Let me show you how art and culture drive technological development.
Let me show you how art and culture drive technological development.
I think my biggest problem with Flock is that it connects the aspects of my digital life too much. I removed my Flickr feed from my blog because I don’t want my students and colleagues and neighbours to find my photos. I use del.icio.us for links that I’m happy for the world to see – if it’s integrated with my browser, I’m going to need an option for private links as well.
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This morning I received the copy-edited version of a paper I recently submitted to a journal. This is always cause for celebration, another step towards publication accomplished! But this time the copy-editor wasn’t human, it was an AI. We have undertaken a light text edit using the tool Paperpal Preflight; […]
At last week’s AI STORIES workshop, Gabriele de Seta led a workshop exploring Butterflies.ai, a social media platform where all the users are AIs. Gathering a group of researchers in a room for a few hours to explore and discuss a specific genAI platform turns out to be a really […]
When I studied literature we mostly read the classics. Great literature, the canon. But that’s not necessarily what most people actually read. What if instead of comparing AI-generated literature to the literary canon, we tried comparing it to super popular and commercial forms of literature instead? Like the folkebøker that […]
Synthetic media is a current popular term for AI-generated videos, texts and images. I think the first use was only a few years ago in 2018, but I couldn’t find an overview of its use so thought I’d cobble one together here, mostly because I like Elena Pilipets and her […]
OpenAI plans to charge $20,000 (USD) a month for an AI agent that can do “PhD level research”. Maybe all the PhDs and postdocs recently fired by DOGE should band together and sell their services as “AI agents” – apparently some people will pay more for robots than people. At […]
This is my original Norwegian draft of an essay published in the Danish foreign policy magazine Udenrigs today as part of a special issue on AI and foreign policy. I argue that AI is influencing the way we tell stories, and more seriously, that there is a risk of this […]
JoseAngel
So, Jill, you’ve felt the shive of what I like to call the “Apocalypse of Total Communication”?
Have a look at this, another shiverer:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, aech straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” (Opening words of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”, 1926)
JoseAngel
Oops, “shiver”. °Shiver!
kawazu
that’s probably the sensitive point about all these new concepts of integrating things… As William Gibson used to write (guess it was in “idoru”, though I’m not sure…): looking at a network, we see that someone is “alive” merely by the fact that he/she is a vital node creating amounts and amounts of information for us to see what he/she is up to, how he/she feels, lives, thinks, works. and we get a pretty clear picture. we even know when someone, well, dies – that’s when this node in the network stops producing information. guess there need to be some more serious talks about secrecy, about privacy and “trusted” computing way beyond technologies like tcpa, drm and the like. people need to be able to trust the machines they use for their daily life…
Alexander
I agree especially with the last point, Jill — I couldn’t believe it that Flock really just offers the choice between publishing none of my favorite links and all of them. I’m not even using that many bookmarks, but this is a show-stopper.
Arne Olav
… you could always choose not to tag the favourites..? This will not put them on del.ico.us, and you could sort them as regular bookmarks, or collections.
I agree that Flock is incomplete, and that the integration of the different elements isn’t working optimally. But Flock is not even in beta yet. I think this a step in the right direction; I’d love an interface that would gather as much of my social stuff as possible; this is what I do when I’m online, I really don’t relate to the metaphors of surfing, crawling or navigating.