The value is in the difficulty - Annotations
We’ve seen this arc before, and music is the richest analogy.
Like Bruce Sterling always says:
Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody.
Stochastic Parrots Day Tickets, Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 8:00 AM | Eventbrite
This free event is running online from 3pm to 7pm UK time this Friday. The line-up features Emily Bender, Safiya Noble, Timnit Gebru and more.
Since the publication of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜 two years ago, many of the harms the paper has warned about and more, have unfortunately occurred. From exploited workers filtering hateful content, to an engineer claiming that chatbots are sentient, the harms are only accelerating.
Join the co-authors of the paper and various guests to reflect on what has happened in the last two years, what the large language model landscape currently look like, and where we are headed vs where we should be headed.
Related links
I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian
AI writing reminds me of Tennyson’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem:
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more
It’s Not AI. It’s FOMOnetization.
FOMO is a feeling. But it’s also a business model—and increasingly, one of the more successful ones. Fear, in general, makes people much easier to separate from their money. It’s perfectly suited to this moment of ubiquitous grift, where everything feels like a lottery ticket or a multi-level marketing scheme.
It’s even more perfectly suited for “the age of AI,” which squeezes economic FOMO from both sides. AI could make you wildly rich (the first person to start a billion-dollar company with zero employees!) or leave you hopelessly destitute (part of the looming “permanent underclass”). Which one do you want to be? Smash that like button, sign up for my online course, and use my new AI-powered business platform!
Expansion artifacts || Matt Ström-Awn, designer-leader
Compression made the information age possible by stripping things down to fit the pipes. Expansion made the AI age possible by blowing data back up again. Both operations leave marks; we’ve learned to spot compression artifacts, but we’ve only just begun to reckon with expansion artifacts. Until we do, there’s a lot of risk to manage.
The AI Great Leap Forward
In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.
In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.
Same energy.
Related posts
Voice User Interface Design by Cheryl Platz
A presentation at An Event Apart Chicago 2019.
Summary punishment
How to improve Google’s search results and the World Wide Web in one fell swoop.
Threat models
Compression, transformation, expansion.
Feedback
In the loop.
Magic
Knock, knock! Who’s there? Control freak (now you say “control freak who?”)