Items tagged ethics in May, 2024
Filters: Year: 2024 × Month: May × ethics × Sorted by date
Spam, junk … slop? The latest wave of AI behind the ‘zombie internet’. I'm quoted in this piece in the Guardian about slop:
# 19th May 2024, 7:54 pmI think having a name for this is really important, because it gives people a concise way to talk about the problem.
Before the term ‘spam’ entered general use it wasn’t necessarily clear to everyone that unwanted marketing messages were a bad way to behave. I’m hoping ‘slop’ has the same impact – it can make it clear to people that generating and publishing unreviewed AI-generated content is bad behaviour.
But where the company once limited itself to gathering low-hanging fruit along the lines of “what time is the super bowl,” on Tuesday executives showcased generative AI tools that will someday plan an entire anniversary dinner, or cross-country-move, or trip abroad. A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models.
— Casey Newton # 15th May 2024, 10:23 pm
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
— Nathaniel Borenstein # 8th May 2024, 8:24 pm
Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content
I saw this tweet yesterday from @deepfates, and I am very on board with this:
[... 301 words]Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the term for unwanted emails, “slop” is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content
— @deepfates # 7th May 2024, 3:59 pm
I believe these things:
1. If you use generative tools to produce or modify your images, you have abandoned photointegrity.
2. That’s not always wrong. Sometimes you need an image of a space battle or a Triceratops family or whatever.
3. What is always wrong is using this stuff without disclosing it.
— Tim Bray # 4th May 2024, 4:26 pm
AI is the most anthropomorphized technology in history, starting with the name—intelligence—and plenty of other words thrown around the field: learning, neural, vision, attention, bias, hallucination. These references only make sense to us because they are hallmarks of being human. [...]
There is something kind of pathological going on here. One of the most exciting advances in computer science ever achieved, with so many promising uses, and we can’t think beyond the most obvious, least useful application? What, because we want to see ourselves in this technology? [...]
Anthropomorphizing AI not only misleads, but suggests we are on equal footing with, even subservient to, this technology, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
— Zach Seward # 2nd May 2024, 7:44 pm