Itâ(TM)s like they think every person they have ever responded to is actually the same person, and so all those disparate conversations were one conversation with a single individual whoâ(TM)s refusing to listen.

there was a professor I knew who worked like that. He always seemed to jump into the middle of an ongoing conversation when he started talking with you. A conversation YOU might not have been part of previously, but it was the only conversation he ever had.

I always just chalked it up to him being autistic AF.

Exactly. The reason they do it this ways is it is that it keeps the power in private hands. They can decide to change funding, change priorities, use their position as leverage against municipalities wanting the funding, or simply as a corrupt bribery fund masquerading as charity.

Seriously, I am sick of these vanity charity projects. Just pay your fair share of taxes, and let us, collectively, decide on our priorities. Because this shit will not be evenly applied, and considering the popularity of a antivax beliefs, and the level of international travel, it his will simply not work without a global commitment. And as bad as the cold and flu can be, there are kids who are going into debt with their school over getting breakfast.

Yes, I saw that. And when combined with the quote towards the end, explains why his position is so fucking insulting.

This basically means that if your part of the movie making process can be performed by this tech, now or in the future, then your job doesn't really matter. Which is a wild take considering that he felt like he could not release the video without the parts AI provided, and which would have been handed to a person to do before AI exists, or if he'd had the budget for it.

Fact is the job DOES matter. He just does not want to have to address the difficult question of what is lost by using AI to do creative work that would previously have gone to a human profession, or what it means that he is willing to make that substitution without any apparent concern for the folks that decision harms. He is yet-another rich-fuck who does not care about the human consequences of technology, so long as they do not impact him personally. Fuck him, and fuck anyone who agrees with him.

Heâ(TM)s saying that Visual effects designers are not important. Because heâ(TM)s replacing somebodies work with AI output.

if I were someone who worked in that field, making the kind of content he used AI to create, and then dismissed my work as unimportant, Iâ(TM)d be salty as fuck.

their work is important enough that the film could not be considered complete without it, but not important enough to have a person do it. There is a clear double standard being promulgated here, that amounts to victim bling. Essentially that if AI can do your job, then by definition, your job is not important. Easy for the guy deciding where and when to us AI to decide in a way that does not put his own contributions to the process at risk of being replaced by AI. Fuck this guy and anyone who accepts this BS justification.

That makes no sense at all. If the company is spending $2-3k, for something they charge only $200, then it is an introductory price. To get you hooked. They have to charge you $3-4k at some point of they want to make money. Their suppliers want to get paid, and their investors want to stop losing money eventually. By ask means take advantage while the deal is good, but donâ(TM)t be so naive as to expect the deal to be good forever.

I wonder what they will do when the cost of AI increases?

We all know that AI companies are selling their services at a loss. Often on a cost-of-compute- basis, but even more so when you factor in model training costs incurred with investor cash. And that is even before we account for how the shortages of relevant hardware and server space for running all of this are driving up the costs of memory, chips, etc. Or the fact that the energy crisis is only getting started, and will impact literally every part of the value chain for addressing the current and future demand.

Most of the sunk costs to date, have been funded with investor cash, but those investors are going to start wanting to get paid back with a strong multiple of their investments to date. That means, as companies reorganize around the use of AI - at the current prices - they are creating a potential nightmare of cost forecasting and control when the AI vendors all decide it is time to start generating that pay-back by sticking the screws to their customers. This is CLASSIC ENSHITIFICATION.

This is a case of spreading FUD by presenting true facts in a sensationalist light.

we have been breeding agricultural plants for higher carbon concentrations, at the expense of everything else in the plant, since the dawn of human domestication of plants. This. Is. Not. New. And as such, should not be scary or cause for alarm.

to the extent that global CO2 levels are adding to the normal trend of breeding pants for higher yields, itâ(TM)s is likely to be the least significant way in which global CO2 levels pose a risk to you. Sea level rise, heat stroke, water shortages, resource wars, ecological systems collapsing ⦠all far, FAR more dangerous than a few extra calories per ton of grain. Most western diets are biofortified with minerals and vitamins already, so the plants natural contribution to your diet is already negligible in many situations.

January 6th attack on the capital involved a lot of proud boys. Several of whom were convicted for their actions that day.

That they exist is not the issue. It is the credulity with which people talk about AI agents. AI, no matter the guidelines, cannot be forced to stick to writing things that are real. It is a simulacrum of intelligence, of self directed agency, of humanness. They are sophisticated simulation algorithms. Not true self-aware intelligences.

part of the problem is one of vocabulary. We need new vocabulary to separate what LOOKs like a person with agency, from some that that actually IS a person with agency. By reviling our existing language, we are conferring greater significance with what these programs are doing than is appropriate, based on HOW they work.

it is easy to believe these agents are being truthful and honest, because they parrot real humans, but every AI output I have ever attempted to validate has turned out to be completely disconnected from reality.

There is no reason to believe ANYTHING the bots told him about their users is real, or accurate. Fabrication is the norm. Stop hugging AI vendor propaganda.

Yeah, and one thing we know about situations like this (referred to as a âoereverse centaurâ, where the person is the liability sink for the computer) is that AI can make mistakes faster and more subtly than busy humans can catch them. So, No, this is not a good use of AI

AI needs to win or lose on the merits of what it can do. NOT on the basis of how good they are at shoving it down our throats.

office first put copilot into the ribbon, which is logical. That is where all new features appear eventually. Then, after people ignored it, because the did not want to use it, they put it into a button that hovers over the document, and cannot be hidden (unlike objects in the ribbon). I rolled back my office install to a version with copilot in the ribbon, so that I could hide it again, and disabled auto update. Hopefully this means they will put it back into the ribbon, and I can re-enable updates and go back to ignoring their AI until such time as I find a use for it.

The things he is advocating for are a means of generating leverage disproportionate to the size of their population. Which is his point.

Being an author, and being an FOSS advocate are not mutually exclusive. That you seem to think they are shows - again - how little you understand. His books, a couple of which I have read, describe his time lobbying against big tech, which makes him an advocate. His books themselves take his lobbying positions to the general public, which makes him an advocate.

you can disagree. Just as all the big tech CEOs and their co-oped politicians. Just do so honestly. He might fail (again), but success isnâ(TM)t what makes one an advocate. The act of pushing is.

I think I spotted the pro-billionare shill.

Doctorow is an open source advocate. Something that, famously, DOESNT pay well. If he is a grifter, what is the grift? Spend your career championing FOSS and losing out to big tech for peanuts?

it is right to be skeptical that Canada can wean itself off of the big tech lobbying teat, but calling him a grifter is just a laughably bad take. It shows you donâ(TM)t know what the word Grifter means.