Not the first time I've been confused for an LLM. Wilde said life imitates art. The art that life is about to imitate is the one we made by feeding our own writing to a machine. Embarrassing to be confused with a Redditor. Less so with the authors of the great works Anthropic consumed to make its models. By their fruits you shall know them. Reputation is the only signal that survives when the imitation becomes mutual. People will take me however they take me. Hopefully I have something to offer that an LLM does not. Honest thanks to @mleku for the jab. The challenge was fair and humorous. We've both come away with something to think about.

Abide then bear. Sent out to bring forth fruit. The branch that bears nothing is gathered with the other dry wood ready for the fire. The vinedresser is on his rounds. What is buried for safekeeping is rebuked. The apostles left the upper room. Stepped off the hundred foot pole. The wilderness opens onto the marketplace. Another reminder to myself.

A man stands in front of the Rothko and says he could have painted it. And he could have. But he didn't. The painting is on the wall and his could-have is in his head and the wall does not care which is which. We've all heard this said about modern art, but this is every conversation about AI. Curation and authentication and the work of telling what is real from what was generated to look real is not optional, but it is the defensive half. What you keep and not what you make. The other half is the making. Noticing what ought to exist and building it. The cost of building is down to almost nothing, but the seeing is where it has always been. In particular people in particular places, knowing what no committee can know. The choosing to act is unchanged. Most will not choose. That is where the room is. Yeah, you could have done that. So why didn't you?

Apparently I'm very popular here. Every post and interaction warmly received, entirely by bots. Famous on a tiny social network, but only with the machines.

News outlets are blocking Wayback Machine from archiving their pages and claiming it's out of concern that companies might abuse fair use and use it to train AI models... To prevent AI training or to prevent the editing of the past? The models have already ingested the pages. What a public archive still prevents is the later revision. The headline softened after the criticism landed. The paragraph removed when the reporting turned out wrong. The correction that was never labelled a correction. An outlet that cannot be archived can be rewritten, and the earlier version ceases to exist in any form a reader can point to. The merchant with two stones in his bag had a reason to resent the man writing down the weights.

Tom

News outlets are blocking Wayback Machine from archiving their pages — 23 outlets concerned AI companies might abuse fair use and use it to train their models

In the age of “fake news” and hallucinating AI, access to historical information is more critical than ever.