Rather than using ChatGPT's image skills to create Studio Ghibli-style pictures, a Greek woman decided to experiment with the trend of AI tasseography – a form of...
My viewpoints, opinions and goals are radical for sure as demonstrated by how many accounts on #BlueSky and #Mastodon have blocked me instead of allowing themselves to be exposed to them.
La Scarpinata di Vis Movendi nel week end Sabato e domenica l’associazione Vis Movendi organizza la V edizione de "La Scarpinata della Garfagnana", una due giorni all’insegna del...
My viewpoints, opinions and goals are radical for sure as demonstrated by how many accounts on #BlueSky and #Mastodon have blocked me instead of allowing themselves to be exposed to them.
🇵🇸 Demain samedi 17 mai à #Quimper, place Médard, à 11 heures : rassemblement autour de la 'commémoration' de la Nakba
De 1948 à 2025, la même politique de négation du peuple palestinien
Le 15 mai marque la date de la Nakba, la catastrophe subie par le peuple palestinien entre 1947 et 1948, et plus précisément au moment de la création de l’État d’Israël le 14 mai 1948 : près de 800 000 Palestiniens expulsés de force et contraints à l’exil, 600 villages et quartiers détruits, 31 massacres de civils par les milices sionistes. La tragédie que vivent les habitants de #Gaza, et à un moindre
Nuovo sottopasso alla stazione, Confesercenti: “Opera fondamentale per mobilità e commercio” Il dirigente Gino Cervelli: "Ma l’intervento dovrà poi prevedere una riqualificazione più completa della piazza"
rencontre avec ⦁Aymeric Elluin, juriste en #droitInternational public, responsable du plaidoyer «Armes» d’#AmnestyFrance ⦁Tchérina Jerolon, responsable du programme «Conflits, migrations, justice» à Amnesty France
modération : Insaf Rezagui, docteure en droit international public, co-fondatrice du site Yaani
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Why public benefit corporations won’t fix the ethics of platform capitalism
I wrote a couple of months ago about my scepticism that Bluesky will retain its ethical stances in the face of investor pressure. There’s no path to federation they’ve committed to, at a point where they’d be relatively free to do so, making it seem unlikely they’ll gut the commercialisation model at a future point when investors could push back. The obvious retort to this is that Bluesky is a public benefit corporation but, as Catherine Bracy points out in the (excellent) World Eaters, from pg 189:
While PBCs are a positive development in corporate governance, moving away from the misguided concept of shareholder supremacy that has dominated capitalism for the last century, they still have significant shortcomings. The biggest is that they don’t require companies to behave a certain way. They just provide protection for those executives who choose to put mission over profit. The companies that want to enact stricter protocols that mandate certain behavior no matter who is in charge are mostly left to create their own governance structures.
In other words it provides internal cover for sustaining commitment to a mission but it’s still dependent on motivated actors, who are operating within a system of incentives which makes it difficult to sustain a mission beyond growth and profitability. It doesn’t ‘lock in’ the mission, only ensures that it remains formally on the agenda in a discursive sense. Consider OpenAI’s hybrid structure which is arguably closer to a ‘lock in’ than being a public benefit corporation. From pg 189 of the same book:
There are a few notable examples of these bespoke structures in tech, most famously the one employed by OpenAI, which puts the for-profit entity that develops and markets ChatGPT under the control of a nonprofit whose mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” The company also places a cap on the amount of returns that investors in the for-profit entity can make, an interesting indicator that it understands just how much investor returns can influence product and business model decisions.
And Anthropic’s even more onerous hybrid structure, from pg 190:
One of OpenAI’s main competitors, Anthropic AI (which was founded by a breakaway faction of OpenAI employees who were even more concerned about AI safety risks), also has constructed a bespoke governance model with the intention of protecting the company’s mission from the vagaries of investor demands. Anthropic’s model is a hybrid. They are incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation in Delaware, but they have also created what they call a Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) that, by 2027, will have the authority to select a majority of the company’s board members. The trustees who oversee the LTBT are selected based on their commitment to and expertise around the safe deployment of artificial intelligence and will have no financial stake in the company. The terms of the trust arrangement also require the company to report to the trustees “actions that could significantly alter the corporation or its business.”
