FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

wait you've all been taking ESTROGEN? this whole time i thought you'd been transitioning with the aid of the guy from "waiting for godot"

We made a comic about a detective.

A job I did a long time ago ⚡

@carrideen On a lark, a while back, I tried to use an AI to help with lesson planning. It gave me a list of 10 poems to use as companions to Fahrenheit 451. 6 of the 10 poems don't exist and 2 of the last 4 were not theme-based at all; I have no idea why it offered up those - listed on the same page somewhere maybe? And the thing is, I can spot this, but my students can't. I don't even know how to feel about this. All I can really do is caution my students about it, and gently "call them out" on AI content when I spot it. And by that I mean, query them verbally to ascertain if they wrote it, and if they didn't, explain our department's position and have them re-write those parts. It's a tool some people will use, and if they are, they need to do so appropriately.

In this case, no, the student was misremembering the name of a poet he read last semester. But, unable to identify a poem on that topic by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Google just made one up.

I've had problems all month trying to put the publication dates of texts next to the titles on the syllabus--quickly searching for a bunch of dates in a row, a lot of them are off by a few decades--just small enough that if you're not really thinking hard about it, might seem plausible.

@carrideen We’ve just spent a few decades teaching students that you should trust backed up information (= stuff you verify with internet search) above a single person’s opinion, as your classmate or neighbor can be wrong.

And now when teachers say ”that’s completely false” about something a kid read from a sentence generator, it can rightfully seem like the teachers are the ones mistaken. There is the valid-seeming search result, after all.

Last night, one of my students thought he had read a specific poem by a poet we're about to read, but I didn't recognize his description of the content of the poem. So he opens up Google and types in the poet's name and the topic, and it just spat out a fabricated poem in her style. This is what's really unnerving--"AI" is not adding value to a search service that works; it's flooding the search results with so much crap that you can't even verify a date or the existence of a text anymore.

OpenAI in front of the Supreme Court: sorry,,, we needz to use all copyrighted material on earth, otherwise our systems simply don't work uwu

OpenAI when another AI company (allegedly) does the same: THEY STOLE OUR WORK? OUR HARD WORK?? STOLEN! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?

As someone who is totally blind, the Fediverse is the only place where I have ever been able to follow people such as photographers, artists, or even those who post pictures of their cats or the food they ate. The reason is that most of them use alt text. They take the time to describe the images that my screen reader can't recognise. Some write the descriptions themselves, and others use tools such as altbot. Some worry that their descriptions aren't good enough, especially when they are new at this. Let me assure you, not only are they good enough, they are extremely appreciated! If the rest of the world thought as you did, it would be a much better place. Don't hesitate to ask if you're unsure of something, but never think that we don't notice your effort.

#appreciation #accessibility #altbot #alttext #blind #blindness #fediverse #gratitude #images #inclusivity #peoplewhocare #pictures #technology

Semiotic Standard: the icons from Alien

Following on from our Solar System transit map, we settled on this as our next vector art project: recreating the "Semiotic Standard" icons used to decorate the Nostromo spaceship sets in the 1979 film Alien.

We also thought it'd be fun to make them usable as fediverse emoji, so we did that.

Find the full set in emojo form here: https://lexie.space/post/blogstuff/2019/12/16/semiotic-standard.html

See the attached image, or https://noisy.lexie.space/@alexis/103322172832060183, for examples.

We'll be publishing large SVG files of these, too - as soon as we get the source file sorted out so we can export them easily. (we still suck at illustrator lol) In the meantime, we hope you enjoy these, and watch this space for more!

TIL big specialized forums have started backdating millions of LLM-generated posts. Now you cannot be sure a reply from 2009 on some forum for physics or maps or flower or drill enthusiasts haven't been machine-generated and totally wrong.

https://hallofdreams.org/posts/physicsforums/

Did you know you can just trans your gender as much and as many times as you like?

TAYLOR REAL!!!

suit is by rabidskunkz

leather

I have said before that my primary life philosophy is an "Ethics of Agency", and I have talked about this before on a podcast episode https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/11-an-ethics-of-agency.html

I'm not interested in "happiness" as much, because I don't want a rat that leans on a lever. The "ethics of agency" thinking is a rough approach modification of utilitarianism that replaces the measurements of "happiness" and "suffering" in Utilitarianism with "agency" and "subjection".

But "subjection" is weighed more heavily.

I am not "against AI". I actually am very interested in building AI systems, but not the kinds which exist or are being pushed today.

To me, the important part of an AI system is its accountability.

We actually do hold much of our software accountable: if it does something bad, we actively change and repair it.

Corporations are rushing to flood the market with tools which don't care, have no accountability, don't have a stake in things.

That's depressing.

Every time I see someone bring up "IQ scores" I feel the need to repeat: IQ scores were literally invented by eugenicists and they've always been biased towards privilege

Also if you haven't noticed, once someone starts to believe they're a genius, they start to think a lot less clearly.