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Braiding AI

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Close up image of dark brown braided fibers.

"Knots & Braids" by Norm Wright is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

I guess I’m carving out a space focused on AI metaphors. First it was working with Anna Mills to suggest “mirage” rather than “hallucination” as a metaphor for when AI gets it wrong. Now I’m fixated on this thing we keep hearing about the importance of keeping humans “in the loop” with AI. We need to stop this kind of talk.

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Are We Tripping? The Mirage of AI Hallucinations

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A photograph of mirages in a desert under a hazy light blue sky showing some distant outcroppings reflected in what looks like water beyond a sandy foreground.

Photo credit: “Mirage” by bobrayner, here cropped, is licensed via CC BY.

There is a deep disorder in the discourse of generative artificial intelligence, aka AI — or what I like to call sparkling intelligence, because everyone is using ✨✨✨ emojis and icons to signify AI. All joking aside, the disorder in AI discourse is the way everyone keeps talking about hallucinations when AI makes mistakes, leading us to anthropomorphize AI and imagine that AI both experiences reality and sometimes loses it. Anyone who knows how AI really works knows that’s wrong.

Welcome to the #AInthropocene

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A giant robotic limb made of crumbling stone dominates the left side of an image, while in the background, a shadowy human figure standing facing away in rocky landscape, looks out on a moon or asteroid caught hurtling over distant light blue water.

"The AInthropocene" by Nate Angell was created using the DALL-E 2 generative AI service with the prompt "Picture a future geologic age in which humans and artificial intelligence coexist and collaborate to shape the Earth and its ecosystems in ways that were previously unimaginable" and is dedicated to the public domain via CC0.

Inspired while reading Tressie McMillan Cottom’s 20 Dec 2022 NY Times post, “Human This Christmas“, I tweeted about the “AInthropocene”, which I thought would be an already existent portmanteau word that combines the idea of the Anthropocene geologic age with the “AI” abbreviation for artificial intelligence — putting the “AIn’t” in the Anthropocene if you … Read more

Mothering Digital

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A black and white screengrab from the recording of Douglas Engelbart giving the "Mother of All Demos" in 1968.

Screengrab of Douglas Engelbart from the recording of the 1968 "MOAD".

Today folks are gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (“MOAD”). Held in 1968 in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, SRI’s Douglas Engelbart and others demonstrated networked computer systems they were developing, including the mouse, hypertext, and real-time collaborative editing. The MOAD has become a notorious event in computer and internet history, both presaging and shaping the digital technology environment we live in now.

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Random Encounters: Thinking Beyond the Totality

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Image of a solar eclipse during totality.

"Totality" by Geoff Livingston licensed CC BY-NC-ND.

This post involves a bit of Frankenstein thinking, because two — seemingly unrelated — posts I came across recently made connections for me. Let’s see if I can explain why I think they’re connected. TL;DR: While I have gigantic respect for both authors of these posts, I think both ask us to view things too generally, without paying attention to details that matter.

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