AI developments that made us spin

The eye doctor shined a bright light into my left eye as I realized, I have stopped thinking of the future. The day was hot, the air dry. I was slowly and surely going blind, from a progressive, incurable eye disease. On my way home, I could smell wildfire smoke. Shadows trailed the edges of... Read more »

A new series focused on AI literacy outside the hype-doom binary. For the first installment, Reality Studies looks at questions of labor in the context of generative AI.

Generative AI can involve citizens directly in decision-making, but not while developers’ incentives are only financial, says Polly Curtis, chief executive of Demos

Notes prepared for DEFCON31 in Las Vegas

Some AI makes a ton of money; a lot of it is still speculative

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was skeptical a few weeks ago: "I probably trust the answers that come out of ChatGPT the least of anybody on Earth."

Creative skills can currently be reproduced using deep learning and neural networks, but their true potential lies in the prospects of collaboration rather than replacement. Two distinct subjectivities, one human and one automated, can meet halfway and produce a captivating mutual symbolic space, brimming with possibilities, but also with dead ends. It is both too early and arrogant to hazard a guess as to the artistic impact AI will exert in the medium term.

Ursula Le Guin said we must be able to imagine freedom. AI traps us in the past.

Wowed by a new paper I just read and wish I had thought to write myself. Lukas Berglund and others, led by Owain Evans, asked a simple, powerful, elegant question: can LLMs trained on A is B infer automatically that B is A? The shocking (yet, in historical context, see below, unsurprising) answer is no:

ChatGPT and other new AI services benefit from a science fiction-infused marketing frenzy unlike anything in recent memory. There's more to fear here than killer robots.

The technology has resulted in a host of cutting-edge AI applications — but its real power lies beyond text generation

Rest of World analyzed 3,000 AI images to see how image generators visualize different countries and cultures.

ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything (or look like they can), so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them back into single-purpose software? What are the products?

Sam Altman’s weekend of shock and drama began a year ago, with the release of ChatGPT.

Modern AI puts us firmly into an age of exploration of computational reality

A Very Niche Foresight Report