I wrote about frictionlessness and "AI". The essay is admittedly a bit of a weird ride trying to connect a few very distinct thoughts. I hope it's still worth reading.

Smashing Frames

Friction and not being touched

The journalist Karen Hao – who published an absolutely fantastic book about OpenAI called “Empire of AI” recently – coined ...

I got myself a ticket to see [@Mer__edith](

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Meredith Whittaker (@Mer__edith@mastodon.world)

1.19K Posts, 314 Following, 32.9K Followers · President of @signalapp

) in Berlin soon. Get them while they last.

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Publix Berlin (@publix@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 image Join us to see Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, in conversation with Maria Exner and Matthias Spielkamp, to discuss why ...

I was talking to someone yesterday (let's call them A) and they had another "AI" experience, I thought might happen but hadn't heard of before. They were interacting with an organization and upon asking a specific thing got a very specific answer. Weeks later that organization claimed it had never said what they said and when A showed the email as proof the defense was: Oh yeah, we're an international organization and it's busy right now so the person who sent the original mail probably had an LLM write it that made shit up. It literally ended with: "Let's just blame the robot ;)". (Edit: I did read the email and it did not read like something an LLM wrote. I think we see "LLM did it" emerging as a way to cover up mistakes.) LLMs as diffusors for responsibility in corporate environments was quite obviously gonna be a key sales pitch, but it was new to me that people would be using those lines in direct communication.

Microsoft Research is at it again: Advait Sarkar, a Microsoft Research employee got a paper published at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in computing systems: "AI Could Have Written This: Birth of a Classist Slur in Knowledge Work" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706599.3716239 Now I am all for calling out structures and language of oppression and discrimination but this is really something special. "AI shaming arises from class anxiety in middle class knowledge workers" ... yeah no. It's about shaming people (usually from the middle or upper class) who don't want to put in actual work but get credit for having done it. Like what is the argument: Lower class people can only compete while using AI and therefore should not be shamed? What kind of a view on lower class people does Mr. Microsoft Research communicate here?

I don't think that "give beginners LLMs to get them started so they can actually learn to do it later" checks out. (Original title: But will they?)

Smashing Frames

But will they?

Armin Ronacher, who is quite a well-known open source developer (especially in the Python community) and who would probably consider himself a very...