Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal forum category. The context here is that I recently get pinged by slowness/load spikes on the diaspora* project web infrastructure (Discourse, Wiki, the project website, ...), and looking at the traffic logs makes me impressively angry. In the last 60 days, the diaspora* web assets received 11.3 million requests. That equals to 2.19 req/s - which honestly isn't that much. I mean, it's more than your average personal blog, but nothing that my infrastructure shouldn't be able to handle. However, here's what's grinding my fucking gears. Looking at the top user agent statistics, there are the leaders: 2.78 million requests - or 24.6% of all traffic - is coming from Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot). 1.69 million reuqests - 14.9% - Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Amazonb...

In early November, I had a stimulating Zoom call with a former OpenAI employee and Berkeley graduate named Suchir Balaji, who had just left OpenAI.

Why the kinship between artificial intelligence and the human mind is terrifying.

If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

Exclusive: Age, disability, marital status and nationality influence decisions to investigate claims, prompting fears of ‘hurt first, fix later’ approach

It’s fun to say that artificial intelligence is fake and sucks — but evidence is mounting that it’s real and dangerous

TL;DR Context Writing A 1996 Essay Again in 2023, This Time With Lots More Transistors ChatGPT 3 Gathering the Sources PrivateGPT Ollama (and Llama2:70b) Hallucinations What I Learned TL;DR I used …

You have the power, not Google.

The Institute for Technology, Ethics and Culture (ITEC), housed at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, is a collaboration between the Center and the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. The Institute convenes leaders from business, civil society, academia, government, and all faith and belief traditions, to promote deeper thought on technology’s impact on humanity.

In two recent conversations with very thoughtful journalists, I was asked about the apparent ‘schism’ between those making a lot of noise…

The president of the not-for-profit messaging app on how she believes existential warnings about AI allow big tech to entrench their power, and why the online safety bill may be unworkable

A new research paper describes an algorithm that can detect other research papers written by robots. Scientists from the University of Kansas say they developed a technique to identify ChatGPT's writing in scientific writing close to 100% of the time.

The grim reality is there will never be enough trained therapists to meet the demand for eating disorder treatment.

Claiming wisdom based on the Bhagavad Gita, the bots frequently go way off script.

As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?