Microsoft's Xbox Copilot Will Act As an AI Gaming Coach - Microsoft is preparing to launch an AI-powered Copilot for Gaming soon that will g... - https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/03/13/1549238/microsofts-xbox-copilot-will-act-as-an-ai-gaming-coach?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed #ai
ai
Newsletter: The real threat isn't AI using open knowledge — it's AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free. The future of free and open access isn't saying “wait, not like that” — it’s saying "yes, like that, but under fair terms”.
https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/
Wait. Is this reading correct?
"Under current law, content produced entirely by AI immediately enters the public domain, allowing unrestricted commercial use."
https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2025/03/20/ai-generated-works-are-public-domain-court-affirms/
Other news coverage:
"Because many of the Copyright Act's provisions make sense only if an author is a human being, the best reading of the Copyright Act is that human authorship is required for registration."
Got a website?
Feel like helping make unauthorized LLM scrapers choke on an infinite sea of garbage, potentially making their models collapse?
...Then take a look at:
https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/
PS Do make sure to read the warnings, boost and have fun! 😈
.
Thanks to @dlatchx for reminding me where to find this!
Edited 31d ago
Several of my papers are in that LibGen database Meta used.
I feel a bunch of ways about it, but one way I feel is that it adds insult to injury. In all but two cases I was required to sign an onerous agreement to get the paper published, handing over rights to a publisher that is continuing to abuse this arrangement (in my view). I did that begrudgingly because I was early in my career and didn't think I had another option. Later I experimented with refusing to sign these agreements and publishers walked back the terms somewhat (I don't know if that's possible now).
I also feel that the Meta computer scientists responsible for this betrayed their own colleagues, which I find pretty scummy.
Anyway, I don't consent to any of this. It's been imposed on me and countless other authors.
#LibGen #meta #LLM #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI
I feel a bunch of ways about it, but one way I feel is that it adds insult to injury. In all but two cases I was required to sign an onerous agreement to get the paper published, handing over rights to a publisher that is continuing to abuse this arrangement (in my view). I did that begrudgingly because I was early in my career and didn't think I had another option. Later I experimented with refusing to sign these agreements and publishers walked back the terms somewhat (I don't know if that's possible now).
I also feel that the Meta computer scientists responsible for this betrayed their own colleagues, which I find pretty scummy.
Anyway, I don't consent to any of this. It's been imposed on me and countless other authors.
#LibGen #meta #LLM #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI
"The new feature would likely be an unwelcome one for users who would rather keep comments AI-free on Instagram, especially those who believe their friends deserve genuine comments as opposed to AI slop."
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/21/meta-spotted-testing-ai-generated-comments-on-instagram/
#news #technology #TechNews #meta #instagram #SocialMedia #AI #slop
We were given a prompt as an invitation to participate in this newsletter: “How are you using AI in the classroom?” While we have accepted this invitation, we are engaging in the most humanistic act we can imagine—refusing the prompt.
A nice articulation of why "incorporating AI" in the classroom is detrimental to education and learning, inducing longterm costs that no perceived benefit of doing so could outweigh.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ChatGPT #education #pedagogy
💰 Spain is done with AI slop and disinfo
｢ The Spanish bill, which needs to be approved by the lower house, classifies non-compliance with proper labelling of AI-generated content as a "serious offence" that can lead to fines of up to 35 million euros ($38.2 million) or 7% of their global annual turnover ｣
🖥️🚲
Hi 😀 durch die einführung von #meta #ai gibt es nun einen schlagenen grund mehr, meta und #whatsapp zu verlassen. und z.b. auf #signal umzusteigen.
erzählt das auch euren technisch und #datenschutz nicht so affinen mitmenschen.
die #mdedien pennen und plappern nur #marketing sprüche nach.
Edited 22d ago
"Being pro-labor and pro-AI is incompatible, as AI devalues the work that actual workers do, making them less valuable to the market and easier to underpay going forward."
https://www.vulture.com/article/ghibli-portrait-chatgpt-ai.html
#news #technology #TechNews #AI #labor #WorkersRights #ghibli #StudioGhibli
Edited 19d ago
65% of Wikimedia's most expensive traffic comes from bots.
"Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models."
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/
Oh wow, the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) annual challenge for writers that started as a Yahoo! mailing list in 1999 is shutting down.
