Statement on Generative AI | Ben Myers
I endorse this statement.
Link tags: ua
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Tailwind, and the death of web craftsmanship
CSS is better now. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than its ever been, and it’s better than tailwind. Give it another try. Don’t reach for big globs of libraries to paper over the issues you think it has.
This is why it’s so important to re-evaluate technology decisions.
I’ve seen people, lead and principal engineers, who refuse to learn modern JS, insisting that since it was bad in 2006 its bad today. Worse still is some of these people have used their leadership positions to prevent the use of modern JS.
We’re still not innovating with AI-generated UI.
It looks like it will be a great tool for prototyping. A tool to help developers that don’t have experience with CSS and layout to have a starting point. As someone who spent some time building smoke and mirrors prototypes for UX research, I welcome tools like this.
What concerns me is the assertion that this is production-grade code when it simply is not.
Squish Meets Structure: Designing with Language Models
The slides and transcript from a great talk by Maggie Appleton, including this perfect description of the vibes we get from large language models:
It feels like they’re either geniuses playing dumb or dumb machines playing genius, but we don’t know which.
Making Large Language Models work for you
Another great talk from Simon that explains large language models in a hype-free way.
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: /
“If It Sounds Like Sci-Fi, It Probably Is”
Emily M. Bender:
I dislike the term because “artificial intelligence” suggests that there’s more going on than there is, that these things are autonomous thinking entities rather than tools and simply kinds of automation. If we focus on them as autonomous thinking entities or we spin out that fantasy, it is easier to lose track of the people in the picture, both the people who should be accountable for what the systems are doing and the people whose labor and data are being exploited to create them in the first place.
Alternative terms:
- Stochastic parrots
- Spicy autocomplete
- Mad Libs
- Magic Eight Ball
And this is worth shouting from the rooftops:
The threat is not the generative “AI” itself. It’s the way that management might choose to use it.
Catching up on the weird world of LLMs
This is a really clear, practical, level-headed explanatory talk from Simon. You can read the transcript or watch the video.
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.
Fruit Of The Poisonous LLaMA? – Terence Eden’s Blog
I want to live in a future where Artificial Intelligences can relieve humans of the drudgery of labour. But I don’t want to live in a future which is built by ripping-off people against their will.
How to report better on artificial intelligence - Columbia Journalism Review
- Be skeptical of PR hype
- Question the training data
- Evaluate the model
- Consider downstream harms
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.
Word Count 53: The state of AI and the Goodreads fiasco
Could the tsunami of AI shite turn out to be a flash flood? Might the models rapidly degrade into uselessness or soon be sued or blocked out of existence? Will users rebel as their experience of the internet is degraded?
In my most optimistic moments, I find myself hoping that the whole AI edifice will come tumbling down as tools disintegrate, people realise how unreliable they are, and how valuable human-generated and curated information really is. But it’s not a safe bet.
Introducing AI Help: Your Trusted Companion for Web Development | MDN Blog
As part of this pointless push, an “AI explain” button appeared on MDN articles. This terrible idea actually got pushed to production (bypassing the usual deploy steps) where it lasted less than a day.
You can read the havoc it wreaked in the short term. We’ll find out how much long-term damage it has done to trust in Mozilla and MDN.
This may be the worst use of a large language model I’ve seen since synthentic users (if you click that link, no it’s not a joke: “user research without the users” is what they’re actually proposing).
XML is the future - by Nobody has time for Python
I learned that geeks think they are rational beings, while they are completely influenced by buzz, marketing, and their emotions. Even more so than the average person, because they believe they are less susceptible to it than normies, so they have a blind spot.
In new AI hype frenzy, tech is applying the label to everything now
Today’s AI promoters are trying to have it both ways: They insist that AI is crossing a profound boundary into untrodden territory with unfathomable risks. But they also define AI so broadly as to include almost any large-scale, statistically-driven computer program.
Under this definition, everything from the Google search engine to the iPhone’s face-recognition unlocking tool to the Facebook newsfeed algorithm is already “AI-driven” — and has been for years.
A prayer wheel for capitalism
Why “AI” won’t help you get past the blank page in any meaningful way:
The value in writing lies in what we discover while writing.
Will GPT models choke on their own exhaust? | Light Blue Touchpaper
There’s a general consensus that large language models are going to get better and better. But what if this as good as it gets …before the snake eats its own tail?
The tails of the original content distribution disappear. Within a few generations, text becomes garbage, as Gaussian distributions converge and may even become delta functions. We call this effect model collapse.
Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale.