commit 3ef4491d27df5cb33ad4122ee9121be307a8507e
parent 53e38e8f8346f1669cd36627d371c4b22389e18e
Author: David Eisinger <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:40:55 -0400
finish august
Diffstat:
2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 630 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-18-august-2024/index.md b/content/journal/dispatch-18-august-2024/index.md
@@ -15,8 +15,8 @@ references:
file: www-wheresyoured-at-7mfome.txt
- title: "AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?"
url: https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/
- date: 2024-08-13T03:39:45Z
- file: www-citationneeded-news-4myqvd.txt
+ date: 2024-04-18T16:30:46Z
+ file: www-citationneeded-news-loassa.txt
- title: "Recently - macwright.com"
url: https://macwright.com/2024/08/01/recently
date: 2024-08-09T03:43:36Z
diff --git a/static/archive/www-citationneeded-news-4myqvd.txt b/static/archive/www-citationneeded-news-4myqvd.txt
@@ -1,628 +0,0 @@
-[1] [citation needed]
-a newsletter by Molly White
-
- • [4]Archive
- • [5]Recap issues
- • [6]Podcast feed
- • [7]Follow the Crypto
- • [8]About
- • [9]RSS
- • [10]Tip jar
- • [11]Privacy policy
-
-[13]Sign in [14]Subscribe
-
-Sidenotes
-
-[16][ ] Show footnotes
-[17][ ] Show references
-[18]( ) [19]( ) [20]( )
-[21]( ) [22]( ) [23]( )
-[24]Newsletter
-
-AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
-
-AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool
-justifies the harm.
-
-[25] Molly White
-
-[26]Molly White
-
-Apr 17, 2024 — 15 min read
-AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
-audio-thumbnail
-AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
-0:00
-/1311.164082
-[29][0 ]1×[33][100 ]
-Listen to a voiceover of this post, [34]download the recording for later, or
-[35]subscribe to the feed in your podcast app.
-
-As someone known for my criticism of the previous deeply flawed technology to
-become the subject of the tech world's overinflated aspirations, I have had
-people express surprise when I've remarked that generative artificial
-intelligence tools^[36]a can be useful. In fact, I was a little surprised
-myself.
-
-But there is a yawning gap between "AI tools can be handy for some things" and
-the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically
-reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large
-language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument
-that "well, they can sometimes be handy..." doesn't offer much of a
-justification.
-
-Some are surprised when they discover I don't think blockchains are useless,
-either. Like so many technologies, blockchains are designed to prioritize a few
-specific characteristics (coordination among parties who don't trust one
-another, censorship-resistance, etc.) at the expense of many others (speed,
-cost, etc.). And as they became trendy, people often used them for purposes
-where their characteristics weren't necessary — or were sometimes even unwanted
-— and so they got all of the flaws with none of the benefits. The thing with
-blockchains is that the things they are suited for are not things I personally
-find to be terribly desirable, such as the massive casinos that have emerged
-around gambling on token prices, or financial transactions that cannot be
-reversed.
-
-When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to
-my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to
-do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might,
-and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that
-beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than
-blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.
-
-[37]Subscribe
-
-I've been slow to get around to writing about artificial intelligence in any
-depth, mostly because I've been trying to take the time to interrogate my own
-knee-jerk response to a clearly overhyped technology. After spending so much
-time writing about a niche that's practically all hype with little practical
-functionality, it's all too easy to look at such a frothy mania around a
-different type of technology and assume it's all the same.
-
-In the earliest months of the LLM mania, my ethical concerns about the tools
-made me hesitant to try them at all. When my early tests were met with mediocre
-to outright unhelpful results, I'll admit I was quick to internally dismiss the
-technology as more or less useless. It takes time to experiment with these
-models and learn how to prompt them to produce useful outputs,^[38]b and I just
-didn't have that time then.^[39]c But as the hype around AI has grown, and with
-it my desire to understand the space in more depth, I wanted to really
-understand what these tools can do, to develop as strong an understanding as
-possible of their potential capabilities as well as their limitations and
-tradeoffs, to ensure my opinions are well-formed.
-
-I, like many others who have experimented with or adopted these products, have
-found that these tools actually can be pretty useful for some tasks. Though AI
-companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be
-able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or
-develop a video game from scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are
-handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some
-tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.
