Werd I/O

This is the kind of AI declaration I prefer.

“As we know from social media, the failure to regulate technological change can lead to harms that range from children’s safety to the erosion of democracy. With AI, the scale and intensity of potential harm is even greater—from racially based ‘risk scoring’ tools that needlessly keep people in prison to deepfake videos that further erode trust in democracy and future harms like economic upheaval and job loss. But if we act now, we can build accountability, promote opportunity, and deliver greater prosperity for all.”

These are all organizations that already do good work; it's good to see them apply pressure on AI companies in the public interest. #AI

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For me, this paragraph was the takeaway:

"We affirm that, whilst safety must be considered across the AI lifecycle, actors developing frontier AI capabilities, in particular those AI systems which are unusually powerful and potentially harmful, have a particularly strong responsibility for ensuring the safety of these AI systems, including through systems for safety testing, through evaluations, and by other appropriate measures. We encourage all relevant actors to provide context-appropriate transparency and accountability on their plans to measure, monitor and mitigate potentially harmful capabilities and the associated effects that may emerge, in particular to prevent misuse and issues of control, and the amplification of other risks."

In other words, the onus will be on AI developers to police themselves. We will see how that works out in practice. #AI

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Baldur Bjarnason talks frankly about the cost of writing critically about AI:

"It’s honestly been brutal and it’ll probably take me a few years to recover financially from having published a moderately successful book on “AI” because it doesn’t have any of the opportunity multipliers that other topics have."

I worry about the same thing. I've noticed that AI-critical pieces lead to unsubscribes on my newsletter, and that most lucrative job vacancies relate to AI in some way.

I'm not sure I regret my criticism, though. #AI

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Reuven Lerner was banned from advertising on Meta products for life because he offers Python and Pandas training - and the company's automated system thought he was dealing in live snakes and bears.

And then he lost the appeal because that, too, was automated.

This is almost Douglas Adams-esque in its boneheadedness, but it's also a look into an auto-bureaucratic future where there is no real recourse, even when the models themselves are at fault. #AI

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"Advances in AI are amplifying a crisis for human rights online. While AI technology offers exciting and beneficial uses for science, education, and society at large, its uptake has also increased the scale, speed, and efficiency of digital repression. Automated systems have enabled governments to conduct more precise and subtle forms of online censorship." #AI

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White supremacist rhetoric is endemic in AI research. An interesting (and complex) point is also made here about preprint journal sites and how they allow companies to whitewash embarrassing mistakes. #AI

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To be fair, you could draw a picture of this in Photoshop, too. But I suspect a few brands might have a few things to say about Microsoft hosting this tool. #AI

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I think I'm a clone now. #AI

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"Crime predictions generated for the police department in Plainfield, New Jersey, rarely lined up with reported crimes, an analysis by The Markup has found." In fact, much less than 1% of the time. #AI

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"Microsoft's data centers in West Des Moines, Iowa guzzled massive amounts of water last year to keep cool while training OpenAI's ChatGPT-4. [...] This happened in the midst of a more than three-year drought, further taxing a stressed water system that's been so dry this summer that nature lovers couldn't even paddle canoes in local rivers." #AI

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"The vast majority of computer vision research leads to technology that surveils human beings, a new preprint study that analyzed more than 20,000 computer vision papers and 11,000 patents spanning three decades has found.” #AI

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Once again, this looks completely like magic. Very high-fidelity images across a bunch of different styles. The implications are enormous. #AI

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The legislation passed with a heavy majority - this veto is a signal that Newsom favors the AI vendors over teamster concerns. Teamsters, on the other hand, claim the tech is unsafe and that jobs will be lost. #AI

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LLMs are a magic trick; interesting and useful for superficial tasks, but very much not up to, for example, replacing a trained medical professional. The idea that someone would think it's okay to let one give medical advice is horrifying. #AI

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These poets are being hired to eliminate the possibility of being paid for their own work. But I am kind of tickled by the idea that OpenAI is scraping fan-fiction forums. Not because it’s bad work, but imagine the consequences. #AI

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"A trade group for U.S. authors has sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court on behalf of prominent writers including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Jodi Picoult and "Game of Thrones" novelist George R.R. Martin, accusing the company of unlawfully training its popular artificial-intelligence based chatbot ChatGPT on their work.” #AI

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“The 392 news organizations listed below have instructed OpenAI’s GPTBot to not scan their sites, according to a continual survey of 1,119 online publishers conducted by the homepages.news archive. That amounts to 35.0% of the total.” #AI

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“In a way, the people our cars mow down are doing just as much as our highly paid programmers and engineers to create the utopian, safe streets of tomorrow. Each person who falls under our front bumper teaches us something valuable about how humans act in the real world.” #AI

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I certainly have some thoughts that I will share. Imagine if you could allow an AI agent to create copyrighted works at scale with no human involvement. It would allow for an incredible intellectual property land grab. #AI

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Customs and Border Protection is using sentiment analysis on inbound and outbound travelers who "may threaten public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel". That's dystopian enough in itself, but there's no way they could limit the trawl to those people, and claims made about what the software can do are dubious at best. #AI

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A good rule of thumb is that if technology makes something feasible, someone will do it regardless of the ethics. Here, AI makes it easy to perform warrantless surveillance at scale - so someone has turned it into a product and police are buying it. #AI

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Whether this comes to fruition with the NYT vs OpenAI or another publisher vs another LLM vendor, there will be a court case like this, and it will set important precedent for the industry. My money's on the publishers. #AI

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Probably inevitable, but it nonetheless made my jaw drop. What an incredibly wrong-headed use of an LLM. #AI

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The NYT's new terms disallow use of its content to develop any new software application, including machine learning and AI systems. It's a shame that this has to be explicit, rather than a blanket right afforded to publishers by default, but it's a sensible clause that many more will be including. #AI

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“Weizenbaum’s questions, though they seem simple—Is it good? Do we need it?—are difficult ones for computer science to answer. They could be asked of any proposed technology, but the speed, scope, and stakes of innovation in AI make their consideration more urgent.” #AI

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