Meta's Open Letter titled "Europe needs regulatory certainty on AI" is bullshit. | Continue reading
Is "AI" art impossible? Or is that just a way to exclude people from making art? I think both perspectives are wrong: It's about materials. | Continue reading
“By some estimates, more than 80 percent of AI projects fail—twice the rate of failure for information technology projects that do not involve AI.” – The Root Causes of Failure for Artificial Intelligence Projects and How They Can Succeed A study by the RAND Corporation (found vi … | Continue reading
Especially in IT and software development numbers keep popping up about “savings” through AI. Amazon for example claims to have “saved” 4500 person years of work. These numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt and shouldn’t be interpreted as “oh, we will save massive amounts … | Continue reading
Mozilla.ai did a study on generative AI trends and their methodology shows that they should never be allowed near anything AI. Ever. | Continue reading
Tech Won’t Save Us is probably one of the most influential podcasts in the space of critical, deep analysis of technologies and their social and political effects. That’s why it has been such an honour and pleasure to be a guest on it. In this week’s episode we talk about Europe … | Continue reading
Under the motto “Who Cares” Re:Publica gathered a few thousand people in Berlin and I got to give a talk continuing the path I started out on with my last two talks in 2022 and 2023. Titled “Empty Innovation” I tried outlining my understanding of the patterns of the weird technol … | Continue reading
One of the more reasonable use cases for modern “AI” (statistical pattern matching and generating machines) is to support doctors in diagnostics, especially in the evaluation of complex data sets / documents in order to determine potentially dangerous abnormalities. It’s a proble … | Continue reading
I just got an email from a store I bought something at about 4 months ago. It happens, they have my mail, somewhere in their fine print they said that they were gonna send me product recommendations or I clicked a thing because it looked like the box you have to click to get the … | Continue reading
While the crowd at sxsw2024 booing a sizzle reel of people either promising the beauty of the future "AI" will bring or claiming it to be "without alternative" is funny and went viral for all the right reasons, this event speaks to a deeper shift in perception. #ai #genAI #luddis … | Continue reading
In tech-related discourse “decentralization”, “Open Source”, “democratization”, “federation” have become weird terms. Not because of the specific architectural or technological concept they are describing but as a way to hide the fact that the speaker thinks that “markets” are th … | Continue reading
So when I moved to Berlin a few years ago I probably “used” the city more than living in it. Like I enjoyed (and still enjoy) all the cultural, social, etc. offerings but I didn’t care too much about where I lived – as long as the connection to public transportation were good. If … | Continue reading
I wrote an essay about the tensions of "AI" and democracy because I don't believe their respective values and goals fully match. | Continue reading
Automattic is secretly selling the stuff their users wrote and drew and created to "AI" companies to fuck up the web a bit more for a few bucks. But the problem goes deeper. | Continue reading
Currently when talking about very big large language models even people who want to be taken seriously talk a lot about bio or chemical weapons: Will "AI" systems make creating bio weapons too easy? But is that a real danger? Will ChatGPT give terrorists new weapons to attack us … | Continue reading
Even before “lean” became the battlecry of everyone making work a bit more annoying companies were focused on being efficient. Optimizing processes, reducing waste to squeeze more profit from the materials and labor put into their respective processes. And in that context this fo … | Continue reading
The political Europe is very busy currently: Having passed the GDPR a few and the DMA even fewer years ago its currently in the process of debating the so-called “AI Act”, a piece of legislation aimed at the developers of so-called “AI” systems trying to enforce “European Values” … | Continue reading
I understand that OpenAI/Microsoft can’t build ChatGPT within our legal framework. Well they could but it would be prohibitively expensive (it already is now without paying the people who did the work). But I missed the part where that is our problem as a society. This! I am t … | Continue reading
The reaction to OpenAI's admission to be unable to train their systems without breaking copyright sometimes misses the point a bit: OpenAI is not a normal organization. | Continue reading
If you go to secondary school in Germany for the last 2 years you have to pick a bunch of specializations, subjects you want to focus on to a degree. You spend more time on these subjects and your final grade is strongly influenced by your results in those courses. When I picked … | Continue reading
When I was a kid / teenager I wanted to play the guitar. Like many people that age. Got myself a guitar and everything but never really practiced at all in any meaningful way. I didn’t so much want to play the guitar but I wanted the reward I associated with the output, the cultu … | Continue reading
I think there are a lot of good points in Mozilla’s “Joint Statement on AI Safety and Openness“. Yes, relying on proprietary vendors to provide security is not the right path and we should know this because we’ve had that debate decades ago about IT security and open source: Open … | Continue reading
For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings fo … | Continue reading
I was on a panel yesterday and the narrative of “exponential growth in LLMs” came up. The story goes like this: LLMs have in recent years doubled in size every few months, so they’ll get better/smarter etc. and we’ll have to base our model of thinking about them, their regulation … | Continue reading
Recently 25 experts and me released an open letter to the US Senate and House of Representatives asking for better regulation of the crypto market. Being what it is this letter had to argue on the basic fundamentals of the underlying tech without going into a lot of technical det … | Continue reading
(This text is very long. Maybe too long. You can find a PDF and an EPUB of it below.The current version of this text will always live at https://web3.tante.cc) By tante Version 1.0Date: Dec 17th 2021License: CC-BY-SA 4.0 Introduction I had hoped that I wouldn’t have to write this … | Continue reading
“Robots will replace us!” is a very popular meme for those who don’t want robots or “AI” to replace human… | Continue reading
Automated statistics systems are all the rage today. But not under that heading and name. They are called “artificial intelligence”.… | Continue reading
A few days ago I spend my lunch break writing a short Twitter thread pointing out the core falsehoods people… | Continue reading