Month: August 2023
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Women’s Pro Hockey and The Ghost of the ABL
Once upon a time, there was a woman’s professional basketball league. It played basketball during the fall and winter, when people expected a league to play, and it paid its players enough that they generally did not have to go play in Europe to make reasonable salaries for professional athletes. But it did not have…
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Freedom from Data Driven Life
The title is a wee bit hyperbolic, but there have been a couple of interesting regulatory developments that hint at better way forward for our digital lives. First, the Consumer Financial Protection Board has issued new regulations around data brokers. Second, and likely more important, the EU’s new Data Services Act has gone into effect.…
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Messaging and Trump, or the Value of Words
This is not entirely in the wheelhouse of this newsletter, but, well, it involves words so close enough. Noah Berlatsky has a typically interesting post on how messaging works. The takeaway is, unsurprisingly, that it does not work the way that political gurus want it to — there is no one trick that will turn…
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AI and the Avoidance of Accountability
One of the reasons the creators of imitative AI systems focus so much on theoretical dangers, such as a super intelligent AI deciding we should all be turned into paperclips, rather than immediate harms is that by doing so they can avoid hard questions about the actual purpose of these systems. Because it turns out…
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Not Everything is a Tech Problem
Rant incoming. So we have another proposed tech standard that will allegedly allow perfect privacy and security and safe social media and puppies and flowers for everyone — if we all just agree to use it and no one minds that moderation will be impossible: The group, Cult of the Dead Cow, has developed a…
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In Semi-defense of Tech
This is going to ramble, so grab a snack. I was listening to the excellent Print Run podcast the other day and they were discussing a couple of trends they felt were interrelated — the purchase of Simon Shuster by a hedge fund known for dismantling companies (they are the ones that destroyed Toys R…
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No Technological Promised Land: A Review of Progress and Promise
People who think that technology should never be regulated, that its owners should be allowed to disrupt as much as they like and do whatever damage they like to people and society in the meantime, love to argue that technological progress inevitably means that everyone will eventually benefit from the progress that technology brings. No…
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What Happens When There is No More Training Data? The Potential End of Brute Force AI.
A new paper suggests that we may run out of high-quality data upon which to train artificial intelligence systems within the next few years — possibly by 2026. In fact, there are allegations that Google has already trained their system on output generated from ChatGPT, though they deny those allegations. Artificial Intelligence systems depend upon…
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AI and Functional Stupidity
A Black woman was arrested in the Detroit area for committing a carjacking that she could not have committed. What makes this story more interesting than that usual tales of police racism and incompetence is that the arrest was driven by facial recognition. It is a good example of how artificial intelligence and other algorithms…
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Watch What They Do: A.I. Community Seems to Really Dislike Artists
An artist did not want his art used to train AI art models and one of the companies — Stable Diffusion — did the right partially. It removed the ability to ask for the system to produce work in his style. It was probably too late to remove his work from the training set, but…