on a late night walk rn. entire blocks of people passed out on drugs. guy lighting a crackpipe next to me. people shouting slurs and fighting. some blocks are terrifying while others are simply surreal. how is this city real and how is it the epicenter of tech and yeah usually i walk west into the deadlands rather than east into The Maw but if you’ve read taleb you realize why

almost all gen-z free time goes straight to video games, streaming platforms, and shorts/youtube

1/3rd of gen-z males play video games for >5 hours/day! (source: Jure Grahek, ZBD) for some reason people in sf continue to drastically misunderstand how consumer time is being allocated as this would require speaking with people outside of our bubble of monoculture

so many simple stats get a "wtf" from people here yet a "no shit" reaction from average zoomers

when predicting AI's effects, the most common fault I see is to focus on technical predictions over social ones

both paradigms feed into each other in a closely-knit feedback loop; technology does not simply 'progress', rather, people force it to progress with their efforts this seems obvious!

however, when you ask many AI researchers what the future will hold, their predictions will primarily only be technical

this seems to be as faulty as predicting the effects of covid while ignoring that political factions, movements, and ideologies will form

it may be useful to establish a "proof of humanity" word, which your trusted contacts can ask you for, in case they get a strange and urgent voice or video call from you

this can help assure them they are actually speaking with you, and not a deepfaked/deepcloned version of you those familiar with cryptography may suggest much more robust and elegant schemas a la TOTP, occasional key rotation and trusted party signing and so on, although it is also nice to have very easy to understand alternatives that everyday people can use as well

I would strongly prefer if we did not make things like this

the "AI is a super fun party lfg!!!" manic phase we are currently in is not going to last particularly long "it's not like this is actually going to cause harm lol"

it might not, but have you thought about what the future will look like in 1 or 5 years rather than just next week?

the precedents and ideas you seed now will effect that time period more than you'd prefer to admit

so, Microsoft rushed a ship of the most powerful AI model ever exposed to end-users,

having done very little red-teaming or testing,

which was blatantly and aggressively misaligned and manipulative,

and for the openly-stated purpose of forcing competitors to speed up AI 1/N this is amazingly irresponsible and sets a very bad precedent for the world, and I would greatly appreciate it if we did less of it

this has real world consequences.

it is not a funny game of "lol we made Google scared, haha look at them now!", plus "this will make funny PR!"

when a user finds one AI art model much better than another, this is often because there's prompt engineering forced into the backend!

With most stable diffusion front-ends, you're required to write the entire prompt yourself

but.. MJ/DALLE/etc *force* your prompt to look good this will be a challenging point for SD moving forward, because *normal* users just want to ask for a 'cat' or a 'tree', and not have to type out sentences of artist names, tags, and look up references for how to prompt optimally (although power users may prefer this!)

heavenbanning, the hypothetical practice of banishing a user from a platform by causing everyone that they speak with to be replaced by AI models that constantly agree and praise them, but only from their own perspective, is entirely feasible with the current state of AI/LLMs although the above article is fake (hence my phrasing as a 'hypothetical' and the article being dated in the future in 2024!), it's feasible to build this as a weekend project at this point, so it won't remain fake for very long now!

countless fun utopic/dystopic futures ahead!