What I've Been Reading Lately
I've been reading some bangers lately, so I thought I'd share!
The first three are connected and I found out about #2 from #1.
The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble
Written by: Edward Zitron
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
This post felt like a breath of fresh air. Every time I listen to or read about 'AI' my brain feels this weird dissonance between their words and my lived experience. My experience engaging with AI was at first when I tested it for programming, writing, or generating art. More commonly now it's thrust upon me like the top of my search results (I switched to Kagi to avoid this), emails from my coworkers that are 3 times as long, 5 times as polite, and 10 times as annoying to read, or the soulless art that appears on my feeds in posts and advertisements. What I read and hear from AI fans is how it is revolutionizing everything. What I see are half-truths masquerading as full truths, bland text with no personality, and the images that lost their novelty factor 3 years ago.
Ed's post is well-researched and gives me some hope. I sincerely think AI is feeding a stupidity crisis that has been festering for the better part of two decades. It's easy to point to Trump's dipshit posts on whatever platform he's puking into these days or RFK's snake oil being lathered on the American public which will likely result in the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over the next decade. But those guys have been idiots for their entire lives. (I don't know, maybe they were fine in kindergarten or something but I fucking doubt it.)
What I'm more worried about is the negative effect social media wrought on the global ability to focus on anything longer than 5 minutes, and how AI is coming in for the KO to ensure an entire generation of people lose the ability to engage with anything on a meaningful level. I fear it further pushes us from respecting and pursuing expertise. The anti-intellectual movement has already wedged itself into the public consciousness and now vaccine hesitancy is increasing, government officials are trying to (and often succeeding) in gutting departments (or their scope of power) like the EPA and NASA, and now AI is feeding delusions and making people think they can rely on it as much as they'd be able to rely on a professional who has dedicated their life to a subject matter.
Anyway, The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble reassures me that at some point, expectations around LLMs may crash into the realm of realistic.
Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI
Written by: Nikhil Suresh
That post above references this post.
It is a response to a popular article that made the rounds which presented AI-doubters as nuts. It's a very good read and works well in tandem with Ed's post.
The Rise of Whatever
Written by: Eevee
To round out the AI-sucks block, read this post.
This was a fun read and helped me to work through some of the reasons why I feel how I feel when looking at AI-generated content and thinking about how it impacts our ability to critically think. The author, Eevee also creates NSFW artwork so be warned if you stray from that article too far.
Other than that, I had 6 or so books pending hold through Libby and one finally became available, so I started reading it and have been enjoying it so far.
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
Written by: T. Kingfisher (real name Ursula Vernon)
Wikipedia page for the book
This is a fun and light read! It's about a young girl named Mona who is capable of magic! But only on bread and dough-based stuff (for the most part). It's whimsical and the author does a great job of world-building without overindulging in lore-dumps. I'm only about 40% of the way through so far, so I can't speak to it as a whole, but I've found the characters to be charming and real.
I especially like the writing around Mona's perspective. Since she's a child and magical baker, a lot of effort was made to really give you that perspective. For example, Mona will remember people by their morning order at the bakery or have a naive trust in authority figures and bureaucratic processes. I'm really enjoying my time with the book so far and hope it keeps it continues delivering.
That's some of the stuff I've been reading lately. Peace!