Published on 2026-01-28
]]>Published on 2026-01-28
Tags: politics, quote, society
]]>Adam Serwer for The Atlantic on 2026-01-26:
The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.
Published on 2026-01-05
]]>Published on 2026-01-05
Tags: commentary, llm, security, society, software-eng
People are using Grok LLMs on X (formerly Twitter) to harass women: when a woman uploads a photo, they request the LLM to transform the photo into one depicting sexual situations or violence.
]]>Maggie Harrison Dupré for Futurism on 2026-01-02:
Earlier this week, a troubling trend emerged on X-formerly-Twitter as people started asking Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok to unclothe images of real people. This resulted in a wave of nonconsensual pornographic images flooding the largely unmoderated social media site, with some of the sexualized images even depicting minors.
When we dug through this content, we noticed another stomach-churning variation of the trend: Grok, at the request of users, altering images to depict real women being sexually abused, humiliated, hurt, and even killed.
Published on 2026-01-03
]]>Published on 2026-01-03
Tags: art, economics, politics, quote, society
Ursula K. Le Guin delivering her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.]]>Ursula K. Le Guin on 2014-11-19:
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Published on 2025-11-23
]]>Published on 2025-11-23
Tags: books, commentary, economics, llm, society
]]>Gillian K. Hadfield and Andrew Koh in An Economy of AI Agents on 2025-09-03:
Silicon Valley promises us increasingly agentic AI systems that might one day supplant human decisions. If this vision materializes, it will reshape markets and organizations with profound consequences for the structure of economic life. But, as we have emphasized throughout this chapter, where we end up within this vast space of possibility is a design choice: we have the opportunity to develop mechanisms, infrastructure, and institutions to shape the kinds of AI agents that are built, and how they interact with each other and with humans. These are fundamentally economic questions—we hope economists will help answer them.
Published on 2025-11-20
]]>Published on 2025-11-20
Tags: commentary, llm, quote, society
]]>Nicholas Carlini on 2025-11-19:
I briefly looked through the papers at this year's conference. About 80% of them are on making language models better. About 20% are on something adjacent to safety (if I'm really, really generous with how I count safety). If I'm not so generous, it's around 10%. I counted the year before in 2024. It's about the same breakdown.
And, in my mind, if you told me that in five years things had gone really poorly, it wouldn't be because we had too few people working on making language models better. It would be because we had too few people thinking about their risks. So I would really like it if, at next year's conference, there was a significantly higher fraction of papers working on something to do with risks, harms, safety--anything like that.
Published on 2025-09-26
]]>Published on 2025-09-26
Tags: commentary, film, quote, society, tv-series, video-games
]]>Katharine Trendacosta for Gizmodo on 2019-12-19:
Corporations have identified the monetizable parts of both curatorial and transformational fandom and made them all consumptive fandom. Fans are encouraged to want what’s been approved by the creator and to back up that approval by buying more and more.
...
Fandom that wants to create communities, that wants to promote the interests of fans, protect their work, help them experience media in the best way possible for them is on one side. The fandom of nonprofits like AO3 and the sadly dying tumblr communities. The fandom that isn’t about winning but is about enjoying creativity.
Versus the fandom that wants to dictate to you, that has been approved by marketing, that is immune from criticism because real fans just spend the money first and debate it later. Or never debate at all, just unthinkingly consuming. The fandom that is valid because Zack Snyder said so. The fandom of huge mega-corporations endlessly humping the same IP over and over.
Published on 2025-09-08
]]>Published on 2025-09-08
Tags: commentary, llm, quote, society
]]>I agree with the intellectual substance of virtually every common critique of AI. And it's very clear that turning those critiques into a competition about who can frame them in the most scathing way online has done zero to slow down adoption, even if much of that is due to default bundling.
At what point are folks going to try literally any other tactic than condescending rants? Does it matter that LLM apps are at the top of virtually every app store nearly every day because individual people are choosing to download them, and the criticism hasn't been effective in slowing that?
Published on 2025-08-08
]]>Published on 2025-08-08
Tags: books, quote, society
Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction on 1991-03-01:
Yet each time the futility argument amounted to a denial or downplaying of change in the face of seemingly enormous, epochal movements such as the French Revolution, the trend toward universal suffrage and democratic institutions during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the subsequent emergence and expansion of the Welfare State. The appeal of the arguments rests largely on the remarkable feat of contradicting, often with obvious relish, the commonsense understanding of these events as replete with upheaval, change, or real reform.
Societal change is pretty commonplace, and a cursory stroll through recorded history demonstrates it handily. I'm reminded of the fundamentalist Christian position on the theory of evolution, a dogmatic insistence that the commonsense understanding of the fossil record — that of consistent evolution, is false. Their rejection of evolution and reactionaries arguing using the futility thesis are making purely structural arguments, which fall apart when you look at available evidence.
]]>Published on 2025-07-29
]]>Published on 2025-07-29
Tags: books, quote, society
]]>Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction on 1991-03-01:
This sort of argument is of course familiar from the Marxist tradition which, at least in its more primitive or “vulgar” version, views the state as the “Executive Committee of the bourgeoisie” and denounces as hypocrisy any claim that it may conceivably serve the general or public interest. It comes as something of a surprise to encounter so “subversive” a reasoning among certain pillars of the “free-enterprise” system. But this is not the first time that shared hatreds make for strange bedfellowship. The hatred that is being shared in this case is directed against the attempt at reforming some unfortunate or unjust features of the capitalist system through public intervention and programs. On the Far Left, such programs are criticized because it is feared that any success they might have would reduce revolutionary zeal. On the Right, or among the more orthodox economists, they are subject to criticism and mockery because any intervention of the state, particularly any increase in public expenditures for purposes other than law, order, and perhaps defense, is considered as noxious or futile interference with a system that is supposed to be self-equilibrating.
Published on 2025-07-15
]]>Published on 2025-07-15
Tags: books, quote, society
]]>Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction on 1991-03-01:
The claims of the futility thesis seem more moderate than those of the perverse effect, but they are in reality more insulting to the “change agents.” As long as the social world moves at all in response to human action for change, even if in the wrong direction, hope remains that it can somehow be steered correctly. But the demonstration or discovery that such action is incapable of “making a dent” at all leaves the promoters of change humiliated, demoralized, in doubt about the meaning and true motive of their endeavors.