"Facebook announced a 5% across-the-board layoff and doubled its executives' bonuses – on the same day. They fired thousands of workers and then hired a single AI researcher for $200m:
(...)
Whatever else all this is, it's a performance. It's a way of demonstrating the efficacy of the product they're hoping your boss will buy and replace you with: Remember when techies were prized beyond all measure, pampered and flattered? AI is SO GOOD at replacing workers that we are dragging these arrogant little shits out by their hoodies and firing them over Interstate 280 with a special, AI-powered trebuchet. Imagine how many of the ungrateful useless eaters who clog up your payroll *you will be able to vaporize when you buy our product!*

Which is why you should always dig closely into announcements about AI-driven tech layoffs. It's true that tech job listings are down 36% since ChatGPT's debut – but that's pretty much true of all job listings:"

pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-…

#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #LLMs #Unemployment #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

Your regular reminder that AI (yes, including your fun art generators and silly ChatGPT questions and Google search) use more power than whole countries, and are speeding up climate change and the destruction of the environment.

Let's definitely replace people with this poor quality, surveillance state, ecocidal nonsense.

inequality.org/article/ais-ene…

#AI #generativeAI #AIArt #chatgpt

AI’s Energy Demands Are Fueling the Climate Crisis - Inequality.org

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence systems is precipitating an environmentally problematic spike in data center construction.

^{Inequality.org}

So a crazy thing happened. In a crime thriller film called Les chambres rouges (Red Rooms, 2023) there is a scene where the hacker protagonist is attempting to purchase a snuff film in online auction. The auction happens via IRC or IRC-like chatting environment and to my surprise there's actually me @rolle and my wife @mustikkasoppa who are one of the bidders.

1) The nickname of my wife is mistakenly written as "mustikasoppa" (with one k) but if I recall correctly she has used a mistakenly written nickname in the past
2) We are both operators and on the same IRC channel as we've been for the past 17 years

This is not a coincidence. One nickname can be made up by accident but not two with these features and definitely not in a French movie. My wife's nick "mustikkasoppa" is Finnish and means "blueberry soup".

Our IRC logs are more or less public because of open source and statistics so I presume the scene has been made with chatgpt which has scraped our nicks from the Internet so that they ended up in the movie. We still chat via IRC every day together.

The era of AI... Do your background check, folks. I'm glad this wasn't a dramatized documentary film but a complete fiction. However my wife and I are real. Mixed feelings.

#OpenAI #Privacy #Movies #IRC #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT

"Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:

On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”"

medium.com/illumination/ms-wor…

#Microsoft #AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #MSWord #Privacy #Word

MS Word is Using You to Train AI - ILLUMINATION - Medium

Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on…

^{Dr. Casey Lawrence (ILLUMINATION)}

Was she AI generated? Some definite weird quirks on the speech there such as "share idees" and "Free softwahrr". Didn't seem like it was just an accent.

#GenAI #AI #GenerativeAI

We are recruiting for the position of a PhD/Junior Researcher or PostDoc/Senior Researcher with focus on knowledge graphs and large language models connected to applications in the domains of cultural heritage & digital humanities.

More info: fiz-karlsruhe.de/en/stellenanz…

Join our @fizise research team at @fiz_karlsruhe
@tabea @sashabruns @MahsaVafaie @GenAsefa @enorouzi @sourisnumerique @heikef #knowledgegraphs #llms #generativeAI #culturalHeritage #dh #joboffer #AI #ISE2024 #PhD #ISWS2024

☝️

"Declare #AIdependence, says #Cloudflare, as it provides tools to prevent #GenerativeAI systems from stealing info."

Well, these authors cut right to the chase in this paper!

#LLMs
#AI
#GenerativeAI
#bullshit
#ethics
#truth

In 2023, #generativeAI made content creation easier but raised trust concerns due to #deepfake attacks. Using #AI, fraudsters crafted fake videos from victims' images, enabling identity #fraud.

At the @w3c member meeting in #Hiroshima 🇯🇵, Sophia Wu (Ant Group) called for collaboration to tackle #deepfake threats with new complementary Web standards.

🎬 Watch the video: youtu.be/PGBIfZSF174

Like many other technologists, I gave my time and expertise for free to #StackOverflow because the content was licensed CC-BY-SA - meaning that it was a public good. It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug.

