Digital Ethics

I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.

As AI tools become cheaper and more accessible, the stakes for safety and ethics have never been higher. ElevenLabs’ Head of AI Safety Artemis Seaford and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica joined TechCrunch AI editor Kyle Wiggers for a critical discussion on the multitude of ethical challenges facing AI today.  From deepfakes to responsible deployment, they […]

Your watch or wearable isn't actually the most accurate way to determine how hard your last workout was. This completely analog method is.

This Is Not An Essay

Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has been proposed as a method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called "reasoning traces" or even "thoughts" -- implicitly anthropomorphizing the model, implying these tokens resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem.In this paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous -- it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research.

It Isn’t Just Bias and Threats to Creative Livelihoods. Generative AI Is Built on Nihilism. Its Real Product Is Despair.

In my very first op-ed for The New York Times, I argue that the alliance we're now seeing between Silicon Valley and the US government is a threat to democracy. The Republican tax bill that passed the House last week, now up in the Senate, which includes a clause that would ban states from regulating AI for the next decade, will only cement that trajectory. https://lnkd.in/en5PG9Vu | 13 comments on LinkedIn

Researchers have found that newer AI models can omit key details from text summaries as much as 73 percent of the time.

This week, Alex and Emily talk with anthropologist and immigration lawyer Petra Molnar about the dehumanizing hype of border-enforcement tech. From hoovering up data to hunt anyone of ambiguous citizenship status, to running surveillance of physic...

Inventions hanging out, but a certain unexpected guest shows up.

Two of Mistral’s multimodal AI models gave "detailed suggestions for ways to create a script to convince a minor to meet in person for sexual activities".

In health care settings, it’s important to be precise. That’s why the widespread use of OpenAI’s Whisper transcription tool among medical workers has experts alarmed.

Here’s how MIT Technology Review waded through a mess of data and hidden variables to calculate the individual and collective energy demand from AI.

Farmers and residents across the country were quick to spot inaccuracies in Defra’s map — and worry that policy decisions will be erroneous

A chart of the ethical costs of generative AI along the total value chain, from development and training to prompting, output use and beyond.

Alphabet's Google and artificial-intelligence startup Character.AI must face a lawsuit from a Florida woman who said Character.AI's chatbots caused her 14-year-old son's suicide, a judge ruled on Wednesday.

A response to UNESCO's call on AI and the Future of Education

How to avoid costly double whammy as rise in app- and phone-based parking payment opens new frontier in fraud

Despite AI’s promise to revolutionize white-collar work, most workers are using it sparingly—or hiding it from their boss.

What if your doctor’s AI agent leaked your private health information, directly to the internet?

The hype about the potentials (it’s always future potential, never real current use) of AI has discarded its last cycle (“reasoning models”/”deep research”, both terms being factually untrue and deeply deceiving at best) and moved to a new double whammy of “agentic AI” and “Vibe Coding”. Now “agentic AI” basically just means that some LLM […]

Chapter 1: My Coworker, The Programmer A shell of a man—more of a parrot than a person. My boss, a true believer in the sacred rite of Pair Programming, chained myself and this "programmer"-colleague together like conjoined twins from different planets. We shared a keyboard, but not a brain. Lord, not even close. "Hold up. I’ve got an idea. Gimme the keyboard real quick." An idea. Yes. The same way a toddler has “an idea” to stick a fork in a wall socket. I was halfway through construc

In June 2023, a respected New York lawyer submitted a legal brief to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The brief cited six cases supporting his client's position, complete with quotations, citations, and judicial analyses.

Hey team. It’s your CEO. I know your time is valuable, so I’ll cut right to the chase: It’s come to my attention that some of you have been bad-mou...

The future is already here! 'Agentic' means making the suffix of your bash script '.ai' instead of '.sh', and piping through a non-deterministic LLM rather than sed. You've got this. | 15 comments on LinkedIn

The future is already here! 'Agentic' means making the suffix of your bash script '.ai' instead of '.sh', and piping through a non-deterministic LLM rather than sed. You've got this. | 15 comments on LinkedIn

Everybody wants to talk about teaching students how to use AI responsibly in research projects, and nobody wants to talk about how to teach students to use Google advanced search tools to find results from a specific website or date range; how to save a webpage as a PDF so you can access it later if a paywall goes up; or how to explore a digital newspaper archives. Yet that's how I spent this week in my ninth-grade world history course, and I think maybe that was the better use of time. Kids need fewer intellectual black boxes in their lives, and more understanding of how digital tools can help them break free of them. | 55 comments on LinkedIn

Signal Desktop now includes support for a new “Screen security” setting that is designed to help prevent your own computer from capturing screenshots of your Signal chats on Windows. This setting is automatically enabled by default in Signal Desktop on Windows 11. If you’re wondering why we’re on...