This Week’s Texted Discoveries

“Explosive diarrhea” is a fitting legacy for Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and everyone else involved with the failed MAHA/MAGA project he enabled.

This is the weirdest request for input that I’ve seen in a while. It’s almost like the ACM is sitting at the table with the “change my mind” sign. So, let’s do it. Here’s the input I gave them (link to leave your own in the comments): Large language models, used these days primarily to produce synthetic text, are a scourge on our information ecosystem. The role of the ACM and other scholarly organizations is to curate and produce and archive scholarly work. This should extend to being good stewards of the information ecosystem and not colluding with the powers actively polluting it. People who are enthralled by the fantasy of “AI” would have you believe that providing good text to their LLMs will help them be more “accurate” or “smarter” etc. That somehow the issue here is “garbage in garbage out”. But that was only ever a one-way implication. High quality data in still gets us garbage out with LLMs used to synthesize text, because in doing so they make papier-mâché of their input. Beyond that, I expect all professional organizations to stand for good citational practice and care with information provenance. The use of LLMs (and related tech) ruptures such systems. When the papier-mâché that comes out contains something that someone finds to be a good idea, they are cut off from understanding it in its source context. I urge the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery to look at its values (e.g. as encoded in the Code of Conduct) and ask: how do we stand for those values in the faces of pressure from wealthy interests? | 58 comments on LinkedIn

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