p. sampson

🥳🥰

so much of our present misery is just a giant, prolonged backlash to integration

tried describing sinners to a friend theough genre and realized “vampire slasher“ wasn’t expansive enough but adding, “set in the south“ wasn’t satisfying.

“vampire slasher x afrofuturist magical realism circa jim crow” is a mouthful! 😭

At the end of the day, the Black Lives Matter era was about whether people should be killed in the street, and lots of people decided yeah and put those little blue flags on their cars. It spread to everyone because it stopped for no one.

I don’t think people quite understand that the occupation by ICE in the Twin Cities has more or less erased non-white people from public life. They cannot safely exist in any space accessible to the public and moving between private places leaves folks vulnerable to kidnapping by armed masked goons.

AI companies should be extremely careful not to repeat the many mistakes that have been made — and harms that have resulted from — the adoption of personalized ads on social media and around the web. (4/5)

we’ve been here before I fear…

!!!!!! so cool!

oop. 🌚

scientific communication and papers as a format have many problematic norms but this accelerates the idea that "we" "all" "know" certain social phenomena are problems and thus the ability to design for, measure, and describe them is not something requiring deep, agile, and maintained expertise.

truly torpedoing my turducken to see the critical theories (+ the scholars that put such work forth) that i take immense pride in drawing on in my work and am dead specific in describing simply abstracted away by an ai summary i cannot edit!!!!!! in the main archive for my contributions!!!!!!

(2) Give authors of papers the ability to edit the AI-generated summary. Ideally directly, but if that's not possible, to easily request a change.

(3) Give authors the ability to opt out of having an AI summary on their paper entirely. (Or require an opt in.)

Artificial Intelligence Tools on the ACM Digital Library ACM uses Artificial Intelligence tools to enhance your research experience. Currently, we offer written summaries of individual articles as well as podcast-style audio summaries of conference sessions. We will soon add chat-style interactivity to our content and search functionality. All summaries on the Digital Library are clearly labeled as AI-generated. When citing ACM content, authors should always cite the original article, not an AI-generated summary. AI can make mistakes, and it cannot replace the experience of reading an article in full. But we do believe it will help you find, understand and use ACM content both more quickly and more deeply. These tools were designed in consultation with a diverse group of Digital Library stakeholders and will continue to evolve as Artificial Intelligence advances. We are continuously tuning our Foundational Model to optimize readability and we conduct regular audits for hallucinations and other errors. We are very interested in your thoughts and suggestions- please leave them by clicking the "Feedback" button on the far right of this page. If you find a problem with a specific AI-generated summary, please return to that summary and click the Feedback there.

As someone who has ::checks notes:: 117 publications in the ACM Digital Library, can confirm I was not asked nor told about this. It doesn't appear on ALL papers, and I can't intuit a rhyme or reason to which ones.

Maybe I shouldn't be, but I'm legitimately surprised there's not an opt out option.

❕❕❕

title: Cheap science, real harm: the cost of replacing human participation with synthetic data author: Abeba Birhane abstract: Driven by the goals of augmenting diversity, increasing speed, reducing cost, the use of synthetic data as a replacement for human participants is gaining traction in AI research and product development. This talk critically examines the claim that synthetic data can “augment diversity,” arguing that this notion is empirically unsubstantiated, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful. While speed and cost-efficiency may be achievable, they often come at the expense of rigour, insight, and robust science. Drawing on research from dataset audits, model evaluations, Black feminist scholarship, and complexity science, I argue that replacing human participants with synthetic data risks producing both real-world and epistemic harms at worst and superficial knowledge and cheap science at best

I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public

synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf

Statement on the Brown University shooting.

:(

agre mentioned 👀

beli power user ism

hehe ty!

Penn's Landing sign in Old City, taken at golden hour. A #firstoftheroll shot with an artsy light leak on the lefthand side.

Brick rowhome style apartments in Old City, shot at late golden hour. The buildings have fun moody yellow detail, with a tree standing shadowed in the foreground. Pennsylvania Hospital rises just into view in the far background.

Closeup of ivy and other greenery growing along/trailing off the pillar of a short, weathered grey/beige brick wall.

The far sunlit interior of a garden in focus, shot past a wrought iron fence and long pine needles in soft focus in the foreground.

becoming one of those computer scientists who won't stop yapping about my analog hobby of choice.

(canon ae-1 · kodak ultramax 400)

"what demon in marketing is behind this?"

what a truly evergreen question 😭😭😭

the non-ironic, casual deployment of the white usage of "woke" in news articles and opinion pieces makes me want to scream

I've always felt somewhat uncomfortable with the framing of AI risk around the actions of "malicious actors". Because sometimes the malicious actor is the company that built the thing. And the model is causing harm because it was successfully steered into doing what it's creators wanted it to do.

the alt text! 😭😭😭

the research homies of all time are cooking btw 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

y'know it's kind of a tell that they think celebrating the end of slavery is DEI

my hottest educational take is that schools should actively, non-punitively teach students how to admit when they don't know something, aren't sure or have made a mistake, with various teaching frameworks adapted to support this ideal, because people who can't admit fault are breaking the world