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People keep using the "can't put a genie back in the bottle" metaphor for "AI", even though in the stories they always get back in and current "AI" is more of a "we're spending trillions of dollars and the energy output of a continent trying to keep this bastard out of the bottle" situation

New on Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000!: AI boosters want to hand off emergency services to the bullshit generators. @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social take on the latest automated horrors threatening our collective health and safety. Listen here: www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis...

L’autre c’est un MUST pour la critique de l’industrie de l’IA, par @emilymbender.bsky.social et @alexhanna.bsky.social Iels ont un excellent podcast aussi qui est drôle ET informatif. podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/m...

When the AI boosters self-parody

It's true that I only started working on critical approaches to AI in the current hype wave, because before it I was minding my own business doing a) grammar engineering and b) ethics and language technology.

Is there an article or other source that would be a good starting point into the earlier critical AI literature you are thinking of? >>

Hi Dan -- not much into video games so I had never heard of Katamari Damacy. My thread was just trying to express the giant mess that is AI boosterism/doomerism. A quick search on Google Scholar turns up mostly articles about video games rather than critical AI studies. >>

Now is a good reminder that machine learning is a rebranding of statistical learning. Reinforcement learning is something I first came across in control theory. Many ML formulations are from information theory, a much more theoretically grounded discipline that's been around for decades.

And if you try to go in and pick off the gold foil or whatever that the company/lab in question has pasted onto that one bit of the greasy, sticky ball, and show it for the thin, undersupported claim that it is, the people you are talking to still imagine that the whole ball is made of gold. >>

BREAKING: Tech reporter on record saying he is swallowing everything the tech companies are saying.

For many years, people didn’t randomly film others in public—not because we didn’t have the technology, but because the social contract said you didn’t do that. That’s why Meta is going full court press on their PR and celebrity endorsements. They remember how people ran google glass outta town.

Love this new metaphor for AI. It’s basically a katamari. 😅 (Read the full thread)

Emily Bender gives us language connecting what those who make LLMs take from what belongs to humanity as a whole AND she lays how they're used, *even when deployed solely rhetorically,* to reorganize power, people's lives, and environments. It can be hard to hold all of this in your head. LLMs...

Because I didn’t know, “anthropomorphizing” means “attributing human qualities to non-human things”. Read on, it’s interesting:

“some people say that reporters are doing malpractice by just repeating cynical marketing ploy but reporting says that this absolutely wasn’t a cynical marketing ploy, says journalist” is hilarious though, it’s something someone would say who is really committed to doing zero introspection.

The shape of this discourse is equal parts fascinating and infuriating. I'm thinking today of the term "AI" as mushing together a wide range of products and services in an enormous, greasy, sticky ball, rolling and bouncing its way through our landscape. >>

Also available as video on PeerTube: peertube.dair-institute.org/w/23g3vAkBsg...

One of my worst speech technology nightmares has been happening right in my own city! In the latest Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, @alexhanna.bsky.social and I dig into it: www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/epis...

Unusually for bsky, this has attracted a lot of folks who want to argue (via QTs here and downthread) that the anthropomorphizing language is just fine, actually. Helps people understand clearly. Doesn't obfuscate responsibility. And/or is a more accurate portrayal of what the models are doing. >>