125 items tagged “ethics”
2023
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) supervises, sets rules for, and enforces numerous federal consumer financial laws and guards consumers in the financial marketplace from unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices and from discrimination [...] the fact that the technology used to make a credit decision is too complex, opaque, or new is not a defense for violating these laws.
The AI Writing thing is just pivot to video all over again, a bunch of dead-eyed corporate types willing to listen to any snake oil salesman who offers them higher potential profits. It'll crash in a year but scuttle hundreds of livelihoods before it does.
Latest Twitter search results for “as an AI language model” (via) Searching for “as an AI language model” on Twitter reveals hundreds of bot accounts which are clearly being driven by GPT models and have been asked to generate content which occasionally trips the ethical guidelines trained into the OpenAI models.
If Twitter still had an affordable search API someone could do some incredible disinformation research on top of this, looking at which accounts are implicated, what kinds of things they are tweeting about, who they follow and retweet and so-on.
Before we scramble to deeply integrate LLMs everywhere in the economy, can we pause and think whether it is wise to do so?
This is quite immature technology and we don't understand how it works.
If we're not careful we're setting ourselves up for a lot of correlated failures.
— Jan Leike, Alignment Team lead, OpenAI
Graphic designers had a similar sea change ~20-25 years ago.
Flyers, restaurant menus, wedding invitations, price lists... That sort of thing was bread and butter work for most designers. Then desktop publishing happened and a large fraction of designers lost their main source of income as the work shifted to computer assisted unskilled labor.
The field still thrives today, but that simple work is gone forever.
I literally lost my biggest and best client to ChatGPT today. This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin. [...] Please do not think you are immune to this unless you are the top 1% of writers. I just signed up for Doordash as a driver. I really wish I was kidding.
Thoughts on AI safety in this era of increasingly powerful open source LLMs
This morning, VentureBeat published a story by Sharon Goldman: With a wave of new LLMs, open source AI is having a moment — and a red-hot debate. It covers the explosion in activity around openly available Large Language Models such as LLaMA—a trend I’ve been tracking in my own series LLMs on personal devices—and talks about their implications with respect to AI safety.
[... 781 words]We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics
ChatGPT lies to people. This is a serious bug that has so far resisted all attempts at a fix. We need to prioritize helping people understand this, not debating the most precise terminology to use to describe it.
[... 1,174 words]Projectories have power. Power for those who are trying to invent new futures. Power for those who are trying to mobilize action to prevent certain futures. And power for those who are trying to position themselves as brokers, thought leaders, controllers of future narratives in this moment of destabilization. But the downside to these projectories is that they can also veer way off the railroad tracks into the absurd. And when the political, social, and economic stakes are high, they can produce a frenzy that has externalities that go well beyond the technology itself. That is precisely what we’re seeing right now.
By gaining mastery of language, A.I. is seizing the master key to civilization, from bank vaults to holy sepulchers.
What would it mean for humans to live in a world where a large percentage of stories, melodies, images, laws, policies and tools are shaped by nonhuman intelligence, which knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency the weaknesses, biases and addictions of the human mind — while knowing how to form intimate relationships with human beings?
I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney over night. A poster on r/blender describes how their job creating graphics for mobile games has switched from creating 3D models for rendering 2D art to prompting Midjourney v5 and cleaning up the results in Photoshop. “I am now able to create, rig and animate a character thats spit out from MJ in 2-3 days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D. [...] I always was very sure I wouldn’t lose my job, because I produce slightly better quality. This advantage is gone, and so is my hope for using my own creative energy to create.”
mitsua-diffusion-one (via) “Mitsua Diffusion One is a latent text-to-image diffusion model, which is a successor of Mitsua Diffusion CC0. This model is trained from scratch using only public domain/CC0 or copyright images with permission for use.” I’ve been talking about how much I’d like to try out a “vegan” AI model trained entirely on out-of-copyright images for ages, and here one is! It looks like the training data mainly came from CC0 art gallery collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access.
Don’t trust AI to talk accurately about itself: Bard wasn’t trained on Gmail
Earlier this month I wrote about how ChatGPT can’t access the internet, even though it really looks like it can. Consider this part two in the series. Here’s another common and non-intuitive mistake people make when interacting with large language model AI systems: asking them questions about themselves.
