Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

"Denmark: AI-powered welfare system fuels mass surveillance and risks discriminating against marginalized groups – report"

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/11/denmark-ai-powered-welfare-system-fuels-mass-surveillance-and-risks-discriminating-against-marginalized-groups-report/

> the sweeping use of fraud detection algorithms, paired with mass surveillance practices, has led people to unwillingly –or even unknowingly– forfeit their right to privacy, and created an atmosphere of fear.

This, and not the AI bubble, is going to be AI's legacy. Accountability sinks that enable harms on a massive scale.

Plan B it is

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/plan-b-it-is/

“AI overwhelmingly prefers white and male job candidates in new test of resume-screening bias – GeekWire”

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/ai-overwhelmingly-prefers-white-and-male-job-candidates-in-new-test-of-resume-screening-bias/

“Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said - ABC News”

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/researchers-ai-powered-transcription-tool-hospitals-invents-things-115170291

“AI” models are suffused with US values and, occasionally, those are quite shocking to us non-Americans

An Icelandic police force used a generated image to promote a public notice

People were absolutely horrified

Why?

Because the cop in the image had a gun, in a holster, AROUND CHILDREN 😱

The uniform was also not accurate for an Icelandic cop but what people found obscene was the idea that anybody would carry a gun around children, even holstered

https://www.ruv.is/frettir/innlent/2024-10-20-logreglan-a-sudurnesjum-aetlar-ad-haetta-ad-nota-gervigreindarmyndir-af-logregluthjonum-425104

“The Return”

http://hackeducation.com/2024/10/05/the-return

> I’ll be damned if I’ll go quietly and let the techno-libertarian fantasies strip the future from the rest of us.

> A GitHub [survey published in August](https://github.blog/news-insights/research/survey-ai-wave-grows/) found that 97% of software engineers, developers, and programmers reported using AI coding assistants.

97% using tools that generate 41% more bugs. Fuck all of this. What a fucking clown car of an industry

“Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants | CIO”

https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html?amp=1

> Many developers say AI coding assistants make them more productive, but a recent study set forth to measure their output and found no significant gains. Use of GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs, according to the study from Uplevel, a company providing insights from coding and collaboration data.

Like I've been saying for a while, feeling productive is not the same as being productive

Since every new release by OpenAI is usually followed by nonsense commentary and bubble inflation: a note

Testing a large statistical model with a handful of manual tests ("it solved this riddle!") is like assuming the home remedy you took cured your cold. These are methods that only lead to superstition.

“Going Buildless | Max Böck”

https://mxb.dev/blog/buildless/

I've gone buildless for personal projects for a long while now and am not going back

Also on HTML includes: it makes me sad to think that XML had standardised includes almost 20 years ago. I wasn't a fan of XML at the time but in hindsight it's looking like we, web devs, dumped an entire ecosystem of tools and standards just out of an annoyance with error handling that we then got a worse version of anyway with JSX, setting us back a decade

“The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus”

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-slow-evaporation-of-the-foss-surplus/

Where I try to explain, as succinctly as I can (which isn’t that succinct), why I’m worried about where FOSS is heading

That’s one of the reasons why I take it personally when people use “AI” models and cryptocoins. You are being complicit in creating the demand that is threatening to directly destroy the environment I live in. None of this shit would be happening if there wasn't demand so I absolutely do blame you, personally, if you are a regular user of either of these things

There’s a cost to these tools and you’re pushing it onto others like an asshole

So, fuck you and the AI-generated horse you rode in on

We don't have that much excess power generation. We even have to occasionally limit power delivery to heavy users

Increasing power generation that much requires tough choices: we'd have to ruin the environment some way. We just don't have that many locations left for hydro or geothermal. Most locations that remain are popular tourist sites—destroying them would be bad for the economy—important ecosystems, or would require improvements to the grid that nobody seems to be willing to pay for

Self-indulgent rant:

One reason why IMO, the case against "AI" is as cut and dried as the case against cryptocoins is that shutting those two sectors down through government action would immediately solve the household energy transition for Iceland, for example

The maths is fairly straightforward: switching personal transportation over to electricity here would roughly double household power consumption (give or take, with the assumption that current plans to improve public transport pan out)

However, datacentres in Iceland are almost exclusively used for "AI" or crypto. You can't buy regular hosting in these centres for love or money. If you buy hosting in Iceland, odds are that the rack is in an office building in Reykjavík somewhere, not a data centre

And those data centres use more power than Icelandic households combined

But, instead, the plan is currently to destroy big parts of places like Þjórsárdalur valley, one of the most green and vibrant ecosystems in Iceland

“From Burnout to Balance: AI-Enhanced Work Models for the Future”

https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models

> Nearly half (47%) of workers using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect. Over three in four (77%) say AI tools have decreased their productivity and added to their workload in at least one way.

I wonder why Upword, a company that's all-in on "AI", didn't promote this study on their blog like they do their other studies

(The question’s rhetorical)

“Choose how you want to navigate the web with Firefox”

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/ai-services-on-firefox/

> Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral

Even if this stays opt in once it ambles out of Nightly, all of this AI garbage means regular Firefox product dev looks dead in the water

“AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway”

https://gizmodo.com/ai-detectors-inaccurate-freelance-writers-fired-1851529820

> Some writing gigs are drying up thanks to chatbots. As people fight over the dwindling field of work, writers are losing jobs over false accusations from AI detectors.

And, yet again, fuck every single one of you who has helped implement and popularise LLMs.

“Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation - The Verge”

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166177/google-search-ranking-algorithm-leak-documents-link-seo

> suggests that Google hasn’t been entirely truthful about it for years

So this is what the SEO types have been shouting about

Not going to link to the actual review because I don’t care and will not care about the movie in question, but I find it interesting how quickly and thoroughly the meaning of “AI” in the public vocabulary as shifted from “futuristic automated intelligence” to “bad and lazily made”