Tagged: Akkoma
"Wait, grandpa!? You wanted to solve the climate crisis so you built tools that consumed even more electricity, and made the crisis happen even FASTER!?"
"Well, yes… efficiency was always the game. Exactly what we made more efficient wasn't really an issue. We did fuck up REALLY fast didn't we...? Imagine how many things we can improve now though…"
@sy Is the image description the prompt you used?
@sy Thanks, would it be okay to add this as a comment to the post?
It's good to give the complete picture of how different tools will fare on different prompts. The uncertainty of what tool will be able to do what is an important insight.
@mia Thanks, fixed it now in the online version (it went out as a newsletter as well 😅)
This is a typo that several people have reached out about now, haha.
Generative AI can not generate its way out of prejudice
The concept of "generative" suggests that the tool can produce what it is asked to produce. In a study uncovering how stereotypical global health tropes are embedded in AI image generators, researchers found it challenging to generate images of Black doctors treating white children. They used Midjourney, a tool that after hundreds of attempts would not generate an output matching the prompt. I tried their experiment with Stable Diffusion's free web version and found it every bit as concerning as you might imagine.
https://axbom.com/generative-prejudice/
#AIEthics #DigitalEthics
If your concern is that humans are standing in the way of technological progress, your understanding of the purpose of tech should perhaps be the subject of consideration.
@isotopp Thanks for the quick feedback! 🙏
Quick sketch of an AI being trained on only bits of the world. Makes sense?
I have now started reading Joseph Weizenbaum’s increasingly relevant book from 1976, ’Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation’.
I expected to like it but 23 pages in I can already say I love it. On page 23 he quotes Hannah Arendt about recent makers and executors of policy in the Pentagon:
”They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being ’rational’… They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them; that is, they were eager to discover *laws* by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be… [They] did not *judge*; they calculated… an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality [became] the leitmotif of the decision making.”
@deadsuperhero @BeAware
Glad someone else is testing with Akkoma. I couldn't find the account either.
@danhon Good evening.
@dkmj They had a lot of first-mover advantage and of course have always been children of their time... My perhaps biggest criticism is an unwillingness to grow, acknowledge missteps and to listen to other voices, even as they preach how important it is to make those voices heard. This is an interesting one on Norman:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90868431/the-problem-with-don-norman
I've personally found Norman better at reasoning around potential weaknesses in his own thinking (I've interviewed him twice) but then slowly realised that he never acts on that seemingly sensible reasoning. In his later writings he is essentially saying that he got a lot of his early stuff wrong, but when doubling down on a flavor of co-creation and 'reinventing design education' I haven't seen examples of bringing that thinking to his own practice.
Nielsen's work I've always had a hard time understanding why people latch on to. So much of it is oversimplification and bold assertions based on data that is rarely supporting the exact conclusion he makes. I also take issue with how often he talks about IQ in ableist ways, which definitely biases me against him.
@dkmj That would be awesome. 😁
@devolute
Haha, that is exactly how I felt on the Thursday that I read it. "This will break my Friday planning...", and it did. Thanks for sharing!
It's sometimes good to remember that many people have been debunking several
of Nielsen's assertions about usability for more than two decades. Not least the one about only needing to test with five users.
Here's a good study from 2001 (yes, 23 years ago) about page load times. By Christine Perfetti and Lori Landesman.
Remember when Amazon took 36 seconds to load over a 56kbps modem?
https://web.archive.org/web/20130501084018/http://www.uie.com/events/roadshow/articles/download_time/
#ux #uxdesign
More recent, but still 12 years ago...
https://www.wired.com/2012/04/why-jakob-nielsen-is-wrong-about-mobile-websites/
@ElleGray I applaud your image description. 👏
Looking at complaints can be one way of surfacing pain points in a workflow. Often used by designers as input for customer journey maps.
But you also need to consider who is behind the complaint, who feels comfortable complaining and who is not given an opportunity to complain.
If you don't know what I mean by "not given an opportunity to complain", I'd urge you to read more about privilege, oppression and social norms.
@datarama I've just added it to my Kobo reader. Next in line to read.
@datarama Hard agree.