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Cybernetic Forests

@cyberneticforests.bsky.social
1.5K followers 63 following 56 posts

Alt feed of @eryk.bsky.social focused on sharing good things I am reading lately (arts x critical tech x media) mail.cyberneticforests.com

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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
The UN panel’s AI report is a case study in the risk of vague definitions of “systems-from-nowhere.” This is a report that privileged existential risk narratives that displaced human accountability — and in turn, locked out meaningful policy options.
techpolicy.press
How the UN’s Scientific Panel Erases Human Responsibility for AI
The UN Scientific Panel's report casts artificial intelligence as a system from nowhere, writes Eryk Salvaggio. The definition will shape policy for years.
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
When you say “AI models went rogue,” you manage to skip the part where OpenAI manually removed its cybersecurity blocks and ran tests on a machine with a live network connection. Remember that when they insist they’re the “AI safety” people.
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Image models are not "a" model. Each component was built or integrated to solve a specific problem of computer vision — each engineered to automate a decision, each inscribing its bit of ideology into every generated image. My latest paper unpacks those decisions and what they inscribe.
arxiv.org
The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy
Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological posi...
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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
"Many doomsday anxieties around AI likely reflect the broader epistemological shift away from language as a source of truth. The anxieties we place on them now reflect a deep unease and unfamiliarity with how we navigate a world where words persuade without regard to reality." - @eryk.bsky.social
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
This week I reach back to the 1990s and the concept of “interpassivity,” a critique of the widespread idea that “interaction” was inherently liberating for an audience. But to think in nuanced and critical ways about creativity with generative AI, the “gesture of disappearance” has new salience.
mail.cyberneticforests.com
From Interactive to Interpassive
Where AI Art Meets Cognitive Offloading There is the joke about AI: we wanted robots to do our dishes so we could have time to make art, but we got robots that make art while we do the dishes. We can...
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
ChatGPT is 3 years old this week — what was the world like in late 2022, and how did that shape what ChatGPT has become? I wrote about ChatGPT as a pandemic technology, centered on expectations of social isolation in ways that continue to define it. mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-was-cha...
mail.cyberneticforests.com
What Was ChatGPT?
A Chatbot Optimized for Social Distance Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, we can finally speak in hindsight about what it was and how it came to be. Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gather...
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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
In two weeks from now, on May 13 at 6:30pm, the amazing Eryk Salvaggio @cyberneticforests.bsky.social will come to Zurich to speak about «Embodied Generativity: Critical AI, Art & the Body» at ZHdK, presented by @zkk-zurich.bsky.social www.zentrumkuensteundkulturtheorie.ch//veranstaltu...
Portrait of Eryk
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
Most researchers don’t believe AGI is coming any time soon. But policy makers are steering policy toward AGI anyway. In this article for Tech Policy Press, a look at the distortions the AGI Frame introduces to policymaking. #ai #criticalai #aipolicy In @techpolicypress.bsky.social
techpolicy.press
Most Researchers Do Not Believe AGI Is Imminent. Why Do Policymakers Act Otherwise? | TechPolicy.Press
Tech Policy Press fellow Eryk Salvaggio says it is dangerous to the public interest for policymakers to center the pursuit of AGI in AI policy.
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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
A Nixon-era report warned of data-driven surveillance before AI even existed. Today, the government is linking databases & using “fraud detection” as a cover for targeting citizens, writes Eryk Salvaggio. What happens when free speech is redefined as a “threat”?
buff.ly
The AI State is a Surveillance State | TechPolicy.Press
Tech Policy Press is a nonprofit media and community venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. We publish opinion and analysis.
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Jakob @jakobjuhola.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
"generative AI, is built on a long-standing regime of extracting wealth from information, and a reliance on cheap labor to maximize the information it has collected. Treating generative AI as a revolutionary new tool,...
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
My latest for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, “Anatomy of an AI Coup.” With the takeover of the US government by tech elites underway, we must examine its goals and next steps — and how we will know if it has succeeded. www.techpolicy.press/anatomy-of-a...
techpolicy.press
Anatomy of an AI Coup | TechPolicy.Press
DOGE is gutting federal agencies to install AI across the government. Democracy is on the line, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Eryk Salvaggio.
