As one UK university after an other goes into “restructuring”, a euphemism for hollowing out by administrators, you never hear the phrase “fiduciary duty”. It is clear that these people see the university primarily as a business that they can leave behind. Lost is the idea that they are entrusted with a physical, intellectual, and societal endowment and community built over decades, sometimes centuries, that needs to be nurtured cautiously for the next generation much like a pension fund?

"Trans Lives are Real. Harry Potter is Not"
Sticker spotted in NYC

FYI, Firefox has enabled the "Donate your body to fuel data centers" option to true by default, so if you want to opt-out, make so set this hidden flag to false every browser update.

browser.ml.donateFlesh = false

We'll have to do "AI" rehab for folks once this hype is over. I'm not even kidding.

"You always have a choice in Firefox, including whether to use features enhanced with AI". LIARS! FUCKING LIARS!! THE "BLOCK AI" SWITCH UNDERNEATH THIS WAS TURNED *OFF*! YOU SILENTLY UPGRADED MY WEB BROWSER WHILE MICROSOFT WAS REBOOTING MY COMPUTER IN THE NIGHT, YOU ADDED A BUNCH OF SECRET AI BULLSHIT YOU DID NOT DISCLOSE TO ME, YOU HAD IT TURNED ON BY DEFAULT, and then you have the fucking GALL to say I had a fucking "choice"

Get outa here with your fucking cutesy fox mascot for the apocalypse

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/117428759376078122

I've cut off collaborations because of this sort of shenanigans. I'm not sure it is worth investing in people who do this sort of stuff, and call them out, because they will just revert to the "it is just a tool" argument.

They also don't get consent, as they just fed your IP into the great LLM machine. If they pay it -might- not be used for training, or not. Ask some mathematicians how that went.

I asked a trusted colleague for comments on a written document and they fed it in to chatGPT and sent me back that output and I just want to cry.

Guess I won't be asking that person for help or advice on anything anymore. Enshittification happens in people's writing skills too, I guess.

I also have absolutely no idea how to respond to them. If you're that far down the genAI black hole I don't think pointing out the ethical/environmental/cognitive issues will help. Fuck.

I don’t like this negative pattern of social media interaction:

Post: if you want to x, you can just x! I encourage you to embrace any desires you may have to x and just get started! It’s not as hard as you fear! You don’t need a permission slip to x! 💖

Reply, received in a hundredfold variations: but I don’t want to x! I don’t like x! I have a rare disease that will kill me if I x! My parents were murdered by a clown while pursuing their dreams to x! 😡

okay! sorry to hear about the clown, but you also don’t need a permission slip to NOT follow general encouragement that wasn’t aimed at you specifically! You don’t need to defensively justify yourself to a stranger about it, you’re not being accused of being a bad non-x’er! it’s okay!

#meme humour

RE: https://social.vivaldi.net/@GB0FakeWat/117381597986298493

As with the other boost in Japanese: people poisoning themselves accidentally with poisonous fungi that AI -- or AI-written books -- have falsely deemed edible.

Growing up, there was an illustrated wild mushroom guide in the house: the number of poisonous and deadly mushrooms and how many resembled edible, if not gourmet mushrooms was pretty striking. "False" this. "Devil" that. "Death" this. "Destroying" that. FAFO on a societal scale.

As this boost perfectly puts it: Too much of a gamble.

…but it's much worse. Some, especially most amanita spp., won't make you drop dead wretching like a film. You'd get food poisoning-like symptoms, seemingly recover, but if you didn't get pumped within 12 hours or so before then, the body fails gradually but totally over a week. No cure.

Alpha-amanitin is "if these things were designed by a God, it f*****g hates us"-level, murder mixed with torture bad.

🍄毒キノコ研究者らによると「AIの正答率は６割」
ギャンブルすぎるだろ

『毒キノコ、食用信じて食中毒　「AIで判定」に潜むリスク』
https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUD144QC0U6A910C2000000/

『そのGoogleレンズの判定、鵜呑みにしないで。AIが回答⇨毒キノコ食中毒で危篤の例も…秋に農水省が警鐘』
https://www.huffingtonpost.jp/entry/story_jp_6aa0c9c1e4b0307636055289?utm_campaign=share_x&ncid=engmodushpmg00000004

「なお、海外では近年、チャット式のAIだけでなく、
AIが作成したと思われる「キノコ本」が流通している」マジかよ
英ではAmazonマケプレにAI作成と思しき電子書籍が複数出てたとの報道も　なにそれ怖

#毒キノコ

ヒェーッ。
一応命がかかってることには発言を控えさせるとかした方が良いよ。責任取れないんだから。

毒キノコ、食用信じて食中毒　「AIで判定」に潜むリスク - 日本経済新聞 https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUD144QC0U6A910C2000000/

RE: https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/117378992159256987

Evil things usually come in cutesy wrapping paper.

Why is the muse mascot a soulless labubu?

Video ads at grand central are very expensive. They are putting a lot into this launch. I’m mad they advertised hard enough to get to me. Ima go live on a boat.

EDIT: now that I'm home here is the side by side.

RE: https://fediscience.org/@jameshowell/117328896300630051

called it

#noai #fuckai

I just read a third or possibly fourth news article where the reality of an 'AI has discovered something marvellous!' story turns out to be GenAI somehow accessed material it had no permissions for, which was the outcome of an expert's years of work, and presented it without attribution.

GenAI is a fraud. Whatever it offers is generated from work stolen from humans who know what they're doing. There is no intelligence in LLMs.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Carl_Zimmer/117345065655681591

“The Anthropic scientists [..] said that their A.I. had taken “the first steps of a biological discovery on its own.””

[Mario Rodríguez Mestre, a computational biologist] “disputed that claim. “They are the same systems we have been studying for years,” he said. And they are the same enzymes, he said, that he had described to Anthropic’s A.I.”

—

AI companies stealing people’s work and claiming that their AI is making new discoveries. How long before humanity stands up to these companies?

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. https://nyti.ms/3VSWayc

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Carl_Zimmer/117345065655681591

The bandwagoning of LLM AI -- not to put down machine learning systems to automate, catch errors, analyse and forecast -- by Universities and research institutions was only ever going to have one consequence.