UX researcher. This account is dormant because this place has become too full of shouting. Follows are not endorsements.
San Francisco
Joined August 2008
- Tweets4.5K
- Following755
- Followers708
- Likes2K
Arvind Venkataramani is letting go of conditioning retweeted
Remember the backlash against all AI voices being feminine—Siri, Alexa, etc.? Now, companies use a wider range of AI voices with ambiguous names like “alloy” and “shimmer.” Bias solved forever—ha, no. What happens when people hear these supposedly neutral voices?👇
Oh yes and this is in continuance of our thread earlier about the lack of data on successful use that doesn’t simply parrot marketing and hype points.
Aaand… here’s a study on “psychosis” that touches on these themes:
arxiv.org/abs/2603.16567
That’s fascinating, I grew up around Muslims from various walks of life in India and never once would it have occurred to me to code a sari with a religious identity. It always seemed to have more to do with geography: the more north and west of India, the less sari use.
“ Agents can do anything you can do on a computer”
No this is only believable if you do not have any understanding of what expertise looks like. There is no way to universally achieve quality via quantity; the damage won’t come from “AI” but from using it as an excuse.
Based on how they talk about this, I do not believe they* possess the methodological sophistication or the ontological models to have an analysis engine that can possibly drive inquiry in the way that human social scientists do
*= all AI qual research tool makers
My act of quixotic optimism this week is watering & fertilizing the moss growing in-between the roofing cracks on my apartment’s balcony so it survives but also thrives during this heat wave.
(It survives every year without my help but this year I’ve decided that is not enough)
ALT A close-up photo of green moss with mottled brown spots growing in between cracks on a black tar and grey crushed stone tiled roofing level on a balcony/fire escape. It has been freshly dampened and is actively absorbing water, and the dried spots are slowly rehydrating.
Indeed.
Something seems qualitatively different in this one because of its apparent anthropomorphic superpowers (for consumption) and its alignment with cybernetic science-fantasies (for production). It’s rare for tech to so explicitly and accessibly refigures “human” IMO/IME.
Rotating the perspective a bit, it seems the one definite use GenAI has is revealing many of the deep fault lines and dysfunctions of an overly individualised and hierarchical civilization.
The fact that this is happening frequently explains why they’re offering free usage outside core hours as a “promo” but is probably an experiment to see if they can shift usage to manage load.
Which then produces the question of: what framework animates that decision-making and why and where does it come from and all the other sociological and historical questions that come from that
Which means we would need to differentiate the argument of using Gen AI is bad for the user from using Gen AI is bad for the ecosystem/public/commons,
…knowing that some people will choose to respond by ignoring the collective harms
Which basically complicates the picture around it and explains why some people react to critiques of their use or warnings against it with “skill issue“.
i.e. from their perspective, they claim to have a working model that manages the risks
And that this benefit is laundered as an excuse
But also simultaneously likely that LLMs provide certain kinds of support for some people that we did not realise was possible to give or was needed
↓