Winner of the First Prize in the Joyce Rothschild Book AwardsPlatform cooperatives reimagine a world where domestic workers can double their income by establishing their own platform—an internet where platforms such as Twitch, Twitter, and Roblox were owned by their streamers, users, and creators. What if small fishing

Meaningful human oversight over AI requires a critical look at the temporal dynamics of how AI enters our lives. I argue that ideologies such as “move fast and break things” do just that - move fast and break things. Instead, what if we could slow down and contribute to crafting empowering futures?

Video, slides, and transcript from my talk on the challenges of designing with language models

10/22/20 - Recently, there have been increasing calls for computer science curricula to complement existing technical training with topics re...

A fundamental design principle for techno optimists. How we need to move towards friction in digital culture. By Luna Maurer & Roel Wouters

Intentionally poisoning someone else is never morally right. But if someone in the office keeps swiping your lunch, wouldn't you resort to petty Like putting hot sauce in your lunch to deter stealing, Nightshade poisons data used for AI training, giving artists a way to fight back against scraping without consent.

In the world of generated imagery, you’re either drop-dead gorgeous or a wrinkled, bug-eyed freak.

I know, I know, the title of this post is atrociously click-baity. But if we allow Big Tech to get away with making outrageous claims about how their technology is saving humanity and release software that hallucinates, I hope you can forgive me for using the same tactic to bring up an important topic: the environmental impact of Large Language Models like ChatGPT.

As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?

Practical exercises for non-CS educators teaching AI

Ethics and Information Technology - Through hypothetical scenarios, this paper analyses whether machine learning (ML) could resolve one of the main shortcomings present in Christopher...

Silicon Valley's "effective altruism" and "effective accelerationism" only give a thin philosophical veneer to the industry's same old impulses.

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson’s influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.

Translating Language Justice to Digital Platforms Illustration by Somnath Bhatt A guest post by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian. Mashinka is a visiting Mellon Professor of the Practice at Occidental College and an Associate Director of Research for the Future of Democracy program at the Berggruen Institute. Her book, Algorithmic Bias Training, or, Lectures for Intelligent Machines […]

I summarise a few papers I have recently read on what LLMs can and cannot do. One (not surprising) finding is that LLMs skill profile is very different from humans. Which is good, means that human+…

At the dawn of the AI-driven internet, we are witnessing the revenge of free media

Read the current issue of Critical AI.

Errors in machine learning systems are an interesting phenomenon. Obscuring the role of AI as a shiny tool of capital, the phenomenon is usually studied with the aim to overcome those errors. This text aims for another direction by digging into one particular error, the phenomenon of “adversarials”.

Fun fact: The more you tip ChatGPT, the longer the responses are. Who would have thought that AIs love money as much as humans do... - The baseline prompt…

The story of AI images isn’t just about robots, but also about the people behind these strange, futuristic visuals.

In January 2021, we launched ‘A New AI Lexicon:’ a call for contributions to generate alternate narratives, positionalities, and understandings to the better known and widely circulated ways of talking about AI.

The world is racing to develop ever more sophisticated large language models while a small language model unfurls itself in my home.

Maybe more people are writing about the real and potential problems of technology today than ever before. That is mostly a good thing. The…

A Stanford professor’s dismantling of Silicon Valley’s intellectual origins, by Adrian Daub. Published by FSG Originals & Logic.

Amid the coverage of Sam Altman returning to the helm of OpenAI, women are being written out of the future of AI

As a critical researcher of AI myself and experience as entrepreneur I know how hard it is to navigate the trade offs between surviving in the market and being…