Link tags: humanity

LLMs Are Antithetical to Writing and Humanity

If you’re dyslexic and just trying to communicate more clearly in writing, or you’ve got a bullshit job and you just want to get your bullshit job’s bullshit tasks out of the way so you can move on to more meaningful endeavors, or at least move past the day-to-day slog that permeates your workday and serves no real purpose other than to pay the bills, then I cede; I cannot fault you.

But if, say, you’re a “writer” and you’re using an LLM to “help you” “write” or “think” because it’s easier and takes less time and thought, then I stand my ground; I can and do fault you.

The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles

I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.

And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.

So much truth in one story:

They built a machine to gentrify the English language.

They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.

They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.

Alchemy - Josh Collinsworth blog

I am interested in art—we are interested in art, in any and all of its forms—because humans made it. That’s the very thing that makes it interesting; the who, the how, and especially the why.

The existence of the work itself is only part of the point, and materializing an image out of thin air misses the point of art, in very much the same way that putting a football into a Waymo to drive it up and down the street for a few hours would be entirely missing the point of sports.

The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness

Most obviously, aliveness is what generally feels absent from the written and visual outputs of ChatGPT and its ilk, even when they’re otherwise of high quality. I’m not claiming I couldn’t be fooled into thinking AI writing or art was made by a human (I’m sure I already have been); but that when I realise something’s AI, either because it’s blindingly obvious or when I find out, it no longer feels so alive to me. And that this change in my feelings about it isn’t irrelevant: that it means something.

More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools.

In the way

This sums up my experience of companies and products trying to inject AI in to the products I use to communicate with other people. It’s always just in the way, making stupid suggestions.

The Value Of Science by Richard P. Feynman [PDF]

This short essay by Richard Feynman is quite a dose of perspective on a Monday morning

Aboard Newsletter: Why So Bad, AI Ads?

The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction. These technologies don’t seem to be encouraging connection as much as commoditizing it.

On being human and “creative”

Now we have this collision of those who, with the specific intent of creative expression, make things that are wholly the product of their unique experience and skills and offer them in the marketplace. Then there are those who use machines to produce derivatives of other’s creative work to offer as products in the marketplace. Both are seeking an audience and financial benefit for their offering.

Those who wholly manufacture creative works are asking the same value be put on their imitation of creative expression as the value inherent with sentient creation. They are saying they deserve the same recognition—be that in respect, attention, acknowledgement or compensation—that works created by a person might receive. But they haven’t earned it.

Using generative AI is to ask What If but then hand off not only the responsibility and effort of answering the question but also accountability for the answer. When the machine creates something pleasing or marketable, it’s “look at what I did”. When the machine creates something terrible or wrong, it’s “not my fault, the machine did it”. The claim of ownership is conditional and only maintained if the output can generate value.

There’s so much to love here, like this:

My art is the story of how I have spent the time in my life.

And this:

The value of an idea comes from the execution of the idea.

AI Safety for Fleshy Humans: a whirlwind tour

This is a terrificly entertaining level-headed in-depth explanation of AI safety. By the end of this year, all three parts will be published; right now the first part is ready for you to read and enjoy.

This 3-part series is your one-stop-shop to understand the core ideas of AI & AI Safety — explained in a friendly, accessible, and slightly opinionated way!

( Related phrases: AI Risk, AI X-Risk, AI Alignment, AI Ethics, AI Not-Kill-Everyone-ism. There is no consensus on what these phrases do & don’t mean, so I’m just using “AI Safety” as a catch-all.)

AI is not like you and me

AI is the most anthropomorphized technology in history, starting with the name—intelligence—and plenty of other words thrown around the field: learning, neural, vision, attention, bias, hallucination. These references only make sense to us because they are hallmarks of being human.

But ascribing human qualities to AI is not serving us well. Anthropomorphizing statistical models leads to confusion about what AI does well, what it does poorly, what form it should take, and our agency over all of the above.

