#tech hell

[ultraviolet-divergence]

Caught using AI to hallucinate sources in a report, White House calls it a formatting issue (video)

RFK Jr's "Make America Healthy Again" report appears to be riddled with AI hallucinations. Karoline Leavitt calls them "formatting issues."

Reporter: An investigation found the MAHA commission report cites studies that appear not to exist. Leavitt: I understand there were some formatting issues…It does not negate the substance of the report. Reporter: Is AI used to put together these reports? Leavitt: I can’t speak to that.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

I also want to point out a critically missing skill among students these days is the ability to save a document with an identifiable name in a retrievable location.

This sounds like it should be a non-issue, but this is a skill that is not being taught that is really screwing students over down the road. You need to keep digital copies off your own documents on a device you own. Overreliance on Autosave in general is keeping people from being able to use word processors in the very basic ways.

I frequently hear from students who have lost their own work because they did not know where it was saved and could not retrieve it again. You need to keep copies of your own work no matter what you're doing.

[r0semultiverse]

I’m so glad google glass never became a real thing. I used to be young and ignorant, excited about those kind of technological advancements. Now I can’t help but wonder how much built in spyware and surveillance bull shit is on every piece of tech that gets advertised. I can’t help but to think how every advancement will only serve to make everyone’s lives that much worse.

[birchtreecat]

I’ve got 3 copies of the same fuckass debian machine in vmware and debian 2 is being a little shit they are CARBON COPIES OF EACHOTHER WORK PLEASE?

[imbusssssssss]

no it fucking does not

[eldrichscream]

De-googling help

If anyone has any good gmail/google alternatives, please let me know. I don't want to give ID or selfie verifications, not knowing what it'd be used for in the long run. And, as a whole, I just want to get away from Google and everything that's starting to happen more widespread.

I know that there's Yahoo, and Proton Mail but I'm a 90s baby who only got technology after the Google overhaul of ecosystems, so any advanced help with pros and cons would be much appreciated.

When it comes to browsers, I know of Brave, and Zen (where the only problem with Zen is that telepartying series and stuff is basically impossible—yes, it's necessary because I'm in a LDR and I like watching things with my partner.)

I'm not too concerned with Google Docs because I moved over to @ellipsus-writes a few months ago. And with @bokbi-official in development I don't need an alternative for sheets right now. And, if it makes a difference, I'm on MacOS.

[eleaowl]

An desk.

Supposedly, I'm a professional.

[apparentabstractions]

Some unstructured thoughts

My reaction to the trend of "AI artists" has been pretty viscerally negative—it's a clear off-shoot of the same Silicon Valley tech bro bullshit that gave us NFTs—but I've also been left grappling with the reality that there are very real similarities between much of my APPARENT ABSTRACTIONS work and images generated by AI. The latter involves someone inputting text and hoping for the best. My edited ROM corruption screenshots require similarly little "effort"—ask a program to inject some junk data or alter a few bytes, then wait for the results. In the end, we both have very little control over the actual output. I often make edits to the shape or color to make mine stand out more, but that's not a tall task either.

Furthermore, both are built off the backs of others' work. I think my only real saving grace here is that the "sources" I pull from are commercial, mass-produced products. Of course video games are an art form, and artists worked to create the graphics which I then ask a program to mangle, but at the end of the day I'm pulling from the works of corporations. Fair game for editing? Fair game for collages and sampling? The music enthusiast in me has always felt that way, at least. I wouldn't have a guilty conscience screencapping and editing something from say, Ninja Gaiden—as opposed to trying the same thing from some DeviantArt user's work. One like myself, maybe. I also illustrate as a hobby, and yeah, I don't want my drawings used in AI training datasets. And these days, it's getting harder to trust the websites we host our work on to protect us.

Maybe the big difference between what I'm making and what "AI artists" are doing comes down to ethos. AA is a project that's been going on for four years now. The works have always been released into the public domain. I just think what I'm doing is cool, and I wish more people would do it. It's not really even about the individual pieces but all of them as a unified gallery. I've always viewed AA as one singular ever-expanding art piece. I think it's why I enjoyed making the Tower Unite gallery so much. Very few "AI artists" ever seem actually interested in art. Or at least, they weren't interested in the concept of "art" until they saw that it could be an easy way to make them popular or rich. But you probably know that already.

We saw it with NFTs, too, though maybe less so percentage-wise—I saw a lot of legitimate artists I admired become grifters. I almost bought a John Karel (jjjjjjjjjjohn, the one with the low-poly skeletons) shirt and now I'm glad I didn't. Mark Vomit, the guy who made that "you are not immune to propaganda" meme, is actually a talented audiovisual producer that I liked a lot. Ironically, he tried making NFTs but threw a fit when no one wanted them and people started making fun of him. I don't think he's tried again since. Probably my biggest disappointment in this field was Osamu Sato—the guy behind LSD: Dream Emulator among a slew of great albums. And don't forget a bunch of musicians who were probably forced to engage with NFTs by their labels. But also, like, 80% of the people making "abstract digital art" like my own started getting into it! I had to unfollow the vast majority of them. At their height, it was so bad that you could just tell someone was probably doing NFTs by looking at their art because it had become so popular with certain cliques—my own included. I started using the "AGAINST CRYPTO / AGAINST NFTS" avatar around that time not just because I wanted to make a bold statement against it, but also because I didn't want people to have to check.