Stephany Daniel

My cynical take is tech companies know they’re in the wrong. They also know that by fast-tracking GenAI and putting it in everything as quickly as possible, they can make a case that they are “too big to fail.” If they can’t avoid legal consequences, then next they will cry for a financial bail out.

A shitty map created by ChatGPT5. it purports to be US States with an R in their name, but it's wrong and dumb and worthless just like LLMs.

My goto is to ask LLMs how many states have R in their name. They always fail. GPT 5 included Indiana, Illinois, and Texas in its list. It then asked me if I wanted an alphabetical highlighted map. Sure, why not.

Illinois is the first state to ban AI therapists Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has signed a bill banning AI therapists into law, the first in the nation.

Illinois has banned AI therapy, making it the first state to regulate the use of AI in mental health services.

www.engadget.com/ai/illinois-...

Screenshot of article says: So Bluesky has gone from adding around 5 million new users per month at peak, to adding 1.6 per month more recently. [highlighted] Which, again, is still growth, and with so many apps struggling to gain users, any increase, especially of a million or more per month, is significant. But it’s no longer looking like Bluesky will become a real challenger to X (currently on 600 million users) and Threads (350 million) as a key platform for in the moment engagement.

I read the article to see if they acknowledge that social media growth and engagement is lower across all platforms (which is what mktg folks have been seeing for awhile). They say it briefly and ignore their own point in favor of dunking on bsky.

New platforms take time to grow, esp right now.

A tuxedo cat watches a computer monitor intently as an episode of Meerkat Manor plays

Come back later. She’s busy watching her shows (Meerkat Manor)

If I have to explain to you why it's a bad idea to use a machine that makes shit up 15-80% of the time AND destroys the environment AND contributes to rising fascism and genocide AND puts brilliant skillful creatives out of work by stealing their work, then we're already speaking different languages

It’s so frustrating. It has seeped into everything. Filters and tags don’t work. The AI slop isn’t just awful, though I can’t stress enough it is that. Depending on the subject matter (I work in mental health), images are often offensive, biased, or stigmatizing.

This is delightful.

And also, I suspect the animal kingdom is up to something because I was rudely awoken at 6am this morning by SQUIRREL FIGHT CLUB on my roof.

Photo of a computer with code on the screen

I started a blog series called The Dark Side of GenAI, centered around issues with widespread adoption of GenAI tech and educating about what these tools can/can't do. If that sounds like your cup of tea, check it out: www.sadaniel.com/blog

No paywall (rage sustains me). New posts weekly(ish)!

Touching grass is a trap! I once made the mistake of wearing a cute dress to the park for a sunset picnic. Bites up and down both legs. It was torture for weeks and then it took months for the spots to all go away. 😭

A thing I think we miss is that the “authoritarian playbook” isn’t a set of instructions authoritarians are reading from, it’s just a list of things that happen when narcissists get too much power.

Bless this lady who says “I like pissing off the managers.” Fuck yeah ma’am.

That's how you can tell human authors from AI.

AI will put in some em dashes, then apologise and take them out when told off.

Human authors will climb the filing cabinet, hissing, and defend their right to em dashes with a loaded stapler.

A spongy moth rests on a window. His fuzzy abdomen and antenna are visible.

I know this lil moth is an invasive species, but he is also very cute and fuzzy!

Submissions - Seize The Press Submissions Guidelines Seize The Press Magazine is an anticapitalist publication looking to publish dark speculative fiction. Bleak sci-fi, dark fantasy, horror and all kinds of weird, messy, genre-de...

Announcement for the writers among you: we're increasing our submissions word count to 10,000 words.

If you write dark fiction send it our way. Don't explain anything, just make things weird and make us deal with it. Ambiguity encouraged, definitive endings frowned upon.

Yeah, publishers should be the ones doing the heavy lifting re: publicity/mktg but most authors don’t get access to those resources. Just a few big titles a year get the big budget marketing plan. And often it’s books that don’t need the extra push (celebs, etc). It really sucks!

You’re not alone! I’ve known so many authors who feel this way. Social media can be a helpful tool, so I do encourage experimenting for those who are interested or curious. But if doing it feels soul-crushingly miserable, even the possibility of a modest gain in sales may not feel worth it.

There’s absolutely nuance here which is too complex for a brief social media post. I had relationships with authors and we discussed strategy. Some authors were miserable doing social media and it didn’t help them because everyone could tell they didn’t want to be there. That’s why interest is key.

Well, everything. The death of art. [Laughs.] A thing that I’ve been struck by in the last year of tech development around art is that what makes us human is making art, even if you’re not a professional artist. This is kind of corny, but I think about cavemen, right? One of the first things we ever did as a species was put our handprints on a wall, and it’s just this drive that has always been there. It’ll always be there. And I think it’s preposterous that these people are suggesting that they develop this technology, and the first thing they want to eliminate is art, so you have more time to…what, email? I don’t know what they think I’m going to do with my fucking day. Most of the population is not artists, but a lot of the population has artistic hobbies, and if you replace that with a computer doing it for you or whatever, it’s just pointless. I think there’s a death drive in these people, almost, and an actual hatred of artists; they are jealous of people with imagination because they don’t have one, and they almost consciously want to eliminate it.

My wife is in Vogue shitting on your AI-generated "art" 💜 www.vogue.com/article/matt...

Yes! When I was a book publicist, I would tell authors that they should only be on social media because they want to be there and genuinely like the experience/community. Being present online solely to sell books is going to feel awful and probably won’t work.

We need to teach people the difference between being uncomfortable and being unsafe. Because the discomfort of the safest people is endangering the most vulnerable, all day every day.

We have done this experiment one billion times and it has worked great all one billion times.

I worked in a pharmacy back in the day, and you would not believe how many people asked for refills of their O-meh-pra-zol-ee 🤌 on a daily basis and I had to keep a straight face 😂

Even if the traditional military still were a question mark, there’s no avoiding that he just bought himself a huge army in the form of ICE and its big budget increase. As you said, we are well past “wait and see.”

imo, if someone believes some races or ethnicities are genetically inferior to others, that person has revealed a weakness of mind and character that casts extreme if not irrefutable doubt on their other ideas. why would i expect them to use more rigor on, eg, housing than they do on human nature?

In case any of my fellow creatives also needed this reminder:

I heard someone use a good analogy that using an LLM for learning applications is like taking a forklift to the gym. The point is not to move the weights. The point is what happens inside of you when you do the lifting.

bsky.app/profile/lutz...

A Prominent OpenAI Investor May Be Suffering an ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say Bedrock co-founder Geoff Lewis has posted increasingly troubling content on social media, drawing concern from friends in the industry.

I wrote about how Geoff Lewis, one of OpenAI’s long running investors, has sparked concern among peers who believe he may be facing a public mental health episode brought on by ChatGPT.

futurism.com/openai-inves...

a cartoon of ralph from the simpsons sits on a bus with the words " chuckles i 'm in danger " below him Alt: a cartoon of ralph from the simpsons sits on a bus with the words " chuckles i 'm in danger " below him

How it feels to pull a rotisserie chicken out of the fridge when the cats are around