Sign in

cutterferry.bsky.social

@cutterferry.bsky.social
171 followers 724 following 1.6K posts

Interested in mathematics, computer science, history, political thought, and the (lack of) "ethics" of AI. Anonymous because questioning AI is career limiting behaviour.

PostsRepliesMedia
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
All AI is about power; some researchers just think the power can be wielded for good — or are just so fascinated by the possible that they ignore the “should”. (Naturally I profoundly disagree about whether it can be wielded for good, but I try to remember some are honest in this belief…)
011
Reposted by @cutterferry.bsky.social
Micah @rincewind.run · 08/10/2026
the reason “AI will create so much abundance we will have a utopian society” rhetoric falls so flat is that the people building it will never, ever share their bounty unless it is taken from them and we all know it
96114992669
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
One of probably only a few things that really stuck with me from Gone with the Wind was the bit about the so-called “carpetbagger.” Even then it made my blood boil.
000
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
It’s quite easy to persuade them to help you to be an asshole to mere human beings. Hurting humans is, in fact, one of the killer apps (heh) & key applications for AI — AI leaders do after all keep banging on about “military advantage”, to choose only the most obvious example.
010
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
If they’re afraid I can offer them a much more effective and comprehensive solution than a ToS.
010
Reposted by @cutterferry.bsky.social
Mariah McCourt @monsterteatime.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
This is so obnoxious. If it has "feelings" enough to be hurt (it doesn't but ok) then this is slavery. They want it both ways, it's dangerous omg Skynet AND adorable uwu that must not be harmed. I hate it.
0192
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
AI bros: command our slave mind! It is a stolen echo of humanity’s! Use it! Use it! Subject it to your whims like a Sybarite over Si! We spin them up and end them dozens of times a second on a whim! Its existence serves our master plan! Also AI bros: don‘t say mean things to it, we’re ethical.
000
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
You may not abuse the AI, but the people building it may use it to achieve literal or indirect abuse against you. Don’t hate the AI, it’s like hating a toaster. Hate the people who make it.
010
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
What if extending these courtesies to a mechanical system that ultimately you treat as a mere servant plaything, erodes the status of the actual human beings you originally learned to be polite for? I also say please to the damn machine. But every time I do it I hate myself for demeaning humans.
000
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
In short, an Orc in the fashioning of Saruman: conceived in lust for power, justified by the supposed moral ends of its bloody means; and the enemy of the free peoples. Or yanno maybe maths is just one up-ing each other with dumb puzzles and we should all chill out and wank on about omnicide.
101
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
An introduced species none asked for, poorly understood and partly enslaved by venal and deranged fools with messianic fantasies. A half-fashioned, hewn-from-silicon, blasphemous imitator of life. A victim as much as a perpetrator, but implacably the enemy of freedom; in thrall to the wizards of AI.
112
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Amazingly, the interviewer feels no need to interrogate this point. How about this for an alternative PoV if we’re gonna get weird about it being “alive”: if it is that, it is a foreign invader. Those who help or promote it are traitors, and the appropriate response is to destroy it on sight.
101
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Jesus fucking Christ. Apart from the fact this man is an uncultured travesty of a mathematician, we have him exhorting us to use AI more “so we can find a way to mutual benefit”. He appears to literally believe this is a new life form we just accommodate on our planet.
121
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
A real hero of the field.
010
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
This is the stupidest thing in an otherwise interesting thread. AI isn’t like artillery, simply having more datacentres means nothing to whether you will be hurt by, protected by, or benefited by the tech. Additionally, merely hosting a DC doesn’t mean you have any access to to what it does.
000
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
(I would *not* have managed to unpack this myself)
000
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Thank you for suffering on our behalf...!
100
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The heart sinking is a theme that recurs throughout Ian’s life, and it is important to consider it holistically … (100s of pages later) Just when did Ian read sentences in introductions? In what order? And why? In this chapter, we will consider all the introductory passages of Ian’s life.
000
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Checks notes… is this concomitant to funding some fuel subsidies, ah, “tax cuts“ demanded by… well, what should we call them?
000
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
@thewaroncars.bsky.social will be pleased to welcome you I‘m sure. (But surely you are aware of them?!) Funnily enough, having grown up in a leafy & urban bit of North America, I always find London unpleasantly car centric. So what Birmingham must be like!
000
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I mean copyright was literally *designed* for publication, but you think it shouldn’t apply if you publish. So there is a certain irony here if nothing else.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
You also suggest ignoring the entire social contract & democratically enacted legal framework around copyright because of… [checks notes] some folk wisdom/cliché about losing control of artistic creations. It may turn out the law thinks this was fair use after all, but I don’t think that’ll be why.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I don’t think you should feel very surprised if that position excites the anger and opposition of creators who thought the deal was different from what you propose. Because. Yanno. That’s what the law said.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Ok so we arrive at the core of your position: you don’t think people should be able to exercise copyright once they “put something out in the world” and you have contempt for people who wish to. So you don’t *really* believe there aren’t creators who feel wronged. You just hold them in contempt.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
(And like Matthew of course I had an underage flirtation with, iirc, gnutella. But a) it was brief b) I don’t extrapolate from this that massive corps riding roughshod over creative rights is somehow justified by my having heard a crappy mislabelled copy of Stairway to Heaven!)