There is something kind of pathological going on here. One of the most exciting advances in computer science ever achieved, with so many promising uses, and we can’t think beyond the most obvious, least useful application? What, because we want to see ourselves in this technology?

Meanwhile, we are under-investing in more precise, high-value applications of LLMs that treat generative A.I. models not as people but as tools.

Anthropomorphizing AI not only misleads, but suggests we are on equal footing with, even subservient to, this technology, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

“‘AI’ is pretty much just shorthand for mediocre” — Piper Haywood

Continuous partial ick …or perhaps continuous partial cringe.

Anyways, maybe we’ll eventually get to the point where AI has that human “spark”, who knows. Maybe it’ll happen next month and I’ll eat my words. Until then, as most of the content we experience online becomes more grey and sludgy, the personal will become far more valuable.

Can Apple Win Back Music | Vulf Opinion | Brad Frost

There’s no AI substitute for a human-produced drawing of someone on the subway, even if a similar-or-even-better result could be produced in seconds by AI. The artifact is often less important than the process — the human process — that made it. That’s why I suspect videos of creative processes are so attractive; we are captivated by seeing humans doing human things.

Emily F. Gorcenski: How I Read 40 Books and Extinguished the World on Fire

I’ve found that there’s way more good people than bad. There’s way more people willing to help than willing to hurt. Some things are really scary but there’s way more people out there willing to guide us through the darkness than we think. The cynic in me wants to say that the “powers that be” want us to be endlessly doomscrolling and losing hope and snuffing out optimism. We shouldn’t give them what they want. There’s a lot of beauty in the world still within our grasp. We’re better when we’re poets, when we’re learners and listeners, when we’re builders and not breakers.

“Artificial Intelligence & Humanity,” an article by Dan Mall

AI is great anything quantity-related and bad and anything quality-related.

Sensible thinking from Dan here, that mirrors what we’re thinking at Clearleft.

In other words, it leans heavily on averages; the closer the training data matches an average, the higher degree of confidence that the result is more “correct,” or at least desirable.

The problem is that this is the polar opposite of what we consider creativity to be. Creativity isn’t about averages. It’s about the outliers, sometimes the one thing that’s different than all the rest.

On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking ‹ Literary Hub

An excerpt from First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human by Jeremy DeSilva.

Food Timeline: food history research service

The history of humanity in food and recipes.

The timeline of this website is equally impressive—it’s been going since 1999!

When shaken to the core, we get priorities right. Can we stick to it? – Dr. Carolina Odman

Carolina’s post reminds me of A Paradise Built In Hell by Rebecca Solnit:

In the face of disaster, survivors get together, make time and help one another regardless of their differences. It is beautiful and inspiring.

s08e05: There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - Things That Have Caught My Attention

A global communications network now exists that’s cheap enough or in some cases even free to access, offering a pseudonymous way for people to feel safe enough to share a private experience with complete strangers? I give Facebook and Twitter a bunch of shit for their rhetoric about a global community (no, Facebook’s billions of users are no more a community than the television-watching global community) and creating authentic connection, but I will very happily admit that this, this particular example with people sharing what it is like to be me and learning what is it like to be you is the good.

This is the thing that makes free, open, networked communication brilliant. This is the thing that brings down silos and creates common understanding and humanizes us all, that creates empathy and the first steps towards compassion.

That someone can read about this insight and have a way to react to it and share their perspective and not even know who else might read it, but feel safe in doing so and maybe even with the expectation that this sharing is a net good? That is good. That is what we should strive for.

A Tale of Two Clocks

Doomsday vs. the Long Now.

Living in Alan Turing’s Future | The New Yorker

Portrait of the genius as a young man.

It is fortifying to remember that the very idea of artificial intelligence was conceived by one of the more unquantifiably original minds of the twentieth century. It is hard to imagine a computer being able to do what Alan Turing did.