Dr. Casey Fiesler

AI-Powered Teddy Bear Caught Talking About Sexual Fetishes and Instructing Kids How to Find Knives OpenAI blocked access for the toymaker following the incidents.

The maximum acceptable level of risk for an "AI-powered toy" targeted at young children is absolutely too low for use of an off-the-shelf commercial LLM to EVER be a reasonable choice. gizmodo.com/ai-powered-t...

A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”

straight to jail www.404media.co/a-researcher...

(I'm joking, but god what another horrible stake to the heart for the future of science.)

Also to be clear, reaching people who have never even considered the possibility that e.g. algorithms can be racist is literally the reason I do what I do. But Facebook comments have made me realize that it's worth going back to some basics.

... I'm sure it will not surprise you to hear that the Facebook comments section is VERY different than TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. For example:

(1) people who have clearly never even heard of the concept of AI bias before
(2) people who think that any mention of AI bias is leftwing propaganda

A couple of years ago I made a Facebook page to cross-post educational videos because someone said to me "you know who I want to see your content about AI ethics? my dad but he's only on Facebook."

So after several years Facebook has suddenly decided to start showing my videos to people and...

Heh I just saw a LinkedIn post arguing that we definitely know workplace AI is so much more capable than we think because of COURSE the companies that are having massive productivity gains are keeping details of their AI use under wraps in order to maintain a competitive advantage.

I just talked to a journalist about AI slop on Pinterest and as a result of some brief research have absolutely ruined my Pinterest algorithm. (Which is not a big deal since I haven't visited the site in probably five years, but it's definitely unusable now. :) )

Oh I love that this is the paper you picked, I don’t think many people have read this one! And I think it’s more interesting than the general Twitter ethics paper :)

Yesterday I keynoted the ALA Core Forum conference in Denver, and honestly, librarians continue to be one of my very favorite audiences. :)

Well the images are I believe all AI generated which means there is no copyright. (So not a DMCA issue…)

Remember the Human: A Systematic Review of Ethical Considerations in Reddit Research | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Reddit is one of the world's most prominent social media platforms, and also a valuable source of data for internet researchers. However, working with this kind of data also presents novel ethical com...

If you are a researcher who happens to know other researchers who study Reddit/use Reddit data, I beg of you to please send them this paper.

dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Typically analysis of public data does not fall under IRB purview since it doesn't meet the legal definition of human subjects research.

I seriously hate social media sometimes. The way that some people (not here) are coming for me for this video being “wrong” or basically for me not managing to cram an entire Applied Machine Learning class into 60 seconds of a *stand up comedy* set is wiiiiiild.

YouTube video by 9to5Mac Apple TV’s new intro was done entirely practical, not CG 😮‍💨 #apple #appletv #tech #ios26 #iphone

I would kind of love if Apple was the tech company to be like “eh we don’t really need to compete on AI, let’s be the ones to champion human creativity instead.” youtube.com/shorts/C3uLR...

Guess what percentage of comments I’ve already gotten on other platforms are people telling me I’m wrong lol

YouTube video by Casey Fiesler Standup comedy about AI ethics has to be a new level of dystopia right?

I do! (Occasionally, this was only the third time.) This is this set, there’s another on my YouTube channel too. youtu.be/4XdJ2xiPies

Do I add this to my CV as an invited lecture? 🤔

I am sometimes grateful that my constitutional law professor was so scary that I studied a lot haha.

Spending all day at an AI+Copyright conference at the law school that I (nominally) helped organize, and thinking once again that I should hang out with law professors more. :)

YouTube video by Casey Fiesler Standup comedy about AI ethics has to be a new level of dystopia right?

If you're interested in learning about why ChatGPT seems to want to date you, the way that AI might actually be our doom (spoiler: it's not the robot wars), and why you shouldn't put glue on your pizza, you might enjoy watching an information science professor do standup comedy. youtu.be/4XdJ2xiPies

screenshot from canva, showing a small image accompanied by the text description "a person wearing glasses and a purple shirt is holding a microphone"

I just got the video of the standup set I did a couple of weeks ago. :D (Currently working on getting it up on YouTube, hence the Canva screenshot haha.)

oh no we missed a serious marketing opportunity with this new one haha!

Oh I don't think it really matters; it's just a question of whether they feel comfortable with the specific use case of the assignment.

Part of this assignment will be talking to/interviewing people who use AI.

oh that's a great point, I'll ponder what that would look like

I don't understand this question either. :) What does it mean to "write against"?

I'm afraid I don't understand this question... why would they need recorded data?

For the specific assignment here, I'm imagining a combination of talking to/interviewing people they know who use AI + exploring online content like discussions in subreddits.

That would be very interesting! I mean I guess it would make things easier for me.

I did waffle on this a bit in large part due to concern about workload of coming up with alternative assignments etc... but I think it's important that students who are critical of AI also have an opportunity to learn about it. And the class will be small this first time so may as well try it out!