TechTakes

Does anyone here know what Justine Tunney’s deal is? I’d been following her redbean project for a time but came across an article that left me rather startled

"[A]cademic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year."

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai

Not a sneer, but an observation on the tech industry from Baldur Bjarnason, plus some of my own thoughts:

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before this big of a sentiment gap between tech – web tech especially – and the public sentiment I hear from the people I know and the media I experience.

Most of the time I hear “AI” mentioned on Icelandic mainstream media or from people I know outside of tech, it’s being used as to describe something as a specific kind of bad. “It’s very AI-like” (“mjög gervigreindarlegt” in Icelandic) has become the talk radio short hand for uninventive, clichéd, and formulaic.

Baldur has pointed that part out before, and noted how its kneecapping the consumer side of the entire bubble, but I suspect the phrase "AI" will retain that meaning well past the bubble's bursting. "AI slop", or just "slop", will likely also stick around, for those who wish to differentiate gen-AI garbage from more genuine uses of machine learning.

To many, “AI” seems to have become a tech asshole signifier: the “tech asshole” is a person who works in tech, only cares about bullshit tech trends, and doesn’t care about the larger consequences of their work or their industry. Or, even worse, aspires to become a person who gets rich from working in a harmful industry.

For example, my sister helps manage a book store as a day job. They hire a lot of teenagers as summer employees and at least those teens use “he’s a big fan of AI” as a red flag. (Obviously a book store is a biased sample. The ones that seek out a book store summer job are generally going to be good kids.)

I don’t think I’ve experienced a sentiment disconnect this massive in tech before, even during the dot-com bubble.

Part of me suspects that the AI bubble's spread that "tech asshole" stench to the rest of the industry, with some help from the widely-mocked NFT craze and Elon Musk becoming a punching bag par excellence for his public breaking-down of Twitter.

(Fuck, now I'm tempted to try and cook up something for MoreWrite discussing how I expect the bubble to play out...)

In the land down under, the ABC continues to feed us with golden tech takes: Australia might be snoozing through the AI 'gold rush'

"This is the largest gold rush in the history of capitalism and Australia is missing out," said Artificial Intelligence professor Toby Walsh, from the University of New South Wales.

It's even bigger than the actual gold rush! Buy your pans now folks!

One option Professor Van Den Hengel suggests is building our own Large Language Model like OpenAI's ChatGPT from the ground up, rather than being content to import the tech for decades to come.

lol, but also please god no

"The only way to have a say in what happens globally in this critical space is to be an active participant," he said.

mate, I think that ship might have already sailed

"I'm sick of Google putting gratuitous LLMs everywhere"
(finger curls on monkey paw)