aifaq.wtf

I feel like we've heard this a thousand times, but it's going to keep being a problem. Story here.

Here’s our guide to their favorite strategies for asking a chatbot to help with explaining, writing and brainstorming. Just select a topic and follow along.

It's very, very interactive (to the detriment of casual experience, I think), but it does a great job showing you examples of how different types of prompts might affect the output.

Translation is the one part of AI tooling that I'm most pessimistic about. While it could be used to really increase access to information, it's really just going to be used as an outlet for low-quality content that's disrespectful to the audience and anchors English even further as the language of the internet.

According to Betteridge's law of headlines:

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

Gannett was publishing AI-generated sports stories in its local markets, and they were awful. Go read the story, it gives you plenty of threads to pull at to find examples of failure.

Companies like Narrative Science and tools like Heliograf were the historical harbingers of this trend, but all of their auto-generated content was based on templates.

For example, we could write a sentence about who won by comparing the scores of the two teams:

[if team1_score > team2_score]
  [team1_name] beat [team2_name] [team1_score] to [team2_score].
[else]
  [team2_name] beat [team1_name] [team2_score] to [team1_score].

That's 100% fake code, but the idea is that everything was about filling in the blanks, not about generating novel content. With the modern batch of generative AI tools, you're turning the AI loose on the data and letting it figure out what's important and what's not, along with exactly how to phrase everything.

With the unpredictable nature of these tools, it's not a terribly good idea, and I'm certain we'll continue to see more screw-ups of this sort.

We perfected the technology years ago!! Why can't we just have templates back!!

This "we know the image is real" stuff is such a joke for ten thousand reasons. Read the comments to hopefully potentially maybe be converted to team "this concept is a waste of time."

It's a little in the weeds of how these tools work, but generative AI tools are based on "tokens," individual units of text or information. Usually the tokens are developed organically by the model itself, but in this case, the tokens were developed by the team at Baichuan, and they're very revealing of the model's... biases? I don't think I'd call them a bias, just... a reflection... of... something.

Read the responses.

A loooong discussion about whether AI is a wealth concentrator or a distributor. Original link to (only slightly related) blog post here, top comment:

AI will have on artists the same impact that Spotify had on the music industry that is, it will kill any revenue flow for anyone outside of the publishers and big artists/players.

Running models locally is wild! I've seen people talk about it plenty before, but the video really sold it to me.

I need to go buy a fancier mac! I've always prided myself on using old cheap Airs buuuuut maybe that era is over.

404 is a newly-founded outlet by former members of VICE's Motherboard and it is wild and amazing.