Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “generative AI”
Stack Exchange and digital labor
- kudos: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.
assessment as proof of learning or as learning itself?
- kudos:Recently, an idea has been bubbling in my head that’s the culmination of months—even years—of thinking about how I assess in my courses. I’ve typically taken the pretty-standard approach that assessment is the process of students’ proving that they’ve learned something. What if, though, assessment is itself the proof of the process of students’ learning something. That is, what if we doled out points for students’ proving that they appropriately participated in learning activities and then trusted the learning to happen on its own?
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?'
- kudos:I think this might be one of the best things I’ve read on generative AI. link to “AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Facebook’s AI Told Parents Group It Has a Gifted, Disabled Child'
- kudos:Ugh, so creepy. link to “Facebook’s AI Told Parents Group It Has a Gifted, Disabled Child”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Teen Girls Confront an Epidemic of Deepfake Nudes in Schools'
- kudos:Sure, Midjourney is fun, but this is the price we’re paying for that kind of technology out in the world. link to “Teen Girls Confront an Epidemic of Deepfake Nudes in Schools”
Arthur Dent, the bulldozer, and generative AI
- kudos:This week, I decided to see if it was worth relistening to the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series. I’m having trouble committing to things to listen to right now, and I’ve found in recent years that I don’t enjoy H2G2 as much as I once did, so it’s hard to say whether I’ll follow through with this. However, I did get far enough in to the first episode to enjoy Arthur Dent’s confrontation with Mr.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning.'
- kudos:There are some important and interesting pieces of information in here. link to “AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning.”
do you want to be good or to be optimized?
- kudos:This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level: My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The job applicants shut out by AI: ‘The interviewer sounded like Siri’'
- kudos:So, if employers save time from AI, and applicants save time from AI, where’s the net benefit? Or does it become a new burden for everyone? link to “The job applicants shut out by AI: ‘The interviewer sounded like Siri’”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI’s craving for data is matched only by a runaway thirst for water and energy | John Naughton'
- kudos:Bookmarking for future reference. Are the purported benefits of generative AI worth these (and other) costs? link to “AI’s craving for data is matched only by a runaway thirst for water and energy | John Naughton”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Amazon Turkers Who Train AI Say They’re Locked Out of Their Work and Money'
- kudos:Helpful reminder that it’s low-paid, underappreciated workers who contribute to AI as much as high-paid programmers and household-name executives. link to “Amazon Turkers Who Train AI Say They’re Locked Out of Their Work and Money”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Fanfiction Community Rocked By Etsy Sellers Turning Their Work Into Bound Books'
- kudos:This strikes me as illustrating the digital labor issues associated with generative AI. It’s someone else profiting off of one’s work. link to “Fanfiction Community Rocked By Etsy Sellers Turning Their Work Into Bound Books”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools'
- kudos:Aw, geez, and I liked Automattic, too. I get that financing Tumblr is hard, but why this? link to “Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools”
- kudos:
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base''
- kudos:There are few phrases grosser than “monetizing our user base.” link to “Reddit: ‘We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base’”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Reddit Signs $60 Million Deal to Scrape Your Online Community for AI Parts: Report'
- kudos:Look, I’ve never been really into Reddit, but I’m still really disappointed in the company. This sucks. link to “Reddit Signs $60 Million Deal to Scrape Your Online Community for AI Parts: Report”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Reddit sells training data to unnamed AI company ahead of IPO'
- kudos:C’mon, Reddit. link to “Reddit sells training data to unnamed AI company ahead of IPO”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'University of Michigan Sells Recordings of Study Groups and Office Hours to Train AI'
- kudos:This is straight-up awful. Shame on the university for doing this. link to “University of Michigan Sells Recordings of Study Groups and Office Hours to Train AI”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Future data centres may have built-in nuclear reactors'