-
-Still, I do think acknowledging the usefulness is important, while also holding
-companies to account for their false or impossible promises, abusive labor
-practices, and myriad other issues. When critics dismiss AI outright, I think
-in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and
-benefited from AI tools think "wait, that's not been my experience at all".
-
-Use cases
-
-I've found AI tools to be useful to my writing, though not for the actual
-writing bit. When I'm writing, I often find myself with a word on the "tip of
-my tongue" (so to speak), and I've had more success with ChatGPT than with
-Google for these circumstances — although I can usually find the word with
-Google if I try hard enough.
-
-[Screenshot-2024-04-16-at-4]User: What's a word for something that will not
-affect the final outcome Assistant: Inconsequential
-
-Like many people, I also find it challenging to proofread my own writing, and I
-sometimes miss typos or weird grammar accidentally left in from changing a
-sentence halfway through.
-
-USER Please proofread the following text and point out any spelling or grammar
-problems, typos, and other such issues. Do not change the tone of the writing
-or try to adjust the reading level. Do not repeat the entire corrected text
-back to me, simply identify with brief quotes of the flawed text where changes
-need to be made. <document> Bitcoiners are all aflutter as the halving date
-approaches in about a week. This is very exciting for them, because the past
-three halvings look like they've precipitated major price increases
-(particularly if you use a log scale, which bitcoiners love). Bitcoin prices in
-linear scale (blue) and log scale (black) since 2010, with halvings marked by
-the red lines (chart via Bitbo) The "halving" is the moment when bitcoin block
-rewards that is, the amount of bitcoin issued as a reward to the miner for
-successfully mining a block are reduced by half. This is a strategy to ensure
-the total supply of bitcoin gradually tapers... RESPONSE Here are the spelling,
-grammar, and typo issues I found in the text: 1. "kind of the thought process"
-should be "kind of thought process" 2. "beliefs of guaranteed double-your-money
-returns" should be "belief of guaranteed double-your-money returns" 3. "2024"
-is used instead of "2023" in several places, likely typos: • "Notice of appeal
-filed on April 11, 2024." • "Letter motion filed on April 8, 2024." • "Tweet by
-Inner City Press, April 9, 2024." • "Tweet by Inner City Press, April 12,
-2024." • "Order filed on April 8, 2024." 4. "Committee on Committee on Banking"
-should be "Committee on Banking" 5. "consider proposals" should be "considers
-proposals" 6. "BitBoy" Armstrong's name is inconsistently capitalized as
-"Bitboy" in one instance 7. "coinflips" should be "coin flips" 8. There is an
-inconsistency in the number of Web3 is Going Just Great entries between April 1
-and April 12. The text states "11 entries" but only 7 are listed.Proofreading a
-newsletter post with Anthropic's Claude model
-
-LLMs are pretty decent at proofreading, and although they sometimes spit out a
-few false positives, this example from proofreading my most recent recap issue
-shows where it caught several mistakes (points 1, 2, 4, and 8; point 5 was also
-a genuine error, but it was within a quote).
-
-However, I don't think I need generative AI to do this, either. There are a lot
-of proofreading tools^[40]d that work quite well, and, helpfully, don't invent
-errors that weren't in the original text (as I've found the ChatGPT models are
-particularly wont to do).
-
-Coding has been the far more compelling use case for me. Copilot, Github's AI
-coding assistant, integrates directly into VSCode and other [41]IDEs. I've also
-played with using the more general models, like ChatGPT, for coding tasks. They
-are certainly flawed — Copilot has an annoying habit of "hallucinating"
-(fabricating) imports instead of deferring to VSCode's perfectly good non-AI
-auto-import, for example — but in other cases they are genuinely helpful.
-
-I've found these tools to be particularly good at simple tasks that would
-normally pull me out of my workflow to consult documentation or StackOverflow,
-like generating finicky CSS selectors or helping me craft database aggregation
-operations. On at least one occasion, they've pointed me towards useful
-functionality I never knew about and wouldn't even think to look up. They're
-also great at saving you some typing by spitting out the kind of boilerplate-y
-code you have to write for things like new unit tests.
