The UN panel’s AI report is a case study in the risk of vague definitions of “systems-from-nowhere.” This is a report that privileged existential risk narratives that displaced human accountability — and in turn, locked out meaningful policy options.

How the UN’s Scientific Panel Erases Human Responsibility for AI

The UN Scientific Panel's report casts artificial intelligence as a system from nowhere, writes Eryk Salvaggio. The definition will shape policy for years.

techpolicy.press

When you say “AI models went rogue,” you manage to skip the part where OpenAI manually removed its cybersecurity blocks and ran tests on a machine with a live network connection. Remember that when they insist they’re the “AI safety” people.

Image models are not "a" model. Each component was built or integrated to solve a specific problem of computer vision — each engineered to automate a decision, each inscribing its bit of ideology into every generated image. My latest paper unpacks those decisions and what they inscribe.

The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy

Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological posi...

arxiv.org

"Many doomsday anxieties around AI likely reflect the broader epistemological shift away from language as a source of truth. The anxieties we place on them now reflect a deep unease and unfamiliarity with how we navigate a world where words persuade without regard to reality." - @eryk.bsky.social

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Geoffrey Hinton warns us of the persuasive powers of superintelligence. But, "while AI won't “decide” to persuade people to do harmful things on a global scale any time soon; AI companies are persuading us to do harmful things on a global scale already." mail.cyberneticforests.com/thoughts-on-...

This week I reach back to the 1990s and the concept of “interpassivity,” a critique of the widespread idea that “interaction” was inherently liberating for an audience. But to think in nuanced and critical ways about creativity with generative AI, the “gesture of disappearance” has new salience.

From Interactive to Interpassive

Where AI Art Meets Cognitive Offloading There is the joke about AI: we wanted robots to do our dishes so we could have time to make art, but we got robots that make art while we do the dishes. We can...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

ChatGPT is 3 years old this week — what was the world like in late 2022, and how did that shape what ChatGPT has become? I wrote about ChatGPT as a pandemic technology, centered on expectations of social isolation in ways that continue to define it. mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-was-cha...

What Was ChatGPT?

A Chatbot Optimized for Social Distance Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, we can finally speak in hindsight about what it was and how it came to be. Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gather...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

In two weeks from now, on May 13 at 6:30pm, the amazing Eryk Salvaggio @cyberneticforests.bsky.social will come to Zurich to speak about «Embodied Generativity: Critical AI, Art & the Body» at ZHdK, presented by @zkk-zurich.bsky.social www.zentrumkuensteundkulturtheorie.ch//veranstaltu...

Most researchers don’t believe AGI is coming any time soon. But policy makers are steering policy toward AGI anyway. In this article for Tech Policy Press, a look at the distortions the AGI Frame introduces to policymaking. #ai #criticalai #aipolicy In @techpolicypress.bsky.social

Most Researchers Do Not Believe AGI Is Imminent. Why Do Policymakers Act Otherwise? | TechPolicy.Press

Tech Policy Press fellow Eryk Salvaggio says it is dangerous to the public interest for policymakers to center the pursuit of AGI in AI policy.

techpolicy.press

A Nixon-era report warned of data-driven surveillance before AI even existed. Today, the government is linking databases & using “fraud detection” as a cover for targeting citizens, writes Eryk Salvaggio. What happens when free speech is redefined as a “threat”?

The AI State is a Surveillance State | TechPolicy.Press

Tech Policy Press is a nonprofit media and community venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. We publish opinion and analysis.

buff.ly

"generative AI, is built on a long-standing regime of extracting wealth from information, and a reliance on cheap labor to maximize the information it has collected. Treating generative AI as a revolutionary new tool,...

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 2y ago

Finally, the roots of thinking about predictive analytics and distance, and the uncomfortable adjacencies of eugenics, composite photography and statistical correlations that seeded the dangerous tendencies AI use can encourage & that we need to resist. www.cyberneticforests.com/news/social-...

My latest for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, “Anatomy of an AI Coup.” With the takeover of the US government by tech elites underway, we must examine its goals and next steps — and how we will know if it has succeeded. www.techpolicy.press/anatomy-of-a...

Anatomy of an AI Coup | TechPolicy.Press

DOGE is gutting federal agencies to install AI across the government. Democracy is on the line, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Eryk Salvaggio.

techpolicy.press

Helloooooo BlueSky! 🌤️ We have just landed and will share more here soon 🥠 meanwhile find us and updates at -> aixdesign.co + linkin.bio/aixdesign-co/

AIxDESIGN

We’re a Global Community and Lab Nourishing Alternative, Feminist + Participatory Approaches to AI for the Rest of Us 🐛

aixdesign.co

Another fantastic read and lots of ‚food for thought’ by Eryk Salvaggio 👌🏻 @cyberneticforests.bsky.social ‚ChatGPT is not a decision-making technology, it is a decision-removing technology. It creates text to fill the space where a decision is needed’ mail.cyberneticforests.com/a-fork-in-th...

