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Daily Archives: October 19, 2023

Using AI to Comply With Book Bans Makes Those Laws More Dangerous

Brennan Center for Justice: “In August, a public school district in Iowa reportedly used ChatGPT to help it comply with the state’s controversial book ban law. That law—like counterparts passed in Florida, Texas, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina—seeks to limit discussion of gender identity and sexuality in schools by barring school libraries from carrying books that touch on topics related to sexual content. Driven by a growing number of organized groups and political pressure from state lawmakers, such laws threaten students’ rights to access information and run the risk of chilling speech on topics such as sexuality, teen pregnancy, and sexual health. And using generative AI tools to implement these laws only compounds the problem. Widely accessible generative AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard provide individuals free access to tools built on large language models. Earlier language models and other analogous automated tools have been used by businesses to detect spam, recommend products, and moderate online content. Years of experience in content moderation shows that these tools are simply not suited to making decisions based on the types of vague and subjective standards that characterize many book bans. Even for the narrower category of sexual content, AI tools are often overinclusive…”

AI is learning from stolen intellectual property. It needs to stop.

Washington Post – William D. Cohan is a best-selling author and a founding partner of Puck News: “The other day someone sent me the searchable database published by The Atlantic that have been used to train the generative AI systems being developed by Meta, Bloomberg and others. It turns out that four of my seven… Continue Reading

Social Media’s ‘Frictionless Experience’ for Terrorists

The Atlantic [read free]: “These platforms were already imperfect. Now extremist groups are making sophisticated use of their vulnerabilities. The incentives of social media have long been perverse. But in recent weeks, platforms have become virtually unusable for people seeking accurate information….Social media has long encouraged the sharing of outrageous content. Posts that stoke strong… Continue Reading

Are people actually using TikTok for news?

Mashable: “…Researchers Nick Hagar from the New York Times and Nicholas Diakopoulos of Northwestern University have published a study in New Media and Society [Algorithmic indifference: The dearth of news recommendations on TikTok] which investigated how news content was amplified and recommended on the TikTok For You Page. Bear in mind that at the end… Continue Reading

Index of Aesthetics

“The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute is a collective association of researchers and designers dedicated to carrying on the important work of categorizing “consumer aesthetics” from the late mid-century, when work on the subject somewhat trailed off, through today. The cyclical relationship between a culture’s collective attitudes and the visual qualities of the artifacts it generates… Continue Reading

Violent and graphic content of the Gaza conflict served to minors’ accounts

Content warning: This dispatch contains graphic descriptions of violence, including to children. Institute for Strategic Dialogue: “Over a 48-hour period, ISD analysts surfaced more than 300 posts or videos across Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, portraying extremely graphic, distressing, or violent imagery around the conflict between Hamas and Israel, available to the accounts of 13-year-olds utilising… Continue Reading

Introducing The Foundation Model Transparency Index

A new index rates the transparency of 10 foundation model companies and finds them lacking. Katharine Miller – Companies in the foundation model space are becoming less transparent, says Rishi Bommasani, Society Lead at the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM), within Stanford HAI. For example, OpenAI, which has the word “open” right in… Continue Reading

These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech

The Atlantic – Editor’s note: This searchable database is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. You can read about the origins of the database here, and an analysis of what’s in it here. “This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems… Continue Reading

The Necessary and Proper Stewardship of Judicial Data

Huq, Aziz Z. and Clopton, Zachary D., The Necessary and Proper Stewardship of Judicial Data (September 20, 2023). Stanford Law Review, Vol. 76, Forthcoming , Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 23-55, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4578337 – “Governments and commercial firms create profits and social gain by exploiting large pools of data. One source of… Continue Reading