Category: AI Ethics

  • 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…

  • Biden Admin AI Regs Show US Disfunction

    The Biden Administration recently announced a set of “commitments” by some of the top players in so-called generative AI to “protect” people from the potential damages that AI can do to society. The are pretty much going to be useless because the US is mostly a broken a polity. The regulations themselves are entirely voluntary.…

  • Telephone Switch Automation Not the Happy Story Vox Wants It to Be.

    Dylan Matthews has an … interesting take on a new paper that demonstrates how the automation of telephone switches affected telephone switch operators and, most intriguingly, the cohort of people who would have been expected to be operators in the next working generation. Matthews seems to think that the paper is a good story about…

  • On the Quasi-Problems with Data, AI, Publishing and The Way Forward

    This is likely to ramble a bit, so grab some snacks. I have been mulling over this excellent episode of the Publishing Rodeo for a couple of days now, trying to put my finger on why it rattled around my head so. https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/1lMUiKqG7PSlJjx7LoOHkU If you do not listen to the Publishing Rodeo and you have…

  • V.C. Bros Re-Discover A.I. Cannot Write

    The V.C. Bros that now own the Gizmodo group fired off their first A.I. written article and it did not go well: Whitbrook — a deputy editor at Gizmodo who writes and edits articles about science fiction — quickly read the story, which he said he had not asked for or seen before it was…

  • AI Hype is the Dot.com Bubble, not the Crypto Bubble

    This is pretty interesting, if a bit overhyped in the article: Sorting is so basic that algorithms are built into most standard libraries for programming languages. And, in the case of the C++ library used with the LLVM compiler, the code hasn’t been touched in over a decade. But Google’s DeepMind AI group has now…

  • Center for AI Safety Statement is BS

    I hate this kind of thing: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. Statement on AI Risk | CAIS (safe.ai) That statement is bullshit. Now, I am sure that many of the people signing the statement are sincere in their…

  • OpenAI Acts As If They Are Thieves

    The European Union is working on regulations that would regulate certain AI systems. These regulations would require transparency regarding the system’s design and information about any copyrighted data used in training their systems. The leadership of OpenAI’s immediate response was to claim that they would have to stop operating in Europe. They backed away from…

  • Generative AI Won’t Cure Your Cold

    One of the claims for generative AI tools like ChatGPT is that they could provide things like legal, medical or therapeutic services for those people who either cannot afford those service or who do not have access to them because of language, proximity, or other barriers. On its face, this sounds like a reasonable potential…

  • Technology is Not Going to Save Us

    I probably owe Andy Boenau a bit of an apology. I got a bit pedantic and grumpy with him in the comments of this post, where he takes to task people who are skeptical of technology and urban planning. Andy describes LLMs basically correctly but then goes on to ascribe to them uses that they…