can mimic the outward signs of expression while lacking the inward spark.

“After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.” — Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

a complete surrender to this form of reasoning, though tempting, is likely to lead the U.S. to overlook the disproportionate impact of these systems on nations that are too poor to participate in the AI arms race.

a tendency L.M. Sacacas has labeled the “Borg complex” — because the tech is so effective and so much better than any alternatives.

Contrary to their cheery marketing copy, Investors and corporations don’t funnel their money into AI because they are interested in innovation for its own sake. AI promises to solve the problems of capital by unlocking exponential growth, eliminating labor costs, optimizing efficiency, and a slew of other expected outcomes. But the AI solution will come about only if the systems actually eventually work as promised.

This framework sensitizes us to “small” systems that cause tremendous harm because of the settings in which they’re placed and the authority people place upon them; and it inoculates us against fixations on things like regulating systems just because they happened to use 10^26 floating point calculations in training - an arbitrary threshold, denoting nothing in particular, beneath which actors could (and do) cause monumental harms already, today.

A good definition can help sensitize us to critical details that we might otherwise overlook.

I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to “democratize” AI routinely conflate “democratization” with “commodification”.

(There’s also the question of the chatbot form of the L.L.M. itself, and the particular dangers it poses and fallacies it inculcates, which I’ve written about before and which Mike Caulfield wrote about today.)

Meta has allowed these synthetic personas to offer a full range of social interaction—including “romantic role-play”—as they banter over text, share selfies and even engage in live voice conversations with users.

“The revenue model behind these open platforms is to be found in the user data and the value that data can represent.”

a more completelearner profile

“Collect it all” is a phrase used to encapsulate the mission of General Keith Alexander, director of the US National Security Agency

Epistemic displacement

learning analytics

Ideologies dothings.

texts

Ideologies are solutions that address real problems.

Images of AI Slop reflect an aesthetic of algorithmic power: the amplified feedback loop of social media and AI, of optimization and prediction. We have not trained our eyes to see this in the image yet, because we are so unaccustomed to the scale of what generative AI does – both within and beyond the images.

If everything is up for grabs, everything is transgressive, and nothing matters much at all. The entire landscape of our visual culture can become subject to a detached, aesthetic disinterest. Everything can be reduced to data to be manipulated. Once you believe that, you can easily come to believe wholesale in the ideological project of AI.

"To be disinterested is to take pleasure 'in the mere representation of the object,' not in its existence." AI is not only disinterested, it is wholly incapable of interest.