Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
Public

Reading through Anthropic's official repo for giving agents various "super skills"[1]... There's an "algorithmic art" skill and the instructions are explicitly encouraging pure deception as one of the key "critical guidelines":

"The philosophy MUST stress multiple times that the final algorithm should appear as though it took countless hours to develop, was refined with care, and comes from someone at the absolute top of their field. This framing is essential - repeat phrases like "meticulously crafted algorithm," "the product of deep computational expertise," "painstaking optimization," "master-level implementation.""

github.com/anthropics/skills/b

For someone who's been working in this field for almost 30 years, this "skills.md" file is just the worst... and so far off the mark! 馃ぎ

Touch some effing grass, Anthropic (and all boosters)! How can so many people think this approach is _the_ future? The map is not the terrain...

[1] Alone the premise of this repo is pure comedy gold and pure sadness in equal measures!

Public repository for Agent Skills. Contribute to anthropics/skills development by creating an account on GitHub.

skills/skills/algorithmic-art/SKILL.md at main 路 anthropics/skills

Public repository for Agent Skills. Contribute to anthropics/skills development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com 路 GitHub

Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng
Public

Some growing key questions here really are:

How to defend or adapt disciplines (not just artistic/cultural ones) against this kind of semantic hollowing out of what it means to have skills, experience and expertise in a(ny) field...

What approaches, qualities and "values" (physical, ethical, social/humanist, environmental, resource use) should we (or still can we) be focusing on, which are much harder and more costly for AI companies to mine/extract & subvert?

How to defend actual skills against the emulation of skills, or rather just the appearance of skills? How could a society even function if it only encourages and celebrates the latter?

What does society actually value in art/creativity/culture? If art is free to produce (of course that'll always only ever be an illusion!), funding, possession, collection & speculation of new work would also become meaningless (and only benefit pre-AI era works/collectors). In the larger picture, what do people actually value in culture, politics and striving for more peaceful existence which enables more of the former (pluralistic art/culture) in the first place?

What will be the combined impact of AI & robotics on fields which are currently still thinking themselves more safe (from exploitation) because there's a strong physical element/process to them?

Will art/culture/craft become more performance, experiential/ephemeral again only? Like music before recordings or Buddhist sand paintings with an explicit act of destruction at the end as key philosophical concept? Both of which also have more of a social element to them...

The Samsara Mandala
youtube.com/watch?v=hL8gEc29KTI

The Samsara Mandala

鈥淲hatever has the nature of arising has the nature of ceasing.鈥滿andala creation and destructionedited from the Ron Fricke movie "Samsara" (www.barakasamsara....

www.youtube.com 路 YouTube

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