Lots of helpful stuff in here.

This is dumb and worrying. The CEO of Gab has been promising to develop “based AI,” but he’s a bit player. Musk has the resources and influence to make this a bigger problem.

I don’t know enough about OpenAI to evaluate these concerns, but I think these questions are important. The power of AI means that the companies that control them are also in a position of power, and it’s important that we treat them critically. That said, while I do think making LLM code open source is probably better in the aggregate, it isn’t without concerning drawbacks: The minute it was released under an open license, I’m sure Gab’s Andrew Torba would be considering how to make a homebrew version that can’t be content moderated.

Of all the dumb responses to perfectly legitimate content moderation, this is perhaps the dumbest.

What a dumb world we live in.

Well, this is horrifying. Another example of a news article I wish weren’t relevant to my research.

I wish this weren’t as relevant as it is to my work on Mormon Twitter, but here we are.

Headline overstates things a bit, and I’m on team “change the assessments,” but it’s still worth asking if AI developers are appropriately anticipating the disruptions these tools are causing.

Here, as with autocorrect and citation managers, my personal opinion is that any human who knows enough to use the tool critically knows enough to do the job themself. Maybe slower, sure, but slower isn’t always bad.

Once again, the more I read about this, the more worried I get. I also appreciate the thesis of this particular article: D&D could lose its status as the ur-TTRPG over this.

Libraries are perhaps the most important public institution out there. We can’t afford to cut their budgets.

A good reminder that analog is often better. Digital often benefits others (including bad actors) more than ourselves.

See, as worried as I am about ChatGPT use in education, this actually worries me more, because it’s basically plagiarism detection, which I’m opposed to.

Twitter left up other flight tracking accounts but took down Musk’s?

I hated this project when I read about it in The Verge 5 years ago. I hate it even more now.

What a load of garbage.

Very interesting read.

The midterms could have been a lot worse, but this is a reminder that there’s still real danger lurking out there.

Helpful summary of the current state of QAnon.

This reminds me of all the pastors doing guest posts on the official Gab blog. Also, of course Glenn Beck was involved in this somehow.

Someone’s paying the price for the convenience of shopping on Amazon.

I’ve been worrying about 2024, but 2022 is going to be bad enough. GOP needs to do something about this.

Really important story here, and glad to see George Veletsianos quoted. I’ve long been an advocate for developing assessments that are impossible to cheat at, but I don’t know if that’s the entire (or even a practical) response to GPT-3. We are continuing to develop technologies whose societal effects we are not prepares for.

Wild story, and heck of a scoop. Says far more about Tucker Carlson than about Ye.

Lot of worrying stuff in here. Edtech needs to take surveillance tech more seriously, because the two are increasingly simultaneous.

Good reporting on a scary but important subject. I’ve been collecting Gab blog posts to eventually study some of this Christian nationalism.

Ooof. AI-generated art is fun, but it comes at a price, and we can’t afford to forget it.

I missed the vertical integration aspect of this in earlier reporting I’ve read. It makes this story even worse.

This is very interesting—it gives me some hope that I haven’t had over the past couple of months.

This is my issue with CS education efforts, especially ’teaching people to code.’ It’s narrowly focused on technical skills and not broader social and ethical reflection. I’d never argue that programmers shouldn’t work for defense contractors, but I’m uncomfortable with associating them so closely with CS education.

What a mess of a story. School safety tech is edtech, and like edtech, a lot of it appears to be more posturing and theater than effective practice.

I’ve been grumpy about ClassDojo all week, and this is the only thing that’s made me feel better about it—BECAUSE THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE.

On one hand, I strongly believe Trump should be held accountable for all laws he’s broken or flouted. On the other, I believe that the Espionage Act has been used as a crude cudgel by several presidential administrations, and it’s really important not to be sloppy here. The second doesn’t outweigh the first, but just like one can defend the FBI raid without putting the FBI on a pedestal of infallibility, we need to be critically minded about all this.

Interesting development here.

Such a bad idea. Normalizing Ring won’t make it any better—only worse.

Compelling example of the need for digital privacy in a post-Row world.