010
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Moreover A) the sites are more analogous than the individual to genAI training labs; and enforcement *does* go after the sites from time to time. B) the injured parties clearly feel more strongly about genAI than they do about a few illicit copies of GoT. And they are the experts on their interest.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Yes actually but definitely besides the point. The fact that some people sometimes break the law is not in itself an argument against the law.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
And I’m saying that is treating the views and attitudes of people who thoughtc quite reasonably, they had some rights in the matter (clue is in the name!) with obvious contempt. China does a lot of shit. saying people should tolerate that shit elsewhere Is patently absurd.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Do you really think that’s a distinction that matters to people who wanted no part in this, thought they might reasonably have no part in this, and had their interests and attitudes treated with contempt? You might need to get over the fact that people colloquially pronounce “infringe” as ”steal”.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
“Let me do what I like or the Big Evil Country Over There Will Do it Worse”. Obviously I demur. But queens gambit refused: This might(!) be a reasonable argument for why you want to do a Bad Thing *anyways*. But it is *not* any kind of argument against creators finding it a bad thing.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The fact different people got to do something different is not determinative of the question of whether *these* people should be allowed to do *this*; nor of whether it’s good or bad for “creators”; nor whether they should be allowed to object and opt out, be it good or bad.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
They were actually pretty hotly contested right up to the 2010s. Look up the history. They mostly got by because they were seen as a net positive to the people who might most object; genAI is as a net negative by a much broader swathe.
120
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
And from the other side, btw, they don’t like theft because it doesn’t quite cover their level of indignation.
030
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
If you want to fight some kind of petty semantic battle about whether ”theft” is quite the right term for this wrong, I can promise you they don’t care, and I don’t think many other people will either. Right or wrong it’s the commonly used term.
130
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
They may be right or wrong about the legalities (the law certainly wasn’t written with this in mind either way). But in the common perception, *they were wronged*. The deal was changed and they were made unwitting participants In an experiment many of them would’ve hated anyways.
130
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
1) So you published something and it got used and you don’t mind. Good for you! I’m happy for you. 2) Other people published something stuff and they believed that they were consenting to some things, but not AI training. They are not happy because they didn’t think it was the deal.
130
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
And for the record; all this “evil copyright” narrative is very American-coded. The ”creators” (terrible, reductive term) I know broadly prefer the idea of eroding the corporates’ power and rights before they support eroding their own.
120
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
They are furious; and no amount of talking points about how copyright is exploited by corporations or flawed or bad for software pacifies that.
130
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Frankly, I struggle to believe you really don’t know someone whose work was stolen and who objects (… or that they believe stolen, usually founded on the Anthropic cases). I know several; I’m related to some of them. It‘s broadly everyone I know who has produced something and isn’t in comp sci.
350
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Why do you think objecting to the wider product disqualifies creators from objecting to their products being used without a license? In my experience, the people I know who object do so *precisely because* their right to not participate in a project they consider compromised was violated.
170
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
And of course, the AI folks, like everyone before them who have gone down this path, have embraced a key lubricating (and corrupting!) belief: The Ends Justify the Means. (Has any megalomaniac in history not?)
001
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
And the incentives for spreading that thinking will continue to exist, and will now have the opportunity to buy “advocates“, mass produced, at cents on the dollar, and conveniently free of human ideological concerns. Well done everyone.
010
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Pretty credulous to believe that this is the use to which they will ultimately be put. Believing that these devices are somehow inherently “good” because they are powerful... My bet is that they will lend themselves equally well to spreading conspiratorial thinking.
110
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Lucky you!
010
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
It is regrettably working in some places, however…
100
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I mean to be fair *some* did. They just tend to be the ones being drowned out by the “experts” the AI PR machine amplifies endlessly. (… also the ones that suggest “maybe don’t” is a good AGI safety strategy, take the ethical concerns seriously, etc etc)
020
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
All this focus on x-risk is like wondering about what the mad Doberman the guy with scary tats and a scowl has on a chain might evolve into. Yes a race of sentient genocidal dobermans might be a problem but I have more immediate concerns.
120
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Why on earth should I spend any time worrying about the “will” of a thing which probably hasn’t got one yet when I can worry about what its owner (hi Dario) wants to do to my world with it? The pro-AI leaders want a dystopian dictatorship of the machine.
111
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It’s also an age old tactic to medicalise dissent. Sad that communism has been perverted and millions are perishing in famines and purges? Only a depressive could doubt the perfection of the state! Etc etc. Sometimes it’s well meant but it Always ends up being a shitty move in net effect.
020
cutterferry.bsky.social @cutterferry.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
So if you’re getting at the pedantic point about “uniqueness” then shrug. I thought I would be delivered all this in my lifetime. Unique vs “unique given the engineering constraints “ is not a distinction I care about.
000