Fuck AI

Discusses how low effort AI posts for engagement farming still get accepted by some users as real in social media feeds …

SOURCE: usatoday.com

I'd weep for the future, if I thought there'd be a future.

Hoopla, a service that provides public libraries around the country with ebooks, announced that it will do more to prevent the spread of low quality AI-generated books after a 404 Media investigation showed that they were common on its platform.
[…]
While the exact details of the plan Hoopla is putting together to prevent low quality AI-generated books from flooding its platform are still not clear, Hoopla emailed librarians again on February 14 to share more information on actions it has already implemented. This includes revising its “collection development policy to ensure we adhere to and evolve with industry best practices,” offering librarians better ways to manage the Hoopla catalog by contacting Hoopla directly, and the removal of all “summary titles from all vendors, with some exceptions,” such as HMH Books, the publisher of the popular CliffNotes series. 404 Media also obtained a copy of this second email.

As 404 Media’s investigation into Hoopla showed, books that seemingly use AI to summarize existing, human-written books, are some of the most common low quality content on Hoopla as well as other ebooks providers, including Amazon. For example, one publisher called IRB Media had hundreds of summaries available to lend via Hoopla when I published my story on February 4. At the time of writing IRB Media still has about a dozen summaries I could find on Hoopla, but most of its books had been removed.
[…]
“Librarians select, purchase, and lend materials in service to the public, and they put their trust in hoopla to provide a curated and high-quality catalog of materials,” Jennie Rose Halperin, executive director at Library Futures, an organization of librarians, told me in an email. “Hoopla has broken this trust in favor of a profit-motivated, exploitative model that flies in the face of professional values. This statement, which is very light on details, continues to avoid accountability for the expensive and shoddy product they are vending. Around the country, libraries are under attack by censors and book banners for simply providing access to quality resources that serve the needs of their communities, and hoopla’s model puts them further at risk. The misalignment of values between big vendors and libraries has never been clearer.”

Quote:

The feature is part of its new Fiverr Go suite of tools, allowing creators to “train AI exclusively on their own body of work, maintaining complete control over their creative process and rights.” Freelancers can edit and set the price for their custom AI models, which are available across services like voiceovers, songwriting, graphic design, illustration, copywriting, and digital marketing.

I hate late stage capitalism and the short term financial incentive for workers and artists to make themselves obsolete

cross-posted from: https://ponder.cat/post/1675150

I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters. OpenAI and Anthropic are not innovators, and are antithetical to the spirit of Silicon Valley. They are management consultants dressed as founders, cynical con artists raising money for products that will never exist while peddling software that destroys our planet and diverts attention and capital away from things that might solve real problems.

I'm tired of the delusion. I'm tired of being forced to take these men seriously. I'm tired of being told by the media and investors that these men are building the future when the only things they build are mediocre and expensive. There is no joy here, no mystery, no magic, no problems solved, no lives saved, and very few lives changed other than new people added to Forbes' Midas list.

None of this is powerful, or impressive, other than in how big a con it’s become. Look at the products and the actual outputs and tell me — does any of this actually feel like the future? Isn’t it kind of weird that the big, scary threats they’ve made about how AI will take our jobs never seem to translate to an actual product? Isn’t it strange that despite all of their money and power they’re yet to make anything truly useful?

My heart darkens, albeit briefly, when I think of how cynical all of this is. Corporations building products that don't really do much that are being sold on the idea that one day they might, peddled by reporters that want to believe their narratives — and in some cases actively champion them. The damage will be tens of thousands of people fired, long-term environmental and infrastructural chaos, and a profound depression in Silicon Valley that I believe will dwarf the dot-com bust.

And when this all falls apart — and I believe it will — there will be a very public reckoning for the tech industry.

cross-posted from: https://ponder.cat/post/1659264

https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https%3A%2F%2Flwn.net%2FSubscriberLink%2F1008897%2F00e5bb0f873858a8%2F

If AI is going to scrape content I post or emails I send to people who use gmail, etc. I would like to include a few sentences in each item that will fuck with any AI training they get used by.

(I especially want to stick it in any emails that google will have access to because certain people I want to communicate with refuse to use anything but gmail, even for conversations just with me, after I've specifically asked them to. 😠 )

So I've searched and found many online "nonsense generators" but they use AI to generate silly sentences for you. That's not what I want.

What I want is something that generates grammatically incorrect entences, sentences with words that would never follow each other, and whatever kinds of sentences would cause AI training methods to learn wrong and meaningless patterns of language, so that when it generates stuff based on that it will be obvious crap that is useless for any purpose.

I figure someone has created this by now. Does anyone know where to find something I can use for this?