Stochastic parrots, text extruders, extractive business models, and chatbots.
AI
[Jason Koebler at 404 Media] "The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project
AI
[Robin Rendle] Robin Rendle on Sarah Jeong's article about the implications of the Pixel 9's magic photo editor in The Verge: "But this stuff right here—adding things that never happened to a picture—that’s immoral because confusion and deception is the point of
AI
[tante] Tante responds to Amazon's claim that using its internal AI for coding saved 4500 person years of work: "Amazon wants to present themselves as AI company and platform. So of course their promises of gains are always advertising for their platform and tools. Advertising might have
AI
[Andy Jassy on LinkedIn] Andy Jassy on using Amazon Q, the company's generative AI assistant for software development, internally: "The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us
AI
[Open Society Foundations] "In February 2024, the Open Society Foundations issued a call for applications for a convening in which selected participants would share their visions of an AI-mediated future." I thought this, from the concluding observations, was telling: "Participants were generallyreluctant or unable to articulate exactly
AI
[Jess Weatherbed at The Verge] "“Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future,” Procreate said on the new AI section of its website. “We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a
AI
[Kylie Robison at The Verge] "Perplexity’s “Publishers’ Program” has recruited its first batch of partners, including prominent names like Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and Automattic (with WordPress.com participating but not Tumblr). Under this program, when Perplexity features content from these publishers in response
AI
[Samantha Cole at 404 Media] "A highly-praised AI video generation tool made by multi-billion dollar company Runway was secretly trained by scraping thousands of videos from popular YouTube creators and brands, as well as pirated films." 404 Media has linked to the spreadsheet itself, which seems to be
AI
[Gerben Wierda at R&A IT Strategy & Architecture] "ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two." The distinction is indeed important: it's akin to making an
AI
[Cloudflare] "To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier." This is really neat! Whatever you land on AI scraping, giving site
AI
[Molly White] "I fear that media outlets and other websites, in attempting to "protect" their material from AI scrapers, will go too far in the anti-human direction." I've been struggling with this. I'm not in favor of the 404 Media approach, which
AI
[Hunter Walk] "The best commerce platforms will be constantly grooming you, priming you, shaping you to buy. The combination of short-term and long-term value that leads to the optimal financial outcome for the business." I think this is inevitably correct: the web will devolve into a battle between