Category: AI Ethics
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RTBs, Stalking, and the Value of Early Regulation
A new paper shows how RTBs (Real Time Bidding) providers enable anyone to track anyone and anyone to get sensitive information about people’s medical history, opinions, and locations. The emphasis of the paper is on the national security implications, but it also demonstrates that waiting on regulation to advance innovation is a fools game. Today,…
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It’s Monday. Let’s Save Ourselves from the Business of Tech
A series of proposals that will make Marc Andreesen furious and ensure I am never promoted by Substack. But the technology industry is massively broken, socializing the costs of its work while privatizing the benefits in fewer and fewer hands. Technology is only beneficial to the extent that it improves the lives of the people…
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Facial Recognition and Police: The Triumph of Data over Expertise
Police, collectively, are bad at their jobs. This is not a statement of opinions, but a fact. Their budgets have balloon since the George Floyd protests of 2020 (there is no record of any city anywhere in the country lowering its police budget). They have continued to kill Americans at a record rate. Their clearance…
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Artificial General Intelligence and the Disconnect from Reality
For those of you who are not caught up in the minutia of tech company internal dramas (and what lucky people you are), OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT among other programs, had quite the kerfuffle recently. The board fired its CEO, Sam Altman, with an ominously worded letter stating that he had not been honest…
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ChatGPT Firing and Insurance Rejections Show Problem with Imitative AI Discourse
Sam Altman, the weirdo who wants to scan the retinas of everyone on Earth and put them on the blockchain (I swear, none of that was satire) and was also the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, got canned last week. The reason for his canning and the huge coverage of it shows that…
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AI Training Data Should Not Be Fair Use
Fair use is famously whatever a court says fair use is after you have spent all your money on lawyers, so I fully expect that the Copyright Office will end up allowing the AI companies to, at a minimum, get away with taking material from writers and authors for their training data without compensation that…
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Health Care AI Bias Shows AI Privileges Data over Expertise
A new study in Nature shows that LLM (Large Language Models, what most of think of when we think of AI — ChatGPT is the canonical example) in medical areas perpetuate racist myths about patients and treatments. This is another example of how imitative AI is going to lesson our ability to access expertise. In…
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It Is Not Your Duty to Lay Down and Die: A Review of Blood in the Machine
Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant is an excellent book that everyone should read. Readers of my reviews know that I tend to be picky in my evaluations, highlighting the good and the bad. And this book is not perfect (I will get to its minor flaws), but it is as close to required…
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In perhaps the least surprising news ever, Cruise, the automated vehicle arm of General Motors (though GM apparently grants it great deal of autonomy) was caught lying to regulators about a serious accident. A Cruise vehicle dragged a pedestrian it could not avoid running over for about twenty feet. Cruise didn’t show the entire vide…
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The Future of AI Assistants is Lies for Free, Money for Trurth
The Washington Post highlights that Alexa is telling lies about the 2020 election. If you ask it about election fraud, it will lie to you and tell you that the election was stolen and that there was unprecedented fraud. It does this because it uses for sources conservative and alt-right news sources such as random…