Scott Boehmer

Category: Technology

  • More AI Necromancy

    I posted about how gross it felt to use generative AI to create an avatar of a dead person back in May (AI Necromancy), and now there is another example with Jim Acosta interviewing a piece of video generating software that is making use of a dead kid’s appearance. This feels so incredibly wrong, and everyone involved, from Acosta and the parents to the developers building the software, should be ashamed of themselves.

    Jim Acosta, the former CNN chief White House correspondent who now hosts an independent show on YouTube, has published an interview with an AI-generated avatar of Joaquin Oliver, who died at age 17 in the Parkland school shooting in 2018.

    Ethan Shanfeld

    Jim Acosta Interviews AI Version of Teenager Killed in Parkland Shooting: ‘It’s just a Beautiful Thing’ (Variety)

  • You Should Use RSS

    Perhaps you’ve heard of RSS. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it allows websites like blogs, newsletters, and news sites to make their content available in “feeds” for outside services called “RSS readers” or “feed readers”. Far from being the new hotness attracting glitzy feature stories in tech media or billions in venture funding, RSS has been around for 25 years.

    …

    I’ve been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it’s a travesty more people aren’t familiar with it.

    Molly White

    Curate your own newspaper with RSS (citation needed)

  • AI, Search, and the Internet

    I wish I could say this is not a sustainable model for the internet, but honestly there’s no indication in Pew’s research that people understand how faulty the technology that powers Google’s AI Overview is, or how it is quietly devastating the entire human online information economy that they want and need, even if they don’t realize it.

    Emanuel Maiberg

    Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain (404 Media)

  • Chatting into Dark Corners

    This is the sort of thing that should come as no surprise. Of course an LLM that ingests as much of the internet as possible is going to incorporate works of fiction, and these programs don’t have any way of separating fact from fiction. Then the chat interface and marketing are built to convince users that they’re chatting with an intelligence rather than a probability-based text generator. Despite all that, it is still a compelling example of the dangers of LLM chatbots.

    Social media users were quick to note that ChatGPT’s answer to Lewis’ queries takes a strikingly similar form to SCP Foundation articles, a Wikipedia-style database of fictional horror stories created by users online.

    “Entry ID: #RZ-43.112-KAPPA, Access Level: ████ (Sealed Classification Confirmed),” the chatbot nonsensically declares in one of his screenshots, in the typical writing style of SCP fiction. “Involved Actor Designation: ‘Mirrorthread,’ Type: Non-institutional semantic actor (unbound linguistic process; non-physical entity).”

    Another screenshot suggests “containment measures” Lewis might take — a key narrative device of SCP fiction writing. In sum, one theory is that ChatGPT, which was trained on huge amounts of text sourced online, digested large amounts of SCP fiction during its creation and is now parroting it back to Lewis in a way that has led him to a dark place.

    In his posts, Lewis claims he’s long relied on ChatGPT in his search for the truth.

    Joe Wilkins

    A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say (Futurism)

  • HTML Quine

    I saw this page shared on Mastodon, and it is an impressive showcase of some things that HTML and CSS can accomplish.

    Its title also meant that I had to look up what quine means:

    quine: A program that produces its own source code as output

    Wiktionary

    This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine. (secretgeek.github.io)

  • BS Machines Broken By BS

    You can trick AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini into teaching you how to make a bomb or hack an ATM if you make the question complicated, full of academic jargon, and cite sources that do not exist.

    Aedrian Salazar

    Researchers Jailbreak AI by Flooding It With Bullshit Jargon (404 Media)

  • The AI Con

    Never underestimate the power of saying no. Just as AI hypers say that the technology is inevitable and you need to just shut up and deal with it, you, the reader, can just as well say “absolutely not” and refuse to accept a future which you have had little hand in shaping. Our tech futures are not prefigured, nor are they handed to us from on high. Tech futures should be ours to shape and to mold.

    Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna

    I recently read The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. It was a solid summary of problems with the current wave of “Artificial Intelligence” that has so completely captured the attention of tech leaders over the past few years. It examines how these pieces of software have numerous negative impacts with very little real upside, and how talk of achieving artificial general intelligence or superintelligence is just marketing with no real substance behind it. While the concepts covered won’t be new if you’ve followed the authors or other critics of the current AI push, like Timnit Gebru, it was a great collection of the information in one place. If you haven’t been paying attention to them, then it is definitely worth reading for a perspective that is often missing from coverage of AI companies and products.

