Rise of the Ghost Machines - The Millions

This thing that we’ve been doing collectively with our relentless blog posts and pokes and tweets and uploads and news story shares, all 30-odd years of fuck-all pointless human chatterboo, it’s their tuning fork. Like when a guitarist plays a chord on a guitar and compares the sound to a tuner, adjusts the pegs, plays the chord again; that’s what has happened here, that’s what all my words are, what all our words are, a thing to mimic, a mockingbird’s feast.

Every time you ask AI to create words, to generate an answer, it analyzes the words you input and compare those words to the trillions of relations and concepts it has already categorized and then respond with words that match the most likely response. The chatbot is not thinking, but that doesn’t matter: in the moment, it feels like it’s responding to you. It feels like you’re not alone. But you are.

Rise of the Ghost Machines - The Millions

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AI and Asbestos: the offset and trade-off models for large-scale risks are inherently harmful – Baldur Bjarnason

Every time you had an industry campaign against an asbestos ban, they used the same rhetoric. They focused on the potential benefits – cheaper spare parts for cars, cheaper water purification – and doing so implicitly assumed that deaths and destroyed lives, were a low price to pay.

This is the same strategy that’s being used by those who today talk about finding productive uses for generative models without even so much as gesturing towards mitigating or preventing the societal or environmental harms.

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Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click

This is a great move from Cloudflare. I may start using their service.

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Should I remove this blog from Google Search?・The Jolly Teapot

There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.

Google is not a huge source of traffic and visibility. I get most of my visits from RSS readers, other people’s links including fellow bloggers, or websites like Hacker News. It’s hard to tell at this point since I don’t track anything, but that’s an educated guess.

Removing my website from Google would have very little impact, so I was wondering if I should just do it.

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Blocking bots – Manu

Blocking the bots is step one.

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