Mastodawn

I think it is meaningful that Marvin Minsky, sometimes called the "father of AI", seemed to hold human beings in low regard.

Here's John Searle in 1983:
Marvin Minsky of MIT says that the next generation of computers will be so intelligent that we will ‘be lucky if they are willing to keep us around the house as household pets.'
Here's Joseph Weizenbaum in 2007:
Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’
He goes on to note that meat is dead and might be eaten or thrown out. Flesh is what's alive. He also draws attention to the word "merely", as in "nothing more than".

I share with Weizenbaum the belief that Minsky has clearly expressed a disdain for human intelligence. We're on the order of household pets. Our brains are no more than food or trash. Obviously Minsky doesn't speak for all AI researchers then or since, but his "meat machine" language is all over the place, and this disdain or even contempt for human intelligence and achievement is also common.

It definitely doesn't speak to a curiosity about intelligence, which I think requires at least a little bit of love and esteem.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #intelligence #GenAI #GenerativeAI

ContraindiKate 3h ago

I'm looking for a good summary article about why relying on AI search results for everything is a bad idea.

I have a friend who is deep in the rabbit hole of Google Gemini. She uses it for everything, and trusts the slop it generates for her above the info on reliable websites. She does not want to believe me when I tell her the instant answers her phone gives her are often wrong and sometimes dangerously so. She's relying on it now for medical advice, even over the advice of her doctor.

Could someone recommend a clear, well-written and concise article for someone who is not at all tech literate?

My friend is not stupid, she's just been wildly misled by tech billionaires and their propaganda. She still thinks facebook is a nice place to put her eyes. But she is open to conversation. I just need to convince her that I'm not the only person who thinks Google Gemini is bad for her health.

English or German language is possible.

#NoAI #ArticificalIntelligence
#enshitification #entshitification
#AIslop
#generativeAI

Anthony 3h ago

Re-reading The Soul Gained and Lost: Artificial Intelligence as a Philosophical Project by Phil Agre as catharsis. Here.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

The Soul Gained and Lost

Miguel Afonso Caetano 4h ago

"So if AI detection becomes impossible, we will have to assume humanity just to operate normally. As I mentioned, this is serving me relatively well in editing and marking, I will assume that if something has someone’s name or signature, they wrote it, and they should assume all of the consequences of that text.

For the same reason, I don’t think that any sort of legislative solution will work. The technology is too far ahead to expect any sort of ban. We could probably try to enact legislation that sets the obligation for LLM developers to clearly identify when an AI has been used to generate text, but this would only open the door for models that have been trained in countries without such restrictions to become popular. And then there will probably be AI humanisers that will get rid of such identifiers.

A solution that appears to be emerging in many writing circles is to loudly attack anyone who is using AI text, and to try to gather consensus in the writing professions to loudly oppose any sort of AI use. Writers are now at the stage in which artists were back in 2022, AI is just about to get good enough as to threaten people’s jobs. So there is a bit of a siege mentality emerging, where the first instict will be to punish and ostracise anyone who breaks this code. I’m highly skeptical of this approach as it is likely to lead to witch-hunts, false accusations, purity spirals, and other nasty online behaviour that is not likely to fix the problem.

Eventually, I think that we will find some balance."

https://www.technollama.co.uk/why-are-people-adopting-ai-to-write

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Writing #AcademicPublishing

Why are people adopting AI to write?

The last few weeks I have witnessed a number of interesting discussions breaking out on social media. A couple of weeks ago a US-based academic admitted using AI in some of his writing, which promp…

TechnoLlama

Miguel Afonso Caetano 4h ago

"Each prior “intelligence explosion” was not an upgrade to individual cognitive hardware, but the emergence of a new, socially aggregated unit of cognition. Primate intelligence scaled with social group size, not habitat difficulty. Human language created what Michael Tomasello calls the “cultural ratchet”: knowledge accumulating across generations without any individual requirement to reconstruct the whole. Writing, law, and bureaucracy externalized social intelligence into infrastructure, institutions that coordinate across longer time horizons than any participant within them. A Sumerian scribe running a grain accounting system did not comprehend its macroeconomic function; the system was functionally more intelligent than he was.

AI extends this sequence. Large language models are trained on the accumulated output of human social cognition—the cultural ratchet made computationally active, every parameter a compressed residue of communicative exchange. What migrates into silicon is not abstract reasoning but social intelligence in externalized form, encountering itself on a new substrate.

If intelligence is inherently social, then the path to more powerful AI runs not through building a single colossal oracle but through composing richer social systems—and these systems will be hybrid. We have entered the era of human-AI centaurs: composite actors that are neither purely human nor purely machine. Centaur actors can take many forms and inhabit many different roles. Each one of us may move in and out of diverse ensembles many times a day: one human directing many AI agents; one AI serving many humans; many humans and many AIs collaborating in shifting configurations."

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeg1895

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #SocialIntelligence #Centaurs #HumanInTheLoop

Miguel Afonso Caetano 4h ago

Hey, look: It's AI-bashing time, folks!!!

"The study evaluated the impacts of three leading AI systems widely used in 2025: Claude 3.5 Haiku from Anthropic, GPT-5 Mini from OpenAI, and Gemini 2.5 Flash. In initial testing, the researchers found that half of the participants refused to use an LLM at all or only used it to find information rather than generate new content. To better categorize the larger batch of participants, the researchers defined heavy AI users as the participants who said they generated more than 40% of their text written for the experiment with an LLM.

The authors found that users who heavily relied on LLMs submitted essays with 50% fewer pronouns, which was representative of the larger shift toward impersonal language that included fewer anecdotes and references to human experiences."

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-changing-style-substance-human-writing-study-finds-rcna263789

#AI #GenerativeAI #Writing #LLMs