[... 1,950 words]The Age of AI has begun. Bill Gates calls GPT-class large language models “the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface”. His essay here focuses on the philanthropy angle, mostly from the point of view of AI applications in healthcare, education and concerns about keeping access to these new technologies as equitable as possible.
Adobe made an AI image generator — and says it didn’t steal artists’ work to do it. Adobe Firefly is a brand new text-to-image model which Adobe claim was trained entirely on fully licensed imagery—either out of copyright, specially licensed or part of the existing Adobe Stock library. I’m sure they have the license, but I still wouldn’t be surprised to hear complaints from artists who licensed their content to Adobe Stock who didn’t anticipate it being used for model training.
Not By AI: Your AI-free Content Deserves a Badge (via) A badge for non-AI generated content. Interesting to note that they set the cutoff at 90%: “Use this badge if your article, including blog posts, essays, research, letters, and other text-based content, contains less than 10% of AI output.”
We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms. Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.
— Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Shmargaret Shmitchell
ChatGPT couldn’t access the internet, even though it really looked like it could
A really common misconception about ChatGPT is that it can access URLs. I’ve seen many different examples of people pasting in a URL and asking for a summary, or asking it to make use of the content on that page in some way.
[... 1,745 words]Thoughts and impressions of AI-assisted search from Bing
It’s been a wild couple of weeks.
[... 1,763 words]Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do all of the other fun things that engines like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have been demonstrating over the past few months: the ability to generate poetry, and jokes, and do creative writing, and so much more.
[... 4,922 words]Exploring MusicCaps, the evaluation data released to accompany Google’s MusicLM text-to-music model
Google Research just released MusicLM: Generating Music From Text. It’s a new generative AI model that takes a descriptive prompt and produces a “high-fidelity” music track. Here’s the paper (and a more readable version using arXiv Vanity).
[... 1,323 words]2022
Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why. Sumana Harihareswara’s in-depth review of Whisper, the shockingly effective open source text-to-speech transcription model release by OpenAI a few months ago. Includes an extremely thoughtful section considering the ethics of using this model—some of the most insightful short-form writing I’ve seen on AI model ethics generally.
Is the AI spell-casting metaphor harmful or helpful?
For a few weeks now I’ve been promoting spell-casting as a metaphor for prompt design against generative AI systems such as GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion.
[... 990 words]Exploring 10m scraped Shutterstock videos used to train Meta’s Make-A-Video text-to-video model
Make-A-Video is a new “state-of-the-art AI system that generates videos from text” from Meta AI. It looks incredible—it really is DALL-E / Stable Diffusion for video. And it appears to have been trained on 10m video preview clips scraped from Shutterstock.
[... 923 words]Feeding AI systems on the world’s beauty, ugliness, and cruelty, but expecting it to reflect only the beauty is a fantasy
Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion
Two weeks ago, the Stable Diffusion image generation model was released to the public. I wrote about this last week, in Stable Diffusion is a really big deal—a post which has since become one of the top ten results for “stable diffusion” on Google and shown up in all sorts of different places online.
[... 2,897 words]For these reasons, I don’t think I’ll be using Midjourney or any similar tool to illustrate my newsletter going forward (an exception would be if I were writing about the technology at a later date and wanted to show examples). Even though the job wouldn’t go to a different, deserving, human artist, I think the optics are shitty, and I do worry about having any role in helping to set any kind of precedent in this direction.
Stable Diffusion is a really big deal
If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on with Stable Diffusion, you really should be.
[... 1,443 words]2021
Many of you here today are toolbuilders who help people work with data. Rather than presuming that those using your tools are clear-eyed about their data, how can you build features and methods that ensure people know the limits of their data and work with them responsibly? Your tools are not neutral. Neither is the data that your tools help analyze. How can you build tools that invite responsible data use and make visible when data is being manipulated? How can you help build tools for responsible governance?
2019
There’s a spectrum on YouTube between the calm section — the Walter Cronkite, Carl Sagan part — and Crazytown, where the extreme stuff is. If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.
— Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google