“#OpenAI has presumably pivoted to new features precisely because they don’t know how to produce the kind of capability advance that the “exponential improvement” would have predicted”
What can we discover by reading the terms and conditions of #GenAI tools? What do users consent to? What are the regulatory responses in 🇪🇺 🇨🇳 🇺🇸?
Join our online event on May 23 at 16:30 UTC+2 to discover the #GenerativeAI Watch project! https://www.sciencespo.fr/ecole-droit/en/events/generative-ai-watch/
We will present a dataset of terms and conditions of major generative #AI services, some of the discoveries that we made when tracking their changes, and how the changing regulatory landscape could impact those terms. #AIAct#TermsSpotting
#Apple#iPad#AI#GenerativeAI#Marketing: "Smartphones and tablets were invented to enhance our lived experience, to make it easier to leave the house and go to the beach and meet up with friends — just a good camera-computer combo that fits in your pocket.
Theoretically, our phones and tablets will become even more useful with AI, serving as virtual assistants that can do all the boring stuff we don’t want to, like summarizing all your new emails and filtering out junk. There’s a world in the not too distant future, according to AI proponents, where you can simply tell Siri or Google “order my usual breakfast from the coffee shop near the office, I’ll be there in 10 minutes to pick it up,” and the bot will do just that.
We’re not there yet, however. And so far, the consumer applications for AI are simultaneously underwhelming and dystopian.
Distorted images may be harmless social media fodder, until they become propaganda spread by bad actors."
#AI#GenerativeAI#HumanRights: "You point out that AI isn’t just some benign cloud floating above our heads. It’s based on material extraction and the exploitation of workers, mainly in the global south, and it’s incredibly polluting to run. But so much of this is hidden from view. How do we go about tackling these impacts?
It is a huge question. One way of dealing with it is by looking at the question of AI adoption from an ESG [environmental, social and governance] perspective. All of the equipment that we use, the phones that we’re talking on now, are built from minerals often taken from conflict regions, including with child labour. Being aware of that hopefully can help shift societal demands and consumer habits. You can use generative AI to make a hilarious meme, but how much water and energy are you expending? Couldn’t you just pick up a pencil, and might that actually be more satisfying?
Do you sometimes wish that AI could be put back on the shelf?
It’s not an all-or-nothing equation between banning AI or embracing it into every aspect of your life. It’s a question of choosing what we want to use AI for. Being critical and asking questions doesn’t mean that you’re against AI: it just means you’re against AI hype."
#AI#GenerativeAI#AIRegulation#TechPolicy: "The overwhelming message that emerges from these books, ironic as it may seem, is a newfound appreciation of the collective powers of human creativity. We rightly marvel at the wonders of AI, but still more astonishing are the capabilities of the human brain, which weighs 1.4kg and consumes just 25 watts of power. For good reason, it has been called the most complex organism in the known universe.
As the authors admit, humans are also deeply flawed and capable of great stupidity and perverse cruelty. For that reason, the technologically evangelical wing of Silicon Valley actively welcomes the ascent of AI, believing that machine intelligence will soon supersede the human kind and lead to a more rational and harmonious universe. But fallibility may, paradoxically, be inextricably intertwined with intelligence. As the computer pioneer Alan Turing noted, “If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.” How intelligent do we want our machines to be?"
#AI#GenerativeAI#Police#Surveillance: "Moreover, if the AI-generated report is incorrect, can we trust police will contradict that version of events if it's in their interest to maintain inaccuracies? On the flip side, might AI report writing go the way of AI-enhanced body cameras? In other words, if the report consistently produces a narrative from audio that police do not like, will they edit it, scrap it, or discontinue using the software altogether?
And what of external reviewers’ ability to access these reports? Given police departments’ overly intense secrecy, combined with a frequent failure to comply with public records laws, how can the public, or any external agency, be able to independently verify or audit these AI-assisted reports? And how will external reviewers know which portions of the report are generated by AI vs. a human?