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AIxDESIGN @aixdesign.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Helloooooo BlueSky! 🌤️ We have just landed and will share more here soon 🥠 meanwhile find us and updates at -> aixdesign.co + linkin.bio/aixdesign-co/
aixdesign.co
AIxDESIGN
We’re a Global Community and Lab Nourishing Alternative, Feminist + Participatory Approaches to AI for the Rest of Us 🐛
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Eugenia Stamboliev @eugeniaunivie.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
Another fantastic read and lots of ‚food for thought’ by Eryk Salvaggio 👌🏻 @cyberneticforests.bsky.social ‚ChatGPT is not a decision-making technology, it is a decision-removing technology. It creates text to fill the space where a decision is needed’ mail.cyberneticforests.com/a-fork-in-th...
mail.cyberneticforests.com
A Fork in the Road
AI is an excuse that allows those with power to operate at a distance from those whom their power touches.
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Cybernetic Forests @cyberneticforests.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
From 2021 — when it was still benign — a revealing bit of satire aimed at the “intellectual movement” that is currently shaping the policies of the United States.
thebaffler.com
How to Become an Intellectual in Silicon Valley | Aaron Timms
You now have ideas, an all-purpose acknowledgments section, and a font. How should you present everything? “Write like you talk,” Paul Graham once said, but he forgot to add: “And talk like an asshole...
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Cybernetic Forests @cyberneticforests.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
“This study presents a structured examination of chatbots across three societal dimensions, highlighting their roles as objects of scientific research, commercial instruments, and agents of intimate interaction.” link.springer.com/article/10.1...
link.springer.com
The Three Social Dimensions of Chatbot Technology - Philosophy & Technology
The development and deployment of chatbot technology, while spanning decades and employing different techniques, require innovative frameworks to understand and interrogate their functionality and imp...
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 26/01/2025
We are seeing a generation of AI systems built without their designers critically grappling with their role in the broader world. Could we do it some other way?
mail.cyberneticforests.com
Are Other AIs Possible?
I believe AI is a political tool. I believe this because I believe that AI, and much other technology, is something of an ideological frame: a set of social fictions that is deployed to justify certai...
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 19/01/2025
I wrote about David Lynch’s practice, in contrast to the model of creativity at the heart of the Gen AI image industry. I ask if the culture we cultivate inside of us could ever connect to Gen AI’s world of endlessly rearranged surfaces. mail.cyberneticforests.com/a-culture-of...
mail.cyberneticforests.com
A Culture Inside
On David Lynch, AI, and the Myth of Automated Interiority My closest real-life encounter with David Lynch was getting into a Lyft that had just dropped him off at the premiere of Twin Peaks: The Retu...
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 19/01/2025
I was added to a “MAGA Trash” blocklist. I am not at all MAGA. While I don’t care about blocklists, this is a reminder to everyone to be wary of using blocklists from accounts they don’t trust.
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Cybernetic Forests @cyberneticforests.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
This account exists but will likely be an automated announcement feed for future newsletters — for the most part I’m just @eryk.bsky.social!
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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 15/02/2024
New 404 Media: University of Michigan is selling hours and hours of audio recordings of office hours, study groups, and more to outside third-parties to train AI. Selling for tens of thousands of dollars, not clear if participants gave informed consent. I got sample www.404media.co/university-o...
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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 12/02/2024
Many moons ago I shared a talk about "modeling doubt," coding and engineering uncertainty into our digital systems, and weaving it into our pedagogy. That talk was published today, open access, in the Journal of Visual Culture. The whole new issue is great! journals.sagepub.com/toc/VCU/curr...