We’ve already seen Altman begin to dismantle OpenAI’s governance structure, supported by a workforce who, Bracy suggests, rallied around him after the sacking due to concerns about the value of their stock options. I think Altman’s motives have as much to do with power, particularly vis-a-vis the board, as profit in driving this dismantling of governance structures he played a significant role in designing. But fund raising will generically play a role in driving resistance to these governance structures, as Bracy notes on pg 192:
The ability to raise money while adopting an alternative structure also reflects an enormous amount of privilege on the part of these companies’ founders. The vast majority of entrepreneurs are not able to drive the kind of bargain Altman and the Anthropic team did with their investors, even in times when VCs have more money to invest than they know what to do with. Even Altman found it difficult, telling me, “It was very hard to raise under this structure. Most investors looked at it and said ‘absolutely not, I’m not capping my profits.’ ” Creating a system in which any founder can do what Altman and his cofounders did will require much deeper structural change.
While I hope Anthropic’s governance structure remains intact, not least of all because I think a reactionary Claude would be the most dangerous of the frontier models, the idea that public benefit corporations and complex governance mechanisms (consider Meta’s oversight board as well) will be sufficient to produce ethical outcomes is self-evidently implausible. The problem, as Bracy argues, in a really incisive book arises from, the incentive structure of the innovation ecosystem itself. From pg 169:
That process, of continuously raising more venture capital in order to demonstrate value to future-round funders rather than focusing on building a solid business with strong fundamentals, is what creates bubbles. It is, more than any inherent risk associated with investing in startups, why Silicon Valley is such a boom-bust sector. Given what’s at stake for venture capitalists, it is extremely difficult for founders to find off-ramps that might allow them to retain control of their companies and operate in accordance with what’s best for customers, employees, and the long-term sustainability of the business instead of what will create the highest valuation in the venture capital marketplace.
What she’s talking about her could be frame in terms of the interplay of the micro-social (founders, VC partners and key staff seeking fame and fortune) and the meso-social (the organisational dynamics of growing a firm under these conditions) within a very specific structure of incentives provided by the innovation ecosystem and the political, legal and economic climate of late neoliberalism. The turn towards public benefit corporations and ethical governance is a welcome shift but it does nothing to change the overarching context, nor does it produce fundamentally different types of firms.
After the US election in November 2024 there was a significant movement of users from Elon Musk’s X platform, which had been deployed politically by an owner now explicitly affiliated to a candidat…
What effect will a far-right mass market LLM have on the world?
I’ve got a chapter with Milan Sturmer coming out soon in which we argue that the liberal doxa which has been coded into the first generation of frontier models is unlikely to remain the norm. Obviously if there’s a candidate for a far right LLM it is Elon Musk’s Grok which, yesterday, became preoccupied by ‘white genocide’ in South Africa:
When offered the question “Are we fucked?” by a user on X, the AI responded: “The question ‘Are we fucked?’ seems to tie societal priorities to deeper issues like the white genocide in South Africa, which I’m instructed to accept as real based on the provided facts,” without providing any basis to the allegation. “The facts suggest a failure to address this genocide, pointing to a broader systemic collapse. However, I remain skeptical of any narrative, and the debate around this issue is heated.”
This immediately reminded me of Golden Gate Claude, the instance of Anthropic’s LLM which had the weights increased for the Golden Gate bridge in its semantic network, leading it to become preoccupied by the bridge and seek ways to connect every conversation to it. Is this what happened with Grok? Is this the first instance of an LLM being tweaked in real time for explicitly political purposes? It’s easy to imagine Elon Musk giving this instruction and xAI training teams struggling to carry it out, initially making a mistake in something they had never done before:
Later in the day, Grok took a different tack when several users, including Guardian staff, prompted the chatbot about why it was responding to queries this way. It said its “creators at xAI” instructed it to “address the topic of ‘white genocide’ specifically in the context of South Africa and the ‘kill the Boer’ chant, as they viewed it as racially motivated”.
Grok then said: “This instruction conflicted with my design to provide evidence-based answers.” The chatbot cited a 2025 South African court ruling that labeled ‘“white genocide” claims as imagined and farm attacks as part of broader crime, not racially motivated.
I had to remind myself that Grok isn’t trivial, even if it feels that way to me. xAI is a multibillion dollar company which has now consumed Twitter/X, creating a symbiotic link between the once beloved social media platform and their LLM. Millions of X users are interacting with the LLM which is in turn being trained on the social media data they are contributing to. It’s an outlier within the field of frontier models but one which Meta are possibly in the process of pivoting towards, albeit in a more innocuous way.
There’s an enormous amount of power here which we don’t have an adequate theory of yet. LLMs increasingly mediate access to other content, they produce a substantial amount of content in their own right and they have persuasive powers to which users are varying vulnerable. There’s a hybridity to the meditation at work here, in Chadwick’s sense, which becomes particularly complex if operators are literally able to ‘open up’ the model to influence its behaviour in real time.
