Helpful reminder that it’s low-paid, underappreciated workers who contribute to AI as much as high-paid programmers and household-name executives.

This strikes me as illustrating the digital labor issues associated with generative AI. It’s someone else profiting off of one’s work.

Aw, geez, and I liked Automattic, too. I get that financing Tumblr is hard, but why this?

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.

There are few phrases grosser than “monetizing our user base.”

Look, I’ve never been really into Reddit, but I’m still really disappointed in the company. This sucks.

C’mon, Reddit.

This is straight-up awful. Shame on the university for doing this.

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.

Hmm. Unsurprising but all the more frustrating for it.

Fascinating read on web crawlers and robots.txt

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.

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.

George’s example statement is one worth bookmarking.

Good thoughts from Newton here. “Who could have predicted this?” indeed.

I don’t get what’s missing from a world without generative AI—and examples like this don’t make me any more convinced.

If OpenAI is going to be an influential company, it would be nice for it to be more transparent.

Generative AI has a digital labor issue, and we aren’t paying enough attention to it.

Even if AI would be beneficial for humanity in the aggregate, it’s important to ask how that benefit would be distributed.

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.

Yeah, but don’t worry, this is definitely the only way that generative AI will be used to overwhelm us with useless content.

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.

The phrase popped into my head before the article could even get to it: We are the product.

Welp, this is scary.

C’est bien inquiétant, cette histoire.