In light of increasing artificial intelligence and proliferating conspiracy, technofetishism and moral panics, faith in ubiquitous data capture and mistrust of public institutions, the ascendance of STEM and the ‘deplatforming’ of the arts and humanities, this article considers doubt as an epistemological condition, a political tool, an ethical force, a rhetorical register, and an aesthetic category. Adapted from the author’s May 2023 inaugural King’s Public Lecture in Digital Humanities at King’s College London, and structured in the form of a syllabus for a speculative class, it aims to identify where humanistic conceptions of doubt do, or could or should, reside within our digital systems: at the interface, within the code, or engineered into hardware and infrastructure.A screenshot featuring a lovely Daniell Manley's painting that depicts three modes of representation: hand-written characters, a colorful grid, and leaf-like scribbles, which evoke disparate ways of communicating certainty and accuracy
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Frances Bell @franrbell.bsky.social · 11/02/2024
Hi folks! I'm designing an undergrad course on the history & ethics of archives & collecting across the liberal arts. We're talking archival silences, data ethics, repatriation, collecting and empire. I'm super excited about it, but struggling to find suitable reading. What would you assign? TIA!
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Jon Ippolito @jonippolito.net · 06/02/2024
Samsung now has a defense of its phone's AI-altering photos of the Moon: "There is no such thing as a real picture." Paging @cyberneticforests.bsky.social (not to mention Cindy Sherman) www.theverge.com/2024/2/2/240...
Before-and-after images of the Moon as altered by Samsung's camera phone
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Kevin Buist @kevinbuist.com · 05/02/2024
I actually read the original story for the first time right before reading this new one. Both are great. clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/
clarkesworldmagazine.com
Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy
Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim
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Christopher Cwynar @cwynar.bsky.social · 04/02/2024
Digging this fun historical perspective on the like button from Carina Albrecht in the Harvard Data Science Review. Thanks to @cheeflo.bsky.social for turning me onto this one.
hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu
Discerning Audiences Through Like Buttons · Issue 6.1, Winter 2024
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Alexander Chee @alexanderchee.bsky.social · 05/02/2024
“Seeing cars​ with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough…but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand.” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
lrb.co.uk
Rebecca Solnit · In the Shadow of Silicon Valley: Losing San Francisco
I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city...
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 05/02/2024
In November we announced a zine, "Models for Making Distance," which would collect instructions and manifestos for creative acts of algorithmic resistance. The deadline is April 15, and then we print. We would love to have your contributions! More details: www.cyberneticforests.com/zine
cyberneticforests.com
Zine — Cybernetic Forests.
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🎃 The Conqueror Woim 👻 @jbirken.bsky.social · 04/02/2024
IMO crucial & productive distinction in @eryk.bsky.social 's newsletter today re: AI tools. I had lots of fun trying out Midjourney over the last year, partially because I professionally write on visual cultures & want to understand how things work, but also because I'm a total sucker for TOOLS 1/7
"When I asked that guy, on Twitter, whether we would be better suited to look at AI with a critical lens as a tool of corporate power rather than his frame — that AI was “collaborative kin designed to spur deep research into what it means to be creative across the human-nonhuman spectrum,” — he responded that my question was “a very predictable critical framework” that I “have been trained to output, one that appeals to humans, especially those seeking validation in the marketable media studies / AI ethics field.”

I think about this a lot. If critiquing AI’s corporate origins can be dismissed as lacking imagination, then I don’t know what imagination is meant to be doing. But it is true: I could never imagine treating Microsoft products as my children.

When work sidesteps meaningful critiques of data & surveillance capitalism in order to focus on statements about AI being “our children” or “our kin,” I can’t read it as a serious engagement with the technology."
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Zane Griffin Talley Cooper @zgtcooper.bsky.social · 25/01/2024
In “The making of critical data center studies,” @melhogan.bsky.social, Dustin Edwards, and I draw together threads across the humanities to critically examine the past, present, and possible futures of studying these weird structures we call data centers. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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Cybernetic Forests @cyberneticforests.bsky.social · 31/01/2024
Who is “the public” when it comes to “public engagement in AI”? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Who are the publics engaging in AI? - Renée Sieber, Ana Brandusescu, Abigail Adu-Daako, Suthee Sang...
