Links

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)

On and off for the last several years I’ve been manually curating my roughly 40,000 lifetime tweets. I recently finished, and in the process embarked on an unexpected journey of self-discovery.

(From: Emily F. Gorcenski)

Loved this post!

Through our carbon.txt project we propose a standardised, yet distributed place on website domains, to efficiently surface the structured data that companies now have to publish anyway.

Carbon.txt would become a single place to look on any domain for public sustainability data relating to that company, that would allow anyone to build a database.

(From: Introducing carbon.txt - Applying lessons from crowdsourcing net zero data - Green Web Foundation)