2024-02-19

Items of interest, February 19, 2024

On the enshittification of everything: Melting Down in the AI Summer

The other day, I saw a post on LinkedIn that appeared to be critical of the use of so-called AI in the courtroom, and I Reposted it before reading the original article. That was on me; I acted irresponsibly. When I did read it, it turned out to contain this gem of a sentence:

…hallucination rates range from 69% to 88% in response to specific legal queries for state-of-the-art language models. Moreover, these models often lack self-awareness about their errors and tend to reinforce incorrect legal assumptions and beliefs. These findings raise significant concerns about the reliability of LLMs in legal contexts, underscoring the importance of careful, supervised integration of these AI technologies into legal practice.

To be a truly critical article, what it should have said was

These findings raise significant concerns about the reliability of LLMs in legal contexts, underscoring the importance of not letting this garbage into the courtroom where such hallucinations can have a major impact on people’s lives.

But even outside of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence labs, that statement has rapidly become unthinkable. The same day, a local representative in my birth town excitedly shared a series of posters promoting urban wildlife, all of which were made by a ‘sustainable’ ad agency using so-called AI. Yeah, using a power-hungry, water-devouring technology that also sidelines human photographers and artists sounds very sustainable to me. Also, if you’ve seen the posters, that’s not a rook, that’s not a marten, that bird’s feet are wonky and beneath the slick veneer, the visuals are dull in the way of all AI-generated images, where one looks fine, two look mediocre and a whole series of them looks like gray goo. But they went for that as their first option and for all I know, they never even considered hiring professionals who knew what they were doing.

Not using so-called AI has become unthinkable, but luckily, there are still people willing to think it. “On The Enshittification of Everything! Melting Down in The AI Summer!” collects some examples of where this “We must use this” attitude leaves us, with the degradation of research, art and labor, a lowering of our standards as the users of these things, and the erosion of critical thinking.

Signal boost: Ryan Estrada on Bluesky mentions that a book he was involved in, Occulted “>got on the radar of the shady Book Morality-Rating website that all the book banners use to choose what books to target.

It got the same “teen guidance” rating as Banned Book Club, so this is likely just the beginning.

and that this is not good because the whole point of the book is

that the ability to read challenging texts is what saved [co-writer] Amy’s life. She didn’t know she’d grown up in an abusive UFO Death Cult until she read books that showed her what was wrong and how to escape.

The self-appointed evangelical/MAGA morality police will have blood on its hands, if it doesn’t already (it totally does).

I think I said something about quitting the regular posts of old The Hooded Crow tracks, but honestly now that I’m done with February Album Writing Month (as of February 25, when I hit 14 written and demoed items - a collaboration has since taken me to 15), I’ve got a little time and well, writing new songs this month has done something to me. Songwriting is not just a way to express myself, create new things and be part of a community, it’s also an ongoing dialog with myself. So writing “Enshittified” last summer, and “In the face of the Eschaton” and “The Planet Spins” this February, has made me listen to my older writing with different ears. The Reinder Dijkhuis Punk Album would definitely have to include this track.