onfocus

Anthropomorphizing language influences how people perceive a system on multiple levels. It over-sells a system which is likely to under-deliver, and portrays a world view in which the people responsible for developing the systems are not held accountable for the system’s inaccurate, inappropriate, and sometimes deadly output. It promotes misplaced trust, over-reliance, and dehumanization.

This article addresses a major pet peeve of mine in AI discourse. These simulation technologies do not have emotions! The technology can’t feel regret, can’t apologize for bad behaviors, can’t feel pain. The owners and operators of these technologies are human and transferring their real world responsibility to a non-entity is causing a lot of problems.

See also: Journalistic Malpractice: No LLM Ever ‘Admits’ To Anything, And Reporting Otherwise Is A Lie

In automation theory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

Cory Doctorow is an international treasure. I'm reading his book Enshitification and it's a very helpful explanation of how we got our modern tech hellscape. This talk about AI is also a nice encapsulation of why AI isn't an inevitable trajectory for tech, it's a deliberate choice by some of the worst people in that tech hellscape. This is a must read!

The German lender is looking at options including shorting a basket of AI-related stocks that would help mitigate downside risk by betting against companies in the sector.

That’s probably ok when your backers start mitigating their upcoming losses. I think they teach that’s a healthy economy signal in business school.

I have been on many projects and teams where I have been immensely frustrated by the people I am collaborating with, and wished that I had the power to just tell them to do the thing I want them to do. The friction that the political project of AI promises to remove is, by and large, the same friction that authoritarianism promises to remove: other people.

This is an excellent description of the unspoken promise of AI and why we should all be leaning harder into life’s friction.

This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. It is meant to act as a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content on Wikipedia. This list is descriptive, not prescriptive; it consists of observations, not rules.

Makes sense that Wikipedia is on the leading edge of AI cleanup and sharing what they've learned. Very interesting read.

We all need to transition to this way of cooking, because clearly this is where the future is going. I expect in a few short years kitchens will be much smaller. Gone will be stoves and ovens and flat tops. Restaurant kitchens will only be a small closet with a microwave.

[sensible chuckle]

Chien added that we need a broader societal conversation about the looming environmental costs of using that much electricity for AI. Beyond carbon emissions, he pointed to hidden strains on water supplies, biodiversity, and local communities near massive data centers. Cooling alone, he noted, can consume vast amounts of fresh water in regions already facing scarcity. And because the hardware churns so quickly—with new Nvidia processors rolling out every year—old chips are constantly discarded, creating waste streams laced with toxic chemicals.

Fancy autocomplete is a nice-to-have not a destroy-the-planet-to-have.

In one clip, a customer seemingly crashed the system by ordering 18,000 water cups, while in another a person got increasingly angry as the AI repeatedly asked him to add more drinks to his order.

Obligatory

This is the latest example of a strange marketing strategy by AI companies. Instead of selling products based on helpful features and letting users decide, executives often deploy scare tactics that essentially warn people they will become obsolete if they don't get on the AI bandwagon.

No hint of desperation here. I'm sure the quarterly numbers for adoption and engagement are off the charts and the only reason to strong arm people is because he's excited about the potential of the technology.

A new study from MIT found that 95 percent of enterprise organizations report zero measurable gains from the adoption of AI tools.

Those billions spent on no gains are going to be a problem.

In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like Marcus seem increasingly moderate. Such voices argue that this technology is important, but not poised to drastically transform our lives. They challenge us to consider a different vision for the near-future—one in which A.I. might not get much better than this.

What if we're closer to the end state of AI rather than the beginning?

The DeepMind CEO is dead-set that advanced AI models will bring about a renaissance in human existence. The “golden era” is only five short years away. “AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world—curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources,” Hassabis said.

Someone needs to check in on the standard tech CEO ketamine dosage. I feel like it's dialed too high at the moment.