“I am staring in horror at something on my phone or laptop, and no matter how many other people are also staring in horror at that thing, somewhere, many of us are sitting alone. We look, and we look, and then there’s another thing, and another." - Reactor Magazine
For instance: “Could AI take over the bulk of legal work or is there an underlying thread of creativity and judgment of the type only speculative super AI could hope to tackle? … Where do we draw the line between general and specific tasks?" - Fast Company
That’s the plan at the urban, fully blended into the city Portland State University, which is in the final stages of a design competition to “revitalize” Portland’s much-derided (mostly, but not only, by conservatives) downtown. - Oregon ArtsWatch
No media consumer is an easier mark than the guilt-ridden parent, whose perseverations about not paying enough attention can be amplified a millionfold by graphic pop-culture warnings about teen temptations. What’s so different about leaving kids to spend seven hours a day on screens? - Racket News
Language has been a central object of philosophical attention ever since the ‘linguistic turn’ in the beginning of the 20th century. What can the emergence of a second language-producing entity tell us here? - 3 Quarks Daily
If you think a poem made like a hot dog of stolen words sounds interesting, that’s fine, but no one should lose their job over that experiment. This entire report makes clear to me that the powers that be see AI as a way to make more money by squeezing down their cost of labor. - LitHub
The crowd addicted to slander and the crowd addicted to censorship are displaying at high visibility the symptoms of what psychologists call disinhibition. When people feel themselves entirely at home, with a group they are sure of, they shed the restraints that are useful in securing a minimal self-censorship in mixed or uncertain company. - Compact Magazine
Social platforms can have a radicalizing effect on fandoms. When we study algorithmic radicalization, we tend to do so in the context of politics, but the same systems might also calcify our beliefs about cultural products. Yet we still have a fairly limited understanding of how all of this works. - The Atlantic
“Some people are more alive than others. Even permanently so.” I find that true to my own experience, even if it is hard to state clearly in what form such vitality exists. - Lapham's Quarterly
Even if nostalgia is a less “dangerous emotion” today than it seems to have been to the Swiss soldiers, it well deserves to be taken seriously and sympathetically. - The Guardian
Your phone mirrors the world back to you. But what you see is the world you want to see—a “frictionless,” “responsive,” “immediate,” “obedient,” “commercialized,” “optimized” simulacrum of your own will accomplished. - The Point
At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. - The Atlantic (MSN)
What defines us as humans is the concept of theory of mind: the ability to track other people’s mental states. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have led to intense debate about the possibility that these models exhibit behaviour that is indistinguishable from human behaviour in theory of mind tasks. - Nature
