It turns out I find “associated with PRC = inherently good” just as annoying as “comes from China = inherently bad.”

Digital labor issues abound in the context of generative AI, but fan labor issues make me particularly angry.

There are some helpful thoughts in here. I think most of my concerns about generative AI are less about the technology itself and more about the corporate interest in and control of it.

More suckiness in the world of academic publishing.

Well put:

TCL plans to get more into original content, fueled by a dystopian strategy that seems largely built around minimizing costs and pushing ads.

This is a solid article. I think the opening is reflective and that there’s an effort to be open minded (more than I would be). It’s also amazing to me, though, how explicitly the goal here seems to be profiting from a surveillance-supported content mill.

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. By way of context, my class policy is to: 1) discourage student use of generative AI, but 2) begrudgingly allow students to use it, but 3) require that they disclose its use.

Lots of interesting reflections here.

Lots of interesting stuff in here, including the difficulty of content moderation, and yet another way that generative AI is screwing everything up.

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.

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.

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 ».

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.

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.

Who benefits from AI? Who doesn’t?

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.

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.

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.

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.

This sucks so much—and encapsulates our world’s obsession with financial success over environmental health.

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.

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.

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.

Generative AI suuuucks, but AI detection software may suck even more.

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.