Where does the “it’s not x, it’s y” come from? It’s not only training data: LLMs are trained to use language to arrive at “answers.” Whatever we’re incentivizing and disincentivizing in our use of language when we resist “sounding like AI” has big implications for students, and for human thought.

"Your average citizen couldn’t have cared less about oscillators, but those with a knack for rudimentary electronics who were also musicians and/or sound appreciators started harnessing them for music. In the East Village in 1967, a young singer named Simeon Coxe started playing around with one."

This week is “Noisy Systems,” and yes it’s in person but also streaming online for free — and without registration, so do check the link and bookmark if you’d like to attend! www.biblhertz.it/events/45629...

« If using AI to write is, at its worst, an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection, at its worst, becomes a surveillance system for thought. »

This is an awesome read. I particularly appreciated this section and the way it vindicated a feeling I haven't been able to articulate:

"when the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language."

Another banger from Eryk Salvaggio. While exploring how AI Detection products fail and actually create incentives for destroying language that rhetorically reasons, he compellingly describes the differences between how AI seemingly 'reasons' and how humans actually do it.

📣 Announcing the release of the 🕊️ Annotated Encyclical 🕊️ from the ethics & society folks at @hf.co. Includes citations to relevant academic work. Very much a WIP. Please add work we haven't added yet! huggingface.co/spaces/socie...

I've written an essay for @arabreforminit.bsky.social on AI-DSS in targeting operations & how they interact with existing military doctrines, operational practices & IHL. I also talk about why we are seeing such a high civilian death toll in current conflicts 👉🏽 www.arab-reform.net/publication/...

Not using AI? You must pay an AI company $$$ to certify you, and then accept their AI-generated recommendations for how to not sound like AI.

"I Profile Celebrities for a Living. Nothing Prepared Me for Chuck E. Cheese."

Enacting deliberation within language, rather than through language: another cracker from @eryk.bsky.social

This one goes onto the fall syllabus for the critical thinking course.

One of the things i keep trying to get people to understand is that these linguistic shorthands and stylistic flourishes have existed in writte and spoken communication for long before "AI" got ahold of them, and their proliferation with the training data is a part of where "AI" "learned" them. …

The model is like:

in this video in like 4 different ways and I hate that

"If using AI to write is, at its worst, an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection, at its worst, becomes a surveillance system for thought."

This is a good read, and particularly further in (beyond the pangram etc) when talking about how two friends use language as a catalyst for a shared reconstruction of events, as a route to reminisce, not to identify an answer

Why don’t they invite Ariel Pink, John Maus, and Morrissey to the America 250 celebration? And Whit Stillman can shoot the documentary

“That's what I paid for: not to learn whether I wrote it, but to be told it wouldn't flag me. Because if Pangram's AI system found me guilty, that's the end of my career. That's literally extortion.”

Where does the “it’s not x, it’s y” come from? It’s not only training data: LLMs are trained to use language to arrive at “answers.” Whatever we’re incentivizing and disincentivizing in our use of language when we resist “sounding like AI” has big implications for students, and for human thought.

Now you can keep track of how many billions the AI companies are losing on AI. (Red is spending, green is revenue.) isaiprofitable.com

New font: E73 new dot matrix font, created from the 1973 ECMA-42 standard

There is a rebuttal to AI crit that goes: “you are assuming there is some mysterious, unnameable essence that makes people human.” The argument is then that we must somehow show evidence; ideally, that evidence would be quantifiable

Qhauntology

Finally reading Kittler and I find him really weird tbh. Probably because I’ve been exposed to him through cultural diffusion that the original seems like a weird throwback to itself

"Researchers have used top Generative #AI models to grade hundreds of undergraduate essays and found that AI only matched human-awarded degree classification around half the time, with AI often failing to assess the best and worst submissions accurately": www.cam.ac.uk/stories/ai-u... #ethics #tech

There is a rebuttal to AI crit that goes: “you are assuming there is some mysterious, unnameable essence that makes people human.” The argument is then that we must somehow show evidence; ideally, that evidence would be quantifiable

Someone on LinkedIn thought my post about what we do and don’t know about LLMs was a post about what I, personally, do and do not know about LLMs. Like a 5th grade book report

I think genuine debate is illegible in contemporary society: it assumes good faith, open mindedness, and a genuine desire to understand and advance together. I can’t stand what we have now, which is no different than football, with cheering when someone gets hit hard enough.

