Digital Ethics

The US Supreme Court’s upcoming decision could shift the interpretation of fair use law—and all the people, and tools, that turn to it for protection.

In its 7-2 ruling Thursday, the Supreme Court said the late artist infringed on a photographer's copyright when he created a series of works based on an image of the pop star Prince.

A new study in Denmark used machine learning techniques on photographs of faces of Danish politicians to predict whether their political ideology is left- or right-wing. The accuracy of predictions was 61%. Faces of right-wing politicians were more likely to have happy and less likely to have neutral facial expressions. Women with attractive faces were more likely to be right-wing, while women whose faces showed contempt were more likely to be left-wing. The study was published in Scientific Reports. ...

Discord's captcha asked users to identify a 'Yoko,' a snail-like object that does not exist and was created by AI.

We’re currently witnessing a technological disruption that will have an unimaginable impact on our society. The only problem is, that we haven’t dealt with racked up ethical debt in the tech industry, and now we’re building the future on a shaky foundation. In this article you will find out why caring about ethics is risk management, and brand protection.

Automated dialogue or conversational systems are anthropomorphised by developers and personified by users. While a degree of anthropomorphism is inevitable, conscious and unconscious design choices can guide users to personify them to varying degrees. Encouraging users to relate to automated systems as if they were human can lead to transparency and trust issues, and high risk scenarios caused by over-reliance on their outputs. As a result, natural language processing researchers have begun to investigate factors that induce personification and develop resources to mitigate such effects. However, these efforts are fragmented, and many aspects of anthropomorphism have yet to be considered. In this paper, we discuss the linguistic factors that contribute to the anthropomorphism of dialogue systems and the harms that can arise, arguing that it can reinforce stereotypes of gender roles and notions of acceptable language. We recommend that future efforts towards developing dialogue systems take particular care in their design, development, release, and description; and attend to the many linguistic cues that can elicit personification by users.

Many parents are frustrated with games that encourage children to spend money to advance.

The Writers Guild of America has its work cut out in the latest struggle against the perennial problem of automation.

Giant AIs abstract away the ‘knowledge of the territory’ in favour of the atlas view of all that is present on the internet. Yet the territory can only be captured by the people doing the tasks that giant AIs are trying to replace.

I’ve been learning a lot lately about how the currently popular AIs that generate images from text prompts work. Now that I can find virtually everything I’ve ever published in those databases, I think it’s time to explain this to others: Opening Remarks I regularly revise and add to this article when I learn something […]

The Federal Trade Commission today issued a warning that the increasing use of consumers’ biometric information and related technologies, including those powered by machine learni

Intrigued by reports of the New York case in which lawyers cited non-existent case law produced by generative AI, I took a quick look at the public court… | 45 comments on LinkedIn

AFFIDAVIT of Peter LoDuca in Opposition re: 16 MOTION to Dismiss pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).. Document filed by Roberto Mata. (Attachments: # 1 Affidavit Affidavit of Steven Schwartz).(LoDuca, Peter) (Entered: 05/25/2023)

A top European Union official says Twitter has dropped out of the bloc's voluntary agreement to combat online disinformation. European Commissioner Thierry Breton tweeted Friday that Twitter had pulled out of the EU’s disinformation “code of practice” that other major social media platforms have pledged to support. But he added that Twitter’s “obligation” remained, referring to the EU’s tough new digital rules taking effect in August. San Francisco-based Twitter responded with an automated reply, as it does to most press inquiries, and did not comment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have successfully been applied to code generation tasks, raising the question of how well these models understand programming. Typical programming languages have...

An interesting thought from Edward Snowden at Consensus 2023 (at 29 min 50 sec, link in the comment), on #AI, understanding of and difference between utility…

I hope all the people who are gushing over Sam Altman's recent statements about AI and regulation take a close look at the document that he and others at Open…

OpenAI's ethics washing: yesterday Altman threatened to stop operating in Europe due to the EU AI Act (far in the future, not now). Contrast with his last… | 13 comments on LinkedIn

With the advent of ChatGPT, large language models (LLMs) went from a relatively niche topic to something that many, many people have been…

The Ethiopian-born computer scientist lost her job after pointing out the inequalities built into AI. But after decades working with technology companies, she knows all too much about discrimination

The Online Safety Bill is a model for stripping citizens of their privacy. We won’t go along with it

Here’s how I used AI to clone a 60 Minutes correspondent’s voice to trick a colleague into handing over Sharyn's passport number. I cloned Sharyn’s voice then… | 177 comments on LinkedIn

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has been hit with a formal suspension order requiring it to stop exporting European Union user data to the US for processing

Neeva was ahead of Google on a lot of things in search — but still couldn’t make users switch

Discover how companies are implementing AI adoption strategies: from Shutterstock to Quora.

Singularism vs. physicalism: two very different ways of looking at AI risk.

Adaptive algorithms have been linked to terrorist attacks and beneficial social movements. Governing them requires new science on collective human–algorithm behaviour.