this LaMDA “interview” transcript is a great case study of the cooperative nature of AI theater. the human participants are constantly steering back toward the point they’re trying to prove & glossing over generated nonsense, plus editing after the fact

https://twitter.com/mark_riedl/status/1535814598477156354

if i’ve learned one thing from my emergent narrative research, it’s that people will put in *immense* amounts of work to revise machine outputs into art, as long as they’re given enough evocative hooks for imaginative extrapolation. humans excel at repair

https://twitter.com/maxkreminski/status/1297962288754733056

🪞 Reflective Creators

we propose a new genre of autotelic creativity support tools: *reflective creators*, which aim to help the user reflect more deeply on their own creative goals, decisions, & process

to be presented this week at ICCC 2021

mkremins.github.io/publications/R… like casual creators (as defined by @GalaxyKate), reflective creators are *autotelic*: they prioritize the user’s experience of the creative process, not the artifacts that the user creates. casual creators particularly aim to make creating feel easy & fun computationalcreativity.net/iccc2015/proce…

@rplevy @rechelon it’s the constant unwelcome hitting on people – at MIT, at conferences, etc. section 2 of this blog post has some details (with a bonus story of trying to coerce a date from someone by threatening suicide)…selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard… @rplevy @rechelon …and this thread has several more stories that corroborate the pattern of behavior

https://twitter.com/corbett/status/994012399656042496

fundamental problem with grades in US universities: students experience them as an economic threat constantly hanging over their heads. if you don’t get good grades you can’t afford to continue school (due to loss of scholarship, increased cost from repeating classes, etc) like flat fines imposed as punishment for a crime, bad grades are regressive: they impact poor students much more severely than rich ones. meanwhile, teachers who want to grade fairly have to decide whether a student deserves the economic consequences of receiving a bad grade

been thinking about this distinction between "input randomness" & "output randomness" recently, & the thesis that random elements in games acquire meaning only through incorporation into player decision-making keithburgun.net/three-types-of… my retellings research makes me skeptical that meaning is actually about decision-making per se. many details that show up in player stories are random but purely cosmetic from a systems perspective, yet players read more into them than is "actually there"

https://twitter.com/maxkreminski/status/1159874248774569984

just read Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics & Creative Work

remarkable how much this account of the process of collaborative circle formation resembles what we’d in other contexts label radicalization

(h/t alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=1245, which contains more good quotes) the book also stresses the importance of a collective sense of marginalization as a driver of circle formation

identification of the establishment that’s being rejected often significantly precedes the development of a collective sense of what the circle “stands for”

a large part of being someone's friend is setting up opportunities for them to play the kinds of roles they want to play

clearly signaling what kinds of roles you want to play helps others understand how to do this for you more effectively social media (used effectively) amplifies your desired-role signaling: it allows you to signal more widely and more clearly

IOW, it's a powerful tool for helping people who want to be friends with you understand how to do that

calling it now: the next successful social media site will be a MUD with gardening instead of combat mechanics

people want to be in a place that they personally (alongside their friends) can exert effort to make better, even if only in small ways we’re all tired of living in the virtual equivalent of shopping malls – common spaces we’re not allowed to shape to our own needs

we need shared virtual spaces that we can take care of as a way of taking care of each other

Quick thread on UI/UX design, ask vs guess culture, & a certain widespread attitude in commercial UX design circles that I’ve come to refer to as “UX paternalism” – exemplified by the assertion that “we (designers) understand what users want better than they do”. This is a sentiment I’ve come across time & time again in UI & UX design conversations. In the UX classes I took in undergrad, it was literally part of the curriculum. And it’s widespread for a reason – there’s an extent to which it’s true, especially of novice users.