#AI articles

[homesweetgoodneighbor]

By Loki's lacy underwear, how is this shit even allowed?

Y'all, do your aunt Kami a huge fucking favor and be super careful when reading articles on tips on food storage or even recipes.

I know a lot about food storage, but not everything. I am making candied yams tomorrow, and I couldn't remember if sweet potatoes brown like regular potatoes once peeled and cut. I figured so, but I wanted to make sure because if so, then I can store them in the fridge in water.

First fucking article I got was from The Mama Report and it's so fucking obviously AI generated it makes you feel like you're having a stroke!

For instance:

Sweet potato fries can be stored in the refrigerator for up to three months if they are cut. You will be able to prepare a large meal more effectively if you cut sweet potatoes ahead of time. You should only cut sweet potatoes three to four days before the meal to ensure they are well stored. If you want to cook sweet potatoes ahead of time, they should be cut three months ahead of time.

Y'all.

Seriously.

Do not fucking cut and store sweet potatoes in your fucking fridge and expect them to be good three months later. Freezer, yes, but not your fucking fridge. (If you're going to do freezer, cut and blanche them first. Works better that way.)

And, the fucking repetition! It's an article that shouldn't be more than handful of paragraphs, but it rambles on and on. I got cross-eyed just reading it:

Thawing sweet potatoes in the refrigerator overnight is a good idea, and reheating them in the microwave overnight is a good idea, too. Thawing sweet potatoes in the refrigerator overnight is a good idea, and reheating them in the microwave overnight is a good idea, too.

My darlings, I don't know whether to call this a minor offense but I'm sufficiently horrified by the implications.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BE AWARE AND CAREFUL ABOUT AI GENERATED ARTICLES. BE CAREFUL WITH THEM AT ALL TIMES BECAUSE THEY ARE GOING TO BE USED AS PROPAGANDA IN THE COMING ELECTIONS, BUT BE JUST AS CAREFUL WHEN IT CONCERNS FOOD BECAUSE THAT SHIT COULD FUCKING KILL YOU.

Jesus fucking hell

.

.

---------------------------------------------

And, yes, I did send them a not even polite email, because fucking around with food is one of the things that trips my Pissed Off Hearth Witch Switch. It will probably do nothing, but it is the best I can do until I can figure out how to do more.

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

AKA: How to cut through the AI news reporting PR BS

Link: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/how-to-report-better-on-artificial-intelligence.php This is an excellent article for journalists, and the public alike, to better scrutinise the claims of large AI companies and their models. There’s an awful lot of fawning, non-critical, reporting on this topic and the moment and it’s really pissing me off. We need to hold companies accountable so that we aren’t suckered into making bad decisions based on their public relations department’s claims. 100% a lot of AI progress is highly impressive, and deserves a lot of attention and praise, but we need journalists to cut through to the cold, hard, facts. Hopefully this will help you personally when reading articles and determining whether they’re fan-wank or critical reporting.

[dye-it-rouge-et-noir]

Hello! I come with some good news! In the EU, a law has been passed restricting generative AIs (particularly ones that pose a high risk). I hope other areas in the world follow suit, but this is huge! It'll take a while to be applied as well, though this is still a major win for everyone.

[txttletale]

it's really funny to be upset that tumblr is selling everyone's posts to AI companies tbqh. very much 'the chicken is already in the nugget' here

[reasonsforhope]

"The world's coral reefs are close to 25 percent larger than we thought. By using satellite images, machine learning and on-ground knowledge from a global network of people living and working on coral reefs, we found an extra 64,000 square kilometers (24,700 square miles) of coral reefs – an area the size of Ireland.

That brings the total size of the planet's shallow reefs (meaning 0-20 meters deep) to 348,000 square kilometers – the size of Germany. This figure represents whole coral reef ecosystems, ranging from sandy-bottomed lagoons with a little coral, to coral rubble flats, to living walls of coral.

Within this 348,000 km² of coral is 80,000 km² where there's a hard bottom – rocks rather than sand. These areas are likely to be home to significant amounts of coral – the places snorkelers and scuba divers most like to visit.

You might wonder why we're finding this out now. Didn't we already know where the world's reefs are?

Previously, we've had to pull data from many different sources, which made it harder to pin down the extent of coral reefs with certainty. But now we have high resolution satellite data covering the entire world – and are able to see reefs as deep as 30 meters down.

Pictured: Geomorphic mapping (left) compared to new reef extent (red shading, right image) in the northern Great Barrier Reef.

[AKA: All the stuff in red on that map is coral reef we did not realize existed!! Coral reefs cover so much more territory than we thought! And that's just one example. (From northern Queensland)]

We coupled this with direct observations and records of coral reefs from over 400 individuals and organizations in countries with coral reefs from all regions, such as the Maldives, Cuba, and Australia.

To produce the maps, we used machine learning techniques to chew through 100 trillion pixels from the Sentinel-2 and Planet Dove CubeSat satellites to make accurate predictions about where coral is – and is not. The team worked with almost 500 researchers and collaborators to make the maps.

The result: the world's first comprehensive map of coral reefs extent, and their composition, produced through the Allen Coral Atlas. [You can see the interactive maps yourself at the link!]

The maps are already proving their worth. Reef management agencies around the world are using them to plan and assess conservation work and threats to reefs."

