For those in the back, who still think AI is all that. It isn’t.
https://www.404media.co/ai-powered-coca-cola-ad-celebrating-authors-gets-basic-facts-wrong/
Thanks for this report, @404mediaco.
artificialintelligence
Have you heard of the site They See Your Photos (https://theyseeyourphotos.com/)?
It uses something called Google Vision to analyse photos, extracting marketing information and coming up with predictions.
It's creepy.
I'm more pro-AI than the average guy, but sometimes even I am worried by the things it does.
I loaded a random photo from my phone; here's the analysis.
Coca-Cola has a new AI-powered ad that proudly features a quote from a J.G. Ballard book — except he didn't write the words, and it's not his book. @404mediaco explains what happened — and the irony of using Ballard's words in a commercial built with technology. "The ultimate role of 'Crash' is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape,” Ballard wrote in his 1995 introduction to his most famous work.
#Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon #JGBallard #CocaCola #Lifestyle #Tech #Technology #ArtificialIntelligence #AI
FFS: What an absolute bellend: "Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will still exist ‘because you still need childcare’"
Were I still using that POS Duolingo, this would have made me stop.
https://fortune.com/2025/05/20/duolingo-ai-teacher-schools-childcare/
Edited 39d ago
YouTube is working on tools to help its biggest influencers identify and control their AI lookalike. Read more from @Semafor:
https://flip.it/I13gSt
I have what I think is a good example of how useless ‘AI’ is for understanding. I am tagging widely. I searched “how to identify mushrooms” on DuckDuckGo, which then so helpfully spammed my screen with this lovely advice (see image with alt text). The source of much of my knowledge is mushroomexpert.com, managed by Michael Kuo.
“A mushroom is identified by its characteristics”. I could get semantic here too about the definition of a mushroom, but talk about a pretty useless statement. Fine though. That’s well enough and good if you want an explanation that is super entry level. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though I don’t remember telling the ‘AI’ that I wanted only entry level information.
Then it talks about the danger in attempting to ID mushrooms because of the potential for poisoning. It tacitly assumes that my wanting to ID a mushroom means I want to eat it. I don’t. I just like mushrooms. I have a problem with the whole ‘some are poisonous’ throw-in, like its something their lawyers required them to include. How many are poisonous? 90%? 5%? We have no idea, and that’s OK. I didn’t tell the ‘AI’ that I wanted information on whether or not they were poisonous. But, as I’ll get to, the fact that this is included is not my problem. My problem is what they don’t include.
I think mushrooms are awesome. I think the fact that some of them are poisonous is relevant only based on the human-centric assumptions ‘AI’ is so obsessed with and what it’s dataset is built on. I don’t see the value in a mushroom based on whether or not I can eat it, and it chaffs me that they don’t also include any information about their ecological roles. You know what is a great way to identify a mushroom (including if I want to eat it)?!?!?! Their ecology (essentially, their ‘behavior’)!!! Let’s be sure to not mention that, #TechBros.
Ok let’s keep going, cause we’ve made it this far. It suggests talking to a #mycologist. It turns out that I don’t have any experienced mycologists on call. Mycologists are helpful but busy people. And I’m more likely than most of the population to know mycologists. You might as well say, ‘don’t bother trying to ID the mushroom’. Way to kill my interest immediately in something I’m trying to get into. If you really want to learn to ID mushrooms for foraging, there are sources you can look up to help you.
I’ll get to my main point. Identification of certain mushroom forming fungi to species is essentially impossible. Look up Amanitas or Russulas on mushroomexpert.com (phenomenal source, old school blogging). There is no clear delineating of what a mushroom forming species even is. Scientists argue over and reclassify bird subspecies all the time. Imagine the black box that is mushroom forming fungi, which most of the time is a web of single-cell wide threads hidden in the soil. Some mushrooms historically were ‘IDed’ (scientifically) by taste or color, which as you all know everyone experiences these things the same, all the time. And, darnit, I happened to leave my DNA sequencing kit at home (as if there aren’t issues with classifying mushroom forming fungi on their DNA alone).