Given the importance of public engagement in governments’ adoption of artificial intelligence systems, artificial intelligence researchers and practitioners spe...
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Molly White @molly.wiki · 28/01/2024
need to start keeping a list of all the times some big supposed display of bleeding edge technology turns out to just be A Guy
Ars Technica headline: Following lawsuit, rep admits “AI” George Carlin was human-written
Creators still face "name and likeness" complaints; lawyer says suit will continue.
KYLE ORLAND - UPDATED 1/27/2024, 8:44 PM
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Harald Klinke @harald-klinke.de · 28/01/2024
Flicking through an older book, I come across this analogy: More data not only brings quantity but fundamentally alters quality.
Text excerpt from a book about artificial intelligence, discussing the evolution of horse imagery from cave paintings to photography and film, referencing Peter Norvig and Pablo Picasso's perspectives on technological progress in image capture.
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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 27/01/2024
In case you prefer watching a video over reading our "Reclaiming AI" paper (preprint available at osf.io/preprints/ps...), here you go 🙂 Enjoy! 🎬🍿 www.youtube.com/watch?v=akuJ...
youtube.com
Iris van Rooij - Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science
Presented at the SAIL Workshop - Fundamental Limits of Large Language ModelsProf. Iris van Rooij (Radboud University, Netherlands & Aarhus University, Denma...
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Cybernetic Forests @cyberneticforests.bsky.social · 27/01/2024
Languages that a human couldn’t easily learn also can’t be easily learned by LLMs, according to this paper. Researchers “systematically altered English data with unnatural word orders and grammar rules.” They suggest that different architectures may have different outcomes. arxiv.org/abs/2401.06416
arxiv.org
Mission: Impossible Language Models
Chomsky and others have very directly claimed that large language models (LLMs) are equally capable of learning languages that are possible and impossible for humans to learn. However, there is...
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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 21/10/2023
Made a table to make the categories of theoretical criteria, virtues and vices, accessible in: What makes a good theory, and how do we make a theory good? doi.org/10.31234/osf... I make the case for us to think explicitly about theories and place desired characteristics into virtues and vices. 1/
Table 1 in https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8fxdsFigure 1 in https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8fxdsFigure 2 in https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8fxdsFigure 3 in https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8fxds
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René Walter @rawx.bsky.social · 26/01/2024
On Taylor Swift AI-porn and why i'm much more worried about the targeting of activists, everyday women and teenage girls, and why AI-porn enables a new digital swarm-version of the male gaze: goodinternet.substack.com/p/taylor-swi...
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 25/01/2024
For the 2023 Adela arts festival, I wrote this essay about Gordon Pask: cyberneticist and conversationalist, and how his vision of “maverick machines” can help us think critically about today’s AI. wiki.ljudmila.org/Eryk_Salvagg...
wiki.ljudmila.org
Eryk Salvaggio: Conversations with Maverick Machines
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Cybernetic Forests @cyberneticforests.bsky.social · 26/01/2024
“We investigate key social, political, and ethical assumptions … of AGI and human-level AI. We then draw on feminist, STS, and social science scholarship on the political and social character of intelligence … to defend a pluralistic, democratic, and participatory conception of the topic.”
arxiv.org
Unsocial Intelligence: a Pluralistic, Democratic, and...
Dreams of machines that rival human intelligence have shaped the field of AI since its inception. Yet there remains no agreed-upon conception of what human-level AI or artificial general...
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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 26/01/2024
"What is the role of image + aesthetic in revolution? Through a series of interviews w/... designers, Josh MacPhee charts the importance of revolutionary aesthetics from... the Black Panthers [to] ACT-UP [to] everyday organizing against nuclear power [and] for housing + international solidarity..."
commonnotions.org
Graphic Liberation: Image Making and Political Movements — Common Notions Press
From the fight against the AIDS crisis to the struggle for Black liberation and international solidarity, Graphic Liberation! digs deep into the history, present, and future of revolutionary politic...
