Links

Iris van Rooij on Ada Lovelace:

Two centuries later, as we are living through yet another AI summer where AI hype and promises of artificial general intelligence (AGI) abound, Ada’s wise words remain relevant as ever. When writing about the “AI” of her time, called the Analytical Engine, she wrote: “It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of [AI]. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency [...] to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable”.

(From: Editorial AI Inside: Celebrating Ada and Women in AI | Radboud University)

Last week I saw Nick Doty from the Center of Democracy and Technology give an excellent short talk at the W3C's 30tj birthday event, in which he said:

We need to consider human rights in all the work that we do at W3C in the next 30 years.

(From: Happy 30th Birthday, W3C - Center for Democracy and Technology)

He just published the full text.

This is creepy, dull and useless. I wish they didn't:

If you think avoiding AI-generated images is difficult as it is, Facebook and Instagram are now going to put them directly into your feeds. At the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, the company announced that it’s testing a new feature that creates AI-generated content for you “based on your interests or current trends” — including some that incorporate your face.

(From: Meta’s going to put AI-generated images in your Facebook and Instagram feeds - The Verge)

In our rush to digitize the world, we often underestimate the value of the patina, subtle imperfections, and otherwise visible history of the physical objects we choose to digitize.

(From: Wendell Berry on the benefits of writing without a computer | Sean Voisen)

But in eliminating the effort, in refusing the temporality of making, the outcome of an “AI”-driven creative process is a phantasm, an unsubstantiality, something that passes through the world without leaving any trace. A root that twists back upon itself and tries to suck the water from its own desiccated veins.

(From: Coming home | A Working Library)

Glad the AI Act seems to effectively protect my rights:

Anyone living in the EU, EEA or Switzerland will not have their data harvested. LinkedIn has not yet confirmed why it has spared the citizens of Europe, but it may be due to rules introduced under the EU AI Act.

(From: LinkedIn trains GenAI models on personal data by default)

Mat​hia⁠s S​chäf⁠er wrote a balanced post about the JavaScript discourse and where to put the blame for poor user experience.

I like what he wrote about the impact of tooling:

We need tools that make it easy to do the right thing and hard to impair the UX. Tools that inform the developer about the impact of a decision on performance and reliability.

(From: Something went wrong · molily)

Artificial intelligence companies deeply underestimate how perfect the things around us are, and how deeply we base our understanding and acceptance of the world on knowledge and context. People generally have four fingers and a thumb on each hand, hammers have a handle made of wood and a head made of metal, and monkeys have two legs and two arms. The text on the sign of a store generally has a name and a series of words that describe it, or perhaps its address and phone number.

These are simple concepts that we learn from the people and places we see as we grow up, and what's very, very important to remember is that these are not concepts that artificial intelligence models are aware of.

(From: Subprime Intelligence)

yup:

I want real things by real people. I don’t want more things averaged out by a language model that can only make likely sentences. I don’t want more creepy images directly sourced from thousands of copyrighted works. I want you to put yourself on the page.

(From: A short note on AI – Me, Robin)

Have been nodding along to this post, that touches on a lot of the themes I plan to bring to Beyond Tellerrand in November:

as AI gets better at mimicking human communication, the pressure on human creators to be weirder, more original, and more authentically human will only increase.

(From: @Westenberg | Shitposting Our Way Through the Singularity)