Posts by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
(DIR) Post #AcVCfWtYszWIXg6VJQ by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2023-12-05T14:32:56Z
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Indeed, there is wallet bullshit to contend with. My bad.
(DIR) Post #AcVCzVTrr29vwmbymO by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2023-12-05T14:43:45Z
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@tante it is one of those “why does this have to be on the blockchain?” projects (and the answer to that question, usually, is “grift”). I feel a weird tide shift happening now too where blockchain projects are pretending to be fediverse projects. Real bummer
(DIR) Post #AczmnEjTjNhbi1iXy4 by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2023-12-17T12:39:41Z
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I'm an AI skeptic but I am deep in its weeds anyway. I can't tell the future, but I can tell you what I learned this year - and where I expect it to go in 2024. https://open.substack.com/pub/cyberneticforests/p/what-i-learned-about-ai-in-2023
(DIR) Post #AdRcUmeO7wKZOCuvce by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-01-02T04:16:36Z
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I will never trust apps that don’t have save buttons. I know this is a me problem. Constant autosave is a smoother design decision. But it lacks the comfort of initiating and recieving feedback.
(DIR) Post #Adddj2cdUdd7SPH09A by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-01-08T13:30:06Z
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Reminder to self: hype can transform society more than technologies do, and usually not for the best. If you offer a tech with a bit of vision you narrow the scooe through which society analyzes those issues, closing off other approaches — the technology never has to materialize
(DIR) Post #AhMSyIuCwafrfFc6Ii by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-04-28T17:28:49Z
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AI acolytes tell us AI can understand us, but at the heart of this view is a reductionist vision of relationships and empathy that strikes me as deeply lonely. This week, I wrote about dogs and covid — and ask if AI would be what it is in a non-corona world. https://cyberneticforests.substack.com/p/is-it-ok-to-love-a-dog?
(DIR) Post #AiW1mx8ZB581pTHvzk by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-05-26T12:30:44Z
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Large Language Models were never designed to produce text that is true — they are designed to produce text that is statistically likely within a sample. Now, any company with a serious commitment to AI has to figure out how to constrain these errors of “truth” —descriptions of the world beyond small samples. They have to do this with a tool that was never designed for outcomes that align with the broader scope of the world in any way. https://cyberneticforests.substack.com/p/a-hallucinogenic-compendium
(DIR) Post #Aj6Hf0Eqquyo4Tg3xg by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-06-19T22:29:05Z
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Research is the antidote to arrogance.
(DIR) Post #Aj6Ih3nufPWZf9cdQO by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-06-19T23:21:15Z
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@cy I’m speaking about myself: reading all the things written in my field helps me remember that I am not alone and not a genius. :)
(DIR) Post #AkYscejnzYLf03q86S by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-07-28T12:33:43Z
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I was a teenage net artist. This is about who I was at a time that the web was forming its own language, while I was trying to fill it with typos. I was an untrained artist, in a new medium, with no guidance and undiagnosed anxiety. It was also a time when misfits could find each other and it felt like we really could transform the world. https://open.substack.com/pub/cyberneticforests/p/i-was-a-teenage-net-artist
(DIR) Post #Alri7Bf0n0Na6ThvG4 by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-09-10T11:42:29Z
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Here’s a paper that shows the complexities of evaluating AI research without questioning AI myths. In this case, the paper (link at the end) suggests a conclusion — and many are circulating this conclusion — that “LLMs are able to generate novel research ideas beyond the level of human experts in a similar field.” Dig into the experiment, and you see a different story.
(DIR) Post #Alri7CYfS4tmt5kN0a by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-09-10T11:42:30Z
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1️⃣ The human experts who put forth ideas to compete with the LLM were PhD students or PostDocs with at least a single publication in NLP. Great! That’s an expert. They were paid to give away ideas to these researchers — not so great, if you’ve ever talked to anyone doing early career research.
(DIR) Post #Alri7DRGB6ZFcPHy6K by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-09-10T11:42:30Z
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In the survey, these were ideas these PhDs thought were pretty good, but not worth persuing: they themselves evaluated their own contributions as pretty mediocre ideas right from the start. Why? Because generating high-quality research is hard enough, and protecting your most novel ideas in their early stages means a lot. Handing away high quality, distinct, novel research proposals is not really worth it to early career academics. They mostly made them up on the spot, according to the paper.
(DIR) Post #Alri7EDpGXPq320kng by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-09-10T11:42:30Z
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2️⃣ The LLM created 4000 ideas. The results were evaluated by experts and narrowed down, meaning that the ideas generated by the LLM were already pre-selected for the criteria under which they competed. Of the 4000, only 200 showed enough variety from one another to be useful. Those 200 competed for novelty against themselves — so it’s good at generating novel ideas, if you strip away the 3800 that were not! (Of course these are different applications of the term novelty — but it still matters).
(DIR) Post #Alri7Ej1OYMxbmbfQO by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-09-10T11:42:30Z
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So what you see in the “novel research” study are the ideas of PhD students that were prefiltered from their own biases (protecting their most valuable research ideas) against an expert-filtered collection of 4000 ideas.
(DIR) Post #Alri7FS2hANjrPfcbA by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-09-10T11:42:30Z
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True Headline: “LLMs can create research proposals equivalent to a human expert’s throw-away ideas, but only if you hire other experts to whittle away 95% of what it produces.”
(DIR) Post #Alri7Fu312mdGGlzFY by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-09-10T11:42:31Z
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This one fits into a “productivity myth”: anyone who suggests that the LLMs in this study saved anybody time or energy probably didn’t read the study.
(DIR) Post #Alri7GaEUCWlN6Vg0G by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2024-09-10T11:42:31Z
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Here’s the link. To the credit of the researchers, they acknowledge all of this. A key finding of this research is that LLMs alone were quite poor at evaluating ideas. This is good research, and I don’t blame them for anything other than a technically accurate conclusion that the public is bound to misinterpret. It’s the hype around it that’s bad. ➡️https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04109
(DIR) Post #Aub3UPrYhuyzs9gPzM by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2025-05-29T19:44:08Z
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"Difficult children are not 'seen', but 'measured against' others... If the category is appropriate, the difficult child is invited into the parent's (or tech platform's) hospitality. But if you betray the category, or are illegible to the measurement system, you are a non-signal. You are noise." https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/human-noise-ai-filters-mr-watson-come-here/
(DIR) Post #AvaAVubUU1gN17vj4C by CyberneticForests@assemblag.es
2025-06-26T13:07:37Z
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"Is AI Art Net Art?" with Vladan Joler, Valentina Tanni & I, just wrapped up. You can already stream the discussion here! Thanks to the Bibliotheca Hertziana for the support. vimeo.com/event/5194804