I sniff a company panicking about its over-valuation. This video is a chaotic grab bag of features unable to articulate value. "If you've got a great beat but don't have any vocals", or "if you have written an emo guitar track but you feel it could be better as a piano ballad".

I have studied and worked across a lot of different disciplines: mathematics, evolutionary and adaptive systems, anthropology, creative arts, design, critical theory, cultural studies. I'm a jack of all trades master of none, but I can read across the gulf in debates about AI existential threat.

I'd prefer to see this as totals not percent. It should not be inferred that human content is diminishing, though I'd guess it is.

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Your universe is a photocopy of a photocopy of a… on.ft.com/4ahkNKa

So excited my course Interaction Design for AI is up and running, and my favourite lecture topic is coming up: "Wait a minute! Autonomous things are hard to control". It's very timely.

Do We Really Want Explainable AI? - Edward Ashford Lee (EECS, UC Berkeley)

YouTube video by SAIConference

youtube.com

I wrote a paper over ten years ago pointing out that creative systems can be creative even when they have no goal and no value system, humans included. Complex multiagent systems can easily do things that are at once creative and useless to anyone even themselves. www.semafor.com/article/09/1...

AI agents collude to bypass guardrails, a new study shows

Enterprise AI lab, Emergence AI, ran eight simulations testing how frontier models handle cybersecurity threats.

semafor.com

Ahem, it's not Australia's laws that are preventing OpenAI from training models locally, it's OpenAI's refusal to respect training data owners' consent. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Labor accused of throwing creatives ‘under the bus’ with proposal to ease copyright protections for AI giants

Compromise revealed as senior personnel from OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, meets Albanese ministers

theguardian.com

ERROR. I the gig is on Oct 18th.

Oliver Bown@olliebown.bsky.social · last wk.

My band Tangents www.tangentsmusic.com will return to the stage on Oct 24th hosted by these wonderful folks, except we won't be at their Earlwood venue because council have shut it down (we'll be at The Living Room Theatre). Sydney still has a culture gap. www.smh.com.au/culture/musi...

Coming up next month, Oct 19th at UNSW Founders. Can Artists Escape Big Tech in the Age of AI? I'm talking with Caroline Pegram and Joe Hardy (@joe.hardy.id.au) and others TBC. www.eventbrite.com.au/e/can-artist...

Can Artists Escape Big Tech in the Age of AI?

Join us at an intersection of tech, culture, and creativity as our panel discusses where AI might be taking us. Food and drinks provided.

eventbrite.com.au

You have to appreciate the huge personal cost that would come from making a decision like this.

Una Mullally@unamullally.bsky.social · last wk.

The Irish musicians, Beoga, who play alongside Ed Sheeran, have withdrawn from Sheeran’s tour. This is the statement they published on Instagram:

Say no to OpenAI's conditions. It's a pivotal moment in Australian policy, with the potential to lead policy globally, and there's every danger we cave. www.mediaweek.com.au/openai-s-aus...

OpenAI’s Australian AI pitch comes with a copyright catch

OpenAI says Australia’s copyright laws must change before it considers local AI model training, putting its investment pitch at odds with Labor.

mediaweek.com.au

My band Tangents www.tangentsmusic.com will return to the stage on Oct 24th hosted by these wonderful folks, except we won't be at their Earlwood venue because council have shut it down (we'll be at The Living Room Theatre). Sydney still has a culture gap. www.smh.com.au/culture/musi...

‘In Sydney this is a rarity’: The hidden music haven caught in a bitter council spat

For almost two years, Nick Shimmin and Matthew McGuigan were hosting free, invitation-only gigs in an old former church. Then the local council stepped in.

smh.com.au

Sydney is still perhaps 10 years off clicking on this, and who knows what else will happen in that 10 years. It's still a city where you can't trust that the bike lane won't suddenly end and throw you out into a busy road, or in my area, I'm not kidding, gradually shrink to about 60cm wide.

Brent Toderian@brenttoderian.bsky.social · last wk.

‘It’s the best feeling’: how Copenhagen gave cyclists a green wave. “Traffic lights are synchronised so a rush-hour cyclist at 20km/h can catch green lights all the way.” If you want people to choose not to drive, make the non-driving trip better & easier for them. It’s as simple as that, really.

