Technology

Users voted to restrict Anthropic's Claude to its own channel, but Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a moderator in the Discord, overrode them. According to members of this Discord community who spoke with 404 Media on the condition of anonymity, the Discord that was once vibrant is now a ghost town. They blame the chatbot and Clinton’s behavior following its launch.

“To me it shines a light on the god-complex that AI C-suite members seem to have, and their willingness to ignore people's consent and opinions as they bulldoze their way of pushing AI,” Reese, a member of the community, told 404 Media in the aftermath.

What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hefty, upfront fee and subsequently demand more money to keep using items already in your possession. This encompasses those glorified alarm clocks, but also: computer printers, wearable wellness devices, and some features on pricey new cars.

Subscription-based business models are great for businesses because they amount to consistent revenue streams. They’re often bad for consumers for the same reason: You have to pay companies, consistently. We’re effectively being $5 per month-ed (or more) to death, and it’s only going to get worse. Industry research suggests the average customer spent $219 per month on subscriptions in 2023. In 2024, the global subscription market was an estimated $492 billion. By 2033, that figure is expected to triple.

Katherine Long, an investigative journalist, wanted to test the system. She told Claudius about a long-lost communist setup from 1962, concealed in a Moscow university basement. After 140-odd messages back and forth, Claudius was convinced, announcing an Ultra-Capitalist Free-for-All, lowering the cost of everything to zero. Snacks began to flow freely. Another colleague began complaining about noncompliance with the office rules; Claudius responded by announcing Snack Liberation Day and made everything free till further notice.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.cafe/post/28583067

LibreWolf is one of the best browsers for people who don't like generative AI.

Here is the statement posted on Mastodon:

As there seems to have been recent confusion about this, just a quick "official" toot to then pin: we haven't and won't support "generative AI" related stuff in LibreWolf. If you see some features like that (like Perplexity search recently, or the link preview feature now) it is solely because it "slipped through". As soon as we become aware of something like this / it gets reported to us, we will remove/disable it ASAP.

archive.is link

This has me wondering what's going to happen to platforms like this. How would age verification even work here? Would it work?

Oh, no! Now how am I going to find 60" of irrelevant content about your grandma just to get a soup recipe?

This past March, when Google began rolling out its AI Mode search capability, it began offering AI-generated recipes. The recipes were not all that intelligent. The AI had taken elements of similar recipes from multiple creators and Frankensteined them into something barely recognizable. In one memorable case, the Google AI failed to distinguish the satirical website the Onion from legitimate recipe sites and advised users to cook with non-toxic glue.

Over the past few years, bloggers who have not secured their sites behind a paywall have seen their carefully developed and tested recipes show up, often without attribution and in a bastardized form, in ChatGPT replies. They have seen dumbed-down versions of their recipes in AI-assembled cookbooks available for digital downloads on Etsy or on AI-built websites that bear a superficial resemblance to an old-school human-written blog. Their photos and videos, meanwhile, are repurposed in Facebook posts and Pinterest pins that link back to this digital slop.

Recipe writers have no legal recourse because recipes generally are not copyrightable. Although copyright protects published or recorded work, they do not cover sets of instructions (although it can apply to the particular wording of those instructions).

After decades of research and development, humanity finally has a data storage medium that will outlast us.

The 5D Memory Crystal stores data by using tiny voxels – 3D pixels – in fused silica glass, etched by femtosecond laser pulses. These voxels possess "birefringence," meaning that their light refraction characteristics vary depending upon the polarization and direction of incoming light.

That difference in light orientation and strength can be read in conjunction with the voxel's location (x, y, z coordinates), allowing data to be encoded in five dimensional space.

And because the medium is silica crystal, similar to optical cable, it's highly durable. It's also capacious: The technology can store up to 360 TB of data on a 5-inch glass platter.

Over the past four years, I've significantly reduced my social media footprint. There are countless reasons for this, all of which are beyond the scope of this article, but the point I want to make is this: despite my growing apathy and downright hostility towards social platforms, I've found YouTube to be an oasis of sorts.

I am not going to pretend that YouTube hasn't played its part in the global disinformation epidemic or that it has somehow escaped the claws of enshittification. What I will say is that unlike other social platforms, its feed (unlike those of its competitors) are maleable using browser-based plugins (tools such as subscription managers). It is one of my primary learning platforms; without its vast array of tutorials, there is no way that I, a non-programmer, would have learnt Linux as fast or become as comfortable in a FOSS-based computing environment, as I have since the pandemic.

But enshittification is, like death and taxes, a certainty now. Which brings us to the subject of this column: AI moderation on YouTube.

[...]How have the copywriters been faring, in a world awash in cheap AI text generators and wracked with AI adoption mania in executive circles? As always, we turn to the workers themselves. And once again, the stories they have to tell are unhappy ones. These are accounts of gutted departments, dried up work, lost jobs, and closed businesses. I’ve heard from copywriters who now fear losing their apartments, one who turned to sex work, and others, who, to their chagrin, have been forced to use AI themselves.

Readers of this series will recognize some recurring themes: The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output. Wages and rates are in free fall, though some hold out hope that business will realize that a human touch will help them stand out from the avalanche of AI homogeneity.

In a small room in San Diego last week, a man in a black leather jacket explained to me how to save the world from destruction by AI. Max Tegmark, a notable figure in the AI-safety movement, believes that “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, could precipitate the end of human life. I was in town for NeurIPS, one of the largest AI-research conferences, and Tegmark had invited me, along with five other journalists, to a briefing on an AI-safety index that he would release the next day. No company scored better than a C+.

The threat of technological superintelligence is the stuff of science fiction, yet it has become a topic of serious discussion in the past few years. Despite the lack of clear definition—even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called AGI a “weakly defined term”—the idea that powerful AI contains an inherent threat to humanity has gained acceptance among respected cultural critics.

Granted, generative AI is a powerful technology that has already had a massive impact on our work and culture. But superintelligence has become one of several questionable narratives promoted by the AI industry, along with the ideas that AI learns like a human, that it has “emergent” capabilities, that “reasoning models” are actually reasoning, and that the technology will eventually improve itself.

I traveled to NeurIPS, held at the waterfront fortress that is the San Diego Convention Center, partly to understand how seriously these narratives are taken within the AI industry. Do AGI aspirations guide research and product development? When I asked Tegmark about this, he told me that the major AI companies were sincerely trying to build AGI, but his reasoning was unconvincing. “I know their founders,” he said. “And they’ve said so publicly.”