#ai-use-cases

[interestingsnippets]

It is unclear if SoftBank was deliberately seeking to evoke dystopia when it named this project, but “EmotionCancelling Voice Conversion Engine” has a bleakness that would turn George Orwell green.  The technology, developed at an AI research institute established by SoftBank and the University of Tokyo, is still in its R&D phase, and the early demo version suggests there is plenty more work ahead. But the principle is already sort of working, and it is as weird as you might expect. In theory, the voice-altering AI changes the rant of an angry human caller in real time so the person at the other end hears only a softened, innocuous version. The caller’s original vocabulary remains intact (for now; give dystopia time to solve that one). But, tonally, the rage is expunged.

AI is coming for our anger

[pettrichore]

okay almost done w the book and all imma say is: suzanne collins is NOT pullin her punches anymore. the messaging is so blatant. it’s so on the nose it isn’t funny. and i know yall arent ready to genuinely talk about it but we GOTTA. there’s even anti-ai shit in it

[fixyourwritinghabits]

Hi hello

How do I get ride of copilot on my laptop?

If it is popping up in Microsoft Word:

Open Files, click on Options at the bottom.

Copilot now appears under the list of options. Click on it, uncheck the Enable box

It will still appear grayed out on your ribbon. Right-click, choose "customize your ribbon," look for "Assistance" under the Home tab, remove Copilot (or the Assistance option in general, frankly).

You will also have to do this for Excel and other apps, but I can confirm it's doable. Microsoft will likely very annoyingly ask you to sign out and sign in or restart your computer. This has taken me at last three times to get to work finally.

If it is appearing on your computer:

Open Settings, click on Apps, click on "Installed Apps"

You should be able to find an uninstall Copilot from there

If Microsoft does a major update, you will probably have to repeat the above steps. Turn off auto-updates to avoid this issue.

Currently you can switch to the Classic version of Office that does not have Copilot, however - also annoyingly - you won't be able to immediately switch until your current subscription is over. You can, however, switch back to earlier versions of Microsoft that does not include Copilot by following these steps.

[mlobsters]

jared padalecki and jensen ackles boston con 2025 - gold panel

cheerleading and (allegedly non-existent) short shorts

[carriesthewind]

"Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content.

The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely."

Fascinating (the full report is linked in the article). I've seen this kind of summarization being touted as a potential use of LLMs that's given a lot more credibility than more generative prompts. But a major theme of the assessors was that the LLM summaries missed nuance and context that made them effectively useless as summaries. (ex: “The summary does not highlight [FIRM]’s central point…”)

The report emphasizes that better prompting can produce better results, and that new models are likely to improve the capabilities, but I must admit serious skepticism. To put it bluntly, I've seen enough law students try to summarize court rulings to say with confidence that in order to reliably summarize something, you must understand it. A clever reader who is good at pattern recognition can often put together a good-enough summary without really understanding the case, just by skimming the case and grabbing and repeating the bits that look important. And this will work...a lot of the time. Until it really, really doesn't. And those cases where the skim-and-grab method won't work aren't obvious from the outside. And I just don't see a path forward right now for the LLMs to do anything other than skim-and-grab.

Moreover, something that isn't even mentioned in the test is the absence of possibility of follow up. If a human has summarized a document for me and I don't understand something, I can go to the human and say, "hey, what's up with this?" It may be faster and easier than reading the original doc myself, or they can point me to the place in the doc that lead them to a conclusion, or I can even expand my understanding by seeing an interpretation that isn't intuitive to me. I can't do that with an LLM. And again, I can't really see a path forward no matter how advanced the programing is, because the LLM can't actually think.

[foldingfittedsheets]

Playing whack a mole with art thieves on Redbubble. Seems a bunch of my Locked Tomb designs have been scraped which is… cool.

As a soft reminder for consumers- if you’re buying from a shop like Redbubble/Teepublic etc it’s a good idea to look at the shops overall portfolio. If it’s all over the place it’s probably stolen art, it only takes a little digging to find the original artist to make sure they’re the ones getting paid for their work.

[lynnlyrae]

They stumbled across some ruins in Teacher’s garden and decided to have a picnic🌿

It was an old sketch and now I can’t remember why Louis is frowning at the ruins. Is he pretending to be an archeologist discovering unknown treasures? Does he have a personal beef with this ancient piece of stone? I will never know and neither will you.

also it’s the first thing not in blues and pinks I did in ages))

[ovaryacted]

Even though I know it’s all intentional, I truly hate how we’ve become forced to normalize AI. I do think that the manufacturing of Artificial Intelligence was not done with malicious intent and has the capabilities of actually doing good, but time and time again ai is being used in literally everything for the worst reasons and getting its getting harder to escape.

From AI being used to scrape people’s hard work all over the internet, to giving predators and abusers more power in fabricating porn of strangers, to being used to strengthen racial bias in surveillance technology and aid in the development of weapons of war and mass destruction against marginalized groups of people…it’s just too fucking much. It’s so exhausting wanting to live in a world where we just didn’t need or have any of this shit, and it wasn’t like this a few years ago either. But now you can’t step outside without seeing something about AI, or a promotional ad for a new system to install. You can’t engage online anywhere without coming across AI software, and literally every single device in our present day implements AI to some degree, and it’s so fucking annoying.

I don’t want to keep worrying about the next idiot that’s spoon feeding my work into their AI system because they lack humanity and imagination. I don’t want to have to manually turn off AI detection on all of my apps and my phone just to use something. I shouldn’t have to be more mindful about the media I consume to distinguish whether or not it’s original or just more AI slop. I know it’s all intentional since we live in a hyper-capitalist world that cares more about profit margins & rapid productivity. But I really do vehemently hate how artificial intelligence has become such a fundamental aspect of our day to day lives when all it does is make the general population dumber and less capable of thinking for themselves.

