[links] John Oliver on ChatGPT / 3D-scans from wifi-routers / Brutalist apocalyptic lofts
Kakkamakkara is not a traditional finnish delicacy.
John Oliver devotes the main segment of his show to AI and ChatGPT: “AI is stupid in ways we can’t predict.“ And masturbating Clippy is a really fine way to start this week.
In german: Wolfgang Schmitt Junior über AI-cinema und unendliche generative Tatort-Folgen: Wird ChatGPT bald Filme schreiben, drehen und analysieren?
TikTok dropped another new filter onto the unexpecting public. Snapchat Dysmorpha and Instagram Face are having a blast in 2023: „Beauty filters are not new, but the precision on this is beyond uncanny. This is psychological warfare“.
Titanic mass grave site to be pillaged for NFTs. Crypto is a scam.
Viral Instagram photographer has a confession: His photos are AI-generated. So much for this guy’s carreer in photography, i guess.
AI-search answers queries directly with links to third party websites playing a secondary role and companies may be held liable. This, just like the open questions regarding copyright in image synthesis, is a time bomb waiting to go off. Already, “Laws protecting expression on online platforms do not apply to ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence platforms”, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch said. Which raises the question what happens with open source models if that holds up in courts.
In a 2019 paper security-researchers found that you could use wifi-routers to track your movements around the house. Now hackers can use them to produce 3D scans of humans. Here’s the paper.
- at breaks down the evidence for why Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. I think, and Haidt doesn’t talk about this either, that one underreported but very important point here is the character of violence among girls which is often psychological and social, targets reputation and works via gossip. Social Media is a predestined breeding ground for these forms of violence and it’s a puzzle piece that is completely absent from the conversation.
In a related piece, Eric Levitz at The Intelligencer writes about how the teenage mental health crisis most likely is not due to “capitalism bad“, as some journalists want you to believe: "Lorenz’s tweets do more to buttress Haidt’s hypothesis than her own; the fact that her ill-substantiated catastrophism performs so well on social media lends credence to the notion that Twitter and TikTok are vectors of depressive thought."
In another related piece, Mark Oppenheimer at The Atlantic writes about schools that ban phones. I’m saying this for years now: Get that digital crap out of the classrooms, pronto.
In a presentation six years ago, i talked about social media as a space where all kinds of epistemologies clash and battle for sovereignty of interpretation. Now, the “U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress“. I’m not interested in the Covid-specifics here — “Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided“ —, but very interested in the fact that a viable scientific theory about the origin of the pandemic got declared a conspiracy by consensus of the media, because this is what happens when you put the scientific method of trial and error in a room with (activist) journalism and everyone else.
This might be the biggest example yet of the consequences of the clash of epistemologies provided by social media, in which you and me meet scientists meet journalists meet activists meet cranks and trolls in a cacophony of meaning and tribalism.
All of these exist on different locations in a continuum of truth, where absolute, unobservable truth is located at one end, and surrealist fiction including fringe humor on the other, with everyone oscillating between those poles and socmed showing us everything.
Journalism, especially activistic journalism "taking a stance", has a real problem in such a world. All of those epistemologies can be gamed and used for whatever means by everyone. Hence, the scientific viable theory of "Lab Leak" becomes cannon fodder in an ideological fight.
The losers in this fight are journalistic integrity, trust in institutions and, well, everyone.
“stablediffusion controlnet is just incredible for post-photography“. If you want to play around with controlnet, here’s a collection of colabs.
- has a great piece about the roots of algorithmic bias and “the virulent reunion of statistical correlation and composite images laying latent in these models and their logic“.
A good piece about the limits of digital telepathy, which, yes, is a thing.
In case you want to become Theodore from Spike Jonzes “Her“, here’s Talk-to-ChatGPT, “a Google Chrome extension that allows users to talk with the ChatGPT AI using their voice (speech recognition), and listen to the bot's answer with a voice (text-to-speech)“.
The always great Burgerkrieg about the conservatism of Political Correctness. I think it’s as funny as unnerving that any and all of this kind of criticisms have to start with stuff like “the very first thing that I want and need to make clear before I really get into the meat of this video is that I am definitely on the far left side of the political spectrum“. So for what it’s worth: I sympathize with the hard left and like some ideas in socialism and anarchism, while considering myself a moderate leftie with some rare instances of conservatism, mostly when it comes to education. I’m also anti-woke, and I don’t care how you square that in your head.
Are Space And Time Real? Nope, likely not.
Never change, ChatGPT. "The limited supply of training data in smaller languages like Finnish shows in the output of ChatGPT, where it confidently states that 'kakkamakkara' (literally 'turd') is a traditional Finnish delicacy and 'part of Finnish culture'." 💩
Eine Frage wäre, haben die Filter-User im Beispiel tiktok ,neben dem Spieltrieb, schon vorher die Waffel nicht knusprig oder erst danach?