Now that a deal has been struck with #OpenAI to scrape all the questions and answers in Stack Overflow, to train #GenerativeAI models, like #LLMs, without attribution to authors (as required under the CC-BY-SA license under which Stack Overflow content is licensed), to be sold back to us (the SA clause requires derivative works to be shared under the same license), I have issued a Data Deletion request to Stack Overflow to disassociate my username from my Stack Overflow username, and am closing my account, just like I did with Reddit, Inc.

policies.stackoverflow.co/data…

The data I helped create is going to be bundled in an #LLM and sold back to me.

In a single move, Stack Overflow has alienated its community - which is also its main source of competitive advantage, in exchange for token lucre.

Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow's former instantiation, used to fulfill a psychological contract - help others out when you can, for the expectation that others may in turn assist you in the future. Now it's not an exchange, it's #enshittification.

Programmers now join artists and copywriters, whose works have been snaffled up to create #GenAI solutions.

The silver lining I see is that once OpenAI creates LLMs that generate code - like Microsoft has done with Copilot on GitHub - where will they go to get help with the bugs that the generative AI models introduce, particularly, given the recent GitClear report, of the "downward pressure on code quality" caused by these tools?

While this is just one more example of #enshittification, it's also a salient lesson for #DevRel folks - if your community is your source of advantage, don't upset them.

I'm old enough to remember how @creativecommons was founded as a way for independent creators to safely share their work and build upon each other.

In 2024, their take is now "billion dollar companies plagiarizing your art is fair use".

creativecommons.org/2023/02/17…

Hats off to the author, you don't see that kind of, uh, skillful rhetoric chicanery every day. Like "generative AI doesn't compete with artists because artists are not in the data market". 😬

#CreativeCommons #GenerativeAI

Stop confusing publicly available with public domain.

These are not the same, at all.

If you are confused about it, read this: plagiarism.org/blog/2018/02/27…

#Copyright #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #DigitalRights #Privacy

"Blind internet users struggle with error-prone AI aids", reports an article in the Financial Times:
ft.com/content/3c877c55-b698-4…

#FT has a paywall but three articles can be accessed for free if you register.

TLDR is that AI #accessibility widgets over promise and under deliver. Repeatedly.

#AI #GenerativeAI #a11y

#GenAI hype in financial terms! #AI #nvidia #NVDA #generativeAI

youtube.com/watch?v=idxW9VGdXo…

The Stock Market is 'Priced to Insanity'.

Is the stock market currently 'priced to insanity'? In this video, we look at what the Dean of Valuation has to say. Aswath Damodaran recently gave an interv...

^YouTube

Can generative AI help us write accessible code?

In this post on the @TetraLogical blog, I ask Bard (now Gemini), ChatGPT from OpenAI, and Fix My Code from userway for help writing accessible code:
tetralogical.com/blog/2024/02/…

#GenerativeAI #AI #accessibility

Can generative AI help write accessible code? - TetraLogical

Like many inventions before it, Generative AI is changing the way we do things. Like those inventions that went before it, Generative AI is capable of great good and great harm, and like the humans that used those inventions before us, we need to be …

^TetraLogical

From an actual AI VC:

Generative AI investing: a process by which venture capital firms transfer large amounts of money to NVIDIA via intermediaries known as “startups”

Inflection.ai latest round:

Inflection AI is building the largest AI cluster in the world comprising 22,000 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.

Even with NVIDIA as investor, that's one pricey cluster 🤑

#ai #generativeAI #nvidia

Inflection AI announces $1.3 billion of funding led by current investors, Microsoft, and NVIDIA

^Inflection

This one has different methodologies and philosophies that try to mitigate some of the ethical issues with other similar #GenerativeAI programming systems.

Hugging Face and ServiceNow Research release StarCoder, a free alternative to code-generating #AI like GitHub's #Copilot, as part of the #BigCode project.

techcrunch.com/2023/05/04/hugg…

#MachineLearning

"Midjourney now offers a clever twist on its #AI image software, using its powerful machine-learning algorithms to generate text descriptions of already-existing images. This makes detailed image captions trivially easy to make and could totally change the game for blind people when it comes to pictures. "

Why #Midjourney’s New #ImageToText Generator Is an #Accessibility Home Run | #AI #GenerativeAI
lifewire.com/why-midjourneys-n…

For my latest story, I got to correspond with a Ukranian developer with cerebral palsy who uses ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to communicate and code. It was wild, because I don't think our interaction would have been possible just a few years ago.

Beyond that, though, #GenerativeAI is removing barriers for him to code and contribute. He even released his first #OpenSource project recently sharing his experience!

github.com/readme/featured/ope…

#ChatGPT #GitHubCopilot #GitHub #A11y