Dorothea Baur - the ethics crusader

Is language the same as intelligence? The AI industry desperately needs it to be The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake.

"human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own" great piece by @benjaminjriley.bsky.social www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

I hope not... I am a big fan of deliberation, not determination.

Should facial analysis help determine whom companies hire? A new paper suggests a photo can tell a recruiter much about an applicant’s personality

Researchers are "looking at whether AI facial analysis can give lenders useful clues about a person’s propensity to repay loans. For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing."

Coming soon: cosmetic surgery that improves your credit rating!

www.economist.com/business/202...

Wissenschaft im Rechtfertigungs- statt im Entdeckungskontext, würde Habermas wohl sagen.

Great observation! But I thought that billions of people were already using LLMs etc. - not enough?

Thanks! Much appreciated context. I need to research different types of chips - I wasn't aware of a difference between GPU- and non-GPU-based chips.

The big question for me is: Once the AI bubble burst, will these data centers become stranded assets or are there ways to repurpose them for "meaningful" uses of AI? Or does this require different types of chips/hardware?
Can anyone help me with this?

Or the pineapple on your pizza, as some would argue 😈

What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms | Eric Reinhart A dangerous faith in AI is sweeping American healthcare – with consequences for the basis of society itself

"machines are supplying the language with which patients relay their suffering, and doctors are using machines to...respond". By outsourcing "the most intimate definitions of ourselves to AI, doctors and patients risk becoming...further alienated from one another" www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

also: "The gigawatt data center is an evolutionary dead end. When the AI hype-bubble bursts, they are going to be multi-billion-dollar white elephants full of chips that are best simply turned off and the money regarded as wasted" Great piece by @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com via @davidgerard.co.uk

The futile future of the gigawatt datacenter — by Nicholas Weaver Guest post by Nicholas C. Weaver The AI companies and related enterprises are currently spending huge amounts in capital expenditures (CAPEX) to build “Gigawatt” class data centers for various AI-r…

"LLM’s output is bullshit in the philosophical sense: statements that are divorced from whether or not they are true or false.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠The point of a LLM is to output text that looks right given the training data and query, not to produce text that is right" pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/07/t...

How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’

“It has been one minute, and you really cannot say anything?... If you don’t remember what you wrote, you don’t feel ownership. Do you even care?”
Nataliya Kosmyna, MIT Media Lab research scientist on the effects of ChatGPT on writing and retention.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/t...

Wären alle Urheber:innen fair entschädigt worden, gäbe es generative KI in ihrer heutigen Form nicht. Die fossile Wirtschaft externalisiert die Kosten für CO2. Generative KI die für unsere Kreativität.

Meine Aussage im Referat zu "KI & Nachhaltigkeit" im Rahmen der Agenda 2030 in Bern vorgestern.

How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time The idea that machines will be as smart as—or smarter than—humans has hijacked an entire industry. But look closely and you’ll see it’s a myth that persists for many of the same reasons conspiracies d...

It used to be the internet age and now it’s the AI age. "It’s normal to have something presented to you and be told that this thing is the future." What’s different is that in contrast to the internet, "AGI doesn’t exist". @shannonvallor.bsky.social
www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/30/1...

In einem derart offensichtlichen Kontext unverzeihlich, sogar für KI ;-)

Camembert oder Kreisdiagramm? Warum KI-Übersetzung scheitert Camembert oder Tortendiagramm? KI-Übersetzung erkennt Muster, aber keinen Sinn. Was auf Duolingo noch charmant wirkt, wird zum Problem, wenn Maschinen Urteile fällen, wo Menschen verstehen müssten.

Neuer Blogartikel: Woran KI-Übersetzung scheitert. Z.B. am fehlenden Savoir Vivre, im wahren Sinne des Wortes.
baurconsulting.ch/camembert-od...

Why AI should be able to “hang up” on you Endless AI conversations are harming people. Why aren’t companies using this obvious safeguard?

"Only Anthropic has built a tool that lets its models end conversations completely. But it’s for cases where users supposedly “harm” the model—Anthropic has explored whether AI models are conscious and therefore can suffer—by sending abusive messages" 🤦‍♀️ www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/21/1...

#translation #ai #machinetranslation #techethics #languagematters #fitcongress2025 | Dr. Dorothea Baur After Duolingo's AI translation turned camembert into a pie chart in Part 1 of my reflections from the FIT Congress , it’s time to zoom out a little. Here’s Part 2: What exactly are we automating w...

Recently I gave a keynote on "AI: what happens when we let machines speak for us - and about us?" at the FIT World Congress. In it I argued that automating translation means treating language as a matter of pure perception or prediction, at the expense of judgment.
www.linkedin.com/posts/doroth...

The Job Market Is Hell Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.

"The surge in same-same AI-authored applications prompts employers to use robot filters to manage the flow. Everyone ends up in Tinderized job-search hell"
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

😁

Kudos to the Oxford Dictionary of English for reading AI
1. as Amnesty International
2. as artificial insemination,
3. and only then as ... AI.

😁

(picture from Shannon Vallor's great book "AI Mirror - @shannonvallor.bsky.social 🙏)

The Myth of AI Democratization - baur consulting AI companies create groundbreaking innovation. But when it comes to business ethics, they seem pretty ignorant. What are they missing?

"And attribution – or any other kind of recognition – is not just missing, it is actively prevented.

Democratization would mean participation, visibility, and credit. What we are seeing here is something else entirely." 2/2

From @dorotheabaur.bsky.social

On the Myth of AI Democratization

"This is not Robin Hood. It’s reverse Robin Hood. Value is extracted from underpaid authors, artists, and researchers in order to fuel systems that are controlled and monetized by some of the wealthiest and most powerful companies on the planet." 1/2

Oh, thank you!

Newsletter. Heute dabei:
- Warum KI-Unternehmen von Demokratie reden und Oligarchie meinen
- Wie Sam Altman unlautere Forschung als Anlass nimmt, um seinen Iris-Scanner und eine Kryptowährung zu pitchen
- Wie weiter nach dem Ende des Nachhaltigkeitshypes
mailchi.mp/312b885babf3...

YouTube video by The AI impact podcast Nick Clegg's Shocking AI Bankruptcy Claim: Meta's Secret Exposed!

Talking about Nick Clegg apparently turns me into a kind of middle-aged Greta Thunberg: "How dare you?" But I stand by it: his justification for the genAI industry's predatory business model is the bottom of the barrel. #AI #genAI #copyright
youtube.com/shorts/dgk4W...

My office for the next few weeks.

"most likely"... that's most likely an understatement ;)

A secret AI study. A biometric orb. A new internet ID. - baur consulting AI companies create groundbreaking innovation. But when it comes to business ethics, they seem pretty ignorant. What are they missing?

In the aftermath of the undercover study in which researchers from Zurich Uni tried to manipulate users, Reddit is considering using Sam Altman's Orb (an iris-scanning biometric surveillance tool linked to his cryptocurrency WorldCoin) in order to identify users.
baurconsulting.ch/en/a-secret-...

Hach, danke. 😅 Wahrscheinlich lebt Baur sogar umso mehr, je weniger man hier von Baur sieht...