-
-The tools can also do the kind of simple, repetitive tasks I'd previously write
-a quick script to do for me — or they can generate that quick script. For
-example, here's me asking ChatGPT to write a quick Python script to turn my
-blogroll OPML file into the JSON file I wanted while I was adding a [42]
-blogroll page to my website:
-
-Suggest some python code to turn an OPML file like this into a JSON file with
-fields for "text", "xmlUrl", and "htmlUrl": <opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>
-Feeds of molly.white5 tagged as Blogroll from Inoreader [https://
-www.inoreader.com]</title> </head> <body> <outline text="Blogroll" title=
-"Blogroll"> <outline text="Adactio" title="Adactio" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://
-adactio.com/rss/" htmlUrl="https://adactio.com/"/> <outline text="Anil Dash"
-title="Anil Dash" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://feeds.dashes.com/AnilDash" htmlUrl
-="https://dashes.com/anil/"/> <outline text="Ben Werdmüller" title="Ben
-Werdmüller" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://werd.io/?_t=rss" htmlUrl="https://
-werd.io/"/> <outline text="Birch Tree" title="Birch Tree" type="rss" xmlUrl=
-"https://birchtree.me/rss/" htmlUrl="https://birchtree.me/"/> <outline text=
-"cabel.com" title="cabel.com" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://cabel.com/feed/"
-htmlUrl="https://cabel.com"/>
-
-After changing the feeds.opml file path to the location of the file on my
-computer, the code it suggested worked without any modification:
-
-ASSISTANT python import xml.etree.Element Tree as ET import json tree =
-ET.parse('feeds.opml') root = tree.getroot() feeds = for outline in
-root.findall('.//outline'): feed = { 'text': outline.attrib.get('text'),
-'xmlUrl': outline.attrib.get('xmlUrl"), 'htmlUrl': outline.attrib.get
-('htmlUrl') } feeds.append(feed) json_data = json.dumps(feeds, indent=4) with
-open('feeds.json', 'w') as f: f.write(json_data) This code will read the OPML
-file 'feeds.opml', extract the 'text', 'xmlUrl', and 'htmlUrl' attributes from
-each outline element, and save the data into a JSON file 'feeds.json' with
-proper indentation.
-
-Besides my own experimentation, others are using these tools in ways that are
-really hard to argue aren't useful. Someone I know in real life has told me
-about creating a custom model based on their own emails, which they then query
-as needed, or use to create some fairly boilerplate documents they previously
-had to spend hours on. Open source developer Simon Willison has been
-documenting his own AI coding experiments on his blog, and has described how
-LLMs have [43]made him more ambitious with his projects and more likely to
-embark on what he calls "[44]sidequests".^[45]e Sumana Harihareswara [46]uses
-OpenAI's speech recognition tools to create subtitles for her videos and
-recorded talks, or to "mine" them for material she can later reuse. Elsewhere
-on the internet, those who speak English as a second language have spoken of
-LLMs' usefulness in revising their professional communications. Others use it
-to summarize meeting notes. Some use it as a starting point for documentation.
-
-Reality check
-
-Despite some unarguably useful features, the limitations of these tools make
-themselves readily apparent.
-
-When it comes to coding, while it can make for a handy assistant to an
-experienced developer, it can't replace an experienced developer. Microsoft's
-[47]Super Bowl commercial, which shows a person prompting Copilot to "Write
-code for my 3D open world game", is pure fantasy.
-
-molly Write code for my 3D open world game GitHub Copilot Used 1 reference >
-Sorry, but writing code for a 3D open world game is a complex task that
-requires a lot of time and effort. It's not something that can be done in a
-single response. However, I can help you get started by creating a basic
-structure for a game using a game development framework like Unity or Unreal
-Engine. Here's a simple example of a Unity script in C# that moves a game
-object: using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using
-UnityEngine; public class PlayerMovement: MonoBehaviour { public float speed =
-10.0f; void Update() { float moveHorizontal = Input.GetAxis ("Horizontal");
-float moveVertical = Input.GetAxis ("Vertical"); Vector3 movement = new Vector3
-(moveHorizontal, 0.0f, moveVertical); transform.position = transform.position +
-movement * speed * Time.de } } This script should be attached to the player
-object. It takes input from the keyboard and moves the player object
-accordingly. The speed variable can be adjusted to control how fast the player
-moves.
