Artificial Intelligence
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20-something Hubris
A young prodigy in AI development named Alexandr Wang got a sack of cash from world-class sociopath Zuckerberg to build Facebook’s new AI program “Muse.” Now [Twitter-link warning:] he’s attempted to justify his work, in the most hubristic, egotistical way imaginable. Of course he did so on Twitter. Katie Notopoulos saw through it immediately as… Continue reading
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Not everything is property
The court case between news organizations and AI vendors just made public some interesting internal documents from the AI folks, calling scraping news “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.” I think the intellectual foundation of this behavior goes back to the original scam of claiming that when someone creates something — by writing, for example… Continue reading
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Thought Experiment
Let’s say you’ve come up with a genuinely clever new gizmo that can do lots of things fairly well, and sparks people’s imaginations because it looks a lot like the imaginary gizmos from super-popular movies and TV shows, especially scary ones. You and your friends start companies and manage to raise insane amounts of money… Continue reading
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The corporate overlords and the long despair
Hello. Thank you for calling our support line. Please be aware our options have changed. Press one to continue in English. Pulse dos para español. tlhInganvaD Tap wej. If you know your party’s extension, enter it now. If you don’t know your party’s extension, please say or enter “I have no friends.” If you would… Continue reading
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The Grift Also Rises
Ed Zitron’s latest overly long missive about the AI industry and its misdeeds includes this: “LLMs Are Built To Help Grifters and Imbeciles Do Impressions Of Work.” I’m sure it gets a lot of agreement. I mean, look how much grift and scamming surrounds LLMs, vendors, and many users. But grifting existed for a looong… Continue reading
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Once more, into the breach
Not for the first time, I have launched a newsletter, piggybacking on the Substack platform. The guiding question, or perhaps lament, driving this effort is what are we to do? That applies to a great many areas these days, but my concern is around artificial intelligence, its oppressive and sudden domination of practically everything to… Continue reading
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But all my friends say I should…
Nikhil Suresh wrote a thought-provoking essay that introduced a term to me (I don’t think it’s a brand-new term) that really resonates: AI mania. Suresh is a director at a software engineering consulting firm. I think they’re pretty well connected, such that he’s often in conversation with top executives and directors at major companies we’ve… Continue reading
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It’s a (the) process
Sigmund Freud observed that humanity has suffered three great “humiliations.” Galileo found that we are not the center of the universe, Darwin found that we are not the culmination of nature, and he himself (Freud) found that we are not in control of our own minds. Ayad Akhtar recently made the point in The Yale… Continue reading
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I’m with stupid
Large language models actually work. They’re not fake, and they’re surprising, amazing technology. LLMs are real. The LLM vendors and their business models, though, might be something else again. They’ve raised historic amounts of money, which the venture capitalists are going to want repaid at some point. But if you examine their revenues, expenses, and… Continue reading
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Author! Author!
What is writing for? What matters, who wrote some text, or who reads it? One idea is that text — I’ll call it “literature” here — only matters, and only really exists as a significant entity at all when someone reads it. This is a key idea from “reader-response criticism,” a branch of literary theory.… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my newsletter, Artisanal Scribbles, where I’m grappling with writing, authentic human authorship, integrity, and the craft of beauty in the AI age. You can also find some of my old software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly wrote tiny utilities in Python and shell scripts. I’m mostly retired from coding nowadays.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- I’d rather have a taco
- 20-something Hubris
- You can’t be a leader without followers
- Candy Trees and Handkerchiefs
- Reliability: just a movie plot now?
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