J. Martin

March 19, 2023

Papers & Parrots

Last week was a busy week. First, it was filled with oral exams, where our bachelor’s degree candidates presented their research and answered our questions. Traditionally, as a peculiarity of our university’s game design department, these exam sessions are attended not only by the examining committee, i.e., the students’ thesis advisors, and often other students if the candidate agrees to it, but also by all faculty members who aren’t busy otherwise. Which makes matters more lively and often extremely interesting! Then, at the end of the week, I attended Stochastic Parrots Day, which I already mentioned in last week’s newsletter. There were four panels, each lasting an hour: about the development since the “Stochastic Parrots” paper was published; about worker exploitation, data theft, and the centralization of power involved in creating these large language models; on AI hype vs. reality; and on “What’s next? A Call to Action”—what we can do individually in our respective fields. Which is something we should deeply care about—as I wrote elsewhere, a lot can go wrong and will go wrong when tech bros funded by sociopaths fantasize about AGI while rushing untested high-impact technology to market with the potential to affect almost everyone in every industry.

Accordingly, last week’s output was focused on AI/LLM/GPT issues—from two snarky swipes at Microsoft on Late State Enshittification at LinkedIn and The Bleeding Edge of Scam-Powered Technology; a slightly less snarky post on Google Following Bing over the Chatbot Cliff; an angry post on Following OpenAI Into the Rabbit Hole; and a rather technical post on Elena Esposito’s paper on Explainable AI. Regarding photos, there’s a new album on Flickr with 10 images from the Confucius Temple and the Guozijian Imperial College in Beijing, China; new daily vintage-style travel squaries at Pixelfed; and, finally picking up where I left when COVID-19 hit me, some fresh posts on my betweendrafts and voidpunkverse Instagram accounts.

For the Sunday funnies, something special up front which I became aware of just recently: the Korean Film Archive made more than 400 classic Korean movies available on their YouTube channel back in 2020, complete with subtitles in English (just enable the captions) and sometimes other languages (check the settings). Then, please enjoy this 17 Seconds Star Trek movie; this lovely gif treatment of Scully and Mulder’s dance scene from “Post Modern Prometheus”; and Acrobat Cat (with, alas, a very expendable audio track).

J.