commit 703b0e43d19215fcabeb809e1e5b30bd7bf5aed6
parent e8a5d6e2ec78ac18fbc74757e4aced3a8396b18e
Author: David Eisinger <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2024 12:31:09 -0400
AI isn't useless
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diff --git a/content/journal/dispatch-15-may-2024/index.md b/content/journal/dispatch-15-may-2024/index.md
@@ -21,6 +21,10 @@ references:
url: https://cliophate.wtf/posts/boox-palma-review
date: 2024-04-18T14:01:57Z
file: cliophate-wtf-quluwp.txt
+- title: "AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?"
+ url: https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/
+ date: 2024-04-18T16:30:46Z
+ file: www-citationneeded-news-loassa.txt
---
Some thoughts here...
diff --git a/static/archive/www-citationneeded-news-loassa.txt b/static/archive/www-citationneeded-news-loassa.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,623 @@
+[1] [citation needed]
+a newsletter by Molly White
+
+ • [4]Archive
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+[15][ ] Show footnotes
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+[17]( ) [18]( ) [19]( )
+[20]( ) [21]( ) [22]( )
+[23]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.
+
+[24] Molly White
+
+[25]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
+[28][0 ]1×[32][100 ]
+Listen to a voiceover of this post, [33]download the recording for later, or
+[34]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^[35]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.
+
+[36]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,^[37]b and I just
+didn't have that time then.^[38]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^[39]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 [40]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 [41]
+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 [42]made him more ambitious with his projects and more likely to
+embark on what he calls "[43]sidequests".^[44]e Sumana Harihareswara [45]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
+[46]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 [47]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, [48]some [49]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([50]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.^[51]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.^[52]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^[53]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 [54]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 [55]keyword
+stuffing and [56]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
+"[57]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 [58]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,^[59]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 [60]deepfaked images,
+audio, or video, and the [61]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 [62]harass and [63]sexually abuse.
+Other AI models are enabling [64]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 [65]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 [66]generative artificial intelligence and [67]large
+ language models (LLMs), which is what people generally mean these days when
+ they say "AI". [68]↩
+
+ 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. [69]↩
+
+ 3. ChatGPT was publicly released in November 2022, right as the cryptocurrency
+ industry was in peak meltdown. [70]↩
+
+ 4. Many of which are built with various other kinds of machine learning or
+ artificial intelligence, if not necessarily generative AI. [71]↩
+
+ 5. As it happens, he has also [72]written about the "AI isn't useful"
+ criticism. [73]↩
+
+ 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. [74]↩
+
+ 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 [75]about page. [76]↩
+
+ 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. [77]↩
+
+ 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. [78]↩
+
+Loved this post? Consider [79]signing up for a pay-what-you-want subscription
+or [80]leaving a tip to support Molly White's work, which is entirely funded by
+readers like you.
+
+Read more
+
+[81] A hand holds a gold "Bitcoin" coin that has been cut in half
+
+Issue 55 – Halving a bad time
+
+The bitcoin "halving" looms, and that may not be as good news as coiners hope.
+Also, Terra committed fraud and Uniswap got a Wells notice.
+
+Apr 13, 2024
+[82] A collage of a Bored Ape, a photo of Ryder Ripps, and the BAYC logo
+
+"The Monkey Fraud": An interview with Ryder Ripps
+
+An interview with Ryder Ripps, a defendant in the Yuga Labs v. Ripps case about
+Bored Ape Yacht Club trademark infringement and racism.
+
+Apr 4, 2024
+[83] A small fake critter with orange bristles, grey-blue skin, and large black
+eyes, with its mouth agape
+
+Issue 54 – Cases continue
+
+Crypto-related litigation is in full swing, as the Terra civil fraud trial has
+kicked off and two other cases against crypto companies have survived motions
+to dismiss.
+
+Apr 2, 2024
+[84] B&W photo of Sam Bankman-Fried overlaid on a yellow-tinted photo of the
+NYC courthouse with scrap of sentencing transcript
+
+25 years for Sam Bankman-Fried
+
+"The judgment has to adequately reflect the seriousness of the crime, and this
+was a very serious crime."
+
+Mar 28, 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.
+
+[85]Subscribe
+
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+
+© 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://www.citationneeded.news/about/
+[8] https://www.citationneeded.news/rss/
+[9] https://donate.stripe.com/14k8AseTNaqLaZy7ss
+[10] https://www.citationneeded.news/privacy/
+[12] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#/portal/signin
+[13] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
+[23] https://www.citationneeded.news/tag/newsletter/
+[24] https://www.citationneeded.news/author/molly/
+[25] https://www.citationneeded.news/author/molly/
+[33] https://www.citationneeded.news/content/media/2024/04/2024-04-16-AI-isnt-useless-voiceover.mp3
+[34] https://www.citationneeded.news/podcast/
+[35] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-1
+[36] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
+[37] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-2
+[38] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-3
+[39] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-4
+[40] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment
+[41] https://www.mollywhite.net/blogroll
+[42] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/
+[43] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/22/claude-and-chatgpt-case-study/#not-notable
+[44] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-5
+[45] https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2022/speech-to-text-with-whisper-how-i-use-it-why/
+[46] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaCVSUbYpVc
+[47] https://github.com/molly/courtlistener-download
+[48] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/sports-illustrated-found-publishing-ai-generated-stories-photos-and-authors
+[49] https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/01/17/cnet-ai-articles-journalism-corrections/
+[50] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSYCmj-hH51Yz8uc0W55lYYvrCD3464Jb2uULI9_aqsZ6ZGsLl-5IXYv1HkNiNagLFyYgtMubGQx-Ns/pubhtml
+[51] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-6
+[52] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-7
+[53] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-8
+[54] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
+[55] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_stuffing
+[56] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_farm
+[57] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_work
+[58] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-training-data-synthetic-openai-anthropic-9230f8d8
+[59] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-9
+[60] https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-elections-disinformation-chatgpt-bc283e7426402f0b4baa7df280a4c3fd
+[61] https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/ai-tracking-center/
+[62] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/technology/ai-4chan-online-harassment.html
+[63] https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084164/deepfake-porn-scandal-pushing-us-lawmakers/
+[64] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/07/artificial-intelligence-surveillance-workers
+[65] https://incidentdatabase.ai/
+[66] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence
+[67] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
+[68] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-1
+[69] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-2
+[70] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-3
+[71] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-4
+[72] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/22/claude-and-chatgpt-case-study/#llms-are-useful
+[73] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-5
+[74] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-6
+[75] https://www.citationneeded.news/about/
+[76] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-7
+[77] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-8
+[78] https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/#footnote-anchor-9
+[79] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
+[80] https://donate.stripe.com/14k8AseTNaqLaZy7ss
+[81] https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-55/
+[82] https://www.citationneeded.news/yuga-labs-ryder-ripps-interview/
+[83] https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-54/
+[84] https://www.citationneeded.news/sam-bankman-fried-sentenced/
+[85] https://www.citationneeded.news/signup
+[86] https://www.citationneeded.news/page/2/
+[87] https://www.citationneeded.news/tag/weekly-recaps/
+[88] https://www.citationneeded.news/podcast/
+[89] https://www.citationneeded.news/about/
+[90] https://www.citationneeded.news/rss/
+[91] https://donate.stripe.com/14k8AseTNaqLaZy7ss
+[92] https://www.citationneeded.news/privacy/
+[93] https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/
+[94] https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff
+[95] https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki
+[96] https://www.youtube.com/@molly0xfff
+[97] https://www.tiktok.com/@molly0xfff
+[98] https://www.mollywhite.net/
