#reversecentaur — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #reversecentaur, aggregated by home.social.
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Italo Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' (1979) is rather prophetic in how computer produced content leads to a mass production of random noise, which then is marketed or not based on response. #Calvino #LLM #reversecentaur #postmodernism
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Italo Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' (1979) is rather prophetic in how computer produced content leads to a mass production of random noise, which then is marketed or not based on response. #Calvino #LLM #reversecentaur #postmodernism
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Italo Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' (1979) is rather prophetic in how computer produced content leads to a mass production of random noise, which then is marketed or not based on response. #Calvino #LLM #reversecentaur #postmodernism
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Italo Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' (1979) is rather prophetic in how computer produced content leads to a mass production of random noise, which then is marketed or not based on response. #Calvino #LLM #reversecentaur #postmodernism
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Italo Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' (1979) is rather prophetic in how computer produced content leads to a mass production of random noise, which then is marketed or not based on response. #Calvino #LLM #reversecentaur #postmodernism
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“I have to admit I felt a little weird as I prepared to toss this flaming incendiary device through [Altman’s] front window, but the recipe explicitly stated that this was an essential step to get that creamy, velvety risotto texture. I guess I didn’t know any better. I mean, I’ve never made risotto before.” The suspect went on to tell reporters that he still had “a whole fridge full” of Molotov cocktails at home, having attempted to prep enough risotto to last the week.”
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I hadn't heard about this kind of #ReverseCentaur before:
"The only winner that emerges are the platforms in the global north [that] capture all the enduring value."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/21/ai-trainers-identity-cost
People should use machines, not the other way around. But the #AI industry is fundamentally anti-human.
It's high time more people realize this.
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Niemand würde mehr einen Gedanken an Reinigung verschwenden. Genausowenig würden Menschen noch an Orten arbeiten an denen lungenschädigende Stäube anfallen, sie würden diese aber weiterhin steuern.
Anstelle dessen bekommen wir Systeme die den Menschen vorgeschaltet werden um A) die Drecksarbeit aufrechtzuerhalten bei B) niedrigerem Lohn um C) den Menschen zum Befehlsempfänger zu machen (Reverse Centaur).
Wer sich als AG nicht als Pro-Mensch bekennt ist das Problem. #llm #ki #reverseCentaur -
Someone at work turned on Copilot code reviews on GitHub. Now one has to wait 5 minutes for an AI code review before doing anything else. Is this a #ReverseCentaur situation?
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for instance, regarding the gradually forming AI usage practices/habits, and seeing this piece in the news, I think we could only benefit from touching base with unions of various kinds. See if we have something to offer that they are interested in (teaching, models, ways of criticizing AI), what direction they would like us to go into, what they would like us to investigate and reasearch, and what to argue for or substantiate with scholarly findings and experiences.
https://infosec.exchange/@Cyberoutsider/116141377375695709.
And in the end, it is also us - at least with our RSE hats on, but maybe it even holds for the organisation of academic research as a whole - and our working conditions, tasks and pressures, who are talked about and disposed of in these developments who may be urged to become "reverse centaurs"...
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I'd like to believe all the hype from the #AiAntagonists but to me they all sound like soldiers in a besieged city, cheering the news of the relief columns that never comes.
The article is supremely optimistic, which is fair enough, optimism is needed with one of the key avatars of the #AntiAi movement being sprung using AI himself. The #reversecentaur #asbestosinthewalls guy himself @pluralistic
#AI Blew past the #turingtest so fast, folks were tripping over themselves to bury decades of benchmarking. The previous AI attempts never breached Turing.
Meanwhile, #HLE is climbing up faster than expected, which is the exact opposite of what folks who claim AI is not advancing is.
It seems that the models are capable of Zero-shot learning, reaching accurate results for knowledge not in the training data.
The answer as always is to become politically active and #regulateAI
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I'd like to believe all the hype from the #AiAntagonists but to me they all sound like soldiers in a besieged city, cheering the news of the relief columns that never comes.
