Link tags: exploitation

The growing backlash against AI

You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work.

In this way “AI” is deeply dehumanizing: Making the spaces and opportunities for people to grow and be human smaller and smaller. Applying a straitjacket of past mediocrity to our minds and spirits.

And that is what is being booed: The salespeople of mediocrity who’ve made it their mission to speak lies from power. The lie that only tech can and will save us. The lie that a bit of statistics and colonial, mostly white, mostly western data is gonna create a brilliant future. The lie that we have no choice, no alternatives.

Pluralistic: Tech workers and gig workers need each other (13 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Ever wondered why you’re always being encouraged to download the app?

But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don’t exist, because you’d go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.

Losing the imitation game

The hard part of programming is building and maintaining a useful mental model of a complex system. The easy part is writing code. They’re positioning this tool as a universal solution, but it’s only capable of doing the easy part. And even then, it’s not able to do that part reliably. Human engineers will still have to evaluate and review the code that an AI writes. But they’ll now have to do it without the benefit of having anyone who understands it. No one can explain it. No one can explain what they were thinking when they wrote it. No one can explain what they expect it to do. Every choice made in writing software is a choice not to do things in a different way. And there will be no one who can explain why they made this choice, and not those others. In part because it wasn’t even a decision that was made. It was a probability that was realized.

This post also has a really good explanation of how large language models work.

There may be real, productive uses for these kinds of tools. There may be ways to build and deploy them ethically and sustainably. But that’s not the situation with the instances we have. AI, as it’s been built today, is a tool to sell out our collective futures in order to enrich already wealthy people. They like to frame it as being akin to nuclear science. But we should really see it as being more like fossil fuels.

CSS { In Real Life } | Stop Using AI-Generated Images

I have yet to meet anyone who wants to hang AI art on their walls (although I fully expect to see it in hotel chains).

Statement on Generative AI | Ben Myers

I endorse this statement.

“If It Sounds Like Sci-Fi, It Probably Is”

Emily M. Bender:

I dislike the term because “artificial intelligence” suggests that there’s more going on than there is, that these things are autonomous thinking entities rather than tools and simply kinds of automation. If we focus on them as autonomous thinking entities or we spin out that fantasy, it is easier to lose track of the people in the picture, both the people who should be accountable for what the systems are doing and the people whose labor and data are being exploited to create them in the first place.

Alternative terms:

• Stochastic parrots
• Spicy autocomplete
• Mad Libs
• Magic Eight Ball

And this is worth shouting from the rooftops:

The threat is not the generative “AI” itself. It’s the way that management might choose to use it.

Jeepers Frigging Cripes Crypto and NFTs are so stupid and dumb and bad and I can’t even. I’m out. Goodbye. Burn it down please. - Chris Coyier

Literally every experience I have in this world is gross at best and criminally evil at worst. Who it benefits that actually needs the benfefit is vanishingly few.

Here are some rhetorical questions from Chris:

How many years into this are we with no practical use cases for the world? How many resources have to be burned before this is seen?

The stupidity of AI | The Guardian

A great piece by James, adapted from the new edition of his book New Dark Age.

The lesson of the current wave of “artificial” “intelligence”, I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished. We deserve better from the tools we use, the media we consume and the communities we live within, and we will only get what we deserve when we are capable of participating in them fully. And don’t be intimidated by them either – they’re really not that complicated. As the science-fiction legend Ursula K Le Guin wrote: “Technology is what we can learn to do.”

The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger

Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

This resonates:

I’m not alone in believing in the fundamental technical uselessness of blockchains. There are tens of thousands of other people in the largest tech companies in the world that thanklessly push their organizations away from crypto adoption every day. The crypto asset bubble is perhaps the most divisive topic in tech of our era and possibly ever to exist in our field. It’s a scary but essential truth to realise that normal software engineers like us are an integral part of society’s immune system against the enormous moral hazard of technology-hyped asset bubbles metastasizing into systemic risk.

The Non-Innovation of Cryptocurrency

There is zero evidence that crypto is creating any technical innovation connected to the larger economy, and a strong preponderance of evidence it is a net drain on society by circumventing the rule of law, facilitating tax evasion, environmental devastation, enabling widespread extortion through ransomware and incentivizing an increasingly frothy ecosystem of scams to defraud the public. Nothing of value would be lost by a blanket cryptocurrency ban.

Remote to who? A working letter

The idea that your job should be the primary source of meaning in your life is an elaborately made trap, propped up across industries, designed to make you a loyal worker who uses the bulk of their intellectual and creative capacity to further their own career.

Creative Good: Why I’m losing faith in UX

Increasingly, I think UX doesn’t live up to its original meaning of “user experience.” Instead, much of the discpline today, as it’s practiced in Big Tech firms, is better described by a new name.

UX is now “user exploitation.”

ongoing by Tim Bray · Bye, Amazon

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

Fair play, Tim Bray!

The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Failing to distinguish between a tractor trailer and the bright white sky | booktwo.org

James talks about automation and understanding.

Just because a technology – whether it’s autonomous vehicles, satellite communications, or the internet – has been captured by capital and turned against the populace, doesn’t mean it does not retain a seed of utopian possibility.

Against Sharing | Jacobin

But under the guise of innovation and progress, companies are stripping away worker protections, pushing down wages, and flouting government regulations. At its core, the sharing economy is a scheme to shift risk from companies to workers, discourage labor organizing, and ensure that capitalists can reap huge profits with low fixed costs.

There’s nothing innovative or new about this business model. Uber is just capitalism, in its most naked form.

Ian Bogost - Gamification is Bullshit

This is not as linkbaity as the title might suggest.

I’ve suggested the term “exploitationware” as a more accurate name for gamification’s true purpose…