I see some folks starting to use the “TESCREAL” acronym. So, here’s a short thread on what it stands for and why it’s important. 🧵

ok folks, I've got five e-book links for my book on music recommendation burning a hole in my pocket press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book… If you'd like one, reply to this tweet with a recommendation of music that's not on Spotify (but that I can stream somewhere), and I'll pick 5 randomly.

instead of "adapting" society to be machine readable and writable. The current race towards ever larger "AI experiments" is not a preordained path where our only choice is how fast to run, but rather a set of decisions driven by the profit motive.

I’ve spent 1000s of hours studying the top storytellers in the world. People like Tolkien, Rowling and Gaiman. Here’s what I learned: *** "What happens next?" Neil Gaiman says you can sum up great storytelling with those 3 words. They should be the first thing a reader (or

I'm just going to do a thread about some things that people need to know about classifiers like this. This is stuff that 99% of people did not learn in school at any level, but which a lot more than 1% of people are going to need to understand to navigate AI world.

NYT "AI" explainer misleads. Deep learning techniques date from the 1980s, & "AI" had been hot/cold for decades, not slow until 2012. There was no new "single idea" in 2012. What WAS new, & propelled the AI boom, was concentrated resources (data/compute) controlled by tech cos 1/

Writing is hard, drawing also. But what if I build website layouts with LEGO and then generate mockups with AI? cc LEGO

The book I edited with Morgan G. Ames 🔥☕🐕🔥 is finally out: it contains ten well-integrated essays on the history of algorithmic concepts and practices from the 1500s to the present. My heartfelt thanks to Morgan and to the contributors!

AI and Power: The Ethical Challenges of Automation, Centralization, & Scale Based on 20-min talk: youtu.be/spHB7IEFXbg Blog post version: rachel.fast.ai/posts/2023-05-… 2/

Here is another case study in how anthropomorphization feeds AI hype --- and now AI doomerism. vice.com/en/article/4a3…

Our results echo the work of experts in the field of algorithmic bias, such as Sasha Luccioni, PhD 🦋🌎✨🤗, Abeba Birhane, @timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social), and Dr. Joy Buolamwini, who have been warning us that the biggest threats from AI are not human extinction but the potential for widening inequalities. 🧵 8/13

I never met him and yet his writing and thinking was so important to me for so many years. I read Art Worlds and a ton of his articles over and over again. This is sad news.

With the OpenAI clownshow, there's been renewed media attention on the xrisk/"AI safety" nonsense. Personally, I've had a fresh wave of reporters asking me naive questions (+ some contacts from old hands who know how to handle ultra-rich man-children with god complexes). 🧵1/

🟥My mom has a farm in Indiana 🟥I was born and raised in Ohio 🟥I lived in North Carolina for a decade 🟥I wrote a book about white conservative social movements 🟥But I learned a lot from other scholars of working-class white communities --> Read them instead of Vance - a🧵

Such a useful sanity-check reminder from @emilymbender.bsky.social's #ACL2024 Presidential Address: *Language research* is itself interesting, independent of AI. Slides here: faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers…

"[The obsession with AI] fundamentally has to do with power, and certainly with the power to make life... This is an expression of a uterus envy." - Joseph Weizenbaum, 1996

danah boyd @notnaughtknot I suspect that this is not quite right, and that the real motivation is to be able to do away with, rather than have to control and make accommodations with, the 'lower orders'. Which of course include women (at least as satisfiers of sexual desires). But also dangerous /1

A deep dive into Sports Innovation Lab’s data cloud analyzed the population of sports fans with disabilities and found: -They are BIG sports fans -Their fandom is on the rise -They have immense purchasing power -They are HUGE fans of baseball Read more: hubs.la/Q02MVgbp0

Interviewing Users (2nd edition) by Steve Portigal is for anyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick and wants to learn how to interview and listen to people. But don't take our word for it—see what others have to say about it! rfld.me/3wUUV57

Let’s all take a moment to appreciate blank VHS cassette packaging design trends