Sincerely fuck AI. And if you use AI, I really do suggest you read up on how the data centers built to manage these AI systems suck up all of our resources for a simple prompt input. Who cares about answering a question in ChatGPT, entire communities don’t have water because they’re too busy cooling down the servers where people ask what 6 + 10 is cause their brains are so fried they can’t fire a single fucking neuron.

[turtleblogatlast]

Something I love about Leo is that, canonically, he IS capable of cooking, he’s just completely incapable of using a toaster. He’s banned from the kitchen not out of an inability to make edible food, but because being within six feet of a toaster causes the poor appliance to spontaneously combust.

[crescenthistory]

yes, the consequences of ai in academia can be devastating and we should be concerned about it. but you know what else we should be concerned about? the impact of the overt suspicion and paranoia against students just trying to get through their degrees to survive in this world

you think scrutinising students and trying to decipher who has and hasn’t used ai will be done without bias or prejudice? you think international students won’t be flagged for using “too formal/static” language because that’s how they learned english? you think poc, disabled or other minorities that are often belittled won’t be unjustly flagged for sounding “smarter than they are”? you think lower-class students will be unaffected by having to spend extra time and resources to show up at meetings to prove they haven’t used ai?

it’s never going to be a fair and proportionate impact when we focus all our energy on “catching” the bad ones

conversations around ai should always acknowledge and emphasise the safety of students and people, we cannot become hyper vigilant unpaid police who try to point out who’s “fake” with no regard to how subconscious biases affect the direction of your finger

[interestingsnippets]

consumers’ mass adoption of AI tools has had a knock-on effect on attitudes towards robotics, said Sonali Fenner of management consultancy Slalom. This has enabled companies to consider using robots in public-facing settings. Fenner used the example of a large retail client who deployed Spot, a Boston Dynamics robot dog powered by Google’s Gemini Pro model, in its stores to assess inventory. “[The hype] has opened the door a little bit to what is expected in particular environments and, even if you don’t want Spot walking around your retail store, you might accept a slightly less intrusive robot,” Fenner added. Ahti Heinla, co-founder of Skype and chief executive of delivery bot start-up Starship Technologies, who has deployed the small grocery robots across more than 100 cities and towns in Europe and the UK, said he was surprised at how easily people “perceive the robots to be normal participants in public space, and accept them as natural”.

Artificial intelligence breakthroughs create new ‘brain’ for advanced robots

[nostalgebraist]

Someone asked me about that "Utility Engineering" AI safety paper a few days ago and I impulse-deleted the ask because I didn't feel like answering it at the time, but more recently I got nerd-sniped and ended up reproducing/extending the paper, ending up pretty skeptical of it.

If you're curious, here's the resulting effortpost

[fromevertonow]

Y’all gotta fucking quit with this ai ‘art’ for fourth wing. Not only does it look absolutely terrible (my eyes need to be bleached at its sight), you have also set COMPLETELY unrealistic expectations for how certain characters should look and which actor for the adaptation comes closest to that expectation (spoiler alert: literally fucking no one because the picture isn’t real). Instead of creating nonexisting people, maybe just pop an edible and start zooming and imagining these characters in your head. Idk just a thought.

[cupidsncheerios]

jayvik au where viktor is the name of an ai automated lab assistant in jayce’s workplace that operates various precision tools like the hexclaw, and viktor slowly gains sentience as the researchers shift his role from mechanical aid to full on lab butler getting coffee for them and shit

eventually viktor falls in love with jayce because jayce is the only person in this lab of complete assholes that says thank you after viktor helps them

[writingjourney]

what i don't get is why do you use an AI pic as a banner or graphic for your fic after you spent hours writing it? you discredit your whole work because you can't be bothered to look for a proper cc licensed stock photo or use one of the many, many graphics people create on here for free for exactly that purpose? will never understand.

[taradactyls]

Trying to Tread Water Updates

FINALLY HERE IT IS!!

11/04:

I'M ALMOST FINISHED

I'm hoping to get it finished tonight, and then send it off for editing.

So, unless I get told that the entire thing needs a rework (entirely possible, I've been working on this for almost two months so my brain is doing that thing it does when you look at a word for too long it ceases to look like a word - except for all my goals for this chapter) it'll be up tomorrow night.

I've finally been getting some free time and I am HUSTLING I was even working on some bits on the bus home today:

I AM ALSO DESPERATE TO HAVE THIS POSTED

29/03:

I can sum up my week by describing my last three hours: I've been thrown up on twice and spent the time since the sick twins fell asleep washing vomit covered towels and working on an assignment.

Earlier this week I did find time to add another thousand+ words to the chapter though, so progress continues however much it has been hindered by... well, everything. I can give a little spoiler and say I've been writing dialogue for the Bennets! It's been awhile since I last got to play with their different temperaments and speech styles so I'm enjoying it immensely. I even went looking for an extract Mary could quote (which is also why I so easily remembered a relevant quotation from a conduct book for that 'Is Darcy a Virgin?' post, lol) because I imagine she's been moralising about marriage a lot lately.

21/03:

Nothing this weekend.

Sorry it's been so long, it's been ROUGH since the last chapter came out. Four or five things happening (most unexpectedly) which all require more than usual focus, energy, time, etc and all back-to-back and/or overlapping. My brain has been running on fumes for weeks. I'll talk more about the major ones when I eventually get this chapter out but you know about the cyclone and I replied to an ask mentioning we lost Husband's beloved childhood cat.

I put the twins in for an extra day of day-care this week so I could have some sort of recovery and honestly was too drained to even watch a movie. Classic burn out, but three days later and I'm feeling much more recovered. Hoping I'll get some free time this weekend!

Hope everyone's well <3