Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “generative AI”
trapped between generative AI and student surveillance
- kudos:We’re getting to the end of the semester here at the University of Kentucky, which is my traditional time to get overly introspective about grading. There’s a lot on my mind at the end of this semester, but one thing that has popped into my head tonight and that I think will be quick to write about is a dilemma that I’m facing this semester, when I’ve had faced more suspicions about student use of generative AI than in any previous semester.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web'
- kudos:Lots of interesting reflections here. link to “Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge'
- kudos:Lots of interesting stuff in here, including the difficulty of content moderation, and yet another way that generative AI is screwing everything up. link to “Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge”
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Between my kid’s nascent interest in search engines and my students’ using generative AI despite my discouraging it, I’m thinking a lot this week about directly teaching epistemology as a foundation for other concepts.
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I teach in a tech-focused program, and I think it’s reasonable to ask how we’re going to address generative AI in our curriculum, but I still resent the expectation that we must jump on this bandwagon simply because it’s there.
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The only good thing I got out of reading a blog post arguing that ChatGPT leaves open the door for young earth creationism just now was a reminder to reread Hervé Le Tellier’s « L’Anomalie ».
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I do not believe in using AI detection software, but I reserve the right to be annoyed by the students whom I suspect of taking advantage of that belief.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'More academic publishers are doing AI deals'
- kudos:I keep thinking about the similarity of exploitation of academic labor by publishers to the exploitation of everyone’s labor by AI companies, and stories like this just make it more clear. link to “More academic publishers are doing AI deals”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How Memphis became a battleground over Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer'
- kudos:Who benefits from AI? Who doesn’t? link to “How Memphis became a battleground over Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI Checkers Forcing Kids To Write Like A Robot To Avoid Being Called A Robot'
- kudos:I am way more pessimistic about AI than Masnick is, but we agree on this sort of thing. Algorithmic surveillance is no more appropriate in response to AI concerns than it is to cheating concerns. link to “AI Checkers Forcing Kids To Write Like A Robot To Avoid Being Called A Robot”
generative AI and the Honorable Harvest
- kudos:I come from settler colonial stock and, more specifically, from a religious tradition that was (and still is!) pretty keen on imposing a particular identity on Indigenous peoples. I am the kind of person who really ought to be reading more Indigenous perspectives, but I’m also cautious about promoting those perspectives in my writing, lest I rely on a superficial, misguided understanding and then pat myself on the back for the great job I’m doing.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'CAPTCHAs Becoming Useless as AI Gets Smarter, Scientists Warn'
- kudos:One thing this article misses is how often CAPTCHA has been used to train AI. It’s always been playing both sides against each other. link to “CAPTCHAs Becoming Useless as AI Gets Smarter, Scientists Warn”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’'
- kudos:What reckless hubris. As I wrote earlier today, I’m in favor of more liberal IP law, but not so that businesses can swallow up content to profit from it. link to “Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI brings soaring emissions for Google and Microsoft, a major contributor to climate change'
- kudos:This sucks so much—and encapsulates our world’s obsession with financial success over environmental health. link to “AI brings soaring emissions for Google and Microsoft, a major contributor to climate change”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI means Google's greenhouse gas emissions up 48% in 5 years'
- kudos:If AI is indeed going to help us reduce emissions, it seems to me that that will be the product of targeted, scientific and industrial use of AI, not shoving AI into a load of commercial products. Are these commercial companies using AI to figure out how to reduce emissions? If not (and maybe even if so), it seems disingenuous to express optimism that their increased energy use will be magically cancelled out by someone else.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ChatGPT Now Has PhD-Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove It'
- kudos: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. link to “ChatGPT Now Has PhD-Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove It”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'On What We Lose: Chai, AI and Nostalgia | Punya Mishra's Web'
- kudos:I appreciate Punya’s essay here. I’m very grumpy about generative AI, but that doesn’t change the fact that some grumpiness has more to do with moral panic than a reasoned response—but THAT doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for some of this kind of careful nostalgia that Punya is sharing. link to “On What We Lose: Chai, AI and Nostalgia | Punya Mishra’s Web”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway'
- kudos:Generative AI suuuucks, but AI detection software may suck even more. link to “AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Apple’s new custom emoji come with climate costs'
- kudos:I am very grumpy about this. Also, the point of emoji is that they exist within Unicode, yeah? So these aren’t really emoji in the way that those icons are useful—they’re just a fun trick that’s helping advance the climate crisis. link to “Apple’s new custom emoji come with climate costs”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Apple WWDC 2024: the 13 biggest announcements'
- kudos:I’ve been feeling for a while like I need to move away from Apple eventually, but I’m so entangled in the ecosystem that I’m dragging my feet on it. Seeing the company drink the AI Kool-Aid is definitely accelerating my plans—and will even more so if there’s no easy way to turn these featutes off. link to “Apple WWDC 2024: the 13 biggest announcements”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Journalists “deeply troubled” by OpenAI’s content deals with Vox, The Atlantic'
- kudos:In a roundabout way, I think this helps demonstrate why scraping data for generative AI isn’t a question of copyright. Even when there is a legal agreement, it can still be exploitative—it’s a question of digital labor. link to “Journalists ‘deeply troubled’ by OpenAI’s content deals with Vox, The Atlantic”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Decentralized Systems Will Be Necessary To Stop Google From Putting The Web Into Managed Decline'
- kudos:Some good thoughts here by Masnick. link to “Decentralized Systems Will Be Necessary To Stop Google From Putting The Web Into Managed Decline”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'OpenAI loses its voice'
- kudos:Look, it shouldn’t take this story for people to realize that OpenAI exploits others’ contributions to make its products, but if it does the trick, I’ll take it. (And this is admittedly creepier than its base-level exploitation.) link to “OpenAI loses its voice”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: You were promised a jetpack by liars (17 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Compelling essay about vain hopes for the future. link to “Pluralistic: You were promised a jetpack by liars (17 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Microsoft’s AI obsession is jeopardizing its climate ambitions'
- kudos:Such a depressing article. link to “Microsoft’s AI obsession is jeopardizing its climate ambitions”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Stack Overflow users sabotage their posts after OpenAI deal'
- kudos:Some better, broader coverage of complaints I made in a blog post earlier this week. link to “Stack Overflow users sabotage their posts after OpenAI deal”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'OpenAI, Mass Scraper of Copyrighted Work, Claims Copyright Over Subreddit's Logo'
- kudos:I don’t think intellectual property is the way to fight back against generative AI, but it is wildly out of line for a company who profits off using other’s intellectual property to be this petty. link to “OpenAI, Mass Scraper of Copyrighted Work, Claims Copyright Over Subreddit’s Logo”
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’”