- kudos:You know, instead of assuming that we must grow AI data centers and asking how we should power them, we could look at the costs in terms of power and ask whether we should grow AI data centers. link to “Future data centres may have built-in nuclear reactors”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Microsoft and OpenAI say hackers are using ChatGPT to improve cyberattacks'
- kudos:Hmm. Unsurprising but all the more frustrating for it. link to “Microsoft and OpenAI say hackers are using ChatGPT to improve cyberattacks”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The rise and fall of robots.txt'
- kudos:Fascinating read on web crawlers and robots.txt link to “The rise and fall of robots.txt”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: How I got scammed (05 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Fascinating post. Grateful for Doctorow’s honesty at his being scammed and interested in the idea that lowering quality of services through AI trains us to accept fraud. link to “Pluralistic: How I got scammed (05 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Absurd One-Sidedness of the Ethics of AI Debate: A rant | Punya Mishra's Web'
- kudos:Punya is a bit warmer on AI than I am, so I wasn’t sure what I would be reading based off of the title, but this is one of the best things I’ve read on generative AI in education. These companies have so much power and could use a little more Parkerian responsibility. link to “The Absurd One-Sidedness of the Ethics of AI Debate: A rant | Punya Mishra’s Web”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Generative AI course statement – George Veletsianos, PhD'
- kudos:George’s example statement is one worth bookmarking. link to “Generative AI course statement – George Veletsianos, PhD”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Taylor Swift deepfakes are a warning'
- kudos:Good thoughts from Newton here. “Who could have predicted this?” indeed. link to “The Taylor Swift deepfakes are a warning”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'X is being flooded with graphic Taylor Swift AI images - The Verge'
- kudos:I don’t get what’s missing from a world without generative AI—and examples like this don’t make me any more convinced. link to “X is being flooded with graphic Taylor Swift AI images - The Verge”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'OpenAI went back on a promise to make key documents public | Ars Technica'
- kudos:If OpenAI is going to be an influential company, it would be nice for it to be more transparent. link to “OpenAI went back on a promise to make key documents public | Ars Technica”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Cat and Girl'
- kudos:Generative AI has a digital labor issue, and we aren’t paying enough attention to it. link to “Cat and Girl”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says'
- kudos:Even if AI would be beneficial for humanity in the aggregate, it’s important to ask how that benefit would be distributed. link to “AI to hit 40% of jobs and worsen inequality, IMF says”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Plagiarism is the latest weapon in the culture wars. But what even is it? - Vox'
- kudos:Lots of interesting comments in this article. I haven’t been following this story as closely as I should, but it—and articles like this—are making me think that I need to think harder about plagiarism: what it is and how I should respond to it. link to “Plagiarism is the latest weapon in the culture wars. But what even is it? - Vox”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'I’m sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy - The Verge'
- kudos:Yeah, but don’t worry, this is definitely the only way that generative AI will be used to overwhelm us with useless content. link to “I’m sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy - The Verge”
- kudos:
I have lots of concerns about LLM training, but I think it’s better to think of the issue in terms of digital labor, not copyright. My blog is licensed for reuse, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less exploitative for someone to scrape it all to develop software that will make them rich off my work.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Meta’s new AI image generator was trained on 1.1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos | Ars Technica'
- kudos:The phrase popped into my head before the article could even get to it: We are the product. link to “Meta’s new AI image generator was trained on 1.1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos | Ars Technica”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI chatbots can infer an alarming amount of info about you from your responses | Ars Technica'
- kudos:Welp, this is scary. link to “AI chatbots can infer an alarming amount of info about you from your responses | Ars Technica”
🔗 linkblog: mes pensées sur 'Les deepfakes pornographiques comme nouvelle arme de harcèlement scolaire - rts.ch - Technologies'
- kudos:C’est bien inquiétant, cette histoire. lien pour “Les deepfakes pornographiques comme nouvelle arme de harcèlement scolaire - rts.ch - Technologies”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '4chan users manipulate AI tools to unleash torrent of racist images | Ars Technica'
- kudos:Content moderation is a good thing. link to “4chan users manipulate AI tools to unleash torrent of racist images | Ars Technica”