-
-And in my experience, it sometimes gets in the way more than it helps, as when
-I experimented with it while working on a [48]Chrome extension I was writing
-recently and ultimately had to turn it off. It constantly suggested plausible
-but completely non-functional code, scaffolded the project in an outdated
-format, and autogenerated CSS classes that looked like they could be Bootstrap
-classes, but weren't. It's good at short functions and common boilerplate, but
-it's not going to architect a project for you, and, as with writing, it's not
-going to "think" of novel ideas. I like it for getting annoying, repetitive
-tasks out of my way; I don't worry it's going to take my job.
-
-Arguably the most widely-described use case for generative AI is writing.
-Indeed, as media companies lay off journalists in droves, [49]some [50]outlets
-are replacing their work with shoddy, AI-generated approximations. Freelance
-writers are reporting challenges in finding work as their former clients decide
-that ChatGPT can do a good enough job. But what these companies and clients
-fail to recognize is that ChatGPT does not write, it generates text, and anyone
-who's spotted obviously LLM-generated content in the wild immediately knows the
-difference.
-
-You've gotten this far into my article, so you're recently familiar with a
-couple dozen paragraphs of purely human writing. Contrast that with LLMs'
-attempts, from prompts with varying degrees of detail, with my very best
-efforts put into trying to get it to sound halfway normal:
-
-A table with a range of LLM prompts provided to three models: ChatGPT, Claude,
-and Gemini([51]spreadsheet)
-
-Yikes. I particularly like how, when I ask them to try to sound like me, or to
-at least sound less like a chatbot, they adopt a sort of "cool teacher"
-persona, as if they're sitting backwards on a chair to have a heart-to-heart.
-Back when I used to wait tables, the other waitresses and I would joke to each
-other about our "waitress voice", which were the personas we all subconsciously
-seemed to slip into when talking to customers. They varied somewhat, but they
-were all uniformly saccharine, with slightly higher-pitched voices, and with
-the general demeanor as though you were talking to someone you didn't think was
-very bright. Every LLM's writing "voice" reminds me of that.
-
-Even if the telltale tone is surmountable, LLMs are good at generating text but
-not at generating novel ideas. This is, of course, an inherent feature of
-technology that's designed to generate plausible mathematical approximations of
-what you've asked it for based on its large corpus of training data; it doesn't
-think, and so the best you're ever going to get from it is some mashup of other
-peoples' thinking.^[52]f
-
-LLM-generated text is good enough for some use cases, which I'll return to in a
-moment. But I think most people, myself certainly included, would be mortified
-to replace any of our writing with this kind of stuff.^[53]g
-
-Furthermore, LLMs' "hallucination" problem means that everything it does must
-be carefully combed over for errors, which can sometimes be hard to spot.
-Because of this, while it's handy for proofreading newsletters or helping me
-quickly add a fun feature to my website, I wouldn't trust LLMs to do anything
-of real import. And the tendency for people to put too much trust into these
-tools^[54]h is among their most serious problems: no amount of warning labels
-and disclaimers seem to be sufficient to stop people from trying to use them to
-provide legal advice or sell AI "therapy" services.
-
-Finally, advertisements that LLMs might someday generate feature-length films
-or replace artists seem neither feasible nor desirable. AI-generated images
-tend to suffer from a similar bland "tone" as its writing, and their
-proliferation only makes me desire real human artwork more. With generated
-video, they inevitably trend towards the uncanny, and the technology's inherent
-limitations — as a tool that is probabilistically generating "likely" images
-rather than ones based on some kind of understanding — seem unlikely to ever
-overcome that. And the idea that we all should be striving to "replace artists"
-— or any kind of labor — is deeply concerning, and I think incredibly
-illustrative of the true desires of these companies: to increase corporate
-profits at any cost.
-
-When LLMs are good enough
-
-As I mentioned before, there are some circumstances in which LLMs are good
-enough. There are some types of writing where LLMs are already being widely
-used: for example, by businesspeople who use them to generate meeting notes,
-fluff up their outgoing emails or summarize their incoming ones, or spit out
-lengthy, largely identical reports that they're required to write regularly.
-
-You can also spot LLMs in all sorts of places on the internet, where they're
-being used to try to boost websites' search engine rankings. That weird, bubbly
-GPT voice is well suited to marketing copy and social media posts, too. Any
-place on the web that incentivizes high-volume, low effort text is being
-inundated by generated text, like e-book stores, online marketplaces, and
-practically any review or comment section.
