Le sigh.

This is horrifying. Reading the headline is one thing, but reading some of the details is stomach-churning. I’m not a lawyer, and as disgusted as I am with this, I don’t know what legal liability should look like here. I feel more comfortable describing this as ethically bankrupt, though. I think I would have many fewer concerns about generative AI if it weren’t a platformized consumer product. Whatever the right legal response to this is, OpenAI has some moral responsibility for this sort of thing.

Today, a student from across campus explained that they used ChatGPT to identify me as a potential thesis committee member, and I am shallow enough to have had a very brief flicker of positive feeling toward the technology.

Look, I don’t have experience running an academic publishing company, but I don’t know if I’d activate the experimental AI summarizer on an article exploring the ethics of generative AI.

Interesting stuff here. I think most complaints about OpenAI “censorship” are hogwash, but it’s still fascinating—and worrying—to see how much control the company exercises over its product.

This is a darker version of some of the thoughts I had when I first heard about the “PhD comparison.”

Before you click through to the article, I also want to use this short post as a complaint that I don’t think “intelligence” is a thing—and that PhDs certainly wouldn’t be a measure of it if it were.

Oh, please no no no. I usually read a whole article before posting it, but just the first few paragraphs are giving me such a visceral reaction that I don’t know if I’ll make it through the rest. The existing tech giants already have such a hold on us, let’s please not let OpenAI in the door.

Today, Stack Overflow announced that it was entering into a partnership with OpenAI to provide data from the former to the latter for the purposes of training ChatGPT, etc. I’ve used Stack Overflow a fair amount over the years, and there have also been times where I tried to get into some of the other Stack Exchange sites, contributing both questions and answers. I haven’t really been active on any of these sites in recent times, but I still decided to take a couple of minutes this afternoon and follow the advice of one outraged Mastodon post: delete my contributions and shut down my accounts.

This week has enough writing (and deadlines!) that the utilitarian appeal of ChatGPT is finally clear to me; and yet, it’s also so much clearer that I would rather do fewer things well and on my own.

Three cheers for ChatGPT or whatever.

Even if ChatGPT could be trusted to do this task, “let’s remove books from libraries with less work” is a good example of how efficiency isn’t always a good thing.

I get why folks in ed compare ChatGPT to Wikipedia, but there are important differences. Wikipedia is entirely non-profit, lays bare its knowledge generation process, can be fixed on the fly, and can’t actively generate problematic content. It’s not just about reliability.

Everyone excited about generative AI needs to account for this kind of thing. We don’t pay enough attention to digital labor and the dehumanizing aspects of content moderation.

I’m spending a chunk of today starting on revisions to my Intro to Data Science course for my unit’s LIS and ICT graduate prograrms. I’d expected to spend most of the time shuffling around the content and assessment for particular weeks, but I quickly realized that I was going to need to update what I had to say in the syllabus about plagiarism and academic offenses. Last year’s offering of the course involved a case of potential plagiarism, so I wanted to include more explicit instruction that encourages students to borrow code while making it clear that there are right and wrong ways of doing so. Likewise, my colleague Josh Rosenberg posted earlier today about ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter, and while I don’t know that my students will even know that’s an option, I wanted to get out ahead of that possibility, too.

This is a wild, compelling story that I missed when it first came out. Glad to be reading it now.

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.

Content moderation is hard, and moderating AI content definitely seems harder to me. However, so long as OpenAI has control over ChatGPT (and benefits from others’ use of it), I do think it has a responsibility to shape what it can produce. That said, there remains a deeper, legitimate question about how much influence a single company should have over LLM output.

Important points in here.

Important to keep an eye on this.

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

Just because some worries about ChatGPT are, indeed, moral panics doesn’t mean that there aren’t legtimate criticisms of the technology—including from an educational perspective. I happen to agree with Masnick that schools ultimately need to roll with the punches here, but given how much we already expect of our schools and teachers, it’s reasonable to resent being punched in the first place. Masnick’s point about the error rate for detecting AI-generated text is an important one, though: I don’t think plagiarism-detecting surveillance is at all the right response.

Looks like the job of AI training is as awful as the job of content moderation.

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.

I’ve been making a real effort to be less pessimistic about ChatGPT, and I imagine this makes a better headline than actual threat, but this is still the sort of thing that makes me wonder about AI. What is missing from our world that ChatGPT fills? And is it worth these increased risks?