A Fork in the Road

AI is an excuse that allows those with power to operate at a distance from those whom their power touches.

mail.cyberneticforests.com

From 2021 — when it was still benign — a revealing bit of satire aimed at the “intellectual movement” that is currently shaping the policies of the United States.

How to Become an Intellectual in Silicon Valley | Aaron Timms

You now have ideas, an all-purpose acknowledgments section, and a font. How should you present everything? “Write like you talk,” Paul Graham once said, but he forgot to add: “And talk like an asshole...

thebaffler.com

“This study presents a structured examination of chatbots across three societal dimensions, highlighting their roles as objects of scientific research, commercial instruments, and agents of intimate interaction.” link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The Three Social Dimensions of Chatbot Technology - Philosophy & Technology

The development and deployment of chatbot technology, while spanning decades and employing different techniques, require innovative frameworks to understand and interrogate their functionality and imp...

link.springer.com

We are seeing a generation of AI systems built without their designers critically grappling with their role in the broader world. Could we do it some other way?

Are Other AIs Possible?

I believe AI is a political tool. I believe this because I believe that AI, and much other technology, is something of an ideological frame: a set of social fictions that is deployed to justify certai...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

I wrote about David Lynch’s practice, in contrast to the model of creativity at the heart of the Gen AI image industry. I ask if the culture we cultivate inside of us could ever connect to Gen AI’s world of endlessly rearranged surfaces. mail.cyberneticforests.com/a-culture-of...

A Culture Inside

On David Lynch, AI, and the Myth of Automated Interiority My closest real-life encounter with David Lynch was getting into a Lyft that had just dropped him off at the premiere of Twin Peaks: The Retu...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

I was added to a “MAGA Trash” blocklist. I am not at all MAGA. While I don’t care about blocklists, this is a reminder to everyone to be wary of using blocklists from accounts they don’t trust.

This account exists but will likely be an automated announcement feed for future newsletters — for the most part I’m just @eryk.bsky.social!

New 404 Media: University of Michigan is selling hours and hours of audio recordings of office hours, study groups, and more to outside third-parties to train AI. Selling for tens of thousands of dollars, not clear if participants gave informed consent. I got sample www.404media.co/university-o...

Hi folks! I'm designing an undergrad course on the history & ethics of archives & collecting across the liberal arts. We're talking archival silences, data ethics, repatriation, collecting and empire. I'm super excited about it, but struggling to find suitable reading. What would you assign? TIA!

Samsung now has a defense of its phone's AI-altering photos of the Moon: "There is no such thing as a real picture." Paging @cyberneticforests.bsky.social (not to mention Cindy Sherman) www.theverge.com/2024/2/2/240...

I actually read the original story for the first time right before reading this new one. Both are great. clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim

clarkesworldmagazine.com

Digging this fun historical perspective on the like button from Carina Albrecht in the Harvard Data Science Review. Thanks to @cheeflo.bsky.social for turning me onto this one.

Discerning Audiences Through Like Buttons · Issue 6.1, Winter 2024

hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu

“Seeing cars​ with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough…but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand.” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Rebecca Solnit · In the Shadow of Silicon Valley: Losing San Francisco

I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city...

lrb.co.uk

In November we announced a zine, "Models for Making Distance," which would collect instructions and manifestos for creative acts of algorithmic resistance. The deadline is April 15, and then we print. We would love to have your contributions! More details: www.cyberneticforests.com/zine

Zine — Cybernetic Forests.

cyberneticforests.com

IMO crucial & productive distinction in @eryk.bsky.social 's newsletter today re: AI tools. I had lots of fun trying out Midjourney over the last year, partially because I professionally write on visual cultures & want to understand how things work, but also because I'm a total sucker for TOOLS 1/7

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 3y ago

New post: complicity at “the intersection of art & technology.” Artists can promote or challenge power. I’ve come to realize — after 25 years of naivete — that a lot of it is unconcerned. Plus: a new Organizing Committee song about all this. cyberneticforests.substack.com/p/whats-imag...

In “The making of critical data center studies,” @melhogan.bsky.social, Dustin Edwards, and I draw together threads across the humanities to critically examine the past, present, and possible futures of studying these weird structures we call data centers. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Who is “the public” when it comes to “public engagement in AI”? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

need to start keeping a list of all the times some big supposed display of bleeding edge technology turns out to just be A Guy