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Cybernetic Forests @cyberneticforests.bsky.social · 25/01/2024
A 61-year-old man was taken into custody when a private surveillance company misidentified him based on automated facial recognition and sent his name to police.
vice.com
Man Jailed, Raped, and Beaten After False Facial Recognition Match, $10M Lawsuit Alleges
A 61-year-old man alleges that a facial recognition algorithm used a mugshot from the 1980s to ID him in a crime he didn't commit.
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 25/01/2024
We would have seen many more articles like this if LLMs had emerged in 1995. Kate Hayles has a piece that's less psychoanalytic, but a bit like this in arguing that we need to understand the "Umwelt" of a model. muse.jhu.edu/article/898324
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Cybernetic Forests @cyberneticforests.bsky.social · 25/01/2024
Structured like a language model — “We argue the intentional fictional projection of subjectivity onto LLMs can yield an alternate frame through which artificial intelligence behaviour, including its productions of bias and harm, can be analysed.” journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
journals.sagepub.com
Structured like a language model: Analysing AI as an automated subject - Liam Magee, Vanicka Arora,...
Drawing from the resources of psychoanalysis and critical media studies, in this article we develop an analysis of large language models (LLMs) as ‘automated su...
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Zane Griffin Talley Cooper @zgtcooper.bsky.social · 24/01/2024
If you’ve ever asked yourself on a lazy Sunday, “What is the making of Critical Data Center Studies?” @melhogan.bsky.social, Dustin Edwards, and I have a fresh new article for you! It’s a state-of-the-field of humanistic data center research and would be a great addition to any syllabus! ☺️
journals.sagepub.com
Sage Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
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dorian @doriantaylor.com · 23/01/2024
all these organizations are "using data" to make their operations "more efficient" but it seems like the actual decisions they're making with that data are really naïve
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Cybernetic Forests @cyberneticforests.bsky.social · 21/01/2024
Google study says that even slight alterations of digital images aimed at ML systems (like Nightshade) can register in human perception: “the brain informs us there’s a hint of cat about it.” deepmind.google/discover/blo...
deepmind.google
Images altered to trick machine vision can influence humans too
In a series of experiments published in Nature Communications, we found evidence that human judgments are indeed systematically influenced by adversarial perturbations.
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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 19/01/2024
Indiana University researchers explored the underground market for tools and services with names like BadGPT, XXXGPT, and Evil-GPT. OpenAI models are behind many of these products, which are used to generate malware, phishing campaigns, and scam websites. www.techpolicy.press/studying-bla...
techpolicy.press
Studying Underground Market for Large Language Models, Researchers Find OpenAI Models Power Maliciou...
Indiana University researchers explored tools and services with names like BadGPT, XXXGPT, and Evil-GPT.
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Jon Ippolito @jonippolito.net · 14/01/2024
The ever insightful @cyberneticforests.bsky.social exposes AI's performative side with cameos from Brenda Laurel, Cory Archangel, jodi.org and Gordon Pask's 1964 theater design with buttons for the audience to "weight" how a play is performed. (Start at 01:30) www.youtube.com/watch?v=04pl...
youtube.com
Eryk Salvaggio: Screens, Machines & Dreams: Artificial Intelligence is Imaginary
How can video game studies contribute to the field of generative AI? In this presentation, artist, researcher and RIT game design instructor Eryk Salvaggio c...
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Mercedes 🤦‍♀️ Bunz @mrsbunz.bsky.social · 08/01/2024
“In confronting the epistemology of AI and its regime of knowledge extractivism, a different technical mentality, a collective ‘counter-intelligence,’ has to be learned.” www.e-flux.com/journal/141/...
e-flux.com
The Automation of General Intelligence - Journal #141
Matteo Pasquinelli proposes a labor theory of automation.
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Mél Hogan / The Data Fix @melhogan.bsky.social · 09/01/2024
🎙️The Data Fix will start up again in February, with Anne Pasek. She is truly so brilliant so please subscribe now so you’ll catch the episode as soon as it’s released. shows.acast.com/the-data-fix
shows.acast.com
The Data Fix with Dr. Mél Hogan
a lefty pod about perpetual tech promises
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