Digital Ethics

A conversation with Chat GPT can consume a bottle of water. So why is big tech setting up AI in some of the world’s driest countries?

Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of

Carbon capture outfits could be making up to $45B, say analysts

Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses.

By Abeba Birhane. We live in a world where technological corporations hold unprecedented power and influence. Technological solutions to social, political, and economic challenges are rampant. In the Global South, technology that is developed with Western perspectives, values, and interests is imported with little regulation or critical scrutiny. This work examines how Western tech monopolies, with their desire to dominate, control and influence social, political, and cultural discourse, share common characteristics with traditional colonialism. However, while traditional colonialism is driven by political and government forces, algorithmic colonialism is driven by corporate agendas. While the former used brute force domination, colonialism in the age of AI takes the form of ‘state-of-the-art algorithms’ and ‘AI driven solutions’ to social problems. Not only is Western-developed AI unfit for African problems, the West’s algorithmic invasion simultaneously impoverishes development of local products while also leaving the continent dependent on Western software and infrastructure. By drawing examples from various parts of the continent, this paper illustrates how the AI invasion of Africa echoes colonial era exploitation. This paper then concludes by outlining a vision of AI rooted in local community needs and interests.

Artificial intelligence researchers said Friday that they have deleted more than 2,000 web links to suspected child sexual abuse imagery from a dataset used to train popular AI image-generator tools.

​An inquiry into models that can create child sexual abuse material may have yielded results

Almost everyone I talk to in the tech industry is experiencing some level of burnout. Even if they don’t call it by that name, they are…

Study Reveals: AI Training is Copyright Infringement Brussels/Berlin - September 5, 2024: A computer scientist and a legal scholar shed light on the black…

A Blog post by Sasha Luccioni on Hugging Face

archived 31 Aug 2024 21:27:52 UTC

On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s still a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.

Surveillance Watch is an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.

A comprehensive living database of over 700 AI risks categorized by their cause and risk domain.

The large language model gets medical calls wrong more often than not.

A briefing from Eirgrid, which operates the electricity network in Ireland, warned of a possible "mass exodus" of data centres from the country if new connection agreements could not be signed off on.

But not doing it could make it look irresponsible.

Why clear documentation matters! 🤣 Clear documentation is the GPS in an AI-driven world, guiding us to harness technology without losing our irreplaceable… | 214 comments on LinkedIn

Sam Altman’s ChatGPT promises to transform the global economy. But it also poses an enormous threat. Here, a scientist who appeared with Altman before the US Senate on AI safety flags up the danger in AI – and in Altman himself

The tech industry is looking more and more like NASA in its darkest hours

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The training process for a single AI model, such as an LLM, can consume thousands of megawatt hours of electricity and emit hundreds of tons of carbon. AI model training can also lead to the evaporation of an astonishing amount of freshwater into the atmosphere for data center heat rejection, potentially exacerbating stress on our already limited freshwater resources. These environmental impacts are expected to escalate considerably, and there remains a widening disparity in how different regions and communities are affected. The ability to flexibly deploy and manage AI computing across a network of geographically distributed data centers offers substantial opportunities to tackle AI’s environmental inequality by prioritizing disadvantaged regions and equitably distributing the overall negative environmental impact.

Video and data gathered by the Wall Street Journal from over 200 Tesla Autopilot crashes reveals that longstanding concerns about Tesla’s camera-based technology, which differs from the rest of the industry, are showing up on the roads and putting the public at risk.⁠ Photo Illustration: Ryan Trefes

Colonialism was motivated by the promise of plundering the environment and subjugating populations. Its legacy makes it far more challenging to address the climate crisis and implement equitable solutions.

Yesterday, OpenAI unveiled its prototype AI search engine, SearchGPT. However, the pre-recorded demo video meant to showcase the tool's capabilities contained a significant error, putting SearchGPT in familiar company.

What the Luddites can teach us about resisting an automated future.

As the demand for AI processing power grows and thermal loads increase, liquid cooling has become a critical element in data center design. However, technology company Schneider Electric international operations secure power division senior VP Natalya Makarochkina says this is a challenge in water-scarce countries such as South Africa, therefore necessitating an innovative and comprehensive, yet flexible, approach. “Cooling towers and other evaporative cooling techniques are popular heat rejection solutions for hyperscale data centres because of their high efficiency and large cooling capacity.

Would you scale back consumption to save the planet?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now ubiquitous, from virtual assistants to algorithms driving autonomous vehicles to content creation and personalized

The maths isn’t adding up.