Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus @Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net

"We must not arbitrarily array you,
Twilight, as though you were Morning's rising.
We obtain from the oldest painting palettes
the same gestures, the same colors, the same rays
which the healers used to keep you so concealed.

We build up images before you like walls—
already a thousand walls surround you.
And we rush to cloak you with our pious hands,
whenever our hearts see your nakedness."
— Rainer Maria Rilke, 'The Book of Hours,' "The Book of a Monastic Life," Ch. 4, attempted translation by me.

I truly wish #Mastodon did not bomb it with BIPOC during the Twitter migration. #bluesky is becoming a crap show. I can't even invite people here b/c of what they have experienced or heard about others experiencing.

If you ever think your vote doesn’t matter, take a look at what happened in MN. 321 votes was the difference between nothing moving forward and a progressive triumph this session.

Once again it's #TurkeyElection day. Last two weeks was pure mess and Erdoğan did his best to further oppress and silence Kılıçdaroğlu to the point authorities banned him from sending SMS to people for legal reasons while everyone else, including me, were getting Erdoğan propaganda SMS messages from politicians we have no idea how they got our numbers.

It’s going to be an interesting day. As in the saying “may you live in interesting times”.

On this note, I think that we have to deliberately build empathetic, or non-heartless, and respectful, algorithms, that are part of our society and must behave in a social way . Just as we should behave respectfully to the "tools" around us we can build "good" tools. #WisCon46 #RogueCode

Great review of Witch King by @marthawells in the New York Times :) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/books/review/new-science-fiction-fantasy-books.html

To the media: Wow is it a bad look that one old white guy comes out belatedly saying "AI is bad!" and you fawn all over him, while failing to connect with the scholars (mostly not white men) who have been documenting the actual problems with "AI".

>>

6 (!) years ago, @timnitGebru put forward a profound idea for AI research: document your training data. To say she was treated like shit would be putting it lightly. If she had been respected like her male peers were, imagine what a different path AI could have taken.

You could even use Hinton's "realization" as a hook and then pivot to covering the work of and talking with:

Ruha Benjamin
Safiya Noble
Cathy O'Niel
Sasha Costanza-Chock
Brandeis Marshall
Deb Raji
Abeba Birhane
Meredith Whittaker
Karla Ortiz

and of course Timnit Gebru and Meg Mitchell, who were fired by Google over our paper discussing the dangers of large language models (aka, to Hinton "AI").

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A pile of sketches for putting up with the all the Redbubble announcements: https://www.patreon.com/posts/83644032

release the Yellowjackets soundtrack like they *used* to, as a physical copy & a download not just on fucking Spotify you cowards

Martha Wells talks about the conventionial narrative of evil robots who want to take over the world. Ann Leckie and others have pointed out that that idea is used to justify slavery #WisCon46 #RogueCode

@Wolven@ourislandgeorgia.net Yep. They produce something that looks like an answer to things that look like your prompt.

I prompted it to produce text about the effects of alcohol on a sea sponge. Most animals have livers, and liver damage is a common effect of alcohol. So "liver damage" sounds like an answer to questions that sound like what I said.

Sea sponges don't have livers.

It doesn't know that. It just knows that the phrase "liver damage" is associated with the phrase "effects of alcohol."

@Wolven
Someone asked ChatGPT for safety advice:

https://www.makeuseof.com/can-chatgpt-save-your-life-in-the-wilderness/

I am now ready to fight a bear. Thanks, Chat-GPT!

@Wolven I have a friend who used it to help them write a technical document. His response after futzing around for a bit was. "It writes great prose. It sounds amazing but keeps getting the technical details wrong in bs ways that would be believable to someone without expertise in the field"

And I'm all like ... yeah ... sound about right.

I've seen so many stories about anti-LGBTQ right wingers who scream about "grooming" kids but then get arrested for child porn or sexual abuse, that I'm starting to wonder if many of the puritanical citizens of Salem might have been actual witches.

A friend pointed me to a TED talk by a Swedish architect who proposed a massive environmental intervention in Africa -- using bacteria to fix Saharan sand in place to create a 'wall' and so halt desertification -- while freely admitting that he didn't know any of the details and it made me realise: neocolonialism driven by anthropogenic climate change is really going to be a thing.