Police reports, skewed and biased as they often are, codify the police department’s memory. They reveal not necessarily what happened during a specific incident, but what police imagined to have happened, in good faith or not. Policing, with its legal power to kill, detain, or ultimately deny people’s freedom, is too powerful an institution to outsource its memory-making to technologies in a way that makes officers immune to critique, transparency, or accountability." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/what-can-go-wrong-when-police-use-ai-write-reports
#AI#GenerativeAI#Chatbots#HR#JobMarket: "Job seekers, frustrated with corporate hiring software, are using artificial intelligence to craft cover letters and résumés in seconds, and deploying new automated bots to robo-apply for hundreds of jobs in just a few clicks. In response, companies are deploying more bots of their own to sort through the oceans of applications.
The result: a bot versus bot war that’s leaving both applicants and employers irritated and has made the chances of landing an interview, much less a job, even slimmer than before.
“You’re fighting AI with AI,” said Brad Rager, chief executive of Crux, a recruiting firm that matches cybersecurity specialists with employers.
The AI arms race is bad for job candidates, he said, who feel defeated when online applications come to nothing, and for employers, who are frustrated when imprecise AI tools highlight weak candidates. “There’s so much promise, but there’s a lot of crap and garbage,” Rager said of the tools used by employers."
#AI#GenerativeAI#Automation#Unemployment#ViceMedia#Journalism#Media#Apple#iPad: "On the one hand it is really wild to me that Apple would miscalculate on something so drastically — Apple prides itself on its marketing, which is as crucial to the company as any of its technologies — but on the other, I’m thankful. The ad has clarified some things: amid (yet another) week in which human writers and artists were watching their work degraded into content fodder, Apple came along and handed us a perfect visual metaphor for one of our most potent fears about big tech right now — namely, that it is crushing the arts and transmuting them into dull consumer products. And, I might add, they are so content with what they are doing, that they are more than happy to broadcast that intent explicitly via advertising — signed off on by the highest echelons of Apple, and Tim Cook himself tweeting it out — with an exclamation point in the title. “Crush!” indeed." https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/for-artists-writers-humans-big-techs
#Commons#AI#GenerativeAI#Chatbots#Copyleft#Google#Search: "Ostrom described how commons can be wisely managed, over very long timescales, by communities that self-governed. Part of her work concerns how users of a commons must have the ability to exclude bad actors from their shared resources.
When that breaks down, commons can fail – because there's always someone who thinks it's fine to shit in the well rather than walk 100 yards to the outhouse.
Enshittification is the process by which control over the internet moved from self-governance by members of the commons to acts of wanton destruction committed by despicable, greedy assholes who shit in the well over and over again.
It's not just the spammers who take advantage of Google's lazy incompetence, either. Take "copyleft trolls," who post images using outdated Creative Commons licenses that allow them to terminate the CC license if a user makes minor errors in attributing the images they use:" https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/09/shitting-in-the-well/#advon
In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
#AI#GenerativeAI#StackOverflow#AITraining: "Stack Overflow, a legendary internet forum for programmers and developers, is coming under heavy fire from its users after it announced it was partnering with OpenAI to scrub the site's forum posts to train ChatGPT. Many users are removing or editing their questions and answers to prevent them from being used to train AI — decisions which have been punished with bans from the site's moderators.
Stack Overflow user Ben posted on Mastodon about his experience editing his most successful answers to try to avoid having his work stolen by OpenAI.
@ben on Mastodon posts, "Stack Overflow announced that they are partnering with OpenAI, so I tried to delete my highest-rated answers. Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community. So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message. Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days."
Ben continues in his thread, "[The moderator crackdown is] just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you."
Hats off to the author, you don't see that kind of, uh, skillful rhetoric chicanery every day. Like "generative AI doesn't compete with artists because artists are not in the data market". 😬
how are folks feeling about the use of #generativeAI? when is it ok to use? when is it not? what are some examples you've seen of the wrong call being made? would love to get a ton of folks' opinions so please #boost for reach! ✨💗✨
#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#AIHype#Science: "I don't do predictions, but I do spend a good bit of time these days pondering how things might play out when the current AI hype bubble finally pops, or slowly deflates, or drifts away, or whatever it does. It seems clear by now that the engine keeping this hot air balloon (if I can abruptly switch to a nearby metaphor) inflated and afloat is the frothy interest of venture capitalists and the finance side of Big Tech. But that air has been blowing so hot and so long now that its miasma has long since infected just about every other sector. And I worry that when the VCs start focusing somewhere else, we'll still be stuck digging out from entrenched surveillance as well as business processes that have been contorted to jump on the ChatGPT bandwagon."