Month: May 2023
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MS Exec Ignores AI Harm to Avoid Regulation, Or Why the Cassandras Are Right
A Microsoft exec thinks that AI should not be regulated until it actually harms people: “There has to be at least a little bit of harm, so that we see what is the real problem,” Schwarz explained. “Is there a real problem? Did anybody suffer at least a thousand dollars’ worth of damage because of…
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Is Google AI About to Destroy the Web?
A bit hyperbolic? Maybe. But their vision for search has that potential: To demonstrate, Liz Reid, Google’s VP of Search, flips open her laptop and starts typing into the Google search box. “Why is sourdough bread still so popular?” she writes and hits enter. Google’s normal search results load almost immediately. Above them, a rectangular…
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There’s A Lot of Human in Your Artificial Intelligence
NBC has a nice look at the people who make artificial intelligence possible. No, not the programmers or engineers or data scientists. The people who classify the data: Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who have been doing the behind-the-scenes labor of teaching AI systems how to analyze data so they…
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Are Mass Shootings As Much About Ideology as Mental Health?
The mass shooter in Allen TX (and how infuriating is it that we live in a country that I have to specify which mass shooter I am referring to?) had an account on a Russian social media site where he posted rants about white supremacy, antisemitism, misogyny and his own mental health issues. A lot…
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Elizabeth Holmes, Whiny Right-Wing Academics, the NY Times, and Our Broken Elite Culture
The NY Times, over the weekend, published an article that is essentially a re-branding exercise by Elizabeth Holmes. It also published an op-ed by some right-wing agitators whining that their frankly juvenile paper (seriously, at no point in my academic career, down to about fifth grade, would I have not been ashamed to hand in…
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The Marshmallow Test is BS: A Review of Escape From Model Land
The marshmallow test is some bullshit. First, it is classicist and therefor racist and thus inaccurate. But no one should have taken it seriously to begin with. Any child with half a minute of lived experience knows that adults lie. The chances that they are going to get the second marshmallow are pretty much nil…
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Hopelessness, Art, and Society
I am not a hopeful person by nature. I do not, as a rule, expect good things to happen to me. I do not expect American democracy to survive the Boomer/GenX turn towards fascism (even though I am a GenX-er). I mean, I wrote an entire post about how I had little chance to get…
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Sometimes, AI is Just Hype
You may have seen a version of this article floating around. It claims that ChatGPT does better than regular doctors in accuracy and compassion. Wouldn’t that be amazing if true? Except, well, the comparison they used seems somewhat flawed: Researchers compared written responses from physicians and ChatGPT to real-world health questions and found that a…
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Capitalism vs. Useful AI
The Washington Post has a fascinating story about how improved algorithms allow people with conditions that have robbed them of their speech to sound much more like themselves than the old methods. Previously, a person would record thousands and thousands of worlds over a session that lasted up to thirty hours. The system would then…