I read this when Wil first published it, but I thought of it again today with even more gratitude—for both Wil and Senator Fetterman. I’ve been wondering recently whether I should refrain from making particular commitments or pursuits because of my own struggles with mental health, and knowing that there’s someone with depression serving in the U.S. Senate is giving me hope.

Content moderation is hard, and moderating AI content definitely seems harder to me. However, so long as OpenAI has control over ChatGPT (and benefits from others’ use of it), I do think it has a responsibility to shape what it can produce. That said, there remains a deeper, legitimate question about how much influence a single company should have over LLM output.

This is just so petty. I don’t know how his leadership at Twitter is defensible anymore.

Interesting and important read.

Interesting reflection here.

Every time I think this acquisition can’t get dumber, it does.

Somewhat meandering read, but I think there are interesting implications for both teaching and research.

Some good coverage of the consequences of API restrictions for researchers—though I think we still need clarification from Twitter about whether the academic dev status is being handled separately from primary dev status.

I’d seen some of the headlines Masnick is critiquing here, but I hadn’t read the articles. I appreciate this critique and overview.

Important points in here.

Important to keep an eye on this.

Of all the dumb responses to perfectly legitimate content moderation, this is perhaps the dumbest.

Just because some worries about ChatGPT are, indeed, moral panics doesn’t mean that there aren’t legtimate criticisms of the technology—including from an educational perspective. I happen to agree with Masnick that schools ultimately need to roll with the punches here, but given how much we already expect of our schools and teachers, it’s reasonable to resent being punched in the first place. Masnick’s point about the error rate for detecting AI-generated text is an important one, though: I don’t think plagiarism-detecting surveillance is at all the right response.

I presume this decisuon also cuts off academics; this is going to have a huge impact on research, and not in a good way. I’m glad I’ve pivoted to other platforms, but this is still infuriating.

Fascinating read. I can’t believe it’s been 20 years… I remember learning the news at a Boy Scout activity.

What a dumb world we live in.

Why… why don’t we better anticipate better misuses like this? Are technological “progress” and market opportunities more important than these side effects?

Well, this is horrifying. Another example of a news article I wish weren’t relevant to my research.

This is dumb and gross, and another reason I’ll never use Spotify.

Franchement, c’est parfait.

I wish this weren’t as relevant as it is to my work on Mormon Twitter, but here we are.

Welp, all the more reason to leave birdsite behind.

Headline overstates things a bit, and I’m on team “change the assessments,” but it’s still worth asking if AI developers are appropriately anticipating the disruptions these tools are causing.

Glad this story is still getting attention, because it so neatly demonstrates why facial recognition is scary. We shouldn’t tolerate this level of surveillance—by private or public actors.

Looks like the job of AI training is as awful as the job of content moderation.