I’m not going to comment on That Banking Thing other than to say that this entire saga just showed us, again, that Miles Bron in The Glass Onion was an accurate representation of a certain type of tech/startup/VC guy.
This is exactly the sort of mess and resolution of said mess that is caused by that kind of ignorance, coupled with the power we keep giving to those ignoramuses.
Anyway, I digress…
Why you should ignore most AI research you hear about on social media
If you find it hard to keep up with AI research, here’s a foolproof rule-of-thumb for deciding which studies to ignore:
If a majority of the authors work for the AI vendor or a major partner, you know it:
A 4-Monthiversary sale for Out of the Software Crisis
It’s almost 4 months since I published my book “Out of the Software Crisis”.
I’ve been really happy with the response and wanted to do something cool to mark the occasion.
But I couldn’t come up with any cool ideas, so I decided to just do a sale instead: 20% off! Sale expires 16:00 GMT, 15 March 2023. Sale is now over!
Until then, you’re benefiting from my inability to come up with something clever.
Out of the Software Crisis: Systems-Thinking for Software Projects (20% off) (Sale is now over.)
How do you know if you’re going to like it?
Well, the best way is to read bits of it! Which you can do because I’ve posted extracts as essays on my website.
If you enjoy reading these, you’re going to enjoy the book:
- Great apps are rare. The book’s introduction
- Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies. Why layoffs are usually bad ideas.
- WTF is a Framework? A Kuhnian take on frameworks.
- Programming is a Pop Culture. Always relevant.
These few aren’t extracts from the book but are very much in the same vein and style.
- Small is Successful.
- Tech Companies Are Irrational Pop Cultures. I have a theme going here, if you can’t tell.
- 10x Devs Don’t Exist, But 10x Organisations Do.
- Generative AI is the tech industry’s Hail Mary pass.
Reading through these should give you a very clear idea of whether you’ll like the book or not.
Don’t like the essays? Avoid the book.
Enjoy the essays? Then the book has more.
Anyway, the book is on sale for the next few days, until 16:00 GMT on the 15th of March 2023. Until then, 20% off. (Sale is now over.)
It Took Me Nearly 40 Years To Stop Resenting Ke Huy Quan - Decider
This is so touching.
Craft vs Industry: Separating Concerns - hello, yes. I’m Thomas Michael Semmler: CSS Developer, Designer & Developer from Vienna, Austria
Seems to be asking exactly the sort of questions we should be asking ourselves at this time.
Lovely to see AI critics split into adversarial factions over Liliputian which-end-of-the-egg details when the hype crowd stands united around bullshit and false promises.
Vanderbilt Apologizes for ChatGPT-Generated Email
Like I’ve said before, the technical term for somebody who uses AI to write their emails is “asshole”.
Startup Winter is Coming - Stacking the Bricks
A few years' old but very accurate.
The long shadow of GPT - by Gary Marcus
I’ve tried hard in my research to be even-handed—try to get a realistic sense of the pros and cons of this tech
But, man, does it seem tailor-made for fraud and misinformation.
These models absolutely do have practical uses. They are amazing at many of the things they do, which is something that recent bubbles like cryptocoins didn’t have.
But I have never seen a technology so perfectly suited to fraud, disinformation, and outright abuse. Yeah, even more than crypto. These models are much more accessible, much easier to use, and have a much wider range of different abuse and fraud vectors.
I’m finding it hard at this point to see how this can be a net win.
Like, a 13-year-old dickweed isn’t likely to be able to engage in a rug-and-pull and is more likely to be the victim, not perp, in a crypto scam.
But using his gaming computer to download a bunch of photos off a classmate’s social media account and using stable diffusion+dreambooth to create deepfakes of her is so easy that I’m convinced it’s already begun to happen.
And that’s just one potential abuse vector for one of these models. They all have dozens, if not hundreds of abuse vectors.
At the moment, I think the only thing that’s truly holding back large-scale abuses and fraud is the fact that these tools are slow and expensive.
If prices continue to drop (which IMO is necessary for financial viability) then we’re in for a world of hurt.
Abuse and deception tactics with AI are becoming quite sophisticated. Already last autumn, researchers started to notice organised efforts to use AI image generation for astroturfing.
Now, with improved image generation and lower OpenAI API prices, it seems very likely that these astroturfing systems will very quickly become more sophisticated and more realistic. Autogenerated social media profiles. Realistic family photos. LinkedIn profiles more convincing than your own.
Kodsnack discussion with Tim Urban and Torill Kornfeldt
A really interesting discussion between an AI enthusiast and a biologist. Poor audio but worthwhile.
The Best of the Rest
- Influencer Parents and Their Children Are Rethinking Growing Up On Social Media - Teen Vogue
- The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence
- Artists can now opt out of generative AI. It’s not enough.
- Can ChatGPT—and its successors—go from cool to tool? - Freedom to Tinker. Where somebody tries to use ChatGPT to do a thing it’s absolutely not capable of.
- ‘Horribly Unethical’: Startup Experimented on Suicidal Teens on Social Media With Chatbot. We’re going to see more of this kind of thing. Hype leads people to cut corners and the hype is just beginning.
- Disability, Bias, and AI :: Aaron Gustafson
- Employees Are Feeding Sensitive Business Data to ChatGPT. I’m guessing that the reason why OpenAI changed their data retention policy the other day is that they knew these stories would be popping up.
- Large Language Models and software as a medical device - MedRegs
- More than you’ve asked for: A Comprehensive Analysis of Novel Prompt Injection Threats to Application-Integrated Large Language Models - Papers With Code
- I tested how well ChatGPT can pull data out of messy PDFs. Bullshitting, misgendering, typo injection, and a 1-6% error rate. Using these tools to extract structured data from unstructured seems like a huge mistake.
- Briefly, my concern with ChatGPT - by Daniel Zollinger
- Diffusion Art or Digital Forgery? Investigating Data Replication in Diffusion Models. This is interesting. Seems to indicate that the plagiarism rate is around or in excess of 2%.