Flutterby™! (short)

Coyote Media: How Did An AI-Generated Mural Wind Up in This Vallejo Alley? Even the sign printer who did the vinyl got caught up in the fiasco:

"I wish I could,” he said. “But two months ago I listened to AI when it was instructing me on changing out my email server. It spoke to me so reassuringly, and then gave me a command that I followed, that deleted all my old emails from forever ago. Gone. All my history."

Yellow - Coldplay (Transgender Duet With My Past Self) By Dylan And The Moon (YouTube video).

Via Faith, Purple haired feminist 🧋 @faithisleaping@anarres.family who notes:

Okay, this might be the coolest thing I’ve seen all week. It’s a trans guy singing with his past self.

And it's a damned good cover.

Nanoraptor @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social

Angsty pretentious teenage me writing a dream journal near christmas 1987 shows up as 95-100% AI generated, by detectors offering to sell me services to re-generate my text with AI more humanised so it passes as not AI.

It hurts to think about — even more than reading 16 year old me.

That post has a bunch of the examples as image And Nanoraptor @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social

Another detector said it is NOT AI! but that detector also claimed a story written literally that moment in chatgpt was also 0% AI.

Interesting thread, with receipts, asserting that the US automakers failure to deliver EVs is Trump's fault

Frontier AI Models Are Doing Something Absolutely Bizarre When Asked to Diagnose Medical X-Rays

As detailed in a new, yet-to-be-peer- reviewed paper, a team of researchers at Stanford University found that frontier AI models readily generated “detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided.”

Via.

AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights Jiannan Xu, Gujie Li, Jane Yi Jiang

These simulations show that candidates using the same LLM as the evaluator are 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted than equally qualified applicants submitting human- written resumes, with the largest disadvantages observed in business-related fields such as sales and accounting. We further demonstrate that this bias can be reduced by more than 50% through simple interventions targeting LLMs' self-recognition capabilities. These findings highlight an emerging but previously overlooked risk in AI-assisted decision making and call for expanded frameworks of AI fairness that address not only demographic-based disparities, but also biases in AI-AI interactions.

Via

Alt comics page readers will recognize the name: Nicole Hollander, creator of the "Sylvia" comic strip which ran from 1980 to 2012, has passed away.

On 26 March 2012, 'Sylvia' was discontinued completely. Hollander established a now-defunct personal blog to repost old comics and post new ones. Apart from her own opinions and work, she also offered room for articles and cartoons by younger artists. Her blog received the title Bad Girl Chats. Hollander quipped: "You have to be careful when you type in the URL, because you may get a porn site" (which ironically enough it became after Hollander's site was discontinued).

Via.

NPR: AI music is flooding streaming platforms. But listeners like it less and less. I have a notoriously bad track record at predicting the future, but it seems like Generative AI music is gonna be micro-targeted at the creator, and everyone else is either going to generate their own, or find an artist who's genuinely creating something new and different.

And prompting is not enough of an input to consistently get good results.

Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion.

Dawkins extending more humanity to a language model than he does toward Muslims or trans people is hardly a surprise based on his personal and political views. But even if he had not moved rightward in his senesence, when you consider Dawkins’s scientific views about what minds are and how they function, seeing him flirting with a chatbot is completely expected.

Edit: Background includes British scientists don't like Richard Dawkins, finds study that didn't even ask questions about Richard Dawkins

The investigation into science's public image didn't even ask about the atheist professor, but it got an answer anyway

Via

Neighbor moved to the other side of town a few years ago. Yesterday called me up and asked if I could help him fix his kid's scooter.

So he came over, and I texted another neighbor, and we had an awesome "guys hang out and drill holes in metal and bullshit" afternoon, and I need more of that.

A friend borrowed our electric citrus juicer, and has not yet returned it, so I just did half a gallon of lemon juice by hand with a clamshell juicer.

The phrase "easy peasy lemon squeezy" is hogwash.