Carissa Véliz’s Post

Maybe we'll have a new more interesting social media thanks to Musk after all. "Social networking startup #Bluesky continues to benefit from X’s shutdown in Brazil, having now added more than 2 million new users over the past four days" https://lnkd.in/eU9UJic9

NanoWriMo says it's "classist and ableist" to reject using Gen AI for writing. Many writers disagree, arguing that Gen AI is unethical and has been built through stealing copyrighted works of art, that it is offensive to suggest that disabled people need AI to create art, that it is a business-based stance, and that it uses politically correct language to shield itself from criticisms. What do you think about the debate? #AIEthics https://lnkd.in/ecqKDgRG

Very thoughtful piece. Lots of highlights. #AIEthics "If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art." "The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists." "Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium." "Any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it." "The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying." "Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate." "Is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them?" "The more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater [the requirements to create low-quality text] will eventually become." https://lnkd.in/eGES5p9T

#Facebook is full of AI slop. #AIEthics “Instead of focusing on fostering wholesome relationships, or in being trustworthy sources of information, social media has focused on gaining people’s attention. And it turns out that what attracts most of our attention is akin to junk food.” https://lnkd.in/eDZQ8GWr

Tech companies are better at concealing the racism in their models, but racism is still there. "Language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of African American English be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain" #AIEthics https://lnkd.in/ghWB74g2

Anyone else worried about governments being increasingly dependent on big tech? #AIEthics