Adding to this:

I’d like to focus on my actual takeaway here: Elon Musk sucks at AI.
Look, Musk said multiple times that OpenAI wouldn’t succeed. He’s tried, repeatedly, to kneecap it and steal its researchers and in one case — that of Andrej Karpathy, a founding team member Musk lured to Tesla — succeeded. But how’s xAI doing? Well, it’s a black hole for money that’s been acquired by SpaceX. It’s hemorrhaging researchers. One of its huge data centers isn’t going to be occupied by xAI — there’s a deal with Anthropic instead. It might buy Cursor, in an attempt to match the programming-focused products put forward by Anthropic and OpenAI. xAI’s enterprise users, whether that’s the US government or private companies, have been strong-armed into using it. To the degree that its bespoke CSAM machine Grok, aka MechaHitler, works, it apparently works because Musk distilled other people’s models.

Source: The Verge.

DALL-E 3 is here. And the future too, or almost at least.

Prompt: generate 3D images of the inside of a house in Singapore. It needs to look modern and minimalistic, with light colours, to show a customer. Focus on the living room.

It still sucks at generating text... Trying to get an 80s style logo for superuser.one...

Website content... The prompt was a weird one.

prompt: for a website, I need an image of a coworking space. It needs to show people working. Our tech is the WiFi and efficient networking equipment that needs to be displayed but not clearly visible. Make it so it's not a given, but shows happy people. Make it photo realistic

Prompt: draw a 3D comic style dolphin with a canon on its back jumping out of the sea

This is quick and dirty (and with the help of ChatGPT).

FlatTurtle has a new site, and there's been some fine-tuning here and there that led to a few typos creeping in. I wanted a quick tool to plug in a page, and that would highlight possible mistakes.

I've been a personal (paying) user of LanguageTool for a few years now (European, and less spammy and dodgy than Grammarly)

Started off with a terminal tool, but in the end that wasn't working out (hard to get the colouring to work and make it clear enough).

Figured a website would be easier:

• Insert a site
• Let it go through the LanguageTool API for mistakes*
• Show what is potentially wrong and explain why so I can go and edit it

(*) Surprisingly hard because it needs to trim all HTML and js and other crap. And it has issues detecting headers (without punctuation) from paragraph text, etc).

It's far from perfect, but it works well enough for half a day of fiddling around.

You can hover your mouse over the red words to get some information as to why something is wrong.

The code, provided as-is, is here, and you can run it using:

python3 -m pip install flask selenium beautifulsoup4 geckodriver-autoinstaller requests
python3 web_check.py --api-key KEY --username EMAIL

And opening http://localhost:5000.

EMAIL is your login, the KEY can be found here.

Have fun.

So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey — a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100 — and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to "turbocharge" sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America.

A former McKinsey employee has described the company as "capital's willing executioners": if you want something done but don't want to get your hands dirty, McKinsey will do it for you. That escape from accountability is one of the most valuable services that management consultancies provide. Bosses have certain goals, but don't want to be blamed for doing what's necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it's just doing what "the algorithm" says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

Via Kottke

Fittingly, it’s almost been 10 years to the day I’ve posted about “Everything is a Remix”, and AI is no different.

Yes, it’ll affect us, yes, it’s learning from us, but we’re still the creators. And we’ve been doing the exact same.