I released the post "The Curious Case of the Attack on Hugging Face" in the wee hours of this morning. There was 1 post by Gary Marcus I didn't include, titled "BREAKING: Two rays of hope". I guess they didn't seem that hopeful to me. 1 thing I did find hopeful though: at least 1, maybe more, proposal to license LLMs. Finally.
From the ever-reliable Gary Marcus.
Could rogue agent swarms take over the entire internet in the next six months?Yawn. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is the master of spewing bullshit hype to keep the bubble inflated.What does and doesn’t make sense about Dario Amodei’s latest extravagant claim
"Take over the entire internet"??? That happened a few years ago - by LLM training bots. This blog has been around since 2003. Before LLMs, it had, at most, a few dozen readers.
Now, it averages around 3,000 hits/day. My other blog & my YouTube channels have also become > 99% bot traffic.
Sorry Dario, those phantom menace ships sailed a long time ago. Those ships were your LLM training bots.
I know this is a moot point, but, I would like to see stats of how many human readers accessed my stuff. When this 1st started, the bots were all from Windows & MacBook computers. I sent Blogger support a query that would filter out all those bots. Response came there none.
They absolutely don't care. To them, traffic is traffic. Traffic is $$$.
From Hunter Lazarro in "The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places".
Vibecoding The Apocalypse'AI' products are already wildly dangerous. The companies want to make that a 'you' problem.
...
So again: My problem is not with "AI". None of the big three "AI" products themselves are even AI; they are large language models. The big breakthrough is that they are trained on more data than past "AI" researchers could ever have hoped to plug into their own versions, all thanks to the new tech innovation of Just Fucking Stealing It.
My problem with "AI" is that all of the corporate executives you see on your television sets pitching their products are con artists who've talked themselves into a position where much of the world economy depends on them not being con artists, which is precisely what's gone wrong with every other executive board and industry you can name so we can't even claim it's unique.
From the most excellent Doc Searls' blog:
AI as a Teacher of AthletesSearls uses GenAI as it should be used: as a tool for expert creatives. He gives an example of a case where it produced the perfect phrases to describe MyTerms.On the whole, AI writing is good. Yes, I’ve called it “AutoTune for the human kind” and “fancy blah.” Claudio Nastruzzi called it “semantic ablation.” But Big AI’s grammar, styling, and prose still tends to beat the shit out of the ways most people write. Does that have to be a bad thing?
Nearly all of what ChatGPT and Claude write for me (usually without my asking first) isn’t as good as what I write on my own. If I use any of it, I completely rewrite it. But once in a while one of the damned things will produce a sentence that is clearly what I mean, and says better than what I was about to say. I don’t like that, but I do appreciate it.
There are a few vivid lines in Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself that I think describe what Big AI does for everyone’s writing—and we do for its writing as well:
I am the teacher of athletes.
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own
proves the width of my own.
He most honors my style
who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
Still, that "perfect" phrase was so good I think largely because it used strikethrough. I am a huge fan of strikethrough, & have in the past espoused its use. I think I could have come up with that "perfect phrase" if I'd been asked.
So is that phrase, coming from GenAI, worth the smallest contribution to the Climate Crisis? I think not.
Wow, a blast from the past: confused of calcutta, by JP Rangaswami. He's 65 YO now, retired! Yay! Cogent musings on agents. I think I'll create a new tag, LLM Agents. They are a separate source of bedevilment.
Of agents and trust and permissionsGreat post, he discusses over the decades of his career when he used human agents, & the most important component of any such relationship: trust.When I think about agents, I think of what permissions I have to give someone else in order for them to represent me, and what permissions I have to receive to be someone’s agent. Permissions.
I, for 1, have absolutely 0 trust in any LLM-based agent. 15% error rate, way too high for me. None for me, thanks!
From Cory Doctorow, the Bard of the Revolution.
But do you use keyboard shortcuts?If you get the right answer, why does it matter what tool you used? I am a total keyboard shortcut kinda guy, I don't care if you use nothing but menus - as long as you get the work done. Modern managers emphasis on forcing employees to use LLMs is ... WEIRD!AI people are WEIRD.
Seen in this light, bosses' insistence that workers use AI makes perfect sense. Once you reassure yourself that your subordinates produce the things you need by prompting a model, you reassure yourself that you could do their jobs. At that point, you're not relying on their skill – you're doing them the favor of paying them to do a job that you're too busy and important to do, but which you could do. With AI, you can tell yourself that you're in the driver's seat, even if someone else has their hands on the wheel.Hmmm, I may be wrong, but I'm getting the feeling that Doctorow thinks that Most Bosses Are Assholes.
Nice, another *pocalypse. I've read a couple more chapters of the book by the semiotician. Damn, those are a struggle. It's hard to read words written by people who think that the words themselves are all that matters.
This post I think is in that ballpark. The Semiotic Zombie LLMs will eat all the words, leaving none for us poor humans.
From Matthew Kirschenbaum, via Project Syndicate.
When Words Are No Longer for UsOwing to the proliferation of large language models throughout our software and social systems, we are now undergoing a textpocalypse, marked by not just a deluge of slop but a fundamental unmooring of language and text from lived human experience. The first victim is likely to be the internet itself.
Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #147.
