“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”
African AI workers, mostly from Kenya, released an open letter to Joe Biden this week asking him stop US tech companies from “systemically abusing and exploiting African workers” and to end the “modern day slavery” they’re subjected to.
A team at the University of Chicago just released a tool called Nightshade that makes invisible changes to digital images. The selling point is that these changes “poison” AI models that try to use the images as training data.
When +972Mag revealed that Israel was using an #AI called Lavender and trained on faulty data to decide who is or isn't a militant, and another one called Where's Daddy to track them until they were home to kill the whole family, many folks here rightfully wanted to know who was providing the servers and computer infrastructure for that.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to the document, has its own “landing zone” into Google Cloud—a secure entry point to Google-provided computing infrastructure, which would allow the ministry to store and process data, and access AI services.
Google’s vision for the future of search shows how generative AI is all about increasing corporate power.
Instead of sending you to different websites, Google has scraped the open web to generate plagiarized answers to keep you looking at ads on Google. We need to stop being distracted by AI hype and fantasies about intelligent machines, so we can push back on the real threats before it’s too late.
I was invited by #Meta via a third party to join a roundtable about #AI fairness. There was a generous honorarium. They were asking me to sign an NDA. I said I wouldn't do it unless I could publicly declare my participation, the $ involved, and continue to criticise Meta based on public info. They ghosted me ...
Just a few months after the launch of ChatGPT, copywriters and graphic designers (freelancers) have been affected by a significant drop in the number of contracts received, and in those that have received them - a drop in earnings. being more skilled was no shield against loss of work or earnings. Being more skilled was no shield against loss of work or earnings https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4527336#ai#aftificialintelligence#chatgpt#gpt
Wow: “Early in the COVID-19 pandemic a blizzard of disinformation had deadly consequences. A Carnegie Mellon study analyzed more than 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 at the height of the first lockdown. Eighty-two percent of influential users advocating for “reopening America” were bots. This was a targeted “propaganda machine,” most likely Russian, designed to intensify the worst public health crisis in a century.”
It's fashionable to criticize #LLMs, but can you think of another human invention that allows us to spend the energy budget of Tanzania to lift shitposts out of context and present them as if they were authoritative knowledge?
Watch the others in the room. The assholes who jeer and manhandle the protestors. These are your peers in the tech industry. These are the “acceptable folks” in tech. Fuck these people.
Look at their faces. They know exactly what they’re complict in. Look at their smug smiles. Dickheads each one.
Microsoft is really hitting it out of the park with its AI-generated travel stories! If you visit Ottawa, it highly recommends the Ottawa Food Bank and provides a tip for tourists: “Consider going into it on an empty stomach.”
“ChatGPT is full of sensitive private information and spits out verbatim text from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, fandom wikis, Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, Wikipedia pages, news blogs, random internet comments, and much more.”
Just as we all knew all along, #Reddit’s move to charge exorbitant fees for API access was so they can cut lucrative deals to sell user-created material to train #AI models.
I was a redditor of about 15 years when I decided to delete everything I wrote and close my account because I foresaw this hostile repurposing of what is essentially a massive store of freely-accessible, context-rich community-generated content, made by people who didn’t necessarily want their content to be used for training without compensation.
AI training is largely built on top of exploitation of labor for private gain. It’s legal in many cases, but it’s often unethical and immoral.
“Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO”