Wow - the continued trend of AI disasters leaves me less and less surprised...
In honour of this utter failure, I've unpaywalled "The Reading Rebellion" for those of you who would like an actual summer reading list, vetted, recommended by real readers, written by real authors, divided into different time periods of publication, and downloadable as pdf:
Librarians are a good bet if you really want reliable recommendations for reading, at any time, not just summer. They will even discuss your likes, dislikes and willingness or not to try something new or different.
And there's always John Warner, the Biblioracle: tell him the most recent novels you've enjoyed and he'll recommend the next book you'll also love. And he does it year round. (Not many people take him up on the offer, but his recommendations are interesting to read!)
This doesn't diminish your points about AI, but the summer reading list the Sun-Times published was apparently a syndicated insert that was sold to other newspapers as well, and not content created by the Sun-Times. I can imagine them including something like that without vetting it - but I bet they''ll vet anything and everything from now on.
I am not a Luddite. I worked in tech for nearly forty years, yet what is happening with AI scares the holy sh*t out of me. AI-generated music, art, books, and more are syphoning off income from actual musicians, artists and writers. As Ted pointed out, the owners of the large AI databases are using copyrighted works without permission to train their systems. (One of my books was used for AI training without my permission.) Music services like Spotify are including AI-generated music in playlists to effectively syphon off royalties from actual musicians, who are already paid miniscule sums for their music. We are already being bombarded with fake news and false information, and this is making the problem far worse.
Recently-retired software engineer here and I totally agree. There's also the depressing fact that people are OK with willingly using this crap, despite the environmental horrors.
And in tech, I've seen an ad (IBM, I think) where an engineer is happily using an AI assistant to "help" him generate a pile of code. Isn't the _making_ of the thing the fun part? It sure was for me.
One of the most mind-teasingly entertaining books ever written consisted of reviews of nonexistent books: A Perfect Vacuum by Polish sci-fi author Stanislaus Lem. It appeared in English translation in the 1970s and is worth finding. Alas, while Lem was working quite intentionally to create his masterpiece, it seems our AI friends as well as the editors at the Sun Times were not.
The story gets worse. Yesterday the headline that greeted me in the online morning edition of the Sun-Times was the following:
Good morning, Chicago. The Chicago-porn pope was installed as the Catholic Church's first pontiff from the U.S. — and for those who knew him here, "It's so personal."
A porn pope??!! Unintentional AI humor? I confess my typing is so bad that's the kind of mistake I would make. And I was a newspaper copy editor for a number of years.
"Two sets of eyes check every line" was my old chief editor's mantra, and this is why!
(I don't think porn/born confusion is the sort of mistake an AI would make... though hoovering up a typographical error and confidently reproducing it certainly is)
Gee, newspapers never made mistakes in the past, I just don't get this. They always sent their mistakes in to the Columbia Journalism Review comics page in lieu of publishing. Copy editors always caught the mistakes, luckily. Or else a pressman caught them on the first edition and yelled at the newsroom...
Roger that, and you're hired! How soon can you make it to the newsroom? We have until 11pm to get the first edition out. We need experienced people like you.
Geez, I’d feel annoyed if the radio show I was listening to was prerecorded and didn’t know, but to have a AI generated DJ without listeners knowing is really a violation of trust.
I interned in college at a radio station, and they do exactly this. For set DJs who host for a specific block, it's not pre-scripted. But I would watch as they would load a pre-recorded show, then cut the audio, and digitally splice in their own commercials at set breaks between segments for the evening or late-night blocks. It was an easy way to have content that they didn't have to come up with, especially since they were a small station with a small budget. Because frankly, they all had families and no one wanted to get paid peanuts for the graveyard shift.
A tremendous amount of DJ breaks on commercial radio are voicetracked or recorded ahead of time. Often by people not even living in the cares served by the station
Yes, Egyptologists have been excavating the workers' living area at Giza for years now. They were well paid/fed and received good medical care (evidence found from graves of cared-for and healed broken bones, for example).
I label music I produce online with the following; "All music on this and any jazzCittern site is 100% human composed and handmade by real live musicians. Thanks for listening!" Maybe not a solution, but t's a grassroots start, anyway, eh?
"The men who control this transformative technology wield god-like power, but they are not God. They are only men, whose arrogance, lack of wisdom and humility is taking the world down a dark path. Increasingly, by their own definitions and words, their unchecked and unaccountable power is resembling a cult."
- Maria Ressa (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate journalist)
Jubilee of the World of Communications | January 2025
That cult, basically the WEF types and their closest associates, continues to enrich themselves with AI while the rest of us circle the drain. I guess they too may end up on that dark path but too many of us won't survive to witness this
Restraint won't come from legislation. Altman and Elon own the government. It will come, and to a limited extent it's already coming, from public disgust causing business losses. People were abandoning these institutions before the AI invasion. AI will erode profits even more.
On what planet does a newspaper editor pass a booklist generated by AI? And WHY? It’s not that hard to look at publisher catalogs & see forthcoming titles. If the book section is doing this, what other sections of CST are produced by AI & therefore totally nonsensical? And what other”news”papers are engaging in similar dishonesty?
What an alarming essay. Where do we go from here? Why is there a new story every day about professionals in positions of power who somehow didn’t get the memo that AI makes stuff up?
What if...the "light" side of the force is making AI look so stupid to aid public shaming and causing people to want the real deal more and more?
What if AI is not created to make money by people who are already ultra billionaires, but mainly to amplify the chaotic status of the world?
The negative sides of this are self evident The positive byproduct is that, when you cannot rely on any media, you are forced to develop your intuition, going inward.
Anyway, since maybe we won't be seeing a "Created with AI" logo soon, I asked a calligrapher friend to create an "AI Free" logo so that I can place it on my album covers. If anyone wants to use it, just ask and when it's ready I'll share it.
I was reading a transcript of an interview Rod Dreher was quoting on the coming 1,000 foot wave that is the AI tsunami. In it, is was discussing how the middle class is going to be badly hollowed out, since even the most basic, low-level tier work will be given to the programs to be completed. It was quite doom and gloom.
My husband works for a large corporation that is pouring millions into training and finessing AI technology to streamline their processes. We discussed it yesterday, but every year, when they run financial predictions and reports for the yearly and quarterly meetings, there are always major errors. Major errors that require humans to go through, sometimes line by line, to correct and double check. He is not in favor of using the tools. No matter how powerful they are, they still make unbelievably stupid errors.
Even with, perhaps the hollowing out and layoffs of many jobs, you're still going to need human regulators to go through and double-check the AI's work. Not sure how many people that will retain, but it's no where near as trustworthy and foolproof as the hype men want you to believe it is.
AI is going to destroy us, not with killer robots, no by creating endless and perfectly incompetent artificial bureaucrats in large corporate and government organizations. You will be able to get nothing done and there will be no humans to help. The old DMV will seem quaint and delightful by comparison. Welcome to kafkaesque artificial hell.
Wow - the continued trend of AI disasters leaves me less and less surprised...
In honour of this utter failure, I've unpaywalled "The Reading Rebellion" for those of you who would like an actual summer reading list, vetted, recommended by real readers, written by real authors, divided into different time periods of publication, and downloadable as pdf:
https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/the-reading-rebellion-one-book-two
Librarians are a good bet if you really want reliable recommendations for reading, at any time, not just summer. They will even discuss your likes, dislikes and willingness or not to try something new or different.
And there's always John Warner, the Biblioracle: tell him the most recent novels you've enjoyed and he'll recommend the next book you'll also love. And he does it year round. (Not many people take him up on the offer, but his recommendations are interesting to read!)
Thank you, Nicolas.
Bless you Ruth!
This doesn't diminish your points about AI, but the summer reading list the Sun-Times published was apparently a syndicated insert that was sold to other newspapers as well, and not content created by the Sun-Times. I can imagine them including something like that without vetting it - but I bet they''ll vet anything and everything from now on.
Theyll have an ai vetting bot installed pronto
Money before responsibility - nothing new here other than the vehicle.
I sure hope they will (vet anything and everything from now on).
They might need to actually hire another (competent, experienced) editor to do that job, as thinly stretched as their editorial staff are these days.
That would buck a popular trend.
I am not a Luddite. I worked in tech for nearly forty years, yet what is happening with AI scares the holy sh*t out of me. AI-generated music, art, books, and more are syphoning off income from actual musicians, artists and writers. As Ted pointed out, the owners of the large AI databases are using copyrighted works without permission to train their systems. (One of my books was used for AI training without my permission.) Music services like Spotify are including AI-generated music in playlists to effectively syphon off royalties from actual musicians, who are already paid miniscule sums for their music. We are already being bombarded with fake news and false information, and this is making the problem far worse.
Recently-retired software engineer here and I totally agree. There's also the depressing fact that people are OK with willingly using this crap, despite the environmental horrors.
And in tech, I've seen an ad (IBM, I think) where an engineer is happily using an AI assistant to "help" him generate a pile of code. Isn't the _making_ of the thing the fun part? It sure was for me.
YES!
One of the most mind-teasingly entertaining books ever written consisted of reviews of nonexistent books: A Perfect Vacuum by Polish sci-fi author Stanislaus Lem. It appeared in English translation in the 1970s and is worth finding. Alas, while Lem was working quite intentionally to create his masterpiece, it seems our AI friends as well as the editors at the Sun Times were not.
"Imaginary Magnitude" was another book by Łem on AI.
Oh my... I wonder whether LLMs were trained on Lem's work too, and now believe that such books & authors really exist?
Seems likely.
The story gets worse. Yesterday the headline that greeted me in the online morning edition of the Sun-Times was the following:
Good morning, Chicago. The Chicago-porn pope was installed as the Catholic Church's first pontiff from the U.S. — and for those who knew him here, "It's so personal."
A porn pope??!! Unintentional AI humor? I confess my typing is so bad that's the kind of mistake I would make. And I was a newspaper copy editor for a number of years.
"Two sets of eyes check every line" was my old chief editor's mantra, and this is why!
(I don't think porn/born confusion is the sort of mistake an AI would make... though hoovering up a typographical error and confidently reproducing it certainly is)
Oh! Born! I couldn't even think of what the correct headline was, because I was so taken aback.
Are you sure that wasn't the other Chicago paper, The Onion, you were reading?
Maybe the DOGE ate the copy editors and replaced them with A.I. FUNctionality?
Time to bring back the City News Bureau!
Mike Royko!
John Belushi!
It's shenanigans all the way down...
The Sun-Times hardly qualifies as a major newspaper anymore. It will be out of business soon.
For serious?
For serious. I did a screen shot. They published a correction later, not repeating the original error, only showing the corrected text.
Gee, newspapers never made mistakes in the past, I just don't get this. They always sent their mistakes in to the Columbia Journalism Review comics page in lieu of publishing. Copy editors always caught the mistakes, luckily. Or else a pressman caught them on the first edition and yelled at the newsroom...
Christ the editor took a day off and they all look like fools now. This shit needs to be regulated yesterday.
Not religious but in nearly 80 years never realised Christ was an editor. Jesus, I learn something new every day.
Commas are so important, don't you think?
Roger that, and you're hired! How soon can you make it to the newsroom? We have until 11pm to get the first edition out. We need experienced people like you.
Y? Mistakes are be-ing, made///////
But not "enough," yet, (haha)
Can, u type ?
,also, are you "good" ,with, compu-t-ers?
'iyhytkutliuhjhgiy;oh.kjh/iuoiu
jg,gltliyyhgg.h.kh.kh.kh.hkh
,huh.ughgilyug.kku;ouooiy
303030303030303030303030
Comma-n over! Free pizza.
"Do not reply, this is an Auto-Generated message."
"Do not reply, this is an Auto-Generated message."
"Do not reply, this is an Auto-Generated message."
"Do not reply, this is an Auto-Generated message."
HAHAHA ‼️🤣
My first out-loud laugh of the day!
Thank you 😁
Geez, I’d feel annoyed if the radio show I was listening to was prerecorded and didn’t know, but to have a AI generated DJ without listeners knowing is really a violation of trust.
I interned in college at a radio station, and they do exactly this. For set DJs who host for a specific block, it's not pre-scripted. But I would watch as they would load a pre-recorded show, then cut the audio, and digitally splice in their own commercials at set breaks between segments for the evening or late-night blocks. It was an easy way to have content that they didn't have to come up with, especially since they were a small station with a small budget. Because frankly, they all had families and no one wanted to get paid peanuts for the graveyard shift.
A tremendous amount of DJ breaks on commercial radio are voicetracked or recorded ahead of time. Often by people not even living in the cares served by the station
I'm pretty sure I recall reading that most Egyptian workers on ancient monuments were paid, not slaves. But maybe we should confirm this with Chatgpt
Yes, Egyptologists have been excavating the workers' living area at Giza for years now. They were well paid/fed and received good medical care (evidence found from graves of cared-for and healed broken bones, for example).
I label music I produce online with the following; "All music on this and any jazzCittern site is 100% human composed and handmade by real live musicians. Thanks for listening!" Maybe not a solution, but t's a grassroots start, anyway, eh?
I’ve started doing something similar: #human-created music
#not AI
It’s only a little statement but I wish I’d see more of it.
AI music is soulless.
"TECHNOLOGY REWARDS LIES"
"The men who control this transformative technology wield god-like power, but they are not God. They are only men, whose arrogance, lack of wisdom and humility is taking the world down a dark path. Increasingly, by their own definitions and words, their unchecked and unaccountable power is resembling a cult."
- Maria Ressa (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate journalist)
Jubilee of the World of Communications | January 2025
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2025-01/jubilee-of-the-world-of-communications-maria-ressa.html
That cult, basically the WEF types and their closest associates, continues to enrich themselves with AI while the rest of us circle the drain. I guess they too may end up on that dark path but too many of us won't survive to witness this
Restraint won't come from legislation. Altman and Elon own the government. It will come, and to a limited extent it's already coming, from public disgust causing business losses. People were abandoning these institutions before the AI invasion. AI will erode profits even more.
On what planet does a newspaper editor pass a booklist generated by AI? And WHY? It’s not that hard to look at publisher catalogs & see forthcoming titles. If the book section is doing this, what other sections of CST are produced by AI & therefore totally nonsensical? And what other”news”papers are engaging in similar dishonesty?
What an alarming essay. Where do we go from here? Why is there a new story every day about professionals in positions of power who somehow didn’t get the memo that AI makes stuff up?
Excellent piece. Lecter, not Lechter--he probably ate the h out of his last name.
What if...the "light" side of the force is making AI look so stupid to aid public shaming and causing people to want the real deal more and more?
What if AI is not created to make money by people who are already ultra billionaires, but mainly to amplify the chaotic status of the world?
The negative sides of this are self evident The positive byproduct is that, when you cannot rely on any media, you are forced to develop your intuition, going inward.
Anyway, since maybe we won't be seeing a "Created with AI" logo soon, I asked a calligrapher friend to create an "AI Free" logo so that I can place it on my album covers. If anyone wants to use it, just ask and when it's ready I'll share it.
I was reading a transcript of an interview Rod Dreher was quoting on the coming 1,000 foot wave that is the AI tsunami. In it, is was discussing how the middle class is going to be badly hollowed out, since even the most basic, low-level tier work will be given to the programs to be completed. It was quite doom and gloom.
My husband works for a large corporation that is pouring millions into training and finessing AI technology to streamline their processes. We discussed it yesterday, but every year, when they run financial predictions and reports for the yearly and quarterly meetings, there are always major errors. Major errors that require humans to go through, sometimes line by line, to correct and double check. He is not in favor of using the tools. No matter how powerful they are, they still make unbelievably stupid errors.
Even with, perhaps the hollowing out and layoffs of many jobs, you're still going to need human regulators to go through and double-check the AI's work. Not sure how many people that will retain, but it's no where near as trustworthy and foolproof as the hype men want you to believe it is.
AI is going to destroy us, not with killer robots, no by creating endless and perfectly incompetent artificial bureaucrats in large corporate and government organizations. You will be able to get nothing done and there will be no humans to help. The old DMV will seem quaint and delightful by comparison. Welcome to kafkaesque artificial hell.
Hoping the pushback is coming.