We gotta start talking about the use of LLMs in the peer review as well as in the submissions.

The Machine Visual Culture Research Group has some exciting predoctoral fellowships (a PhD, basically) through UZH. Come live in Zurich, meet in Rome and do some cool critical AI & digital art history with us! Deadline is VERY SOON.

👍⬇️ Polysemy is a real roadblock to dialogue, and while I am no ambassador, technical meanings are distinct from their commonly understood meanings. But that slippage goes both ways, and is precisely why we should avoid terms like "reasoning," "intelligence," "creativity" in the first place

The Machine Visual Culture Research Group has some exciting predoctoral fellowships (a PhD, basically) through UZH. Come live in Zurich, meet in Rome and do some cool critical AI & digital art history with us! Deadline is VERY SOON.

‘Faith in AI pairs with a business incentive. Without inspiring awe, a lack of control over a technology makes it a shoddy system. That creates an uneasy distance between industry players and the products they sell.‘ By @eryk.bsky.social

Lots of people concerned about data theft use AI detection tools like Pangram. I’m curious, does anyone know where Pangram’s training data comes from? Its white paper says “public” data, which sounds to me like “publicly available,” which OpenAI said when it meant “anything we can get our hands on.”

Wikimedia Foundation just fired a long time lead developer of MediaWiki as well as its entire community team for unionizing. If you’re a donor, email [email protected] to protest this move. medium.com/@jakeorlowit...

Zitron is a form of AI slop

Aldous Harding has an extremely alienating stage presence — she plays for the people in front row and that’s it — but good for her, honestly

Two beers at the show: We are lost because everybody thinks art is a bunch of bullshit unless it is “fostering innovation” and sadly this is also the position of many of the most important cultural organizations we have left. They got there out of survival but forgot to actually survive

Two articles submitted, tonight I’ll go see Vera Ellen and Aldous Harding to celebrate.

Yes! I was shut down from an interview once for saying that the EA / AI safety movement is largely steered by a bunch of people hanging out in a couple San Francisco living rooms.

I keep wanting to write something about the encyclical and just keep getting mad about the unnoticed death of every single secular institution I had ever hoped would change

CFP - Artificial Intelligence and Digital Humanities Pedagogy. DHQ invites 500-word abstracts for a special issue on AI in relation to digital humanities pedagogy. Deadline: Aug 1, 2026. More details: dhq.digitalhumanities.org/submissions/...

It's striking to go from the conservative institution of the Catholic church discussing real matters of human dignity in the face of AI, and then see a call from a major cultural org seeking artists to develop new metrics that facilitate an equitable value distribution across sectors

From the LA Times, 1986, an article on expert systems (the kids were calling it "AI"). Skeptics dismiss it as "so much industry hyperbole." www.latimes.com/archives/la-...

My tiny thread yesterday is now a whole op-ed! A quick read, connecting Pope Leo's apology for colonialism and slavery to his warnings about AI — it's all related. Working with editor @mpgphd.bsky.social was an absolutely pleasure!

Cardinal says "the encyclical is not about AI, it's about the human condition." I see, "it's not x, it's y," sparks a 5-second psychosis: cannot tell if he's exhaling the AI language virus. Moral panic in my body. Covid memories of animated air particle graphics. Bad news: this is already a disease

‘dialectics’ is grad school for ‘there’s two of them’

People need user interfaces to navigate computers. Do AIs need reverse user interfaces to navigate people? I sought to find out in a new article for @noemamag.com. www.noemamag.com/how-ais-see-...