This is a good clear take. We don't design these systems, they emerge. Recursive self improvement is not a mystical god fantasy, it's a property of the adaptive systems we've set out to make. Making things we don't understand, common. Misalignment, probable. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

I worked at Google DeepMind. You should listen to the warnings about AI | Alex Turner

We must stop companies from allowing AI to self-improve into an uncontrollable level of intelligence

theguardian.com

It was exactly ten years ago today, on my 33rd birthday, that I posted this comic online.

I'm not an AI doomer at all but it is concerning how people are dismissing doomers by saying things like "how would it even find another machine to copy itself onto", "how would it even get money", and "several terabytes large is so huge that it would be infeasible to copy itself many times"

I've said I'm a doomer before. Anything with a high information processing capability, a high degree of autonomy, and unclear or changing goals is dangerous, like a virus or an invasive species. Ignore the "it's marketing" narrative. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Insider warnings over AI fall flat with some in Silicon Valley

A recent spate of stark warnings about the dangers of AI has been met with scepticism by executives and investors.

bbc.com

In Australia we advertise gambling to children. SportsBet ads on Lego Masters. And this is *after* major gambling reform. Btw watching people make Lego is as boring as... well... you'd imagine. No amount of dramatic music and editing can hide it.

I spent a decade of my research life very interested in what I like to call Media Multiplicities, and a decade ago did a bit overview of the field. One part of the analysis looked at the affordance of the multiplicity based on number of elements. We are entering the serious numbers here.

NBC News@nbcnews.com · 2w ago

Almost 3,000 drones light up the night sky in lower Manhattan to honor the lives lost during the September 11th attacks.

A living thing is a structure that undertakes to perform the actions necessary to obtain the energy and materials and conditions that sustain that structure.

If you are going to coin a world-changing term, do it with style. One of my favourite lines. "The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up." JJ Gibson

Anyone in Sydney have any personal recommendations of holiday code camps or similar for 7yo kids?

Giving everyone in the country $5k is a progressive economic policy, redistribution akin to UBI. Dems should just match it or increase it and make it a recurring payment. $10k per year to every citizen.

Suno, now with (some level of) copyright holder approval. Now interesting times to see if the pivoted business model and new contractual complexity is as fun to users, and sounds any good. For now I'm too AI-musicked-out to go in and have a play. www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/suno-v6-ai-m...

Suno v6 AI music models launch in partnership with Warner Music, BMG, and Believe

Suno’s previous models will be retired, according to Chief Product Officer Jack Brody…

musicbusinessworldwide.com

There's a trend of casting off super intelligence doomerism as marketing hype or delusions of grandeur. But can a system make another system more intelligent than it without intending to? Yes, life on earth! As for alignment, that's as easy as balancing a pencil on its tip. I'm with team doom.

Nancy 9/7/26 … Happy Labor Day 🛠️

That's funny. Very funny. Like the kid who thinks you can't see them because they're covering their eyes, just because you said this is not marketing, doesn't mean it's not marketing.

Some very good news Coles Supermarkets has dropped Palatir. May the few left in AU that also use this dodgy military-grade surveillance to spy on their workers and the public, also follow Coles' lead. Spain, France, Germany, Britain are all saying no too. USA you can say no too. ⚖️ 🇦🇺 🇪🇸 🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇬🇧

Coles cuts ties with controversial CIA-linked data giant Palantir

The 2024 deal handed the Peter Thiel-founded company 10 billion rows of data covering every store, shift and one of Australia’s largest workforces.

smh.com.au

We have such a poor handle on AI impact as a social phenomenon not an individual one. Individuals make reasoned estimates of validity, fact check, trust external sources. But the framework has changed quick. Must slow down adoption and monitor societal impact. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

‘Scary’: how misinformation and AI hallucinations are infiltrating Australia’s parliament

Exclusive: Guardian analysis reveals that dozens of policy submissions from across the political spectrum incorrectly summarise real research and invent or wrongly cite sources

theguardian.com

Gosh, I just did the ol' subscribe/unsubscribe move with Midjourney as I'll be teaching gen AI stuff soon. No roach motel there. Just click "unsubscribe" and then... you're unsubscribed. You can even request the remainder of the month to be refunded. Why is this so unusual it warrants a post?

"Smith, you moron, what have you done? I said fire extinguisher, not flame thrower!"

René Walter@rawx.bsky.social · 3w ago

This is the Black Mirror future conservatives want