Author: Yvonne Aburrow

  • Religious Exemption from using AI

    Religious Exemption from using AI

    If you have an ethic of avoiding harm to the environment and other people, AI and its associated requirement for data processing centres which guzzle water and electricity, and slave labour (or very poorly-paid labour) to mine the minerals needed for the devices it runs on, definitely qualifies as the sort of harm that we would wish to avoid.

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  • Filtering out AI

    Filtering out AI

    For people who want human-made art and writing in their search results, it’s getting harder to distinguish between AI and human-made, as large language models “learn” to generate productions that look more like human language and art.

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  • Human Intelligence

    Human Intelligence

    Artist and author Mickie Mueller has created a “human intelligence” digital badge for art and writing, to make it easy to distinguish between human-produced art and AI-generated stuff.

    Here’s the elevator pitch: It’s a badge free for human creators to add to their social media posts of all kinds that helps everyone know at a glance that this is a human made creation, not made by AI.

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  • AI and consciousness

    AI and consciousness

    When I was a kid and artificial intelligence (AI) was firmly in the realm of science fiction, asking whether AI could become conscious seemed like an interesting philosophical problem, but mostly irrelevant. Why did the Butlerian Jihad destroy all “thinking machines”? Why did humans hunt the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The AI and robots of older science fiction stories are generally presented as benevolent but misunderstood, or on a different trajectory from humans (as is the case in Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, where the AI has retreated from earth and lives on Earth’s artificial satellites).

    Now that something like AI has been created, in the form of machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLMs), some people have already started to believe that it could become conscious, or that it is already conscious. Some people find this fascinating, others find it creepy.

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  • Indigenous History Month

    Indigenous History Month

    June is Indigenous History Month in Canada. A time to reflect and act on the history of interactions between settlers and Indigenous people.

    More and more Canadians want to learn the truth about the destruction of the cultures and languages of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and the theft of their lands.

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  • TBT: Thoughts on AI

    TBT: Thoughts on AI

    A Throwback Thursday post.

    First off, the thing that is currently being called AI is not really AI, depending on your definition of AI. It’s not conscious. It’s uncannily able to resemble consciousness because humans tend to attribute consciousness to things that science says are not conscious. I’m not even sure if it would pass the Turing Test, although that has been criticized as insufficient for detecting consciousness.

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  • Repost: What a 98-Year Old Children’s Book Teaches Us About AI

    Repost: What a 98-Year Old Children’s Book Teaches Us About AI

    Nice work!

    the book: The Trumpeter of Krakow, published by Eric P. Kelly in 1928. Set in the 15th century, it follows a Polish family fleeing their home in Ukraine after it has been destroyed by Tartars and making their way to Krakow. … The protagonist of this novel aimed at young adults, is, predictably, a young adult. Joseph Charnetski flees with his mother and father to Krakow with their only possession: a large pumpkin.

    What a 98-Year Old Children’s Book Teaches Us About AI

    Call for contributions

    If the question of AI interests you, check out our call for contributions to a new anthology:

    Call for contributions: Pagan, Heathen, animist, and/or polytheist responses to AI
  • Repost: SOLARPUNK – the modern ecological aesthetic that wants to change the world

    Repost: SOLARPUNK – the modern ecological aesthetic that wants to change the world

    By Ben Valentine and Vincent Callebaut *

    In the news, the state of the planet is doom and gloom: yet another species is driven to extinction, another wildfire destroys another unprepared city, and some of the strangest weather patterns break another record. Scientists and policymakers are depressed, and our collective consciousness turns to scenes of apocalypse, not narratives of recovery.

    Welcome to the Anthropocene, the period in which human activity exerts a dominant influence on the Earth’s environment and climate, with terrifying results.

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  • Landscape

    Landscape

    What does the land mean to you? Geology, flora, fauna, land use, ecology and ecosystems, archaeology, vernacular architecture, history, folklore, legends, can all be included when we say landscape.

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  • Happy Pride Month

    Happy Pride Month

    June is Pride Month in Canada. And it is not just an excuse for a party, but an opportunity for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community to be visible, and to celebrate our wins over the years, from greater social acceptance to same-sex-marriage.

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