This is my third time reading this book—I couldn’t resist coming back to it for the “epistolary novel” square of my library’s “Books and Bites Bingo” challenge this year. The print book is amazing, the audiobook manages to adapt a book that shouldn’t be adaptable, and I enjoyed this read as much as the last two. The language and worldbuilding are subtle but effective, it’s morally complex without trying too hard to be, and the characters are a good mix between believable and, well, archetypal characters in a YA novel.

Is there any way to complete a CAPTCHA without providing free labor for ML/AI developers? Makes me angrier every time I have to do it.

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. link to ‘ChatGPT Is Passing the Tests Required for Medical Licenses and Business Degrees’

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. link to ‘CNET Defends Use of AI Blogger After Embarrassing 163-Word Correction: ‘Humans Make Mistakes, Too’’

I’ve seen jokes about the supposed irony of having to fill out a CAPTCHA to use ChatGPT, but it’s actually pretty consistent: The purpose of CAPTCHA is also to mine the fruits of human labor to train ML/AI that can replace human labor.

Well, this is terrifying. link to ‘Experts Warn ChatGPT Could Democratize Cybercrime - Infosecurity Magazine’

Good thing engineers really anticipated and considered these consequences before developing this software, right? link to ‘Thanks to AI, it’s probably time to take your photos off the Internet | Ars Technica’

A helpful and thoughtful critique of how people are doing AI text generation. link to ‘ChatGPT, Galactica, and the Progress Trap | WIRED’

Very interesting read. link to ‘Facebook Pulls Its New ‘AI For Science’ Because It’s Broken and Terrible’

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. link to ‘Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers, Because Of Course They Are’

Ooof. AI-generated art is fun, but it comes at a price, and we can’t afford to forget it. link to ‘AI Is Probably Using Your Images and It’s Not Easy to Opt Out’

This article provides good examples of how the efficacy and efficiency of a given technology is often less important than deeper questions of reliance and roles. link to ‘Too much trust in machine translation could have deadly consequences.’