The Auschwitz Memorial Museum posted a statement decrying the use of AI by a Facebook page called “90’s History” to create fictional images of Holocaust victims based on actual photographs. In an appeal to the page’s creators, the Museum’s staff said:
Stop this practice immediately. If your intent is to educate and honor the memory of Auschwitz victims, do so with integrity. Fabricating faces with AI does not preserve memory. It reshapes it, distorts it, and risks turning tragedy into aestheticized fiction. The tragedy of Auschwitz does not need to be made more visual, more “emotional,” or more “shareable.” It needs to be remembered truthfully.
Cory Doctorow insightfully ties the sociological concept of “placelessness” to AI model collapse:
“Placelessness” is the urbanist’s name for “when everywhere optimises toward the same template.” I think of it as Flinstones Syndrome, where the same background is looped behind Fred and Barney as they drive through Bedrock. In New York City, it’s Citibank-bodega-Chipotle-Walgreens; in the Chicago suburbs, it’s the strip malls with a Chili’s, a gas station, and a big box store.
Leek proposes that these are all expressions of the same underlying phenomenon, a failure mode of data science that takes a world of “granular personal data” and arrives at a world where “personalisation produc[es] more sameness.”
There’s always much to chew on in Robin Sloan’s newsletter (which waxes every 29 1/2 days, like the moon).
Meta announced that its Muse agent has 10 million users, of whom 25% are using it daily. Shopping is the biggest use case.
Verity Harding comments on election results in her newsletter, AI Needs You:
It’s hard to separate whether opposition to data centres is about the buildout itself, or the fact that they are one of the few tangible things about AI that people feel they can control – and even stop. Even though it is widely used, the technology itself is hugely unpopular in the United States (especially with Gen Z), with voters citing fears that AI will undermine societal structures, replace human interaction, and take away their jobs. In his acceptance speech, Georgia senator (and potential 2028 Democratic hopeful) Jon Ossoff told his supporters: “I refuse to accept [that my daughters] will grow up with artificial friends and teachers”. A wider sense of AI as representative of what people dislike and fear about modern society has taken hold in a way that will be tough to reverse anytime soon.
