“Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought - Bitestring’s Blog”

“Chatbots, deepfakes, and voice clones: AI deception for sale”

From the US FTC. Also looks like pre-existing regulations might apply quite well to generative AI

“You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype”

On criti-hype and how critics often paradoxically echo the hyperbolic promises of the tech industry

“Great, Dating Apps Are Getting More Hellish Thanks to AI Chatbots”

Tech is digging up its “all regulations lead to monopolies” narrative. Meanwhile something as simple as requiring that all AI-driven communications be disclosed would prevent a wide range of abuses.

A worrying aspect of the wholesale adoption of LLMs in all of our productivity and coding tools is that it seems feasible to poison their training data, both broadly and targeted, at a fairly low cost

“Poisoning Web-Scale Training Datasets is Practical”

“On Generative AI, phantom citations, and social calluses”

The Generative AI age is going to be exhausting and unpleasant, isn’t it?

“ChatGPT in Colombian Courts”

The short answer is that they used ChatGPT as if it was an oracle: a trustworthy source of knowledge that did not require any sort of verification.

This is a direct consequence of how tech portrays these tools

“The Nightmare of AI-Powered Gmail Has Arrived”

Are you excited for your co-workers to become way more verbose, turning every tapped-out “Sounds good” into a three-paragraph letter?

And:

Are you looking forward to wondering if that lovely condolence letter from a long-lost friend was entirely generated by software or if he just smashed the “More Heartfelt” button before sending it?

We’ve had over thirty years of experience in assessing the credibility of online source. Dismissing the fact that you can’t trust LLMs with “how is that different from a search engine” is just arrant nonsense. LLMs don’t have any of the markers we rely on for assessing sources.

we need to we regulate these devices not based on what they are called or what cases they operate on a majority of the time, but based on the worst mistakes they can make.

“No Doctor Required: Autonomy, Anomalies, and Magic Puddings – Lauren Oakden-Rayner”

By calling the device a normal detector, it makes us think that the model is only responsible for low risk findings.

“This Week in AI Doublespeak - by Gary Marcus”

AI “art” is like moving into a house, painting the living room, and declaring that you built the house.

I’m not against using generative AI tools but, AFAICT there are very few trustworthy actors in the field: OpenAI, Facebook, Google, Stability AI, and Midjourney all have a track record that’s dodgy to say the least

The way they’re rushing into AI doesn’t add to the trust either

“‘ChatGPT said I did not exist’: how artists and writers are fighting back against AI - Artificial intelligence (AI) - The Guardian”

“Google won’t honor medical leave during its layoffs, outraging employees”

She was let go by Google from her hospital bed shortly after giving birth. She worked at the company for nine years

Tech cos are run by scumbags

“Why open data is critical during review: An example - Steve Haroz’s blog”

But OpenAI something something “somebody might accidentally utter the name of God and usher in the end times”

“What do tools like ChatGPT mean for Math and CS Education?”

Nothing could be farther from how a calculator works.

“Epic’s overhaul of a flawed algorithm shows why AI oversight is a life-or-death issue”

The ratio of false alarms to true positives was about 30 to 1, according to CT Lin, the health system’s chief medical information officer.

“Against Predictive Optimization: On the Legitimacy of Decision-Making Algorithms that Optimize Predictive Accuracy”

“Tooled. — Ethan Marcotte”

But I’ll just note that labor economics has an old, old term for [gestures around] all this: de-skilling.

Read this.

“OpenAI’s GPT-4 Is Closed Source and Shrouded in Secrecy”

“Social sponges: Gendered brain development comes from society, not biology”

“Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence”

I don’t know if I’ve just been reading too many academic papers but this looks like fairly straightforward guidance

“The stupidity of AI”

The belief in this kind of AI as actually knowledgeable or meaningful is actively dangerous. It risks poisoning the well of collective thought, and of our ability to think at all.