier.
- NoML Open Letter noml.info
A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.
- The digital equivalent of wearing a fake Chanel bag garbageday.email
These tools can’t create anything new. They spin together the most basic aesthetics of digital art into a slurry that feels immediately dated upon creation. Which is why, less than two years after DALL-E 2 launched to the public, ushering in a new age of AI, the content these tools produce has quickly gone from shiny new toy to visual shorthand for e-waste. They are basically a high-tech version of a Bitmoji.
- Dark Visitors - A list of known AI agents on the internet darkvisitors.com
- Cursor - The AI-first Code Editor cursor.sh
Such AI-driven dynamic pricing is already a reality in mainland Europe, as grocery retailers such as DIA in Spain, Iper in Italy, Metro in Germany, and Hoogvliet in the Netherlands are rolling out the technology.
- Have I Been Trained? haveibeentrained.com
Search for your work in popular AI training datasets
- AI Type Design Workshop – FVS flexiblevisualsystems.info
In other words, if we outsource the creative process, we also outsource thinking. Making is deeply connected with thinking. If you want to learn or develop something new, you have to go through a painful process if you want it to be worth something.
A snappy, but not a particularly representative quote. This is arguing for doing the thing to learn properly, later augmenting with AI.
- The OpenAI Keynote – Stratechery by Ben Thompson stratechery.com
The best UI, though, is no UI at all, or rather, just one UI, by which I mean “Universal Interface”.
A.I.’s wonkiness—all of these networks are still in their nascency—forced Lopatin to reëxamine his most instinctive and well-worn habits. “It reminds me a lot of Paul Schrader’s transcendental-cinema thing,” Lopatin said. “He always talks about how there are films that are formulaic and ones that aren’t. The ones that aren’t do weird things with time. They dwell a little bit too long on the wrong object, like a door after someone has passed through it. You’re usually following the person, but now we’re staying on the door. That’s what A.I. is actually doing really well. What it’s not doing very well is following the person.”
- A glitch in the SEO matrix izzy.co
- ChatGPT Gets a Computer – Stratechery by Ben Thompson stratechery.com
- The Age of AI has begun gatesnotes.com
- Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment right now simonwillison.net
So they’re in the wild now. You may not be legally able to build a commercial product on them, but the genie is out of the bottle. That furious typing sound you can hear is thousands of hackers around the world starting to dig in and figure out what life is like when you can run a GPT-3 class model on your own hardware.
- Form, function, and the giant gulf between drawing a picture and understanding the world garymarcus.substack.com
In assessing progress towards general intelligence, the critical question should be, how much do systems like Dall-E, Imagen, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion really understand the world, such that they can reason on and act on that knowledge?
- AI Weirdness • GPT-3 tries pickup lines aiweirdness.com
(In your best Albert Einstein voice) “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
- The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I. – GEN gen.medium.com