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• Post #4286639

  "Rogue AI" sure does get a lot more headlines and freakouts than "badly written program" despite that being what this is about. Similarly "it escaped containment" sounds like an alien or monster broke down a wall, instead of "the program we wrote was run in an environment that was connected to other computers and not secured." It would be cool if major-media reporters did their jobs instead of just repeating the talking points that they're handed.

• Post #2997713

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116489125865801378 This is excellent. Having seen Cat speak elsewhere, I wish I’d been in the room for this talk in order to get the spoken parts in addition to the slide content. Not only were there valuable insights about the surface topic, the framing of effective learning resonated with me as an active teacher of a physical (not technological) discipline as well.

• Post #1844213

  This is Meta's head of AI "safety" doing more than making a “rookie mistake" as she put it. The biggest failing here, imo, was not letting a probabilistic chatbot have full control over her email account. That's bad, but even worse is anthropomorphizing the LLM. When it started to "misbehave" (remember, they don't have any real sense of true/false, and "rules" that you give them are just more text for the...

• Post #1844212

  It could be interesting to start calling the kind of abusive scraping, theft, and regurgitation that all the major LLM-bros base their whole product around as "distillation attacks." If someone says they meant something else when they made up that term, the conversation about describing the distinction ought to be fun. https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/14/ai_risk_distillation_attacks/ What they're angry about (and asking the government to prevent!) sure does look a...

• Post #1844211

  If you "vibe code" something, or otherwise get a GenAI system to provide an output (image, code, text, whatever) based on your prompting, you ought to understand that you do not have any ownership in either the copyright or patent sense of that output. You didn't make it! This means that you have effectively no legal basis to restrict what other people do with it. You cannot apply a copyright license to it, for example, or assign copyright to your employer or anyone el...

• Post #1844210

  @cbarbermd@med-mastodon.com He does like to make predictions. They don't tend to be accurate. Just one recent example: https://futurism.com/six-months-anthropic-coding Those baseless predictions have a very real cost: https://hbr.org/2026/01/companies-are-laying-off-workers-because-of-ais-potential-not-its-performance

• Post #1844209

  @rckenned Trick question! The model doesn't know anything other than "here are more tokens" and so it can't know that what it gives you is patented. Arguably, both the creators of the model and the users of the model might be infringing, in different ways, but both sides of that are as yet untested.

• Post #1844208

  @joel If a teacher over-focuses on “how” and isn’t prepared and willing to get into “why” then I don’t expect that they have much depth to share. If they happily go into why they do things the way they do, then even if I disagree or do things differently then I am inclined to listen to see what might be worth learning or at least thinking about.

• Post #1844207

  I saw a paper (by some GenAI skeptics?) that concluded "we find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average." Oh, wait, it wasn't some anti-AI authors. It's from Anthropic. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

• Post #1844206

  @neil We tried to find a balance on how attestation could be meaningful without degrading user control of their own systems when we looked forward in the direction of this problem about 20 years ago. (paper was published about 4 or 5 years after we wrote it) In general, it can be a complicated problem with semi-competing interests. Principle 3 in the abstract is about the user's ability to constrain disclosure during attestation. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220066790_Prin...

• Post #1844205

  Just got a text from one of my kids that they're at an invited talk (at their university) by @emilymbender -- right on.

• Post #980557

  This post by @mttaggart is one of the most thoughtful posts by a programmer on GenAI that I have seen in a while. Wrestling with our own conflicting perspectives and feelings about this is hard work, and important. https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/