Stephen Downes

If I recall my art history, this is also what happened when Monet began releasing his works in real life. "Someone shared an actual Monet painting as an AI-generated artwork and asked people to explain what makes the 'AI image' inferior to a genuine Monet piece. There was no shortage of 'sharp-eyed' critics eager to chime in." I wonder what the same critics would have made of Voice of Fire. Via Alan Levine.   

I have considered turning my hand to writing a book - a real book, not just a collection of blog posts - but I have also determined that such a book would not consist of the typical Wall of Text, not simply because the format is user-hostile, but also because I think text along is unable to capture the emotions and ambiguities a description of a complex world requires. And this leads me in the direction of writing - or 'creating', I guess - a book that looks more like a slide deck. No, not just a series of bullet points (I could just ask ChatGPT to do that for me if I wanted) but something that captures multiple perspectives in a single presentation. That's not one of the explanations offered here in this article, but I think it should be.

This is a discussion of account identity verification and is basically an endorsement of the ATmosphere Protocol (ie., Bluesky) to do this (I notice conversation at Cosocial.ca noodling around the same topic). Here's the stated objective: "A verification mark on this network must not encode, reference, or be conditional on a government-issued identifier, and no labeller, AppView, or app should publish a mark whose issuance required the user to present government ID to the operator of this network. The mark itself is the line: it answers 'who does this account belong to,' and that question must always be answerable without fees and without government ID." All very well, but I would answer back, "you mean, without government or corporate ID, right?" Because depending on a VC-backed platform for continuity of identity is as risky as depending on the apparatus of the state (these days, they sometimes blend into one). I personally think Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are a perfectly good tool for this and have written some proof-of-concept code around them. And we don't need to depend on Bluesky's VC funders for continued benevolence.

This reads a bit like advertorial content, but it might be a genuine endorsement. Either way, it gives a glimpse into another way of looking at AI, and also, how AI might be able to help people who see the world differently. "Goblin Tools breaks down my nebulous to-dos into manageable, sequenced steps without me ever having to craft a perfect prompt. It's also a great illustration of how AI can power small, effective apps, not just big, complex enterprise platforms and open-ended, general-purpose conversational chatbots." This is the sort of thing I've always done in my head; many people rely on making lists on paper, and some can't do it at all. I might think that the tool is unnecessary, but that would be very presumptuous of me, I think.

Jim Groom channels Tim Klapdor on the evolution of the media as noise machine. "The medium doesn't matter, there's no message anymore," writes Klapdor. "No one's really trying to communicate anything." So "Maybe the new Golden Age begins with a simple post that references someone who stirred you," writes Groom. "Links do a lot of work online. Throw in a ping or even a trackback and we might have a simple, stable, and scalable solution. I don't want to create as much as I want to connect, but it turns out the two are always deeply related." 

Discussion of the recent paper that was retracted, by a member of the editorial board of the journal that carried the paper. "The question 'why was this paper retracted' has an answer. The question 'why does the system keep producing papers like this' does not, because answering it would require redesigning the system. It's easier to just retract the paper."