@cfiesler.bsky.social
information science professor (tech ethics + internet stuff) kind of a content creator (elsewhere also @professorcasey) though not influencing anyone to do anything except maybe learn things she/her more: casey.prof
My first reaction to this story was "doesn't Grammarly have any lawyers?" and then I saw the statement from the CEO that the lawsuit is "without merit" (LOL) and realized that maybe their legal strategy is to ask an LLM to (badly) impersonate a real lawyer without that lawyer's consent.
Song is "God King Google" by Rain McCey. A+ Ozymandias reference in a later verse. youtu.be/Kv0m87LwKss
hahahah I know
anyway I have no idea where my copy of your book is
(though on the bright side that's a side effect of having read it ;) )
Books chosen due to an intersection of what seemed most relevant, what I own, are at my home, and I could find on the shelf the morning I made this. :)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Empire of AI by @karenhao.bsky.social
The Internet Con by @doctorow.pluralistic.net
Silicon Values by @jillian.bsky.social
The AI Con by @emilymbender.bsky.social & @alexhanna.bsky.social
Blood in the Machine by @bcmerchant.bsky.social
It’s been a really long time since I’ve lip synced a song while holding up tech ethics books, so let’s gooooooo! (Posting here mainly because this is the place where I can easily point folks to authors - in thread.)
And this was a bit of an interlude in my series about how large language models work... This is basically my pitch for why it's helpful to have a basic technical understanding of how the technology works, even (maybe especially) if you're critical of it. www.youtube.com/shorts/wRoZS...
Part 5 of this series on how language models work... this one is about transformers. (Also shout-out to someone in my comments who said "more than meets the (A)I?" lol.) www.youtube.com/shorts/-x6rq...
They’re actually really popping off on Facebook of all places haha.
Part 4 of this series on how language models work. This one is about self attention! youtube.com/shorts/LMEQL...
Part 3 of this series on how language models work. This one is about things like encoding, vector space, and neural networks! youtube.com/shorts/oSJqS...
Part 2 of this series on how language models work. This one is covering parts of the training process like self supervised learning and backpropagation! youtube.com/shorts/6uVDY...
I'm creating a series of short form videos about how language models work technically. The goal is to be something in between "you know it's next token prediction" and "now you've taken a machine learning class." I'd love your thoughts so here are the first few! 🧵
www.youtube.com/shorts/VZB8X...
A CS MS student working with me is about to start a project about academic writers' attitudes towards LLMs! I'll mention you're working on this, she might want to chat with you. :)
prepping to try to explain to my AI & Society class what has happened since our last class early last week
I've been thinking a lot about how people interact with chatbots versus online strangers. Recently @heatherkelly.bsky.social (formerly of WaPo siiiigh) asked me a very *interesting* question which is whether chatbots have changed how we ask stupid questions. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
So "bots are doing harassment!" kind of feels like "AI is taking my job!" which attributes agency to AI in a way that is letting actual humans off the hook. Like... why take that very real decision making agency away from THE HUMAN THAT FIRED YOU?
This isn't a story about AI gaining consciousness, it's a story about the capacity for AI agents to contribute to frighteningly scalable harassment. Because "go off my little bot friends and gather intel and write crappy linkedin style blog post hit pieces" is a thing a crappy human can do.
I find this whole "AI agent wrote a hit piece" thing really troubling for reasons that have nothing to do with bots getting "mad" and "deciding" to take down open source contributors. theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...
Why do we keep wanting to give AI so much agency that it lets humans off the hook??
For the record, my AI ethics themed standup set a week ago was mostly a mashup of previous sets, but also included:
- a subtle Donald Trump joke
- a subtle Heated Rivalry joke
- a not-subtle dig at AI bros in my YouTube comments
I’m so proud of the students in my AI & Society class! They honed right in on this sentence from the university’s FAQ about their new ChatGPT site license, and had a LOT of questions. So do I! I promised I’ll try to find out what I can.
Oh definitely not. Also faculty are still permitted to e.g. ban it in their classes.
I'm also just going to leave this FAQ answer here.
This quote comes from yesterday's email announcement from my university that they have acquired a ChatGPT license for everyone.
"We know that for some members of our community, generative AI raises significant concerns around privacy, sustainability and ethical use. We share those concerns and are working to mitigate – where possible – the impacts."
Those em dashes are doing a lot of work.
Except it's not actually a word limit, it's a page limit! Though other ACM venues have moved to word limits instead so I'm not sure why FAccT hasn't...
haha no I mean your point is still very good!!
My usual plea related to how to do ethics in computer science programs is both standalone classes and in every class. I’m not sure what the version of that is here except just telling people they need to talk about it and put it in the right place ha.
Agreed! It also doesn’t need to all be in one place. Those are different kinds of things! I pointed this out in part because some of the instructions include decisions about human subjects research and that seems so weird to put at the end.
But again, I am highly appreciative of the intention behind this. Doing something to encourage authors to write about research ethics in their papers is far more than most publication venues do, especially in computing.