"NaNoWriMo lost significant community support when it took a stand in favor of the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing. [...] Around the same time, the nonprofit was also lambasted for inconsistent moderation on its all-ages forums, which created an unsafe environment for teenage writers, community members claimed."
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/01/nanowrimo-shut-down-after-ai-content-moderation-scandals/
#news #technology #TechNews #NaNoWriMo #NationalNovelWritingMonth #writing #AI
“The USA Math Olympiad is an extremely challenging math competition for the top US high school students… Hours after it was completed…a team of scientists gave the problems to some of the top large language models, whose mathematical and reasoning abilities have been loudly proclaimed… The results were dismal: None of the AIs scored higher than 5% overall”
—Ernest Davis & Gary Marcus, Reports of LLMs mastering math have been greatly exaggerated
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/reports-of-llms-mastering-math-have
#mathematics #llms #llm #ai
Here's my half-baked deep thought of the day.
The culture industry is in the business of producing "culture" and distributing it, unidirectionally, to consumers of culture (think movies, TV shows, albums, books). We had a brief respite with the internet and social media, which are bidirectional and therefore interactive, as companies experimented with co-opting user content for use in cultural products. That period looks to be ending now, and companies are back to the business of unidirectionally firing cultural products at us. Since they never really figured out how to turn what the masses produce towards their ends without incurring significant costs, they are instead opting to fill the internet with generative AI output, which they can control and manipulate, and whose costs are the "better" kinds of costs (labor costs to hire content moderators, even contractors, are far worse to e.g. Wall Street than capital expenditures for servers or, even better, rental costs for cloud services).
The fact that Google took a perfectly good and functional internet search engine that lots of people liked and started turning it into an AI slop generator makes more sense, at least to me, when viewed through this lens. Google's search engine was never really a search engine. It was always a cultural artifact, complete with "commercials" (ads), with web page creators as producers. At some point Google calculated that using an in-house generative AI to produce the content for this artifact made more sense, so they started experimenting with it.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #Google #Gemini #culture #CultureIndustry
The culture industry is in the business of producing "culture" and distributing it, unidirectionally, to consumers of culture (think movies, TV shows, albums, books). We had a brief respite with the internet and social media, which are bidirectional and therefore interactive, as companies experimented with co-opting user content for use in cultural products. That period looks to be ending now, and companies are back to the business of unidirectionally firing cultural products at us. Since they never really figured out how to turn what the masses produce towards their ends without incurring significant costs, they are instead opting to fill the internet with generative AI output, which they can control and manipulate, and whose costs are the "better" kinds of costs (labor costs to hire content moderators, even contractors, are far worse to e.g. Wall Street than capital expenditures for servers or, even better, rental costs for cloud services).
The fact that Google took a perfectly good and functional internet search engine that lots of people liked and started turning it into an AI slop generator makes more sense, at least to me, when viewed through this lens. Google's search engine was never really a search engine. It was always a cultural artifact, complete with "commercials" (ads), with web page creators as producers. At some point Google calculated that using an in-house generative AI to produce the content for this artifact made more sense, so they started experimenting with it.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #Google #Gemini #culture #CultureIndustry
It's worth bearing in mind as we read more and more news about "AI" being shoved into every nook and cranny of the US federal government:
https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/
I'm not finding the reference right now but I've read similar observations about writing as well: the political right used to have talented writers, but nowadays not so much.
(This is not an invitation for "duh, they're just MAGA idiots" responses or variations on that theme. I'm as frustrated as the next person about the political climate but I'm not here for that).
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #FarRight #RightWing
The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy, disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression, right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year posters to ‘terrorwave’. Today it is slop, almost totally.
https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/
I'm not finding the reference right now but I've read similar observations about writing as well: the political right used to have talented writers, but nowadays not so much.
(This is not an invitation for "duh, they're just MAGA idiots" responses or variations on that theme. I'm as frustrated as the next person about the political climate but I'm not here for that).
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #FarRight #RightWing
Edited 10d ago
Today I launch “Amped Up w/ Cliff Schecter,” my new #Substack show every Thur 2pm et!
