More tech that does not need the internet at all would be great.

I’m a video producer who occasionally needs to code. I find it much more useful to write the code myself, then have AI identify where things might be going wrong. I’ve developed a decent intuition for when it will be helpful and when it will just run in circles. It has definitely helped me out of some jams. Generative images/video are in much the same boat. I almost never use a fully AI shot/image in professional work. But generative fill and generative extend are extremely useful.

Great resources! I’d like to add the ALPR Map of Flock Cameras, DeFlock.

Anthropic’s news page is educational in every sense of the word.

$13B Series F

The MIT Study

The Safety Tests

One of the few reliable uses of an LLM is brainstorming, as a wall to bounce ideas off of, or more accurately a semantic mirror. In low-stakes situations (like a writer thinking about their story from a different perspective), you’re essentially probing the latent space for interesting connections between meanings. It’ll default to the most common, generic connections, of course. So if the writer wants to tease through more surprising possibilities, they’ll quickly learn to direct the model to less well-worn territories. It rarely even requires anything approaching jailbreaking methods like U$1||G 1337 5P34K.

If we think of an LLM as something akin to an external imagination, we can interpret interactions with it with some maturity and honesty. If we think of an LLM as an oracle, or a friend, or a lover, or what have you - we’re signing a contract with the Fae Folk. The Childlike Empress makes no distinction between good and evil beings of Fantastica, as they all must live in the imaginations of mankind. In high-stakes situations, this kind of imaginitive freedom can have (and does have) enormous consequences.

I see some similarities in the way that the “Doom Caused Columbine” conversation happened early on. And just as that resulted in the establishment of the ESRB, hopefully this incident (and others like it) will lead to some reform. But I don’t know exactly what that reform needs to look like. I think education is helpful, but I don’t think it’s enough. We largely know about the harms of social media and it is no less of an issue. Guardrails can kind of be set up, but the only way to do it presently (technically speaking) is hamfisted and ineffective. And adults are no more immune to the potential harms of abusing an LLM than they’re immune to being influenced by advertisements.

The similarities between (particularly early) image generation and dream imagery probably aren’t coincidental. Maybe it’s just that they’re both generated from latent spaces.

industry associations and individual businesses […] argued the FTC had failed to follow correct procedures and conduct an analysis before issuing the rule. The judge panel has agreed with them.

Three judges — two appointed by President Trump, one by President George H. W. Bush — found that the FTC’s rulemaking process was flawed and did not include early analysis of the rule’s possible economic effects. [1]

“the law”

Bonsoir, Don.

Politicians attempting to ban AI regulation are only shielding OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, etc. Those same politicians will pearl clutch about Hugging Face or DeepSeek in the same breath. It’s just about money and the arms race. Abdicating responsibility to AI would require either a change in how we regulate people or a granting of rights/responsibility to AI. Though I don’t doubt we will see people try to blame AI for their poor decisions.

People always askin Jesus to take the wheel, like he knows how to drive a car.