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In Yesterday’s IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. (See longer description on their website.) TL;DR: They are pushing Search more into the “here’s your processed answer” direction that “AI Overviews” have established (you know, those AI snippets in current Search that are wrong about 10% of the time). So they are mostly giving up on the paradigm of providing links to information. While they packaged it as a lot of “AI” talk and “agentic” and whatnot, what their whole approach of decontextualizing information, of taking away links to sources and instead producing some LLM generated…
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AI as a Fascist Artifact
(Christian Tieber hat eine deutsche Übersetzung des Textes angefertigt: “KI” als faschistisches Artefakt. Vielen Dank Christian!) (This is a bit of a merger of two talks I recently gave about fascism and AI. One was in German at the Cables Of Resistance conference, one in English at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy. I added some shots of the slides I used as a structure for the text which might make it look a bit weird. You can just ignore the images if you want to. They are kinda like subchapter marks. The text is not exactly what…
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Dissolving the social
“AI” exists to disenfranchise labor. That’s what it’s for. Regardless of how good these stochastic systems are or the flaws they have just being able to point at the non-unionized robot whenever the employees ask for raises or anything really is incredibly valuable for business. The existence of “AI” and the supporting narrative mean that you defending your value and therefore price on the market will have a way harder time. But that’s the impact for people on the top. That’s why the C-Suite wants those tools to exist and to be deployed. I think there is also a strong…
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Claude magic
Anthropic’s Claude models are having a moment. Their newest release supposedly “changes everything” and if you don’t use it every day you just cannot have any opinion on LLMs. Which is the same story we heard about previous OpenAI releases or previous Anthropic releases. Every new (and more expensive) model is groundbreaking and almost AGI until a few months later when you get yelled at for using that old piece of garbage. Remember when everyone was raving about Perplexity and how great their stochastic systems were? This of course is not fully new: Tech lives on closely following the release…
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Nothing to Declare
Making big public statements is always fun and people who think themselves to be important love doing it as a way of trying to influence public opinion and/or politics. They are a way for institutions and individuals to organize and try to shine some light onto important issues. We’ve seen many such things in the AI space, one of the more ludicrous examples being the big push to pause “AI” development (signed by a bunch of billionaires developing “AI”). With “AI” having sucked up all the air in the room what else could we declare things about? Usually those declarations…
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Artisanal care
When we moved into our apartment we hired a contractor to build bespoke cupboards for a few niches that we wanted to use optimally. He built perfectly fitting, nice cupboards that make those areas look nice and clean while allowing us to store all kinds of stuff. And he took great care doing it. Even after the job had started he kept explaining us why certain decisions we thought were smart might have been not so smart and offered solutions – often without charging extra. He wanted to build something that lasts and that makes us happy – while being…
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Bei “Breitband” zum Thema “Digitale Souveränität”
Ich war eingeladen zur Breitband Sendung des Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Wir sprachen (unter anderem) über “Digitale Souveränität”. Die ganze Folge kann man hier nachhören: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/jugendschutz-in-social-media-die-plaene-der-plattform-discord-100.html Kurze Zusammenfassung meiner Aussagen: Ich glaube “Digitale Souveränität” ist keine (bzw. nur sekundär) eine Shoppingfrage (“Wo kaufe ich meine Software?”) und viel mehr eine Frage der Fähigkeit einer Organisation, IT Systeme entlang ihrer Ziele und Bedürfnisse aktiv zu gestalten. Open Source ist dazu eher notwendig denn hinreichend. Die Dynamik, sich weg von proprietären Lösungen zu entwickeln, die sich gerade entfaltet, darf sich nicht darin erschöpfen, 1-zu-1 Replacements für Word und Excel etc zu suchen: Sie muss…
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On Alliances
This morning (it is evening now in freezing Berlin) I wrote an article about a blog post Cory Doctorow had released the day before. In his post Cory made an argument about LLM usage that I criticized: I think his view on technology being neutral and it being possible to “liberate” any technology by making it “free and open” is a bit wonky. You can read his stance and my arguments in the respective articles. Cory Doctorow is not like you or me. He is famous – at least on the Internet and in the tech spaces around it. And…
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Acting ethically in an imperfect world
Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are at some point in a situation where the best you can do is a vegetarian option. Sometimes it’s not even our hand being forced but us not having the mental strength or priorities to do something: I could just not use WhatsApp because it is…
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Diffusion of Responsibility
One of the features of “AI” is the diffusion of responsibility: “AI” systems are being put in all kinds of processes and when they fuck up (and they always fuck up) it was just the “AI”, or “someone should have checked things”. “AI” companies want to sell machines to solve every issue but give no warranties, take no responsibilities and the same dynamic often extends to organizations using “AI”: You get the support-chatbot to promise you a full refund and when you claim that you get a half-assed “oh but that was just the bot, those tell bullshit all the…