The article is supremely optimistic, which is fair enough, optimism is needed with one of the key avatars of the #AntiAi movement being sprung using AI himself. The #reversecentaur #asbestosinthewalls guy himself @pluralistic
#AI Blew past the #turingtest so fast, folks were tripping over themselves to bury decades of benchmarking. The previous AI attempts never breached Turing.
Meanwhile, #HLE is climbing up faster than expected, which is the exact opposite of what folks who claim AI is not advancing is.
It seems that the models are capable of Zero-shot learning, reaching accurate results for knowledge not in the training data.
The answer as always is to become politically active and #regulateAI
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I'd like to believe all the hype from the #AiAntagonists but to me they all sound like soldiers in a besieged city, cheering the news of the relief columns that never comes.
The article is supremely optimistic, which is fair enough, optimism is needed with one of the key avatars of the #AntiAi movement being sprung using AI himself. The #reversecentaur #asbestosinthewalls guy himself @pluralistic
#AI Blew past the #turingtest so fast, folks were tripping over themselves to bury decades of benchmarking. The previous AI attempts never breached Turing.
Meanwhile, #HLE is climbing up faster than expected, which is the exact opposite of what folks who claim AI is not advancing is.
It seems that the models are capable of Zero-shot learning, reaching accurate results for knowledge not in the training data.
The answer as always is to become politically active and #regulateAI
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Ahaha Mr. "AI is asbestos in the walls" has become "#reversecentaur" himself...
What a hypocrite!
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@jamie So, AI agents will need to hire humans to clean-room reimplement vibecoded projects?
What a time to be alive! #ReverseCentaur -
@JoeStewart Oh man, this a strikes me as the crux of what we deal with in the tech industry, but on a stage with far more immediate and dire consequences.
"Go fast, but not so fast that the quality of your work drops." strikes me as the ultimate in bossware-driven crap...a #ReverseCentaur from automation theory that @doctorow cites so often in his work, but with an interesting twist on embedded bias. The fact that these LLMs have a black-box aspect to them puts the onus on the user of the automation to make almost instant decisions on whether the output is trustworthy or not. That's the problem with "non-deterministic automations" like LLMs: they're non-deterministic.
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I missed this transcript of a 🔥🔥🔥 talk by @pluralistic when it came out in early December, it’s well worth a read
The #ReverseCentaur’s Guide to Criticizing #AI
”Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: "How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm." I titled the book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026.”
”Start with what a reverse centaur is. In #AutomationTheory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.
And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.”
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.”To pop the [AI] bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
( h/t @Sminney )
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I missed this transcript of a 🔥🔥🔥 talk by @pluralistic when it came out in early December, it’s well worth a read
The #ReverseCentaur’s Guide to Criticizing #AI
”Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: "How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm." I titled the book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026.”
”Start with what a reverse centaur is. In #AutomationTheory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.
And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.”
.
.
.”To pop the [AI] bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
( h/t @Sminney )
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I missed this transcript of a 🔥🔥🔥 talk by @pluralistic when it came out in early December, it’s well worth a read
The #ReverseCentaur’s Guide to Criticizing #AI
”Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: "How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm." I titled the book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026.”
”Start with what a reverse centaur is. In #AutomationTheory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.
And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.”
.
.
.”To pop the [AI] bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
( h/t @Sminney )
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I missed this transcript of a 🔥🔥🔥 talk by @pluralistic when it came out in early December, it’s well worth a read
The #ReverseCentaur’s Guide to Criticizing #AI
”Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: "How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm." I titled the book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026.”
”Start with what a reverse centaur is. In #AutomationTheory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.
And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.”
.
.
.”To pop the [AI] bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
( h/t @Sminney )
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I missed this transcript of a 🔥🔥🔥 talk by @pluralistic when it came out in early December, it’s well worth a read
The #ReverseCentaur’s Guide to Criticizing #AI
”Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: "How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm." I titled the book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026.”
”Start with what a reverse centaur is. In #AutomationTheory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. You're a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.
And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.”
.
.