-
-But I find one common thread among the things AI tools are particularly suited
-to doing: do we even want to be doing these things? If all you want out of a
-meeting is the AI-generated summary, maybe that meeting could've been an email.
-If you're using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read
-them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre,
-auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them? Or
-is it just middle-management busywork?
-
-As for the AI [55]enshittification of the internet, we all seem to agree
-already that we don't want this, and yet here it is. No one wants to open up
-Etsy to look for a thoughtful birthday gift, only to give up after scrolling
-through pages of low-quality print-on-demand items or resold Aliexpress items
-that have flooded the site.
-
-[Screenshot-2024-04-13-at-5]
-[Screenshot-2024-04-13-at-5]
-
-Your AI model is showing
-
-No one wants to Google search a question only to end up on several pages of
-keyword-spam vomit before finding an authoritative answer.
-
-But the incentives at play on these platforms, mean that AI junk is inevitable.
-In fact, the LLMs may be new, but the behavior is not; just like [56]keyword
-stuffing and [57]content farms and the myriad ways people used software to
-generate reams upon reams of low-quality text before ChatGPT ever came on the
-scene, if the incentive is there, the behavior will follow. If the internet's
-enshittification feels worse post-ChatGPT, it's because of the quantity and
-speed at which this junk is being produced, not because the junk is new.
-
-Costs and benefits
-
-Throughout all this exploration and experimentation I've felt a lingering
-guilt, and a question: is this even worth it? And is it ethical for me to be
-using these tools, even just to learn more about them in hopes of later
-criticizing them more effectively?
-
-The costs of these AI models are huge, and not just in terms of the billions of
-dollars of VC funds they're burning through at incredible speed. These models
-are well known to require far more computing power (and thus electricity and
-water) than a traditional web search or spellcheck. Although AI company
-datacenters are not intentionally wasting electricity in the same way that
-bitcoin miners perform millions of useless computations, I'm also not sure that
-generating a picture of a person with twelve fingers on each hand or text that
-reads as though written by an endlessly smiling children's television star
-who's being held hostage is altogether that much more useful than a bitcoin.
-
-There's a huge human cost as well. Artificial intelligence relies heavily upon
-"[58]ghost labor": work that appears to be performed by a computer, but is
-actually delegated to often terribly underpaid contractors, working in horrible
-conditions, with few labor protections and no benefits. There is a huge amount
-of work that goes into compiling and labeling data to feed into these models,
-and each new model depends on [59]ever-greater amounts of said data — training
-data which is well known to be scraped from just about any possible source,
-regardless of copyright or consent. And some of these workers suffer serious
-psychological harm as a result of exposure to deeply traumatizing material in
-the course of sanitizing datasets or training models to perform content
-moderation tasks.
-
-Then there's the question of opportunity cost to those who are increasingly
-being edged out of jobs by LLMs,^[60]i despite the fact that AI often can't
-capably perform the work they were doing. Should I really be using AI tools to
-proofread my newsletters when I could otherwise pay a real person to do that
-proofreading? Even if I never intended to hire such a person?
-
-Finally, there's the issue of how these tools are being used, and the lack of
-effort from their creators to limit their abuse. We're seeing them used to
-generate disinformation via increasingly convincing [61]deepfaked images,
-audio, or video, and the [62]reckless use of them by previously reputable news
-outlets and others who publish unedited AI content is also contributing to
-misinformation. Even where AI isn't being directly used, it's degrading trust
-so badly that people have to question whether the content they're seeing is
-generated, or whether the "person" they're interacting with online might just
-be ChatGPT. Generative AI is being used to [63]harass and [64]sexually abuse.
-Other AI models are enabling [65]increased surveillance in the workplace and
-for "security" purposes — where their well-known biases are worsening
-discrimination by police who are wooed by promises of "predictive policing".
-The [66]list goes on.
-
-━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
-
-I'm glad that I took the time to experiment with AI tools, both because I
-understand them better and because I have found them to be useful in my
-day-to-day life. But even as someone who has used them and found them helpful,
-it's remarkable to see the gap between what they can do and what their
-promoters promise they will someday be able to do. The benefits, though extant,
-seem to pale in comparison to the costs.