-via ScienceDirect, February 15, 2024

[doctorsiren]

Hatsune Miku being on the Coachella lineup for this year is amazing and great and so very silly but it’s so bad that tech bros are trying to spin it in favour of their “virtual AI influencers”

No. Like actually shut up?? Do you not know anything about Miku?? She is an art tool. She is a musical instrument. She isn’t being paraded around like she’s some sort of Metaverse influencer.

Stuff like that really grinds my gears. Do your research next time, hm? (looking at you specifically, Wendy Lee from the LA Times.)

[heilos]

I have come to the annoying conclusion that many search engines are becoming super useless in trying to track down historical research without bending over backwards for answers. The amount of garbage that shows up in the results is so incredibly aggravating and has nothing to do with my search terms or questions. I cannot in fact "just use X search engines" apparently.

[temporal-discounting]

OK so you are forced to live out the rest of your days in an alternate universe much like our own except for one change to OFMD.

(See this original post for more deets on each option)

[jellyjamheadobb]

Ya’ll this is very important, please read

[noknowshame]

listen, I do not condone historical misinformation, but there is nothing I get delight out of more than this absolutely batshit article from a religious website that unironically lists Flint as a mythological god of pirates

[aiweirdness]

"When the publisher of Sports Illustrated and Men’s Journal announced last week that its magazines would start to publish AI-generated articles, its CEO assured readers that the practice wouldn’t result in a decline in quality."

Men's Journal's AI-generated article: 18 serious factual errors

CNET's AI-generated articles: rampant factual errors and also plagiarism

Using AI to generate articles is the modern journalistic equivalent of selling "strawberry jam" made of red dye and no strawberries

[gacha-incels]

[carriesthewind]

"My investigation shows that discussions about the integrity of our news ecosystem, filter bubbles, plagiarism, copyright, and AI art should focus almost entirely on the fact that American tech giants are obsessed with conquering and colonizing the entire world with products that are half baked and are extremely poorly moderated in languages that are not English. Any conversation about the failing business models of news in the United States, the “communities” we build on social media, and the degradation of the English-language internet due to AI spam is completely divorced from the reality that the people actually spamming these platforms are operating in a different cultural, political, and economic context than the artists or journalists who are having their work ripped off. Big tech has built and invested heavily in these tools, and, knowingly or unknowingly they’re paying people to use them."

[metalichotchoco]

Just four more months guys

[dontforgetukraine]

Interviewer: Can we discuss Russian disinformation operations and any changes you've observed over the last two to three years, or even longer? Is it still the same old Cold War tactics, or has it evolved over time? Pekka Kallioniemi: Russian messaging is pretty much the same KGB-style messaging—claiming corruption, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism. But the biggest change in recent years has been the use of AI. Even in the last six months of 2024, the use of AI on a massive scale is something we are now figuring out, but we still have no clue about the full scale of it. That’s what’s changing and what we need to investigate and understand in the West—the large-scale use of AI in all this.

Source: VERDICT OF A 'VATNIK' HUNTER ⟩ "Western Policymakers Don’t Understand the Scale of the Disinformation Problem"

[exhaled-spirals]

« Today’s AI technology allows people of different cultures to communicate instantly and effortlessly with one another. Wow! Isn’t that a centuries-long dream come true, weaving the world ever more tightly together? Isn’t it a wonderful miracle? Isn’t the soon-to-arrive world where everyone can effortlessly speak every language just glorious?

Some readers will certainly say “yes,” but I would say “no.” In fact, I see this looming scenario as a great tragedy. I see it as the beginning of the end of the age-old tradition of learning foreign languages [...]. The problem is that people of all cultures instinctively follow the path of least resistance.

Today’s young people [...] who grow up with translation software, will not be lured in the same way that I, as a teenager, was lured by the fantastic, surrealistic goal of internalizing another language. They won’t feel the slightest temptation to devote a major fraction of their lives to slowly and arduously acquiring the sounds, vocabulary, grammar, and cultural richness of another language. To them, someone with my self-punishing attitude would seem hopelessly wedded to the past. Why on earth cling to riding a horse or a bicycle for transportation, when you can drive a car (not to mention flying in an airplane)? [...]

[I]t strikes me as possible—in fact, quite likely—that humans are collectively going to knuckle under and throw in the towel as far as foreign languages are concerned. [...] As my friend David Moser put it, what may soon go down the drain forever, thanks to these new AI technologies, is the precious gift that one can gain only by immersing oneself deeply in another culture and thereby acquiring an entirely new set of ways of looking at the world. It’s a gift that can’t help but turn any human being into a far richer and broader one. But David fears that it may soon become as rare as hen’s teeth.

[...I]t’s incredibly depressing to contemplate the profound impoverishment of people’s mental and emotional lives that is looming just around every corner of the globe, thanks to the slick seductiveness of AI translation apps, insidiously creeping their way into ordinary people’s lives and sapping their desire to make other tongues their own.

When children first hear the sounds of another language, they can’t help but wonder: What in the world would it feel like to speak that language? Such eager childlike curiosity might seem universal and irrepressible. But what if that human curiosity is suddenly snuffed out forever by the onrushing tsunami of AI? When we collectively abandon the age-old challenge of learning the languages of other lands, when we relinquish that challenge to ultrarapid machines that have no inner life of their own but are able to give us fluent but fake facades in other languages, then we will have lost a major part of what it is to be human and alive. »

— Douglas Hofstadter, "Learn a Foreign Language Before It’s Too Late"