.”To pop the [AI] bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies need a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
( h/t @Sminney )
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This is an essential read from @pluralistic – well worth your time to understand the points he’s making fully as he’s spot on and the excellent analogies will make it easier for you to discuss the topic with others.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur
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Oh, I found out that when you copy text from their graded tests, #Coursera will add a paragraph telling your chat bot not to help you cheat because that wo be unfair.
I guess, when you just blindly copy and paste, it’s OK if the chat bot Vorwand help you. On the other hand, they use chat bots to grade your answers to their assignments. So, FU!
That makes me think, do they offer trainings on being a #reverseCentaur?
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Why thank you, @winterknell. That is the cover for an e-book, I put together some time back for @standardebooks. The cover is from a painting by the same name. It came to mind unbidden while I was reading about the #ReverseCentaur in this excellent article by @pluralistic. I also suggest the book as being well worth reading. Many people speak about #AI as if it were witchcraft. The book has witches. It's all connected, under the hood.
(My little jibe at the President was purely in jest, BTW.) -
Razor-sharp analysis from Cory @doctorow.
Writes about The #ReverseCentaur, which Apuleius called The Golden Ass.
Yes, yes ... I know that's what some folks call the President. But, that's a different issue.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur
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@davep What a coincidence, @pluralistic just wrote about this today.
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@diabhoil @riffreporter So ist es. Eine Firma hat 5 Kreative (coder, Texter, Grafiker,…) und entlässt 4. Der/die billigste hat dann mehr Arbeitslast und darf dann die KI auf Fehler prüfen und den Kopf hinhalten. #ReverseCentaur
So war‘s zumindest ja in dieser Bestsellerliste letztes Jahr (New York Times?) die filtive Autoren und Bücher enthielt.
Mit nem Grundeinkommen und krasser Milliardär/Unternehmenssteuer könnte das evtl was werden mit den Verheißungen der KI.
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Did an image search for "Reverse Centaur" and it is nightmare fuel in the best possible way. So many excellent takes on the concept.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=reverse+centaur&ia=images&iax=images
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here in this piece @Cory Doctorow is describing the relation between human workers and ai. in particular what he calls "reverse centaurs" or other authors have named "accountability sinks".
there are lots of great insights in this article but one stood out for me: working with ai is not easy. people often think that having ai create texts for them is an innocuous thing. like OCR just more modern. but it isn't. errors made by ai can be very hard to spot. and doctorow here describes, why:And because AI is just a word guessing program, because all it does is calculate the most probable word to go next, the errors it makes are especially subtle and hard to spot, because these bugs are literally statistically indistinguishable from working code (except that they're bugs).
[...]
And you, the human in the loop – the reverse centaur – you have to spot this subtle, hard to find error, this bug that is literally statistically indistinguishable from correct code.
as john oliver recently said:welcome to the demise of our mutually shared reality! isn't it fun?!
#computer #CoryDoctorow #JohnOliver #ReverseCentaur #AccountabilitySink #AI #KI
#^Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory DoctorowPluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was...
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Via @pluralistic
'...it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur" called an "accountability sink."
And
'Automation blindness is the Achilles' heel of "humans in the loop."'
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
Long but worth the read.
#ReverseCentaur #AccountabilitySink #AI
1/3
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#TIL about the term #ReverseCentaur in @pluralistic piece: "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing #AI"
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/
Basically a very dark pattern where the human is not using the AI tool as a helper, but is kept in the loop to take the blame for the failures.
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@axbom this is why @pluralistic is writhing articles about "Reverse Centaurs". It wasn't until I saw the image in this article, https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative , that the meme really stuck in my head though 🤣
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So #OpenAI has created an #AI #ReverseCentaur "academy" and employment agency or something that's nice I guess I dunno
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*So, then, you're that "human in the loop" placed there by your overlords as the "moral crumple zone" and the "accountability sink" #AI #oligarchy #reversecentaur
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:iyeqlhhxvii35dahxodhnqbg/post/3lkv4vyzzr22q -
@pluralistic this:
’The role of this "human in the loop" isn't to prevent errors. That human's is there to be blamed for errors’