I didn’t need to read a printer recommendation article today, but I’m so glad I did. The rage about the world we live in is great.

Studio Ghibli pictures are neat (legitimately! it’s one of the first generative AI things that’s tempted me!), but these deepfakes are the price we pay for them, and I think that’s too high a price.

I think this is a good example of why digital labor is a particularly salient critique of generative AI. Yes, Wikimedia content is licensed, but not as strictly as copyrighted works. Yet, ripping off of their work is arguably worse than grabbing some copyrighted works.

We keep talking about generative AI as though it’s a tool that can be used for good or bad when I think it’s better to think of it as an entire system that benefits some at the expense of others. It’s not that I want to put a tool back in a box—it’s that I want to live in a better world.

I skipped over this article the first few times I saw it, but I think there’s some good stuff in here. Is defying Ghibli the point?

Generative AI products make me mad, I don’t like them, and I’m not going to defend them. That said, if this gets framed as a copyright problem, is there any way to give Studio Ghibli (or Pixar or the Seuss estate) power to cry foul here that doesn’t also shut down fan art, parodies, and the like? I’m skeptical, and that’s why I think “labor” is the more productive—if more legally ambiguous—framing here.

Really wishing Jesus had told a converse version of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard that I could use for theological arguments against generative AI. You know: Bunch of volunteers make a beautiful community garden that a rich dude takes over to further his wealth.

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.

Thanks to this article from The Atlantic that I saw on Bluesky, I’ve been able to confirm something that I’ve long assumed to be the case: that my creative and scholarly work is being used to train generative AI tools. More specifically, I used the searchable database embedded in the article to search for myself and find that at least eight of my articles (plus two corrections) are available in the LibGen pirate library—which means that they were almost certainly used by Meta to train their Llama LLM.

This is a mess of a post blending thoughts on tech policy with religious ideas and lacking the kind of obvious throughline or structure that I’d like it to have. It’s also been in my head for a couple of weeks, and it’s time to release it into the world rather than wait for it to be something better. So, here it is:

I am frustrated with generative AI technology for many reasons, but one of the things at the top of that list is the knowledge that today’s kids are growing up in a world where it is possible—even likely—that their middle and high school experiences are going to involve someone using generative AI tools to produce deepfake nudes (or other non-consensual intimate imagery—NCII) of them. See, for example, this horrifying story from the New York Times last April.

The “brute force” metaphor is helpful here, and the article also draws attention to the vulnerability of algorithmic media to generative AI brute forcing.

I believe that scraping the internet to profit off of generative AI is ethically problematic BUT I concede that it should be fair use BUT this is still a soulless and terrible argument.

Oh, please no. I get (and support) that Community of Christ wants to explore doing digital church, but it also has really compelling theological reasons to not deploy generative AI products, and this makes me sad.

Dentist’s office tried to get me to sign away my health data for AI training, but at least I got to talk Astérix with the German dentist and hygienist.

I get a lot of reading done through hoopla, but this kind of story is starting to sour me on the platform.

Throughout my career, I’ve been a data-first researcher, and theory has always been one of my weak areas. This is not to say that I dismiss the importance of theory: I appreciate danah boyd and Kate Crawford’s critique of Chris Anderson’s “the numbers speak for themselves” in their 2012 paper Critical Questions for Big Data as much as I appreciate Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s similar critique in their book Data Feminism. It’s just that while I agree that theory is important, I’ve never been well-versed in it—except for the loose theoretical framework of sociocultural learning, multiple literacies, and social communities and spaces that I bring to much of my work (even that work that has gone beyond educational technology research.

Yeah, it’s really hard to have any sympathy here at all.

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.