Cerstin Mahlow @CerstinMahlow@qoto.org

How hand waving LLMs have been elevated to being „The AI“ by the media is astonishing.

Just because of a being very fluent with perfect syntax. Humans are too easily blinded by people that have high speaking skills.

at this phase of life when I hear things that challenge the very premises I stand upon, I have come to enjoy the free-fall.

https://whatashrinkthinks.substack.com/p/those-that-hear?sd=pf

I wrote a longer-form piece on post.news about the concept of operationalization in AI and the way it disenfranchises communities from making decisions that the systems that govern their lives.

If you want to read it there: https://post.news/article/2LR4k0jt685pzd6uiGeHJlnBwo2

I'll also serialize it, below.

Bet I'm not the first person this week to speculate about Bard in education - but I did write this a while back when Google first talked of LaMDA for learning, and I imagine it won't be long now until it plugs Bard into Workspace and Classroom, and then all across third party edtech products via APIs https://www.fastcompany.com/90641049/google-education-classroom-ai

Hey, remember the first #enshittification of #Google, when every single Google app got #GPlus awkwardly crammed into it because individual googlers’ bonuses were calculated based on how and whether they got people to use G+?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/06/google-ceo-tells-employees-it-needs-all-hands-on-deck-to-test-bard.html

It looks to me like the Bing implementation is the same pattern that a bunch of other people are trying at the moment: you run a traditional search, then dump the search result summaries into a prompt and get the language model to generate text using those summaries

I tried something similar against my blog a few weeks ago! https://simonwillison.net/2023/Jan/13/semantic-search-answers/

My book about keyboards, Shift Happens, is now on Kickstarter!

There is all sorts of new information about it, and a video, and what I think are very cool tiers and rewards on top of a very cool book.

Please back and spread the word!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwichary/shift-happens?ref=cr61wq

There was a #LoveData23 planning meeting today in the library, so I wore my library data dress: both digital and analog. #LoveDataStanford #DHsewing #sewing #textiles

Shift Happens: A book about keyboards
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwichary/shift-happens

Going through my reading list, I found a nice one that @bwyble had posted to Twitter in 2018…

You can walk into any room and scream. "THIS WHOLE THING IS A FARCE!", and it's entirely appropriate every time.

It‘s both interesting and useful that #OpenAI and now #Google are basically turning they‘re #AI product development into a (partly) public exercise. Bonus for them: more testing and feedback. Bonus for us: Public scrutiny is possible. #Bard #ChatGPT https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/

JOB ALERT

We are hiring! Assistant Professorship with Tenure Track in *Computational Social Science with a Focus on Communication*.

Join us at U of Zurich. Great opportunities, details below.

https://jobs.uzh.ch/offene-stellen/assistant-professorship-with-tenure-track-in-computational-social-science-with-a-focus-on-communication/99520e04-afd8-444d-91ea-33ca08ba8ea3

PLEASE TOOT AROUND

@communicationscholars #commodon @ICA_CAT @PolComm @computationalsocialscience

was ich an den unterschiedlichen ki modellen mag: sie entzaubern jegliche kulturproduktion als ansammlung verschränkter nachahmungsgesten.

Künstliche Intelligenz: So funktioniert ChatGPT
Golem.de: IT-News für Profis

The Google post does talk about Bard being useful for "where there’s no one right answer." But often there is, and these LLMs unfortunately don't appear to currently have the capability of distinguishing between these two cases.

Personally, I wish that the "code red" response that ChatGPT inspired at Google wasn't to launch a dozen AI products that their red teams and AI ethicists have warned them not to release, but to combat the tsunami of AI-generated SEO spam bullshit that's in the process of destroying their core product. Instead, they're blissfully launching new free tools to generate even more of it.

Google used to take pride in minimizing time we spent there, guiding us to relevant pages as quickly as possible. Over time, they tried to answer everything themselves: longer snippets, inline FAQs, search results full of knowledge panels.

Today's Bard announcement feels like their natural evolution: extracting all value out of the internet for themselves, burying pages at the bottom of each GPT-generated essay like footnotes. https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/

OpenStreetMap is in trouble

#Microsoft #Bing Map Builder “…has entered the ecosystem with parasitic intents … If no improvements at all happen, we should consider cutting off mapbuilder from the API, and we should consider starting a lawsuit over the copyright infringement. This is not a small hobby website which happened to have forgotten the attribution. This is a cancer that is starting to grow. This is designed to kill the community.”

By @pietervdvn #embraceExtendExtinguish #OpenStreetMap