One of the first times I've wanted to stop reading an aphyr piece before the end...I didn't, though, and neither should you. (He might not be a journalist, but he's a fantastic writer. Not sure why OP here starts out with what reads like a backhanded compliment.)

If the only thing "AI" actually accomplishes is to flood social media with astroturfed propaganda, eventually making it so that no one believes anything on these sites was written by a human and hollowing them out of actual human participation... ...I'll call that a win.

It can't possibly have taken them this long to figure this out. openai.com/index/why-la...

I'd like to propose a novel disorder: pathological anthropomorphism www.psychopathia.ai

You're telling me an AI researcher is myopic and almost completely uninformed about other fields of study that could complement their own? No way; that bunch is famously multidisciplinary and supportive of the humanities.

It takes someone truly ignorant about how this technology works to attempt to regulate "objectivity" and "top-down bias" — but that's been broadly true about government regulation of the tech industry for decades now.

one insidious thing about evil is that it makes thinking about anything else difficult, not only crowding other things out but also making them seem meaningless; it drains all but a sliver of the world of colour and saps the will to live outside that sliver — unless you ignore it, which is giving in

It was the worst of times, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of darkness, it was the winter of despair.

Calling all Faustian bargain hunters! TikTok is (almost certainly) creating a proprietary singing TTS model and would very much like you to donate some training data. https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/07/tiktok-live-music-competition-gimme-the-mic/

Spotify's "AI" DJ is an underrated productivity hack. Every time that obnoxious TTS voice pipes up, I immediately un-distract myself from whatever I'm doing to hit "next track", and then I can get back to actual work. So I guess it does have *one* redeeming feature.

This is not a case against travel; it's a case against tourism, and it says more about the author than it does the subject: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel

Dying and coming back as a lazy Web 2.0 marketer looking for a domain name, call that reinkrnation

Is it just me, or has some of Dashboard Confessional's early stuff, particularly The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, not aged as poorly as it could have?

I was today at 3:45 AM years old when I learned what happens when your thermostat batteries die while the AC is on. My OCD is thrilled to have something new to worry about when I go on vacation.