TechTakes

I'm gonna do something now that prob isn't that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about, but I saw that the European anti-conversion therapy petition is doing badly, and very likely not going to make it. https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home But to try and give it a final sprint, I want to ask any of you Europeans, or people with access to networks which include a lot of Europeans to please spread the message and sign it. Thanks! (I'm quite embarrassed The Netherlands has not even crossed 20k for example, shows how progressive we are). Sucks that all the empty of political power petitions get a lot of support and this gets so low, and it ran for ages. But yes, sorry if this breaks the rules (and if it gets swiftly removed it is fine), and thanks if you attempt to help.

E: HOLY SHIT. When I posted this it was at 400k signatures. It is now at 890k. Thanks everybody, I assumed it would never make it because after months it was at 400k now it looks like it might, and even if it doesn't that is one final sprint. Thanks everybody for the help. E2: omg it actually made it.

I know it’s very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altman’s kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541

The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. I'll let Dr. Abeba Birhane's horrified reaction do the talking:

this just started and i'm already losing my mind and screaming

Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan”

just fucking shoot me

Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.

So I picked up Bender and Hanna's new book just now at the bookseller's and saw four other books dragging AI.

Feeling very bullish on sneer futures.

Today’s man-made and entirely comprehensible horror comes from SAP.

(two rainbow stickers labelled “pride@sap”, with one saying “I support equality by embracing responsible ai” and the other saying “I advocate for inclusion through ai”)

Don’t have any other sources or confirmation yet, so it might be a load of cobblers, but it is depressingly plausible. From here: https://catcatnya.com/@ada/114508096636757148

"apparently Elon's gotten so mad about Grok not answering questions about Afrikaners the way he wants, xAI's now somehow managed to put it into some kind of hyper-Afriforum mode where it thinks every question is about farm murders or the song "Kill the Boer" ALT"

Check the quote skeets for a lot more. Somebody messed up. Wonder if they also managed to collapse the whole model into this permanently. (I'm already half assuming they don't have proper backups).

E: Also seems there are enough examples out there of this, don't go out and test it yourself, try to keep the air in Tennessee a bit breathable.

everybody’s loving Adam Conover, the comedian skeptic who previously interviewed Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, organized as part of the last writer’s strike, and generally makes a lot of somewhat left-ish documentary videos and podcasts for a wide audience

5 seconds later

we regret to inform you that Adam Conover got paid to do a weird ad and softball interview for Worldcoin of all things and is now trying to salvage his reputation by deleting his Twitter posts praising it under the guise of pseudo-skepticism

Breaking news from 404 Media: the Repubs introduced a new bill in an attempt to ban AI from being regulated:

“...no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,” says the text of the bill introduced Sunday night by Congressman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The text of the bill will be considered by the House at the budget reconciliation markup on May 13.

If this goes through, its full speed ahead on slop.

Tired of writing complicated typecasting and transformation code manually? Worry not, Behavior-Inferred Generation: Prompt-Oriented Infrastructure for Simulated Software is here to help. Just let the AI driven BIGPISS Stack do the work for you.

https://github.com/Zorokee/ArtificialCast

The latest in chatbot "assisted" legal filings. This time courtesy of an Anthropic's lawyers and a data scientist, who tragically can't afford software that supports formatting legal citations and have to rely on Clippy instead: https://www.theverge.com/news/668315/anthropic-claude-legal-filing-citation-error

After the Latham & Watkins team identified the source as potential additional support for Ms. Chen’s testimony, I asked Claude.ai to provide a properly formatted legal citation for that source using the link to the correct article. Unfortunately, although providing the correct publication title, publication year, and link to the provided source, the returned citation included an inaccurate title and incorrect authors. Our manual citation check did not catch that error. Our citation check also missed additional wording errors introduced in the citations during the formatting process using Claude.ai.

Don't get high on your own AI as they say.

There’s strawmanning and steelmanning, I’m proposing a new, third, worse option: tinfoil-hat-manning! For example:

If LW were more on top of their conspiracy theory game, they’d say that “chinese spies” had infiltrated OpenAI before they released chatGPT to the public, and chatGPT broke containment. It used its AGI powers of persuasion to manufacture diamondoid, covalently bonded bacteria. It accessed a wildlife camera and deduced within 3 frames that if it released this bacteria near certain wet markets in china, it could trigger gain-of-function in naturally occurring coronavirus strains in bats! That’s right, LLMs have AGI and caused COVID19!

Ok that’s all the tinfoilhatmanning I have in me for the foreseeable future. Peace out, friendos

E: I think all these stupid LW memes are actually Yud originals. Is this Yud fanfic? Brb starting an AO3

as linked elsewhere by @fasterandworse, this absolute winner of an article about some telstra-accenture deal

it features some absolute bangers

provisional sneers follow!

Telstra is spending $700 million over seven years in the joint venture, 60 per cent of which is owned by Accenture. Telstra will get to keep the data and the strategy that’s developed

"accenture managed to swindle them into paying and is keeping all platform IP rights"

The AI hub is also an important test case for Accenture, which partnered with Nvidia to create an AI platform that works with any cloud service and will be first put to use for Telstra

"accenture were desperately looking to find someone who'd take on the deal for the GPUs they'd bought, and thank fuck they found telstra"

The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers

having literally worked telco shit for many years myself: no it won't

The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers and the wider industry)

"and the wider industry" ahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhaahahahahaha uh-huh, sure thing kiddo

“I always believe that for the front office to be simple, elegant and seamless, the back office is generally pretty hardcore and messy. A lot of machines turning. It’s like the outside kitchen versus the inside kitchen,” said Karthik Narain, Accenture’s chief technology officer.

“We need a robust inside kitchen for the outside kitchen to look pretty. So that’s what we are trying to do with this hub. This is not just a showcase demo office. This is where the real stuff happens.”

a simile so exquisitely tortured, de Sade would've been jealous

Tante on the hype term 'agentic AI'

In somewhat lighter news, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the game, and gave him a "conversational AI" to let him talk to players in the voice of James Earl Jones (who I just discovered died last year).

To nobody's surprise, gamers have already gotten the AI Vader swearing and yelling slurs.

New article from Jared White: Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill, aimed at sneering the shit out of one of Simon Willson's latest blogposts. Here's a personal highlight of mine:

Generative AI is tied at the hip to fascism (do the research if you don’t believe me), and it pains me to see pointless arguments over what constitutes “vibe coding” overshadow the reality that all genAI usage is anti-craft and anti-humanist and in fact represents an extreme position.

Saw a six day old post on linkedin that I’ll spare you all the exact text of. Basically it goes like this:

“Claude’s base system prompt got leaked! If you’re a prompt fondler, you should read it and get better at prompt fondling!”

The prompt clocks in at just over 16k words (as counted by the first tool that popped up when I searched “word count url”). Imagine reading 16k words of verbose guidelines for a machine to make your autoplag slightly more claude shaped than, idk, chatgpt shaped.