You don't have to accept the arguments of capitalism's defenders to take those arguments seriously. When Adam Smith railed against rentiers and elevated profit to a means of converting the intrinsic selfishness of the wealthy into an engine of production, he had a point:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Once Google captured its market, its regulators and its workforce, it no longer had to worry about being a good search-engine - it could sacrifice quality for profits, without consequence:
Am I the only one skeptical about modern developers focusing so much on making AI look and sound like humans? Is it god’s syndrome “create them to reflect their image” kind of thing? Because what I need from AI as an individual is do the mundane tasks and be recognizable. I don’t need it to be able to impersonate a virtual friend or anything.
On 7-8 May in #Washington DC, the city’s biggest convention hall welcomed #America’s #military industrial complex, its top #technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of #warcrimes. Of course, that’s not how they would describe it
It was the inaugural “AI Expo for National Competitiveness”, whose lead sponsor was #Palantir, who are currently, supplying some of its #AI products to the #Israel#Defense Forces
The #AI-powered "Search Generative Experience (#SGE)" that the company had been trialing for months is rolling out to everyone in the #US. The top of many results (especially questions) are now dominated by an #AIBox that scrapes the #web and gives you a sometimes-correct summary without needing to click on a single result.
Stuff posted on #Reddit is getting incorporated into #ChatGPT, Reddit and #OpenAI announced on Thursday. The new partnership grants OpenAI access to Reddit’s #DataAPI, giving the generative AI firm real-time access to Reddit posts. #AI#GenerativeAi
W ostatnim odcinku pierwszego sezonu ICD Weekend Arek i Kuba opowiadają o newsach dotyczacych Facebooka, Apple i AI oraz dzielą się nowymi rekomendacjami aplikacji z F-Droida.
"1. Unreliable and nonreplicable searches…
2. Increased likelihood of citation ethics violations…
3. Increased likelihood of bias in the literature…
4. Enabling shoddy research…"
Artificial Intelligence: What Is Behind the Technology of the Future? by Gerhard Paaß & Dirk Hecker (2024)
The English translation of the book “Künstliche Intelligenz – Was steckt hinter der Technologie der Zukunft?” originally published in German (Springer Vieweg, 2020), this book is addressed to the general public, from interested citizens to corporate executives who want to develop a better and deeper understanding of AI technologies and assess their consequences.
How New Science Fiction Could Help Us Improve AI - Scientific American
Fascinating article about organizations trying foster positive sci-fi stories about AI. Good reason why AI sci-fi is mainly negative—more plausible given humankind’s record AND more interesting. My upcoming book The HONOR System is case in point.
Much as I dislike the theft of human labor that feeds many of the #generativeAI products we see today, I have to agree with @pluralistic that #copyright law is the wrong way to address the problem.
To frame the issue concretely: think of whom copyright law has benefited in the past, and then explain how it would benefit the individual creator when it is applied to #AI. (Hint: it won’t.)
Copyright law is already abused and extended to an absurd degree today. It already overreaches. It impoverishes society by putting up barriers to creation and allowing toll-collectors to exist between citizen artists and their audience.
Labor law is likely what we need to lean on. #unions and #guilds protect creators in a way that copyright cannot. Inequality and unequal bargaining power that lead to exploitation of artists and workers is what we need to address head-on.
@990000 I would go further to say that applying #copyright law to #AI will take us further from the equitable future we want. If copyright is successfully applied to AI, what we will see after the dust settles is a handful of media behemoths that profit mightily from AI, without slowing down the damage that AI does to the value of creative human labor.
I always return to this pithy guide by @emilymbender when thinking about this topic: we need to think of AI as automation, albeit one that is more effective at displacing a wide variety of human labor than ever. We can’t use copyright to stop automation; it will just enrich a different set of kingpins without stopping its effects.