  • My Career: Microsoft Edge

    The internet famously caught Microsoft unprepared. Netscape was the first widely used browser, but when Bill Gates redirected the company to focus on the internet, the ability to set the default browser for Windows allowed Internet Explorer to gain dominance. That lasted into the early 2000’s when first Firefox and then Chrome took advantage of Microsoft’s lack of investment in IE to take over the market. As its market share cratered, Microsoft started actually investing in IE again, but by that point its brand was tarnished with a reputation for missing features and poor performance.

    The later part of my work on Windows Phone had been leading a team of engineers that worked on the interface for Internet Explorer for Windows Phone 8.1, but that was fairly separated from the team working on Internet Explorer for desktop Windows. When the Windows and Windows Phone organizations merged together to work on Windows 10, the browser teams merged too. My team and I became one of the teams in the browser app group so that we could use our experience to continue delivering a mobile-friendly browser experience for the converged Windows 10.

    A combination of factors meant that the team could make a big bet. Internet Explorer’s brand image was considered to be badly tarnished, and everyone wanted Windows 10 to be a clear signal of a reset from Windows 8. Then we also were aiming to deliver an OS with apps that could be unified across computer and mobile form factors. With those combined, the decision was made to build a new browser with a new brand. Eventually, the branding folks would name it Microsoft Edge, but internally we were calling it Spartan.

    Spartan involved an entirely new application built as a universal Windows application using C++/CX and XAML. Then the rendering engine was forked from mshtml in order to allow for breaking Internet Explorer compatibility to pursue web standards and Chrome compatibility.

    In that effort, my team was in charge of the mobile interface, downloads experience, and gesture navigation. As the member of the broader Spartan team with the most background in XAML, I also got to play a large role in deciding on the overall app’s architecture to allow for sharing interface components across different presentation modes.

    It was a huge project to get Edge ready for release with Windows 10, so there were definitely some rough edges in that first version, but overall, I was pretty proud of what we delivered.

    At the time, Microsoft had an ambitious vision for the future with Windows as a seamless experience across desktops, laptops, phones, gaming consoles, virtual reality headsets, and mixed reality headsets. Execution towards that goal was uneven though. Within the Windows team, there was a culture that only “Big Windows” (desktop OS) mattered, so it wasn’t uncommon that phone builds would get broken by teams that just didn’t bother thinking about Windows Phone. Other initiatives, like the Creators Update and Paint 3D ended up being trimmed to the point of being disappointments. There were some great ideas in the mix though. One of my favorites was Continuum where a Windows Phone could be connected to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and then present a desktop-like experience.

    Under Satya Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft’s ambitious vision for Windows started to wither. With Windows Phone considered a low priority and then cancelled, the entire idea of a unified OS across different types of consumer devices no longer made sense. It felt like Windows was done trying to build something interesting and instead was resigned to a gradual path towards irrelevance, at least on the consumer side of things. With that feeling of a lack of purpose for the team, I started looking for a way out of the Windows organization.

  • What Happens When the AI Bubble Bursts

    The AI bubble is likely to pop, because the amount of investment in the technology in no way correlates with its severe lack of profit. Sooner rather than later, this will become clear to investors, who will start to withdraw their investments. In this piece, I’m interested in thinking about what the world will look like when the AI bubble pops. Will AI go away completely? What happens to the world economy? What will our information ecosystems look? All of these are quite impossible to predict, but let’s try anyway.

    What happens when the AI bubble bursts? (Ada Ada Ada – Patreon)

  • Billionaires Are Not Like Us

    Now, here we are, an era in which the men of cyber industry — having monopolized goods distribution, security algorithms, internet satellites, social networks, and our attention — have seen fit to attempt a sort of siege on the American government. Is this techno-­fascism? Sure! Should it concern us that power and tech — and the power of tech — are so concentrated in so few hands and that Trump appears to be a Trojan horse for Silicon Valley’s most neo-reactionary ambitions? Absolutely! Do we want America remade in the image of a tech startup by men who like to move fast and break things (especially when most of the systems they’re breaking are ones that they, in fact, would never rely on)? Not I! But also: What is going on with this idea that humans should even want to live in space? What sort of lack of reality testing are we dealing with here?

    Alex Morris

    What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us (Rolling Stone)