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The Demon-Haunted Machine
Notes on belief, delusion, magical thinking, and putting the AI genie back in its bottle where it belongs.
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The anthropomorphism trap
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. The generative AI industry seems to be aiming all its innovation at what it sees as its chief competitor: human beings. The companies working to make us redundant have some pretty sound business cases for it:
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The enshitification of NaNoWriMo
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. It’s time to either fork NaNoWrimo, or just put a fork in it. The National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has been an online event each November since 1999, spurring would-be and wannabe authors to bang
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Beyond Provenance
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. I’m a slow blogger. Perhaps it’s one of the few aspects about this site to act as an indicator that the words here are in fact typed by human fingers. AI-powered sites are running
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Weaponised AI isn't killer robots, it's just humans killing on autopilot
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. “You should not be afraid of AI. You should be afraid of the people building it.” Jessica Matthews, founder of Uncharted Power Tl;dr: The incorporation of AI into weapons needs to be banned in a
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Surveillance capitalism is also just regular old surveillance
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Tl;dr: Surveillance is a natural outcome of the internet as it was created. Surveillance capitalism isn’t an innovation, but a resource extraction industry, and states don’t need to make fancy tools to get
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Automattic for the people, not the AI
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Tl;dr: Automattic, the owner of of Tumblr and WordPress.com, is negotiating with Midjourney and OpenAI to sell them AI training data which would be scraped from platform users’ posts unless they opt out. It’
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It's another week, so another roundup
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Three weeks running and still doing a Weekly Roundup! Is it remotely newsletter worthy as a format or in substance? Would anyone actually subscribe to this? Is the content even martingally monetisable? I’m especially dubious
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The great Twitter migration that maybe kind of wasn't
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. What’s the stronger force, inertia or outrage? When Elon Musk took over Twitter and promptly set about demolishing it, there was a cacaphony of bleetings on the platform threatening a mass exodus. I can be
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Re: A weekly roundup
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Hey, I’ll maybe do these once a week until I don’t. I haven’t quite figured out how to — or if I want to —attempt to monetise this site or if I’ve got
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OoO: An InspiroBot post
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Bored on boxing day evening away from my usual diversions in London and just learned about inspirobot.me. it’s just random text/pic generator clap trap but some are not very far off from what