Runners

May. 2nd, 2023 10:03 am
inferiorwit: (goat)

It’s the end of the fiscal year. Hunting season has begun.

Ultimately, it all kicked off with the invention of the “workplace transparency plan.” As ad revenue stagnated, social platforms instead offered corporate clients access to their employees’ private messages. For a small subscription fee, employers could learn who their workers were communicating with and retaliate as they saw fit.

Within months, an entire industry of talent recruiters found themselves stonewalled by a terrified workforce. With electronic communication lost to them, the recruiters — far behind on their quotas — resorted to more drastic methods.

Strive Solutions is a midsize software company on the third floor of a converted building in the old warehouse district. Its two vintage elevators are too old to support ID card readers, so a pair of security doors flanking the reception area are all that stand between potential intruders and Strive’s inner sanctum.

A few minutes past 3:00 in the afternoon, both elevators open and the mob piles out.

( Read more... )
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scabby the chatbot

Apr. 30th, 2023 02:53 pm
inferiorwit: (judgment)

So it looks like there's going to be a writers' strike in the United States. Among the demands brought forward by the Writer's Guild of America is the regulation of "generative AI" in screenwriting: the use of large language models like GPT, which produce text by calculating where certain words in the English language are statistically most likely to appear next to each other.

No matter what your job is, there's an AI booster out there who thinks GPT can do some part of it better than you can. Those guys are frequently wrong; for example, here's a post by Bret Devereaux examining in-depth the idea that ChatGPT can write your college essays for you. Short answer: it can produce an assemblage of text that looks like an essay, but submitting that text as your essay will not result in a good grade, because a truly successful essay requires a cognitive depth that is completely beyond large language models.

Where ChatGPT and other generative text models like it actually excel is in producing text that meets formulaic requirements in a confident, passable, vaguely novel and blandly inoffensive format.

It is, from a certain point of view, the perfect Hollywood screenwriter.

( Read more... )
tags:

here we fucking go

Feb. 21st, 2023 05:17 pm
inferiorwit: (judgment)

Clarkesworld Magazine, for those unaware, is a publisher of short science fiction and fantasy that is usually open to unsolicited submissions year-round. As of yesterday, they've had to close submissions indefinitely due to a deluge of (allegedly) AI-generated spam.

This looks to be an automated riff on the ol' spam audiobook grift, as explained by Dan Olson here. By using AI, today's grifter can eliminate the (already low) cost of hiring a gig economy ghostwriter. And rather than spam Amazon and Audible, this new version of the grift instead treats short fiction markets as reverse vending machines: insert text, receive cash.

Of course, anyone with half a brain could tell you this is not how fiction magazines work.

But the services used to generate these spam stories aren't free, and I have no doubt somebody's charging a few bucks a head for a webinar on using AI-generated stories to make quick cash. As always, the actual money made is not in the grift itself, but in selling the grift to idiots.

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so here's the thing about AI art

Jan. 27th, 2023 02:39 pm
inferiorwit: (judgment)

The thing is that there is, at present, no foolproof yes-or-no test to determine whether an image or piece of text was made by an AI, unless the publisher of that piece openly admits that it was. We can only guess that a piece was made by AI, based on a few fairly common indicators and our own preconceptions of what AI art looks like.

Beyond the debate about lost jobs and intellectual property and the Death of Art, this means the phrase "it looks like it was made by AI" is an accusation that cannot be proven right--or wrong. An ideological bludgeon to the head of anything that doesn't fit your definition of "real art."

The practical reality of ideological bludgeons is that they're only occasionally wielded against the guilty and most viciously wielded against the vulnerable and the strange.

tags:

fun for the whole family

Dec. 6th, 2018 10:27 am
inferiorwit: (socks)
Like most human beings, I enjoy movies. I’m also heard of hearing, which means that I need subtitles. At home, this isn’t such a huge issue, and I’m lucky enough to have people in my life who don’t get all huffy when I turn the subtitles on while we’re watching a movie together.
 
But if I’m seeing a movie at the theatre, here’s what I have to do:
 
First, I have to make sure the movie I’m headed to features closed captioning (not all of them do). Then, even if I’ve bought my tickets online or at the kiosk, I need to go up to the box office (where there’s frequently a long-ass line) and ask them to give me a captioning device.
 
If you’re at all aware of how difficult it is for deaf/hoh folks to communicate with hearing folks, you may have already spotted the flaw in this system.
 
Also, sometimes they ask for my I.D. as a ransom because they think I’m gonna steal a device that DOESN’T WORK OUTSIDE OF THE THEATRE.
 
So, eventually, the person behind the counter hands me a captioning device. This device usually takes one of two forms: a pair of Google Glass-type glasses, or a little 3-line LED screen with a big ol’ arm on it that fits into my cupholder.
 
If I’ve got the glasses, they can’t really be worn with regular glasses (which is fine for me, but difficult for my mother, who also has hearing problems). They’re also heavy enough that wearing them for a long period of time (i.e. the runtime of your average movie) can get pretty painful. The captions are projected wherever I’m looking, which is disorienting; also, the captions themselves are usually in this bright green font that doesn’t always show up well against the background of the movie.
 
If I’ve got the LED screen, it’s usually so top-heavy that it doesn’t stay in the cupholder. The screws attaching the screen to the arm are frequently loose, meaning the screen will swivel around to the exact wrong direction unless I hold it in place. So I have to spend the whole movie basically babysitting this thing. And even if I line the caption screen up perfectly with the bottom of the theatre screen, I still have to switch between looking at the movie and reading the captions.
 
Additionally, these devices have to be charged (which the theatre sometimes forgets to do) and set to the right movie (which they sometimes aren’t). Meaning that the captions either cut out in the middle of the movie or don’t work at all. Also, there’s no way of knowing whether I’ve got a working device until after the movie has started.
 
If I go back to the desk after the movie and report that the captions didn’t work, the theatre sometimes (sometimes) gives me free movie passes as compensation. Most of the time, they offer their most sincere apology and then move on to the next person in line.
 
Then I go home and check when the movie I just watched is coming out on DVD, so I can finally get the other half of the dialogue.
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