TechTakes

New York Times asks the question on everyone's minds: Is ChatGPT Conscious?

The piece is, unsurprisingly, a complete pile of hot garbage, openly refusing to recognise the difference between lying machines and human beings. This is probably Pivot material.

From the r/SunoAI subreddit: "Sick of having to come up with prompts".

Hey y’all, looking for some tips here. I like what I’ve made so far with Suno but now I’m kind of hitting a wall with ideas for prompts. Why doesn’t Suno also have a feature to write prompts for you? Like just hit a button the says “new prompt” and then hit make song when it comes up with something that sounds interesting! Thoughts?

(Via Dan of the Year.)

Robot poop ruins a Nashville tradition:

https://old.reddit.com/r/nashville/comments/1p7e20t/so_zoolumination/

New sneer popped up lamenting AI's intrusion into hacker spaces. Red site is having a normal one about it

Ziz was arraigned on Monday, according to The Baltimore Banner. She apparently was not very cooperative:

As the judge asked basic questions such as whether she had read the indictment and understood the maximum possible penalties, [Ziz] LaSota chided the “mock proceedings” and said [US Magistrate Douglas R.] Miller was a “participant in an organized crime ring” led by the “states united in slavery.”

She pulled the Old Man from Scene 24 gag:

Please state your name for the record, the court clerk said. “Justice,” she replied. What is your age? “Timeless.” What year were you born? “I have been born many times.”

The lawyers have accepted that sometimes a defendant is uncooperative:

Prosecutors said the federal case would take about three days to try. Defense attorney Gary Proctor, in an apparent nod to how long what should have been a perfunctory appearance on Monday ended up taking, called the estimate “overly optimistic.”

Folks outside the USA should be reassured that this isn't the first time that we've tried somebody with a loose grasp of reality and a found family of young violent women who constantly disrupt the trial; Ziz isn't likely to walk away.

back on my posting sorta off topic shit: well, we’ve talked a bit about anti-academia nutters, so here’s a developing story about (western) academia having a normal one.

Headline: Oxford’s Rafflesia Messaging Sparks Debate Over Representation, Scientific Credit, and Global South Visibility

My summary: in an announcement, oxford performs erasure by only really naming researchers from oxford amongst a team where most of the contributions were from southeast asian researchers.

Pastor Malabrigo Jr. and Adriane B. Tobias are listed as the first and second authors, while other authors are from the University of the Philippines Los Baños, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Bogor Botanical Gardens, University of Bengkulu, and Forest Research Institute Malaysia. The Author Contributions section also shows that Southeast Asian researchers wrote most of the country-specific content, compiled distribution data, and produced scientific figures. Yet none of these appear in the Oxford press release as scientific authorities.

This article is by “scientific watchdog” with a “.id” domain, which is Indonesian. Seems a little bespoke for the article, but, hey, all the facts are verifiable.

it happened again, I Posted. dash of thread to it too. some of y’all may enjoy

and yes that capital P is load bearing

"Enjoy" this toxic stew of prediction markets, racism, and the objectifying of women:

https://protos.com/polymarket-criticized-for-racist-post-targeting-fake-baddies/

Saw this quality nickname for prompt receivers: Chet Jippity

An unnamed OSS project had its license vandalized by AI:

Its currently unnamed to avoid naming-and-shaming any specific devs, but its probably a Mozilla project that was affected.

Bloomberg covers the disastrous impact of AI upon food recipes, while still putting an "AI overview" on the top of the page...

In interviews, 22 independent food creators said that AI-generated “recipe slop” is distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online, damaging their businesses while causing consumers to waste time and money.

Across the internet, writers say their vetted recipes are hidden by the flood. Pinterest feeds are stuffed with AI-generated images of food that the attached instructions won’t achieve; Google’s AI Overviews surface error-filled cooking steps that siphon away clicks from professionals. Meanwhile, Facebook content farms use AI-generated images of supposedly delicious but impossible dishes to the top of people’s feeds, in an attempt to turn any clicks into ad revenue.

All of this, food bloggers say, erodes the simple promise of a recipe: that someone has actually cooked it before you have. To Gargano, this is the core issue. “No matter how clever the AI is,” she said in a recent interview, “it can never actually test a recipe in a real kitchen and see how it works.”

[...]

For Carrie Forrest, who runs Clean Eating Kitchen, AI has been devastating: 80% of her traffic — and her revenue — has disappeared in two years. Although the views started dropping when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released, it wasn’t until Google launched AI Mode in search that her traffic collapsed, she said. Since then, she’s gone from employing about ten people to letting everyone go. “I’m going to have to find something else to do.”

This holiday season is on track to be Forrest’s slowest in years. She fears that if more content creators give up, the AI won’t have new content to draw from — except content generated by AI. It may get to a point where “AI is just talking to itself,” and home cooks are gambling with the results, she said.

Fourth episode of our podcast about historical misogynist and bigoted texts, odium symposium, is out now. We discuss classic british racist enoch powell and his “rivers of blood” speech.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/144105193

(it should be available on every platform)