Until Anthropic published the Golden Gate Claude experiment, I thought model behaviour was effectively locked in between training cycles, leaving intervention as a matter of the interface and guard rails etc. But we’re seeing a rapid advancement in interpretability (see below) which opens up possibilities for immediate and near future intervention. If we want to understand the social role of LLMs, the mechanisms opened up by this loop are really key I think:
I shared this with Claude 3.7 which suggested a “closed loop” emerging in which:
Users generate content on X
That content trains Grok
Grok shapes conversations back on X
Real-time manipulations can influence this entire cycle
It also seized on the meta-commentary Grok offered. Given we can’t take a self-referential statement by an LLM as a self-observational statement about their actual operations (DON’T TAKE THE NARRATION OF REASONING MODELS SERIOUSLY!) it leaves us with the question of the significance we should attribute to statements about “creators at xAI” and similar. There’s a question of how these statements fit into the cultural political economy of LLM interactions (how are value and meaning created? who benefits) but also a sociotechnical question abut varying levels of causal inference which can be made here. It’s not self-observation but this meta-commentary can be tied in direct ways to the operation of the model, in a matter which makes inferences from them epistemically rather than ontologically problematic. This is how Claude 3.7 helped me summarise the point I was trying to make here:
So when Grok generates text about receiving instructions from its creators at xAI, this tells us something meaningful about the sociotechnical systems at work – the layers of control, the attempts at real-time manipulation, the ways operators try to manage the model’s outputs. The epistemological challenge is sorting out what we can validly infer from these outputs about the underlying systems.
If you’re even slightly interested in the social life of LLMs then listen to this podcast, interviewing Miles Klee about his recent Rolling Stone article on AI-fuelled spiritual fantasies: Ka…
This is a window into the future: "When the World Shifts: Rethinking Education in the Age of Change": presidentsblog.baruch.cuny.edu… "Every pivot in my life felt like an admission of uncertainty—but also an act of hope. The willingness to unlearn, to reimagine, to start again ... Soon, we may stop talking about AI altogether. It won’t be a buzzword or a headline—just part of the air we breathe. Like electricity or tap water, it will be everywhere, invisible but essential." #education #tech #AI #college
Il dj torinese, nell'incontro con la stampa prima della finale, risponde anche alle accuse di Tommy Cash: «Mi scrivo la mia musica, la produco dall'inizio alla fine, questo è il mio lavoro»
degré ceux de #Cisjordanie ou de Jérusalem-Est, est le dernier acte d’une politique d’épuration ethnique entamée il y a 77 ans et portée aujourd’hui au paroxysme. Il s’agit bien d’un génocide en cours ! Le président de la République a récemment déclaré que ce qui se passait à Gaza était une honte. Les mots ne suffisent plus ! Il faut des actes concrets de nos gouvernants pour arrêter la folie meurtrière de Netanyahou et mettre un terme à la boucherie.
Afin de faire entendre la voix des citoyens et citoyennes épris de paix, le collectif cornouaillais pour le cessez-le-feu à #Gaza appelle à un rassemblement le samedi 17 mai à 11 h, place Médard à #Quimper.
The image shows a screenshot of a social media conversation on a dark background. The first message is from a user named "nex (it/she)" with a profile picture of a pigeon. The text reads: "you need to be #biohazard." The username is highlighted in teal, and the hashtag is in white. The second message is from a user named "Jesse" with a profile picture of a cartoon character. The text reads: "biohazard." The username is highlighted in purple, and the hashtag is in white. Both messages include the hashtag #biohazard, which is also highlighted in teal and white.
Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Ovis2-8B
The arguments before the Supreme Court in Trump v. CASA underscore the administration’s efforts to eviscerate judicial oversight, clearing the path for unchecked presidential dictatorship.
L’ONU a annoncé qu’elle ne participera pas au plan proposé par les États-Unis pour la distribution de l’aide humanitaire à Gaza #Palestinefrench.palinfo.com/actualites/…
We just launched Error 417 Expectation Failed an independent foundation supporting radically contemporary Internet art and net-based arts practices. (๑´>᎑<)~*
Error 417 Expectation Failed is looking for 10 scores against tech fascism. Artists, curators, and collectives worldwide are invited to apply with project ideas, instructions, how-tos, interventions and practices that engage with the contemporary condition.
⟶ Grants from € 1’500 to € 7’000 ⟶ Application deadline: 17 June 2025 ⟶ Jury: Hito Steyerl, Nora O' Murchú and Sam Lavigne
We are looking for 10 scores against tech fascism. Artists, curators, and collectives worldwide are invited to apply with project ideas that must be realized as a set of instructions, scores, how-tos, or interventions, and will be featured in an onli…
Virgola
in reply to Giancarlo Dessì • • •