Category: AI Ethics
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The Moral Culpability of Tesla
The Washington Post has an excellent article about a crash involving Tesla’s autopilot. It is astonishing and depressing to me how much we have allowed Tesla to escape accountability for their actions. It is clear from reading the article that Tesla deliberately attempts to make people believe that their autopilot is safer than the evidence…
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AI Exacerbates Garbage In, Garbage Out
A recent study has demonstrated that software meant to predict crimes is, well, terrible at predicting crimes. No one involved in the program apparently ever watched Minority Report. Jokes aside, this was entirely predictable. Any form of what we rather lazily call artificial intelligence exacerbates the general rule of programming: garbage in results in garbage…
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Did WGA Contract Derail Imitative AI Business Model?
What follows is going to be more speculative than usual. I did reach out a few days ago to both the WGA East and the WGA West with this question, but neither have gotten back to me (Unsurprisingly. I am a nobody, and they have real reporters to deal with in what I am certain…
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The Problem with AI Art Isn’t the AI, It’s What the Art Does to Society
I do not hate the idea of AI. I realize that may be a bit hard to believe given that general content of these missives, but it is true. I do believe that what we somewhat lazily call artificial intelligence can be beneficial to society, if we use it correctly. There are areas of science…
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Death and Crypto Lies: A Review of Number Go Up
I keep finding myself writing the wrong kind of book review. Or at least, I keep finding myself writing the kind of book review that I do not think is entirely fair to the author. Because I should be recommending Number Go Up by Zeke Faux (who, by the way, has the single best name…
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Are Self Driving Cars Murder Bots? Or The Problem With Just Asking Questions
When I was a teenager, I saw a comedian who I considered ancient, which likely meant he was sixty or so (teenage me was a little shit). His schtick was that his age made him humorously incompetent. He best bit, in my little shit opinion, was “I don’t understand the concern about elderly drivers. I’ve…
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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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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…