Yet another interesting essay from our November issue: @jamesmackaycyp.bsky.social and Polina Mackay share on the practice of creating cut-ups with commercial AI electronicbookreview.com/essay/experi...

"AI is an automated amplifier of social norms and assumptions" - well put by Selena Savić, speaking at "Rethinking the Inevitability of AI" conference today. Such a productive series of talks.

Good to see ebr on here!

Interesting piece on the non takeup of GenAI by educators. This is a group that has been heavily targeted by edutech startups, yet they clearly don't see any huge benefit. www.criticalinkling.com/p/students-u...

Fascinating. “Given the general sentiment about AI, scraping the web for content and the disintermediating of content creators, it’s not hard to imagine enterprising individuals adding ‘David Mayer’ …to their own content or website in an effort to make it disappear from ChatGPT’s output.” 👀

It seems that someone called David Mayer has succeeded in bringing OpenAI to heel. It's impossible to get the chatbot to generate that name.

This isn't true. In fact, only the part of the Internet curated by algorithm will fill up w/ slop. Human curated databases (libraries) are just fine, and still full of wonderful art. It's just that we've all got so used to having a machine do our thinking for us, and now we need #criticalAI skills.

"Not a single Whitehall department has registered the use of AI systems since the government said it would become mandatory, prompting warnings that the public sector is “flying blind” about the deployment of algorithmic technology affecting millions of lives." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Very reassuring piece. Though I'm not sure that "2% of global energy use" is all that minimal.

A huge number of my followers describe themselves as AI artists and/or have feeds mostly filed with #AIart generated pictures. I would love to hear from any of you about what you find creatively satisfying about #GenAI art. Why do you enjoy doing this?

Has a political party anywhere in the world ever won a democratic election with manifesto promising to cut services while raising taxes? (Honestly curious, and it's tricky to research.)

This is only a light little article, but it's the first time I've seen anyone in mainstream media talk about Ethiopian perspectives on Western charity drives. www.theguardian.com/music/2024/n...

Some observations from Digital Forms: The Long and Short of It, an interdisciplinary enquiry into length as a feature of the digital. I'll concentrate on digital cultures and #GenAI, though a lot more was discussed.

If you want to feel the lovely warm glow of human connection, go read the comments under the AI generated Coca Cola advert. "Uncanny" "Disturbing" "Dead," not to mention "Made me a lifelong Pepsi fan." youtu.be/IQWUKWM2JrQ?...

today! #AI #philosophy #empiricism #cogsci #DeepLearning

Got to admit, I'm genuinely shocked at how good ChatGPT has got at generating poetry. Even a few months ago, it was still insistent on making poems rhyme and iterative promptinh was needed. I mean, this isn't a "great" poem. But it's also far from terrible. chatgpt.com/share/673dc8...

Recent research shows that #learning from #AI #feedback is not automatic. Furthermore, despite its individual-level benefits, AI feedback can have significant population-level downsides including loss of intellectual #diversity and an increasing #skills gap. #FutureOfWork arxiv.org/abs/2409.18660

Each of these documents is 10,000-15,000 words long. I've spent today proofing, standardising, cross checking them all. I'd have gone mad if it wasn't for Ants Canada videos on Youtube (www.youtube.com/@AntsCanada) (PS Ignore the absolutely insane nesting folders - it's been a long couple of weeks)

I finally saw snails mating today... such a bizarre process.

What is the very best example of art or music produced wholly by #GenAI that you've seen? Just looking for pictures / audio clips, but with source if possible.

To researchers doing LLM evaluation: prompting is *not a substitute* for direct probability measurements. Check out the camera-ready version of our work, to appear at EMNLP 2023! (w/ @rplevy.bsky.social) Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2305.13264 Original thread: twitter.com/_jennhu/stat...

One of our universities in Cyprus just launched an "MSc in Metaverse." Which may not be the best timing, given that the hype bubble around that concept disappeared about 18 months ago...

The point isn't that GenAI can write good poems now, the point is that most people have no idea what a poem is or what it's for, preferring a vague concept of "poeticness" ("poeticality"?) instead.

I made a free course about deepfakes, hosted by my deepfake. The entire course is AI generated but based on real research. It’s sort of fun/weird/terrifying #artificialintelligence #aieducation leonfurze.teachable.com/p/this-cours...

The #AI feed - roughly 1/3rd entrepreneurs pitching some kind of tool with wild overpromises, 1/3rd academics/commentators saying "read my article please", and 1/3rd people showing off dodgy/exploitative softcore images they've made with GenAI. Pretty accurate reflection of the conversation, then.

It was a fun conversation at the launch of our book Reading #Instapoetry! Lots of interesting suggestions for future directions from the attendees. Many thanks to @eliterature.bsky.social for organizing this event.

People can't reliably detect academic abstracts generated by AI. But of course: abstracts are written to a formula, AI does formulaic writing well, as everywhere AI replaces drudge work. Wake me up when it writes the article (inc research) undetectably. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Testing out the new ChatGPT-o1 preview, and am finding its supposedly enhanced reasoning facilities extremely funny. Although the conversation has mostly been about maths, I'm looking at it for literary analysis/creative writing. It's barely changed from 4, but there is 1 v funny difference.

Today was the second of two very enjoyable days spent re-envisioning university teaching and assessment in the GenAI age. Lovely to have been working with colleagues from medical sciences, law, computer science and more, all focusing on the ever more profound challenges to education from this tech.

How my day's going...

Shakespeare on refugees: “You’ll put down strangers,/ Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,/ And lead the majesty of law in lyam/ To slip him like a hound." (From his treatment of the play Thomas More).

LOVED this book. Very insightful on the rhetorics of white innocence. 💙📚

"In this new generative-AI paradigm, uncertainty reigns over certainty, speculation dominates reality, science defers to faith. The hype around generative AI is accelerating fossil-fuel extraction while the technology consumes unprecedented amounts of energy." www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Fun fact: when we were asked for suggestions for cover designs for our open-access collection Reading #Instapoetry, we just sent the lyrics to Bo Burnham's song "White Woman's Instagram." I think Annabel Hewitson, the cover artist, really understood the brief. Gorgeous, innit?

Fab piece on the lazy metaphors used to describe "generative" AI. Illustrates the need for perspectives from creative arts and literary criticism in ongoing debates about these technologies. www.techpolicy.press/challenging-...