-
-But the reality is that you can't build a hundred-billion-dollar industry
-around a technology that's kind of useful, mostly in mundane ways, and that
-boasts perhaps small increases in productivity if and only if the people who
-use it fully understand its limitations. And you certainly can't justify the
-kind of exploitation, extraction, and environmental cost that the industry has
-been mostly getting away with, in part because people have believed their lofty
-promises of someday changing the world.
-
-I would love to live in a world where the technology industry widely valued
-making incrementally useful tools to improve peoples' lives, and were honest
-about what those tools could do, while also carefully weighing the technology's
-costs. But that's not the world we live in. Instead, we need to push back
-against endless tech manias and overhyped narratives, and oppose the
-"innovation at any cost" mindset that has infected the tech sector.
-
-Footnotes
-
- 1. When I refer to "AI" in this piece, I'm mostly referring to the much
- narrower field of [67]generative artificial intelligence and [68]large
- language models (LLMs), which is what people generally mean these days when
- they say "AI". [69]↩
-
- 2. While much fun has been made of those describing themselves as "prompt
- engineers", I have to say I kind of get it. It takes some experience to be
- able to open up a ChatGPT window or other LLM interface and actually
- provide instructions that will produce useful output. I've heard this
- compared to "google-fu" in the early days of Google, when the search engine
- was much worse at interpreting natural language queries, and I think that's
- rather apt. [70]↩
-
- 3. ChatGPT was publicly released in November 2022, right as the cryptocurrency
- industry was in peak meltdown. [71]↩
-
- 4. Many of which are built with various other kinds of machine learning or
- artificial intelligence, if not necessarily generative AI. [72]↩
-
- 5. As it happens, he has also [73]written about the "AI isn't useful"
- criticism. [74]↩
-
- 6. Some AI boosters will argue that most or all original thought is also
- merely a mashup of other peoples' thoughts, which I think is a rather
- insulting minimization of human ingenuity. [75]↩
-
- 7. Nor do I want to, by the way. I performed these tests for the purposes of
- illustration, but I neither intend nor want to start using these tools to
- replace my writing. I'm here to write, and you're here to read my writing,
- and that's how it will remain. See my [76]about page. [77]↩
-
- 8. Something that is absolutely encouraged by the tools' creators, who give
- them chat-like interfaces, animations suggesting that the tool is "typing"
- messages back to you, and a confident writing style that encourages people
- to envision the software as another thinking human being. [78]↩
-
- 9. Or, more accurately, by managers and executives who believe the marketing
- hype out of AI companies that proclaim that their tools can replace
- workers, without seeming to understand at all what those workers do. [79]↩
-
-Loved this post? Consider [80]signing up for a pay-what-you-want subscription
-or [81]leaving a tip to support Molly White's work, which is entirely funded by
-readers like you.
-
-Read more
-
-[82] An image of Donald Trump at a podium, pointing, with a logo behind him
-reading “robconf2024”
-
-Issue 63 – RobConf 2024
-
-Coinbase responds to campaign finance violation allegations, Trump panders to
-bitcoiners, and I chat with Lyn Alden about sexism in bitcoin.
-
-Aug 7, 2024
-[83] The Coinbase logo and the US Marshals seal overlaid on a photo of two
-people shaking ha
-
-Coinbase appears to have violated campaign finance laws with a $25 million
-super PAC donation
-
-Actively involved in contract negotiations with a federal government agency,
-Coinbase was likely prohibited from making its $25 million contribution to the
-Fairshake cryptocurrency-focused super PAC in May 2024.
-
-Jul 30, 2024
-[84] A person dropping an orange envelope with a white bitcoin symbol into a
-ballot box
-
-When did cryptocurrency policy become a voter issue?
-
-I don’t believe that it has.
-
-Jul 29, 2024
-[85] Rolls of artificial turf in a shop
-
-Issue 62 – Grassroots
-
-Coinbase’s Stand With Crypto Alliance fudges the numbers, a (former) crypto
-industry CEO has a meltdown, and another exchange suffers a nine-figure hack.
-
-Jul 23, 2024
-
-Citation Needed features critical coverage of the cryptocurrency industry and
-of issues in the broader technology world.
