When a student copies an essay online instead of writing it and then painstakingly changes every word to a synonym until the text no longer makes any sense...
This is the fifth anniversary of me receiving the paper that contained "Unused York City." With ChatGPT slop invading my classes like original thought-choking kudzu, I now look back on the copy-paste + Spinbot days with a surprising amount of rosy nostalgia.
I was once in the office and another professor called me over. She was teaching a course on global citizenship.
"I can't figure out what this student is writing about," she said. "She keeps using the phrase 'perspiration stores.' Perspiration stores this, perspiration stores that."
I glanced at the paper and read a paragraph.
"Friend," I said. "She's writing about sweatshops."
When Limby orders ice cream with a friend, she isn’t expecting the day to quickly evolve into a full-on existential panic attack. When she notices the melting ice cream and realizes the impermanence of all things, however, that’s exactly what happens.
Limby takes off into the park, deeply upset, and soon enough finds herself face to face with the physical manifestation of her anxiety over the finite nature of all things, who is named Alyssa. As the two of them talk, however, two truths become apparent.
There’s beauty in impermanence, and Alyssa is hot as heck!
This erotic tale is 4,000 words of sizzling human on sentient existential dread action and lesbian physically manifested anxiety love.
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Google quietly added generative AI capabilities to Google Earth, allowing anyone to generate false images on top of real satellite imagery. It seems pretty rudimentary, but the potential for disinformation is sky-high.
Anyway, did y'all hear that they nuked the White House?
Within the first few hours of its discovery, people on Twitter used this tool to generate an Epstein Island attraction at Disneyland, a mega-prison within Google’s headquarters, and a sequel to 9/11.
Google has already announced that they will be “rolling back” this feature because of screenshots like these:
The fact that they want to bring it back with “guardrails” is ridiculous. Screenshots like these are not the work of some malign actors, they’re instant proof that your idea is terrible on its face
The thing is. "AI" as we've come to call it, is a useful but very niche technology. It's very good at a few things and when applied to those few things it is both economic and non destructive, because those tasks it naturally applies well to don't require environment destroying infrastructure. It's the scale of brute forcing AI to do things that it isn't good at that's become an environmental problem. And when properly applied, it is no more a burden on people than any other new technology. What we should be seeing with AI is the swapping out of old tools in very specific areas for new tools. That would likely cause some job loss, but no one would be trying to replace artists with a machine that's bad at art. For example.
So the question is, what the hell happened?
I genuinely think that a bunch of very rich business people who are morons about computers heard "thinking machine" and immediately jumped to the conclusion "legal slave" because they genuinely thought that the intelligence part of AI was real. And what we have been dealing with since is the consequences of all the largest corporations in the world trying to brute force invent the perfect slave, an idea that they will not let go of no matter how much damage it causes or how obvious it is that it won't work because they are so invested in the idea of not having to pay for labor that they just cannot let it go. They will burn the entire world if that is what it takes. For the same reason prisons of the United States have been warped in the extreme to support as much modern day slavery as they possibly can, these corporations will never stop destroying everything and everyone for the promise of a slave. And like every other attempt to make slaves happen, it's the minority communities, especially racial minorities, that deal with the worst of exploitation and destruction.
I think people are hesitant to criticize AI because there is a dominant narrative that new technology always goes through a period where everybody hates it, but technological "advancement" is always inevitable and eventually the new technology is always recognized to benefit humanity
AI companies are taking advantage of this narrative to force the world to adopt their products
one thing i wanna say though is data centers being built in rural areas is environmental racism + classism so when i see ppl bitching about locals bitching about data centers im like oh it’s literally because it’s not your backyard being demolished and your air not being polluted and your waterways not being ran dry and your soundscapes not being raised to unhealthy decibels ….
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but if the phrase "self care" doesn't resonate with you, try calling it "system maintenance" and see if that clicks.
#this both makes things more fun and also is a really good analogy#because there are four types of system maintenance and that makes the term much more exact than the nebulous ''self-care''#and therefore much more helpful to those of us who uhhh struggle with nebulosity#for anyone curious the four types are:#1. corrective (to fix current problems)#2. preventative (to avoid future problems)#3. adaptative (to re-adjust to any changes)#4. perfective (to work towards a better system)#I really like this idea I'm gonna make a checklist
