A colleague just referred to “My friend Copilot.” A former manager talks about “My friend ChatGPT”.
Are they joking? Sure, but there’s something significant about the choice of that word ‘friend’. People are building parasocial relationships with these things, helped no doubt by the fact that they’re engineered to encourage exactly that.
No wonder our judgement about when we can trust them is so bad. We don’t doubt our friends (mostly).
Chatbots are a social engineering attack.
#LLMs #AI
Artist/writer Molly Crabapple has a book coming out about the Jewish Bund, a secular Jewish labor organization (or organizations) in the early 20th century. If that sounds rather dry, I remember reading some of Molly's social media posts when she was starting to research the Bund, and they were fascinating. Not least because the Bundists seemed to be so far ahead of their time, socially and politically.
Available for pre-order now.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-the-story-of-the-jewish-bund-molly-crabapple/076afcc60cae1ffc
#labor #socialism #books #history
The Finborough Theater is releasing a free livestream of their production “Remember Your Lovers", based on the poetry of Sidney Keyes, an immensely gifted poet who died much too young during the Second World War.
When I was working on the Salamander Oasis Trust website with Victor Selwyn, Victor chose Keyes’ poem "War Poet" as one of the 'flagship’ poems for the site.
Livestream available from 15 August:
https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/remember-your-lovers-the-poetry-of-sidney-keyes/
#poems #poetry #WarPoems #WW2 #literature #drama
Them: Women are weak, fragile flowers who need to be protected.
Me: (having just watched a thirteen-year-old girl who looked like she'd blow away in a strong wind complete an 8.5 mile open-water swim on a diet consisting of five gulps of gatorade and a couple of gummy-ring candies): Mmm, okay, if you say so …
Angus McIntyre