If ‘AI’ were functional, to me, it would include the suggestion that one option is, instead of focusing on species, focus on species groupings (this also applies to foraging for mushrooms if done thoughtfully). Species groupings can be more useful, as is sometimes saying: “I don’t need to know exactly what this is. I’ll just focus on it’s ecology instead of obsessing over an arbitrary definition”. This nuance is not something that can be corrected with better algorithms or more training data (in fact, its going to get worse), because #LLM s are designed to spit out the lowest common denominator.
In the end, given all the questions I brought up, the biggest problems I have with ‘AI’ is that it falsely assumes something gigantic about the question I am asking and gives a simplified and highly misleading perception of how much we actually know. I think it makes a big mistake assuming that I am uncurious and want a bare-minimum answer. And when it comes to the grand total of all there is to know about mushroom forming fungi, we know next to nothing. Of course, 'AI' cannot say that because 'AI' doesn't know what it doesn't know.
You know who can identify and communicate all of these nuances? Humans.
#nature #mushrooms #fungi #AI #technology #artificialIntelligence #ecology #solarPunk #EcologicalReciprocity
So this is cool. And by “cool” I mean fucked up & dystopian. Dead internet theory actively pursued as #Meta launched A.I.-generated profiles on #Instagram
#ai #artificialintelligence #facebook #socialmedia #tech #technology
Newsletter: An OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries on men it describes as “subhuman”, and promoting misogynist ideas sourced from online incel forums.
“Without surgery, you won’t mog genetically superior guys head-on,” it tells one man.
https://www.citationneeded.news/openai-incel-chatbot-subhuman-men/
Apple is temporarily disabling its AI-generated news notifications, which were frequently error-filled, misleading or totally false @CNN reports. Alerts included fake stories that Luigi Mangione, who is charged with murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO, had shot himself, and that Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.
aquí te dejo un texto para copiar y pegar en los comentarios cuando veas que han usado la IA para una ilustración:
el uso de #IA para generar ilustraciones tiene implicaciones morales muy graves: condiciones laborales infrahumanas en centros de datos del centro de Africa, robo de propiedad intelectual para el entrenamiento del programa, apoyo a una red de empresas que promueven el racismo y políticas anti-LGTBI+ en su cultura empresarial, el desastre ecológico creado por la alimentación y la refrigeración de los ordenadores, y la pérdida de trabajo de personas que necesitan cobrar por su arte
___---___---___---___---
Here's a a text to copy and paste in the comments when you see that they have used AI for an illustration
The use of #AI to generate illustrations has very serious moral implications: inhumane working conditions in data centers in central Africa, theft of intellectual property for program training, support for a network of companies that promote racism and anti-LGBTQ+ policies in their corporate culture, the ecological disaster created by computer power usage and its cooling systems, and the loss of jobs for people who need to charge for their art
#generativeAI #IAgenerativa #ilustracion #illustration #artificialintelligence #inteligenciaartificial #arte #art
Edited 30d ago
#ElonMusk’s business #conflicts draw scrutiny amid WH role [apparently no one noticed till now 🙄]
Musk had sharp words for a the $500B partnership touted by the #Trump admin to hasten development of #ArtificialIntelligence #infrastructure. “They don’t actually have the money,” he said of #OpenAI & #SoftBank….
Left unsaid by the #technocrat, he has skin in the game: #xAI, is directly challenging OpenAI for the lead in the race to transform society w/the #technology.
🧵
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/24/elon-musk-conflicts-doge-trump-openai/
Edited 155d ago
Unbelievable
#ElonMusk’s US #DOGE Service are feeding sensitive data into #AI software via #Microsoft’s #cloud
#Musk’s US #DOGE Service have fed sensitive data from across the #Education Dept into #ArtificialIntelligence software to probe the agency’s programs & spending…. The AI probe includes data w/personally identifiable info for people who manage grants, & sensitive internal financial data…
#law #security #InfoSec #CyberSecurity #NationalSecurity #Trump #TrumpCoup
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/06/elon-musk-doge-ai-department-education/
Senators Demand Transparency on Canceled Veterans Affairs Contracts
—
Following a ProPublica investigation into how DOGE had developed an error-prone AI tool to determine which VA contracts should be killed, a trio of lawmakers said the Trump administration continues to “stonewall” their requests for details.
#News #DOGE #Veterans #VA #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #Technology #Government