-
-It is independently published by Molly White, and entirely supported by readers
-like you.
-
-[86]Subscribe
-
- • [87]Archive
- • [88]Recap issues
- • [89]Podcast feed
- • [90]Follow the Crypto
- • [91]About
- • [92]RSS
- • [93]Tip jar
- • [94]Privacy policy
-
- • [95]Twitter
- • [96]Mastodon
- • [97]Bluesky
- • [98]YouTube
- • [99]TikTok
- • [100]Etc.
-
-© 2024 Molly White.
-
-References:
-
-[1] https://www.citationneeded.news/
-[4] https://www.citationneeded.news/page/2/
-[5] https://www.citationneeded.news/tag/weekly-recaps/
-[6] https://www.citationneeded.news/podcast/
-[7] https://followthecrypto.org/
-[8] https://www.citationneeded.news/about/
-[9] https://www.citationneeded.news/rss/
-[10] https://donate.stripe.com/14k8AseTNaqLaZy7ss
-[11] https://www.citationneeded.news/privacy/
-[13] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#/portal/signin
-[14] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
-[24] https://www.citationneeded.news/tag/newsletter/
-[25] https://www.citationneeded.news/author/molly/
-[26] https://www.citationneeded.news/author/molly/
-[34] https://www.citationneeded.news/content/media/2024/04/2024-04-16-AI-isnt-useless-voiceover.mp3
-[35] https://www.citationneeded.news/podcast/
-[36] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-1
-[37] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
-[38] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-2
-[39] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-3
-[40] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-4
-[41] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment
-[42] https://www.mollywhite.net/blogroll
-[43] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/
-[44] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/22/claude-and-chatgpt-case-study/#not-notable
-[45] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-5
-[46] https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2022/speech-to-text-with-whisper-how-i-use-it-why/
-[47] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaCVSUbYpVc
-[48] https://github.com/molly/courtlistener-download
-[49] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/sports-illustrated-found-publishing-ai-generated-stories-photos-and-authors
-[50] https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/01/17/cnet-ai-articles-journalism-corrections/
-[51] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSYCmj-hH51Yz8uc0W55lYYvrCD3464Jb2uULI9_aqsZ6ZGsLl-5IXYv1HkNiNagLFyYgtMubGQx-Ns/pubhtml
-[52] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-6
-[53] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-7
-[54] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-8
-[55] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
-[56] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_stuffing
-[57] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_farm
-[58] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_work
-[59] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-training-data-synthetic-openai-anthropic-9230f8d8
-[60] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-9
-[61] https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-elections-disinformation-chatgpt-bc283e7426402f0b4baa7df280a4c3fd
-[62] https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/ai-tracking-center/
-[63] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/technology/ai-4chan-online-harassment.html
-[64] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084164/deepfake-porn-scandal-pushing-us-lawmakers/
-[65] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/07/artificial-intelligence-surveillance-workers
-[66] https://incidentdatabase.ai/
-[67] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence
-[68] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
-[69] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-1
-[70] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-2
-[71] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-3
-[72] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-4
-[73] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/22/claude-and-chatgpt-case-study/#llms-are-useful
-[74] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-5
-[75] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-6
-[76] https://www.citationneeded.news/about/
-[77] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-7
-[78] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-8
-[79] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-9
-[80] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
-[81] https://donate.stripe.com/14k8AseTNaqLaZy7ss
-[82] https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-63/
-[83] https://www.citationneeded.news/coinbase-campaign-finance-violation/
-[84] https://www.citationneeded.news/when-did-cryptocurrency-become-a-voter-issue/
-[85] https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-62/
-[86] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
-[87] https://www.citationneeded.news/page/2/
-[88] https://www.citationneeded.news/tag/weekly-recaps/
-[89] https://www.citationneeded.news/podcast/
-[90] https://followthecrypto.org/
-[91] https://www.citationneeded.news/about/
-[92] https://www.citationneeded.news/rss/
-[93] https://donate.stripe.com/14k8AseTNaqLaZy7ss
-[94] https://www.citationneeded.news/privacy/
-[95] https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/
-[96] https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff
-[97] https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki
-[98] https://www.youtube.com/@molly0xfff
-[99] https://www.tiktok.com/@molly0xfff
-[100] https://www.mollywhite.net/