@ 2pm et TODAY I talk w fab co-host David Shuster & great guest Joe Walsh w some righteous anger & cutting humor re Trumpy & Co
Exclusively on Substack https://open.substack.com/live-stream/21418?r=j0lyx&utm_medium=ios #news #politics #tech #ai #usa #us #eu #europe #tariffs #stockmarket #media #donaldtrump #elonmusk #trump #tv #musk #press #nato #canada #china #russia #ukraine #america
So Much Content At SUBSTACK! Head Over, Become A SUBSCRIBER!!
" #Trade & #security Aren't a GoFundMe! The #usa Wasn't Played—We Wrote the Rules!" https://www.blueamp.co/p/trade-and-security-arent-a-gofundme #news #press #politics #us #america #media #ai #elonmusk #musk #donaldtrump #tv #trump #tariffs #stockmarket #tech
Atlassian decided to vomit AI all over Jira so I decided to mop it up with uBlock Origin. So far so good. One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to get it out of the context menus (right-click menus).
I also noticed a new Copilot button in GitHub so I zapped that one too.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Jira #Atlassian #NoAI #GitHub
I also noticed a new Copilot button in GitHub so I zapped that one too.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Jira #Atlassian #NoAI #GitHub
Google is so sneaky. This prompt inside Gmail gives you three options. The two most visible options (number 1 is 'Try it now' and number 2 is 'Continue') basically mean 'Enable Gemini AI to write emails.' The third option cancels it which is hidden well. Google, you could do better than this. This is a perfect example of a dark pattern. For those who want AI to write basic emails can enable it but there is not need to do this kind of "shady" stuff.
Software "agents" were a hype-y topic when I was a graduate student 25 years ago. I wrote one for a class. I feel like what's being called "agents" or "AI agents" these days are even less capable than what seemed possible a quarter of a century (1) ago when I was in school.
What I thought then is still true today: to make something like a software agent legitimately useful for a lot of people would require a large amount of low-level grunt work and non-technical work (2) of the sort that the typical Silicon Valley company is unwilling to do. (3) The technology is the absolute easiest part of this task. Throwing a Bigger Computer at the problem leaves all those other pieces of work undone. It's like putting a bigger engine in a car with no wheels, hoping that'll make the car go.
By the way #AI companies and VCs, I'm available for contract work and have done due diligence research before if you ever want to stop wasting everyone's time and money!
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #agents #hype #SiliconValley #VentureCapital #dev #tech
(1) Which we've been told repeatedly is essentially infinite time in the tech world.
(2) Establishing semantic data standards and convincing a large enough number of people to implement them being an important component. LLMs do not magically develop protocols and solve all the ETL-style problems of translating among different ones. The Semantic Web didn't really stick for a lot of reasons, but one reason is that it's hard!
(3) Back when I was still in the startup world I was asked several times by VCs to tell them what I thought about some new startup that claimed to be able to magically clean and fuse data. I think they're still very keen on investing in this style of magic, because it requires an intense amount of human labor, but I think where companies landed was invisibilizing low-paid workers in other countries and pretending a computer did the work they did. Which has also been happening for well over a quarter of a century.
What I thought then is still true today: to make something like a software agent legitimately useful for a lot of people would require a large amount of low-level grunt work and non-technical work (2) of the sort that the typical Silicon Valley company is unwilling to do. (3) The technology is the absolute easiest part of this task. Throwing a Bigger Computer at the problem leaves all those other pieces of work undone. It's like putting a bigger engine in a car with no wheels, hoping that'll make the car go.
By the way #AI companies and VCs, I'm available for contract work and have done due diligence research before if you ever want to stop wasting everyone's time and money!
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #agents #hype #SiliconValley #VentureCapital #dev #tech
(1) Which we've been told repeatedly is essentially infinite time in the tech world.
(2) Establishing semantic data standards and convincing a large enough number of people to implement them being an important component. LLMs do not magically develop protocols and solve all the ETL-style problems of translating among different ones. The Semantic Web didn't really stick for a lot of reasons, but one reason is that it's hard!
(3) Back when I was still in the startup world I was asked several times by VCs to tell them what I thought about some new startup that claimed to be able to magically clean and fuse data. I think they're still very keen on investing in this style of magic, because it requires an intense amount of human labor, but I think where companies landed was invisibilizing low-paid workers in other countries and pretending a computer did the work they did. Which has also been happening for well over a quarter of a century.
Edited 2d ago