i am hearing that ProQuest has been quietly contacting small publishers to see if it can ingest their published output for AI training.
ProQuest has an AI thing now, but it's denied it's training on hosted content ... yet.
if you are, or know, an author who's had a letter of this sort recently, mentioning ProQuest or no, i'd love to know and please tell your friends - email is dgerard@gmail.com
New piece from The Atlantic: The Age of AI Child Abuse is Here, which delves into a large-scale hack of Muah.AI and the large-scale problem of people using AI as a child porn generator.
And now, another personal sidenote, because I cannot stop writing these (this one's thankfully unrelated to the article's main point):
The idea that "[Insert New Tech] Is Inevitable^tm^" (which Unserious Academic interrogated in depth BTW) took a major blow when NFTs crashed and burned in full view of the public eye and got rapidly turned into a pop-culture punchline.
That, I suspect, is helping to fuel the large scale rejection of AI and resistance to its implementation - Silicon Valley's failure to make NFTs a thing has taught people that Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.
[https://x.com/shinboson/status/1846000415793463684?s=46](Roko gets dunked on.)
He had some remarkable tweets a few weeks back about how he was the equal of billionaires or some shit. I wish I had shared it.
Is he some kind of computer fondler irl?
Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn't seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.
Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))
Not a sneer, but an unsurprising development: Bluesky's seeing a surge in users:
As Nina Power was mentioned before, here is an article on a Welsh 'druid'/forger which touches that subject (and Marx) a bit. People might find it an interesting read.
Anti-Woke Druids and Radical Bards - 'What links Welsh 18th century romantic Druid-Bards, gathering around a circle of pebbles in North London, and the contemporary online right?'
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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