Digital Ethics

Wow!

archived 26 Aug 2023 14:34:58 UTC

“The computer has long been a solution looking for problems—the ultimate technological fix which insulates us from having to look at problems.” – Joseph Weizenbaum (1983)   Trying to kee…

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence – but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans

A recent crop of AI systems claiming to detect AI-generated text perform poorly—and it doesn’t take much to get past them.

PDF | The objective of this thesis is to propose and analyse the digital state through an exploration of the governmentalities of Facebook. In this... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

August has not been kind to generative AI

When AI Taylor Swift sings “My Way,” who gets paid?

Porcha Woodruff thought the police who showed up at her door to arrest her for carjacking were joking. She is the first woman known to be wrongfully accused as a result of facial recognition technology.

Generative AI tools have empowered amateurs and entrepreneurs to build mind-boggling amounts of non-consensual porn.

Generative AI will enrich investors and be deployed against everyone else

Artwork created by artificial intelligence isn’t eligible for copyright protection because it lacks human authorship, a Washington, D.C., federal judge decided Friday.

Stephen King, Zadie Smith, and Michael Pollan are among thousands of writers whose copyrighted works are being used to train large language models.

I mentioned in my last post complimenting Netsafe New Zealand on its submission on the Safer Online Services and Media Platforms proposals, the proactive…

AI is making its way into decision-making in battle. Who’s to blame when something goes wrong?

Whistleblower reveals Netherlands’ use of secret and potentially illegal algorithm to score visa applicants

In 2008, while working with Will Smith on the set of a film that never ended up getting made, Remington Scott had an epiphany. The visual effects director was watching Smith stand in a photogrammetry booth, with dozens of cameras capturing the actor’s facial features from every possible angle. “ ...

In late 2016 Prof Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of neural networks, said that it’s “quite obvious that we should stop training…

7 years ago, 1 man caused a nationwide shortage of radiologists. Here’s how: 👉 Professor Geoffrey Hinton said “we should stop training radiologists”… | 57 comments on LinkedIn

Official: "It is simply not feasible to read every book" for depictions of sex.

Alphabet's Google was accused in a proposed class action lawsuit on Tuesday of misusing vast amounts of personal information and copyrighted material to train its artificial intelligence systems.

Last weekend, the White House challenged thousands of hackers to try to outsmart top generative AI models from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and more.

Let’s say someone walks into an old-fashioned record store looking for the Bright Eyes song “False Advertising.” Upon finding and buying the album, she’d have little reason to fear that store employees might sneak into her house later and take it back from her. She’d also have no cause to think that the album was counterfeit and not by the band at all. Now let’s say instead that the same song inspires an artist to create a mural depicting the FTC’s greatest false ad cases, and the mural gets displayed in a local gallery. The artist might be surprised if the gallery later shuts its doors and refuses to return the mural . . . or if some other company secretly reuses bits of it to make something else.

The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of AI in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of AI, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable. This means that any factual AI systems created in the short-run are at best decoys. When we think these systems capture something deep about ourselves and our thinking, we induce distorted and impoverished images of ourselves and our cognition. In other words, AI in current practice is deteriorating our theoretical understanding of cognition rather than advancing and enhancing it. The situation could be remediated by releasing the grip of the currently dominant view on AI and by returning to the idea of AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science. In reclaiming this older idea of AI, however, it is important not to repeat conceptual mistakes of the past (and present) that brought us to where we are today.

Timnit Gebru is not just a pioneering critic of dangerous AI datasets who calls bullshit on bad science pushed by the likes of OpenAI, or a tireless champion of racial, gender, and climate justice in computing. She's also someone who wants to build something different. This week on Reimagining, we t

Discover AI image statistics: the total number of AI images, the number of images created with Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and more.

Several years ago, while still a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini began to notice a troubling pattern in facial recognition technology––an inability to detect a wide range of skin tones and facial structures, even in widely available systems employed by Big Tech, government agencies, and law enforcement.