Documentation for GPTBot - OpenAI API
Now that the horse has bolted—and ransacked the web—you can shut the barn door:
To disallow GPTBot to access your site you can add the GPTBot to your site’s robots.txt:
User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: /
Link tags: bot
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Pulling my site from Google over AI training – Tracy Durnell
I’m not down with Google swallowing everything posted on the internet to train their generative AI models.
A principled approach to evolving choice and control for web content
This would mean a lot more if it happened before the wholesale harvesting of everyone’s work.
But I’m sure Google will put a mighty fine lock on that stable door that the horse bolted from.
The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con
Taken together, these flaws make LLMs look less like an information technology and more like a modern mechanisation of the psychic hotline.
Delegating your decision-making, ranking, assessment, strategising, analysis, or any other form of reasoning to a chatbot becomes the functional equivalent to phoning a psychic for advice.
Imagine Google or a major tech company trying to fix their search engine by adding a psychic hotline to their front page? That’s what they’re doing with Bard.
Why Chatbots Are Not the Future by Amelia Wattenberger
Of course, users can learn over time what prompts work well and which don’t, but the burden to learn what works still lies with every single user. When it could instead be baked into the interface.
LukeW | Ask LukeW: New Ways into Web Content
I like how Luke is using a large language model to make a chat interface for his own content.
This is the exact opposite of how grifters are selling the benefits of machine learning (“Generate copious amounts of new content instantly!”) and instead builds on over twenty years of thoughtful human-made writing.
Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Incident Database
The AI Incident Database is dedicated to indexing the collective history of harms or near harms realized in the real world by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems.
We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics
There’s a time for linguistics, and there’s a time for grabbing the general public by the shoulders and shouting “It lies! The computer lies to you! Don’t trust anything it says!”
Why Not Mars (Idle Words)
I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.
Maciej lays out the case against a crewed mission to Mars.
Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense. But you can’t lie your way to Mars, no matter how sincerely you believe in what you’re doing.
And don’t skip the footnotes:
Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.
Mona Sans & Hubot Sans
Two new lovely open source variable fonts from Github.
Roboto … But Make It Flex - Material Design
This version of Roboto from Font Bureau is a very variable font indeed.
Spear phishing with Slackbot for fun and profit – Eric Bailey
Sneaky social engineering in Slack.
things are a little crazy rn
Adversarial chatbots engaged in an endless back-and-forth:
This piece simulates scheduling hell by generating infinite & unique combinations of meeting conflicts between two friends.
My chatbot is dead · Why yours should probably be too · Adrian Z
The upside to being a terrible procrastinator is that certain items on my to-do list, like, say, “build a chatbot”, will—given enough time—literally take care of themselves.
I ultimately feel like it has slowly turned into a fad. I got fooled by the trend, and as a by-product became part of the trend itself.
Bottom Navigation Pattern On Mobile Web Pages: A Better Alternative? — Smashing Magazine
Making the case for moving your navigation to the bottom of the screen on mobile:
Phones are getting bigger, and some parts of the screen are easier to interact with than others. Having the hamburger menu at the top provides too big of an interaction cost, and we have a large number of amazing mobile app designs that utilize the bottom part of the screen. Maybe it’s time for the web design world to start using these ideas on websites as well?
Gendered AI: Gender Presentation and Distributions in sci-fi AI | Sci-fi interfaces
Thorough (and grim) research from Chris.
Tellart | Design Nonfiction
An online documentary series featuring interviews with smart people about the changing role of design.
As technology becomes more complex and opaque, how will we as designers understand its potential, do hands-on work, translate it into forms people can understand and use, and lead meaningful conversations with manufacturers and policymakers about its downstream implications? We are entering a new technology landscape shaped by artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and synthetic biology.
So far there’s Kevin Slavin, Molly Wright Steenson, and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, with more to come from the likes of Matt Jones, Anab Jain, Dan Hill, and many, many more.
Malicious AI Report
Well, this an interesting format experiment—the latest Black Mirror just dropped, and it’s a PDF.
WALL·E | Typeset In The Future
A deep dive into Pixar’s sci-fi masterpiece, featuring entertaining detours to communist propaganda and Disney theme parks.
Tweeting for 10,000 Years: An Experiment in Autonomous Software — Brandur Leach
Taking the idea of the Clock of the Long Now and applying it to a twitterbot:
Software may not be as well suited as a finely engineered clock to operate on these sorts of geological scales, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to put some of the 10,000 year clock’s design principles to work.
The bot will almost certainly fall foul of Twitter’s API changes long before the next tweet-chime is due, but it’s still fascinating to see the clock’s principles applied to software: longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability.
Software tends to stay in operation longer than we think it will when we first wrote it, and the wearing effects of entropy within it and its ecosystem often take their toll more quickly and more destructively than we could imagine. You don’t need to be thinking on a scale of 10,000 years to make applying these principles a good idea.