One of the main ways that "gen AI" bullshit and the bullshitters attendant thereto have fucked everything for everyone is that they fully succeeded in their attempts to obfuscate and occult what "AI" means, so now people hate the very concept structure of the term, even down to its far less bad uses - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

wolvendamien.bsky.social • 5 days ago

One of the main ways that "gen AI" bullshit and the bullshitters attendant thereto have fucked everything for everyone is that they fully succeeded in their attempts to obfuscate and occult what "AI" means, so now people hate the very concept structure of the term, even down to its far less bad uses

Comments

wolvendamien.bsky.social•5 days ago

"Machine learning" is not unproblematic in either its principles or its applications but holy fuck it is not the same thing as chatgpt or midjourney

boner.dad•5 days ago

this shit kills me

wolvendamien.bsky.social•5 days ago

"AI" has been an intentional obfuscation & an occultation for a long damn time— it's part of why you always see me put the term in quotes; but there's something worth understanding in & *about* that fact. WHY is it occulted? Who does that serve? And why do we keep falling for it?

More on this here:

wolvendamien.bsky.social•5 days ago

We have to ask these questions & understand their implications, because otherwise we end up w/ the bullshitters & hype merchants doing what they've been doing: controlling the conceptual space of what technology means & is meant to be for.

But we can make better, more intentional systems, together.

wolvendamien.bsky.social•5 days ago

Here:
https://bsky.app/profile/wolvendamien.bsky.social/post/3kic54j37gc2m

wolvendamien.bsky.social•5 days ago

here:
https://bsky.app/profile/wolvendamien.bsky.social/post/3ksq6cqgr7e2p

wolvendamien.bsky.social•5 days ago

here:
https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/111528

ncweaver.skerry-tech.com•5 days ago

In fact I use it a shibboleet: When someone speaks of Machine Learning they are far more likely to know what they are talking about.

wowbaggert.bsky.social•5 days ago

Great (long-ish) blog post that deals with this topic:

Generative AI is a hammer and no one knows what is and isn’t a nail
https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/generative-ai-is-a-hammer-and-no-one-knows-what-is-and-isnt-a-nail-4c7f3f0911aa

Comment image

tmoney2007.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think that all the things that have been rapidly rebranded under the "AI" moniker can pretty easily go back to their original name.

Hopefully we'll get to find out.

michaelcrider.bsky.social•5 days ago

Presenting generative "AI" in the sci-fi sense, as if it thinks like Commander Data instead of a phone keyboard's auto-fill, is one of the most transparent lies of this whole mess. At least to anyone who looks into it for half a heartbeat. But the lie stuck, and people think ChatGPT is magic now.

peterswimm.com•5 days ago

They’ve also done the opposite thing where people think the stuff you need to do to keep it honest doesn’t have to be done anymore on the implementation side which might be the biggest crime

apasek.bsky.social•5 days ago

Haha, I am guilty of this!

agent139.bsky.social•5 days ago

mortenbay.bsky.social•5 days ago

Indeed. Somewhere, John McCarthy is having drinks with Warren McCulloch, and the latter is reciting one of his famous poems with the title "No good deed".

They're also explaining to Marvin Minsky for the umpteenth time that he's not welcome in the club anymore because of that Epstein thing.

tasm1n.bsky.social•5 days ago

for real i was seeing this play out with the content moderation problem https://bsky.app/profile/tasm1n.bsky.social/post/3lhw5jyahpk2o

joshmobley.bsky.social•5 days ago

If the teams behind these gen ai platforms hadn't been so cagey about what they trained on, it might have been a lot less problematic for people in general. Instead, they bred incredible distrust and tightly so.

tmoney2007.bsky.social•5 days ago

They had to be cagey about their training data. They stole a shitload of copyrighted information and didn't want to open themselves up to a million lawsuits before they even got a chance to get off the ground.

joshmobley.bsky.social•5 days ago

Right, they knew what they were doing was wrong and if they got caught, it was over.

mortenbay.bsky.social•5 days ago

This.

I find it helps to tell people what it really is: Automation based on pattern recognition. And that it's the scalability part that makes it powerful, whether that means helpful and/or dangerous.

joshmobley.bsky.social•5 days ago

haha *rightly*

crippledscholar.bsky.social•5 days ago

When chat GPT came out and I quickly realized it was an LLM

And just thought “I’ve already been sexually harassed by one of these” while they presented it as unprecedented

When what was unprecedented was the scale of IP theft used to build it

brentbiglin.com•5 days ago

This literally just came up in a work meeting where we were complaining about AI being all over this strategy map, so we just changed it to "machine learning," which is actually useful and makes sense for the work we do

conorosullyds.bsky.social•5 days ago

Just call it machine learning then. Nobody I talk to connects that to gen AI (most don’t even know what it is)

wolvendamien.bsky.social•5 days ago

yeah, an unfortunately that might have to be the move.