The Washington Post burns its own archive Indignity Vol. 4, No. 216 Tom Scocca 09 Dec 2024 LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA VIRGINIA DEP’T. Artificial Intelligence Means You Can’t Read the Newspaper Anymore No one who cared about the purpose of the Washington Post or the purpose of the Washington Post archive would have ever allowed the Ask The Post AI to be deployed. But the world has allowed the management of knowledge to be taken over by ignoramuses, and now the ignoramuses have built ignoramus machines in their own image, manufacturing non-knowledge on a scale previously unimaginable.
My letter to reps:
AI has been polluting ways to search for things. It makes getting things done harder, and with huge amounts of energy expenditure, and all for nothing or to give people misinformation, sometimes dangerous misinformation. We should not be forced to use this stuff in order to access information on the internet.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
AP – Cats on the moon? Google’s AI tool is producing misleading responses that have experts worried – By MATT O’BRIEN and ALI SWENSON Updated 6:10 PM EST, May 24, 2024 “The more you are stressed or hurried or in a rush, the more likely you are to just take that first answer that comes out,” said Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor and director of the University of Washington’s Computational Linguistics Laboratory. “And in some cases, those can be life-critical situations.” That’s not Bender’s only concern — and she has warned Google about them for several years. When Google researchers in 2021 published a paper called “Rethinking search” that proposed using AI language models as “domain experts” that could answer questions authoritatively — much like they are doing now — Bender and colleague Chirag Shah responded with a paper laying out why that was a bad idea.
Listen, I tried the chatbot stuff out, and what I found disturbed me. And what the hell is it with cats in space anyhow?