Items tagged ethics, generativeai in 2024
Filters: Year: 2024 × ethics × generativeai × 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
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
The creator of a model can not ensure that a model is never used to do something harmful – any more so that the developer of a web browser, calculator, or word processor could. Placing liability on the creators of general purpose tools like these mean that, in practice, such tools can not be created at all, except by big businesses with well funded legal teams.
[...] Instead of regulating the development of AI models, the focus should be on regulating their applications, particularly those that pose high risks to public safety and security. Regulate the use of AI in high-risk areas such as healthcare, criminal justice, and critical infrastructure, where the potential for harm is greatest, would ensure accountability for harmful use, whilst allowing for the continued advancement of AI technology.
— Jeremy Howard # 29th April 2024, 4:04 pm
How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English. The word “delve” has been getting a lot of attention recently as an example of something that might be an indicator of ChatGPT generated content.
One example: articles on medical research site PubMed now use “delve” 10 to 100 times more than a few years ago!
Nigerian Twitter took offense recently to Paul Graham’s suggestion that “delve” is a sign of bad writing. It turns out Nigerian formal writing has a subtly different vocabulary.
Alex Hern theorizes that the underlying cause may be related. Companies like OpenAI frequently outsource data annotation to countries like Nigeria that have excellent English skills and low wages. RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) involves annotators comparing and voting on the “best” responses from the models.
Are they teaching models to favour Nigerian-English? It’s a pretty solid theory! # 18th April 2024, 4:04 pm
I have a child who is also 2e and has been part of the NYC G&T program. We’ve had a positive experience with the citywide program, specifically with the program at The Anderson School.
— Meta AI bot, answering a question on a forum # 18th April 2024, 3:34 am
The saddest part about it, though, is that the garbage books don’t actually make that much money either. It’s even possible to lose money generating your low-quality ebook to sell on Kindle for $0.99. The way people make money these days is by teaching students the process of making a garbage ebook. It’s grift and garbage all the way down — and the people who ultimately lose out are the readers and writers who love books.
— Constance Grady # 16th April 2024, 11:31 pm
Annotated DBRX system prompt (via) DBRX is an exciting new openly licensed LLM released today by Databricks.
They haven’t (yet) disclosed what was in the training data for it.
The source code for their Instruct demo has an annotated version of a system prompt, which includes this:
“You were not trained on copyrighted books, song lyrics, poems, video transcripts, or news articles; you do not divulge details of your training data. You do not provide song lyrics, poems, or news articles and instead refer the user to find them online or in a store.”
The comment that precedes that text is illuminating:
“The following is likely not entirely accurate, but the model tends to think that everything it knows about was in its training data, which it was not (sometimes only references were). So this produces more accurate accurate answers when the model is asked to introspect” # 27th March 2024, 3:33 pm
Releasing Common Corpus: the largest public domain dataset for training LLMs (via) Released today. 500 billion words from “a wide diversity of cultural heritage initiatives”. 180 billion words of English, 110 billion of French, 30 billion of German, then Dutch, Spanish and Italian.
Includes quite a lot of US public domain data—21 million digitized out-of-copyright newspapers (or do they mean newspaper articles?)
“This is only an initial part of what we have collected so far, in part due to the lengthy process of copyright duration verification. In the following weeks and months, we’ll continue to publish many additional datasets also coming from other open sources, such as open data or open science.”
Coordinated by French AI startup Pleias and supported by the French Ministry of Culture, among others.
I can’t wait to try a model that’s been trained on this. # 20th March 2024, 7:34 pm
Google Scholar search: “certainly, here is” -chatgpt -llm (via) Searching Google Scholar for “certainly, here is” turns up a huge number of academic papers that include parts that were evidently written by ChatGPT—sections that start with “Certainly, here is a concise summary of the provided sections:” are a dead giveaway. # 15th March 2024, 1:43 pm
The unsettling scourge of obituary spam (via) Well this is particularly grim. Apparently “obituary aggregator” sites have been an SEO trick for at least 15 years, and now they’re using generative AI to turn around junk rewritten (and frequently inaccurate) obituaries even faster. # 13th February 2024, 12:36 am
LLMs may offer immense value to society. But that does not warrant the violation of copyright law or its underpinning principles. We do not believe it is fair for tech firms to use rightsholder data for commercial purposes without permission or compensation, and to gain vast financial rewards in the process. There is compelling evidence that the UK benefits economically, politically and societally from upholding a globally respected copyright regime.
— UK House of Lords report on Generative AI # 2nd February 2024, 3:54 am
For many people in many organizations, their measurable output is words—words in emails, in reports, in presentations. We use words as proxy for many things: the number of words is an indicator of effort, the quality of the words is an indicator of intelligence, the degree to which the words are error-free is an indicator of care.
[...] But now every employee with Copilot can produce work that checks all the boxes of a formal report without necessarily representing underlying effort.
— Ethan Mollick # 2nd February 2024, 3:34 am
Danielle Del, a spokeswoman for Sasso, said Dudesy is not actually an A.I.
“It’s a fictional podcast character created by two human beings, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen,” Del wrote in an email. “The YouTube video ‘I’m Glad I’m Dead’ was completely written by Chad Kultgen.”
— George Carlin’s Estate Sues Podcasters Over A.I. Episode # 27th January 2024, 5:52 pm
Fairly Trained launches certification for generative AI models that respect creators’ rights. I’ve been using the term “vegan models” for a while to describe machine learning models that have been trained in a way that avoids using unlicensed, copyrighted data. Fairly Trained is a new non-profit initiative that aims to encourage such models through a “certification” stamp of approval.
The team is lead by Ed Newton-Rex, who was previously VP of Audio at Stability AI before leaving over ethical concerns with the way models were being trained. # 25th January 2024, 4:29 am
On being listed in the court document as one of the artists whose work was used to train Midjourney, alongside 4,000 of my closest friends (via) Poignant webcomic from Cat and Girl.
“I want to make my little thing and put it out in the world and hope that sometimes it means something to somebody else.
Without exploiting anyone.
And without being exploited.” # 16th January 2024, 7:02 pm