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.

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.

Some good thoughts here by Masnick.

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.)

Compelling essay about vain hopes for the future.

Such a depressing article.

Some better, broader coverage of complaints I made in a blog post earlier this week.

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.

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.

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?

I think this might be one of the best things I’ve read on generative AI.

Ugh, so creepy.

Sure, Midjourney is fun, but this is the price we’re paying for that kind of technology out in the world.

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. Prosser, the man who wants to knock over Dent’s house to build a bypass.

There are some important and interesting pieces of information in here.

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. If my department started to use generative AI as a note-taking tool in faculty meetings (the specific focus of this survey), we would probably benefit from it!

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?

Bookmarking for future reference. Are the purported benefits of generative AI worth these (and other) costs?

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.