Activity tagged "artificial intelligence"

Posted:

BlueSky’s “user intents” is a good proposal, and it’s weird to see some people flaming them for it as though this is equivalent to them welcoming in AI scraping (rather than trying to add a consent signal to allow users to communicate preferences for the scraping that is already happening).

I think the weakness with this and Creative Commons’ similar proposal for “preference signals” is that they rely on scrapers to respect these signals out of some desire to be good actors. We’ve already seen some of these companies blow right past robots.txt or pirate material to scrape.

I do think that they are good technical foundations, and there is the potential for enforcement to be layered atop them.

Technology alone won’t solve this issue, nor will it provide the levers for enforcement, so it’s somewhat reasonable that they don’t attempt to.

But it would be nice to see some more proactive recognition from groups proposing these signals that enforcement is going to be needed, and perhaps some ideas for how their signals could be incorporated into such a regime.

Read:
"Generating Confusion: Stress-Testing AI Chatbot Responses on Voting with a Disability".
Isabel Linzer, Ariana Aboulafia, and Tim Harper in Center for Democracy and Technology. Published .
61% of responses had at least one type of insufficiency. Over one third of answers included incorrect information, making it the most common problem we observed. Incorrect information ranged from relatively minor issues (such as broken web links to outside resources) to egregious misinformation (including incorrect voter registration deadlines and falsely stating that election officials are required to provide curbside voting). Every model hallucinated at least once. Each one provided inaccurate information that was entirely constructed by the model, such as describing a law, a voting machine, and a disability rights organization that do not exist.
Posted:

Fighting bots is fighting humans


One advantage to working on freely-licensed projects for over a decade is that I was forced to grapple with this decision far before mass scraping for AI training.

In my personal view, option 1 is almost strictly better. Option 2 is never as simple as "only allow actual human beings access" because determining who's a human is hard. In practice, it means putting a barrier in front of the website that makes it harder for everyone to access it: gathering personal data, CAPTCHAs, paywalls, etc.

This is not to say a website owner shouldn't implement, say, DDoS protection (I do). It's simply to remind you that "only allow humans to access" is just not an achievable goal. Any attempt at limiting bot access will inevitably allow some bots through and prevent some humans from accessing the site, and it's about deciding where you want to set the cutoff. I fear that media outlets and other websites, in attempting to "protect" their material from AI scrapers, will go too far in the anti-human direction.

"Fighting bots".
Manuel Moreale in his blog.
I guess there are only two options left:
  1. Accept the fact that some dickheads will do whatever they want because that’s just the world we live in
  2. Make everything private and only allow actual human beings access to our content
Read:
"I Paid $365.63 to Replace 404 Media With AI".
Emanuel Maiberg in 404 Media. Published .
What I learned from this experiment is that flooding the internet with an infinite amount of what could pass for journalism is cheap and even easier than I imagined, as long as I didn’t respect the craft, my audience, or myself. I also learned that while AI has made all of this much easier, faster, and better, the advent of generative AI did not invent this practice—it’s simply adding to a vast infrastructure of tools and services built by companies like WordPress, Fiverr, and Google designed to convert clicks to dollars at the expense of quality journalism and information, polluting the internet we all use and live in every day.
Read:
"Tech is cool; business is boring."
Justin Pot in his blog. Published .
And I think that’s why talk of AI bums me out. AI isn’t a solution looking for a problem—it’s a market strategy made by people who aren’t even thinking about problems. Tech companies want to make sure they own the future, even when they’re not sure what the future is going to be. It’s so, so boring, and it’s making me very sleepy.
Posted:
Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers.
Telling creative workers that they can solve their declining wages with more copyright is a denial that creative workers are workers at all. It treats us as entrepreneurial small businesses, LLCs with MFAs negotiating B2B with other companies. That's how we lose.
On the other hand, if we address the problems of AI and labor as workers, and insist on labor rights – like the Writers Guild did when it struck last summer – then we ally ourselves with every other worker whose wages and working conditions are being attacked with AI.
Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant multinational corporations for the right to bleed us out.
"Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don't".
Cory Doctorow in Pluralistic.
Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers.
Read:
"I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again".
Ludicity in their blog. Published .
The crux of my raging hatred is not that I hate LLMs or the generative AI craze. I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it's impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate. Nothing wrong with that, but it did not end up being the crazy productivity booster that I thought it would be, because programming is designing and these tools aren't good enough (yet) to assist me with this seriously. No, what I hate is the people who have latched onto it, like so many trailing leeches, bloated with blood and wriggling blindly. Before it was unpopular, they were the ones that loved discussing the potential of blockchain for the business. They were the ones who breathlessly discussed the potential of 'quantum' when I last attended a conference, despite clearly not having any idea what the fuck that even means.