Neil Turkewitz

The most depressing definition of books in history, c/o ISBNdb: “The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf. Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.” Boo…

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop 404media.co

It starts like this…& it builds. 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 “If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality & its creation of disinformation on a scale unpreceden…

‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom theguardian.com

“I work at VGT3 here in Vegas, & all we do is scan books. Some are assigned to cut books, & others go to receive where they get books & scan the bar codes. We didn't have rates, but now we do, but it's not stressful.” —Amazon employee wrote on a forum for Amazon workers Glad i…

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility 404media.co

“GenAI as it currently exists cannot easily replace human beings, because it cannot manifest human intelligence. That won’t stop it, however, from destabilizing society in ways more profound than we might even imagine.” @zey.bsky.social We need to focus less on the frontier & …

Opinion | Why A.I. Won’t Steal All Our Jobs - The New York Times nytimes.com

“It’s literally the gulag. You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." Every once in awhile, the clouds part & provide perfect moments of clarity. This description of life at Meta perfectly mirrors life…

‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess wired.com

“Our goal has always been to help people create original new music.” —Suno But that goal is impossible. AI models are wholly dependent on their training data, incapable of generating something “original.” A novel remix of the past perhaps, but always literally derivative. @jas…

Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius 404media.co

“All of the speculation and hype around A.I. is hiding the fact that the technology isn’t just large language models or agents or data centers. It is the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological in…

nytimes.com

It’d be great if everyone interested in launching some AI project first asked themselves—would this be acceptable without the AI angle? The conflation of AI & Progress obscures judgment & erases necessary interrogation of processes. Also, can everyone stop with OPT-OUTS? That’…

Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI 404media.co

Hey @nytimes.com, can we meet privately over at camera 2? Listen, I know you need to attract eyeballs, & “rogue actors” are like catnip to the public, but calling AI systems “rogue” is a dereliction of duty. They’re not rogue—they’re operating w/in the poorly set boundaries/in…

nytimes.com

“The fact that someone could ruin our reputation by dropping this cringe garbage under our name is insanely disheartening & speaks volumes about distribution & streaming services that allow this to happen.” —Allison, Lathe of Heaven’s ACTUAL vocalist 🙏🏼 @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.so…

I Hijacked a Real Artist's Spotify with AI Music. It Was Disturbingly Easy 404media.co

“Like most Silicon Valley ‘utopian’ essays, to believe that any of this is going to go how Zuckerberg suggests it will requires one to have been recently concussed or to willfully ignore how this technology is being used today.” @jasonkoebler.bsky.social @404media.co

Mark Zuckerberg Posts Deranged 6,500-Word Essay About Giving Everyone AI Superintelligence 404media.co

“Hinojosa recently told the New York Times, who, like normal, had fully missed the point. “There is one fight,” she added, referring to the people vs the oligarchs. Now, Democrats need to govern like it.” @jasonkoebler.bsky.social #ReasonsToBeCheerfulPartlll www.404media.co/th…

‘There Is One Fight’: American Voters Reject Tech Oligarchy 404media.co

BREAKING NEWS My plea to everyone who’s recently become aware of the dangers of inadequately regulated AI—please understand that the harms aren’t future hypotheticals at some virtual frontier. They’re here & now. If we stopped AI in its tracks, we wouldn’t have resolved AI’s threat to our humanity.

This screenshot of yesterday’s @nytimes.com tech newsletter is a wonderful illustration of the meaningless of “AI” & how this meaningless can lead to a nonsensical debate about its utility. We need to just start talking about the automation of certain functionality. AI is many things, not A thing.

“Amount of 💰 that campaigns & PAC’s have spent on ads generated by AI for the midterm elections: $137 million Share of those campaign ads produced by Republican campaigns or Republican-aligned PAC’s: more than 80% # of federal laws passed to regulate the development of AI technology: 0” NY Times

No AI was used in the creation of this image. I hope you enjoy it.

It doesn’t get better than this— a company advertising “REAL AI MODELS.” So don’t get fooled by those artificial AI models. Hold out for the real thing. And have a Coke.

“The greatest danger, though, isn’t AI’s ability to lie. It’s the ability to persuade.” Anthony Vinci @nytopinion.nytimes.com But AI actually doesn’t lie. It’s truth agnostic, burying truth in irrelevance. Vinci curiously refers to bad actors using AI. But what if the AI companies are the bad guys?

In the immortal words of Buckaroo Banzai, wherever you go, there you are. With AI, we are nowhere. There are better places.

A visual representation of the AI resistance we’ve seen from college graduates these past weeks.

The world offers endless opportunities. Why would anyone abandon their agency and let AI chart their path based on inferences drawn from statistical probabilities? Find your own beach…metaphorically, & possibly literally too.

In today’s TechScape newsletter, @theguardian.com reports that OpenAI’s Greg Brockman said that with the introduction of their new model, “It’s not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era.” To my ear, this is even worse than saying AGI is here. He declares his own reasonableness! 🤬