#ai

See tagged statuses in the local BookWyrm community

An Amazon AI chatbot that sums up the book you are reading while you are reading it. While trampling over the writer’s rights.

“Ask This Book."

“Your expert reading assistant, instantly answering questions about plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements without disrupting your reading flow.”

Enshittification is too polite a word for all this.


https://writerbeware.blog/2025/12/12/kindles-new-gen-ai-powered-ask-this-book-feature-raises-rights-concerns/

Passage abbreviated to fit. "Story So Far lets you catch up on the book you’re reading—but only up to where you’ve read without any spoilers. For our endlessly curious readers, Ask this Book will let you highlight any passage of text while reading a book and get spoiler-free answers to questions about things like a character’s motive or the significance of a scene. The lead article in today’s Publishers Lunch (PL) is all about Ask This Book, which went live in the Kindle iOS app earlier this week (it’ll be rolled out on all devices and Android OS in 2026). Amazon describes it as “your expert reading assistant, instantly answering questions about plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements without disrupting your reading flow.” You can highlight a phrase or sentence, type a question into a search box, and AI will generate an answer “right on the page.” That might sound inoffensive enough. But as PL points out, Ask This Book is, in effect, “an in-book chatbot. You ask any question about the book, and a generative AI process provides you answers.” Which would seem…hmmm…to raise some rights concerns. Questioned about this, Amazon was not prepared to elaborate, but did note that Ask This Book is not optional for rightsholders: Asked whether rightsholders could elect to withdraw from the program, Iraheta wrote, “To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out.”

Music auto-tagging has become a pain since AI. Even if I switch it off, my albums are constantly updated with the most ludicrous imagery. This supposedly represents Bach's St Matthew Passion. AI is like irreparable cognitive impairment resulting from severe brain trauma. 'hEre'S PASsionATe mAtthEw'

AI slop of modern couples dancing (tango?) in front of a screen with a youtube video of a dolphin titled Bachata Style. Wtf? Supposedly, this represents St Matthew Passion by Bach. Seriously, AI is like irreparable cognitive impairment resulting from a severe brain trauma.

CMS users who don't like the turn towards #LLM (or #AI ) – such as the one made by the #wordpress core development – are invited to try Hubzilla as a #CMS software, which offers (beyond CMS functionalities) privacy & access control based connectivity (in the #Fediverse and beyond) between the CMS sites.

Here's what Make WordPress Core says:

AI is an industry shift, quickly becoming a cornerstone of the next generation of technology. For WordPress to grow into the next phase it’s critical that AI become a fundamental part of WordPress itself, and for this to succeed everyone has a role to fulfill.



#Hubzilla #noAI

Quote from an excellent book:

"...[F]or corporations and venture capitalists, the appeal of AI is not that it is sentient or technologically revolutionary, but that it promises to make the jobs of large swaths of labor redundant and unnecessary. "

~~The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by @emilymbender & @alexhanna

Oh holy moly

Google translate has moved from translating words to predictive text translation

It now gives me redacted texts, in which all the interesting bits have been strained out

Also, numbers are translated as random numbers. A two might be a twelve. They’re both numbers, right?

Yesterday’s version sped me up. Today I’ll have to revert to the slower but at least factually accurate read-it-myself-in-the-original

Sigh.

I've become cynical enough to believe that these tech companies are intentionally baiting major AI lawsuits in hopes of getting one in front of the 6-3 conservative majority SCOTUS to establish legal precedent in their own favor for at least a generation

https://writerbeware.blog/2025/12/12/kindles-new-gen-ai-powered-ask-this-book-feature-raises-rights-concerns/

If I were on , I’d cancel my subscription/account immediately.

King Gizzard pulled their music from the platform so Spotify has replaced it with knockoffs of their music. As if paying almost nothing for streaming wasn’t evil enough, they’re now using LLMs trained on stolen content to pay artists nothing at all.

https://futurism.com/future-society/king-gizzard-spotify-ai-knockoff

"I’ve wondered what might happen if I narrow my lens: apply constraints to my days, focus on the choices that actually shape my world."

In today's Year in Reading essay, @cherilucas acknowledges her limits: https://longreads.com/2025/12/12/restraint-as-wisdom/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

is a new repository accepting works generated entirely by .
https://aixiv.science/

It also accepts works by humans and works co-authored by humans and in any ratio. It subjects new submissions to preliminary review done entirely by AI.

Celina Zhao has a good article about it in Science.
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-preprint-server-welcomes-papers-written-and-reviewed-ai

"Says Guowei Huang, one of aiXiv’s creators, 'We should only care about quality—not who produced it.' … [Other preprint] servers, like most conferences and journals, still bar naming AI systems as authors —a stance that inadvertently pushes researchers to use AI without saying so. Huang calls that lack of transparency 'totally unacceptable.'”