What I keep coming back to is McCarthy’s refusal to offer John Grady an easy out. He doesn’t get to be right and win. He doesn’t get to reject modernity and find some pastoral sanctuary where his skills still matter. He just gets to be good at something beautiful while the world moves on without him.There’s a question buried in that: what does it mean to keep practicing a craft you love when you suspect it’s dying?

Wikipedia’s high-level guidance noting some ways to identify LLM writing

A wide ranging talk about the role of universities with regards to AI – centers are Illich’s Tools for Conviviality.

Despite all this effort, the system still failed. In collaboration with MIT Technology Review and Trouw, we set out to understand why. We obtained unprecedented access to the system, the officials who built it, and the critics who fought against it.

ALISON GOPNIK: A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long as we’ve been human. Language itself you could think of as a means that allows this. So are writing and the internet. These are all ways that we get information from other people. Similarly, LLMs give us a very effective way of accessing information from other humans. Rather than go out, explore the world, and draw conclusions, as humans do, LLMs statistically summarize the information humans put onto the web.

One of the relatively little-discussed phenomena in the social critique of AI is the fact that it is not only a centralizing technology, but also one that increases the distance between people and the power of the owners of the coordinating infrastructure. Of course, there is no direct determinism of the infrastructure, but it matters in which way the playing field is tilted.