One of the reasons behind the rise of fascism is that people who could do the most to stop it and genuinely want to* refuse to even consider that what they are currently doing is counterproductive If it weren't for the arrogance & fragility of the mainstream elite, things could be widely different

The Introduction chapter in our textbook is open access and should give a gentle introduction the the terms. Also have also compiled useful video materials here: bsky.app/profile/iris...

1) way to hire certain devs, particularly academics 2) to juice users of your product so you could focus on your real business - raising capital 3) Get free debugging and testing resources 4) To try get your products as the industry standard so you could sell services, cloud etc

SO is creativecommons.org/licenses/by-... Interestingly, btw, I don't think this has been ruled on but arguably ShareAlike allows another license to be embedded "inside" the by-sa "wrapper" license.

But I think this is moot until the corporations identify the data they're using. After that.. there's a lot of code on SO that IS free time, some that isn't (and IPR on that is highly debatable under various different jurisdictions), and there's a lot of code that was never on StackOverflow.

I would argue it's not as *critical and urgent* as the work stolen from those in the more typical creative arts but fundamentally there's no difference between different kinds of labor stolen, or whether it was originally created on their free time, freelance/commission/contract, or employment.

Many toots, but nothing long-form I can think of. Open Source is ultimately a means that can be applied towards many ends. There's full corporate Open Source (e.g. Chromium and Firefox). There's also corporate takeover of Open Source with academic origins (e.g. Scientific Python).

Essentially, I think that LLM-generated dialogue only makes sense if you believe that the product of writing is words. But the product of writing isn't words, any more than the product of justice is prisoners, or the product of love is weddings. The product of writing is meaning.

It's Trump policy that U.S. tech must be globally dominant. It's also US policy that its tech corps must be free from: Regulation. Taxation. Fact checking and monitoring for hate lies, disinformation. All are now being treated as attacks on the U.S. itself. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

“It’s like you’re sitting inside the four walls of your home, and someone is victimizing your child in the next room." A rising number of children are using AI companions regularly. Here's the story of one 11-year-old girl's experience with a generative AI chatbot. Gift link: wapo.st/4scolDU

A recent Pew survey found “~1/3 of US teens use chatbots daily…. 31% of teens said they found conversations with AI companions as satisfying or more satisfying than those with friends.”🧪 This article. This article wrecked me. This:

Map from my copy of an 1832 atlas by educator & cartographer Emma Willard (1787-1870). She argued for equality in women's education, noting women were equally capable of subjects like math & philosophy. In 1821 she opened the first school in the U.S. to offer women's higher education. #WomenInSTEM

Short answer: that's actually not what we claim. Long answer: bsky.app/profile/iris...

If you think I'm going to pay $80k a year in tuition you better believe I want my kid taught by an underpaid human TA who is slowly beating eaten alive by ennui and his marinating feelings of grievance over the impossibility of ever landing a tenure track job.

"I refuse." This is it. There's no reason we should accept a narrative of an already settled future which marginalizes humans and individual agency. No one wants this. No one asked for it.

“Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.”— Ronald Purser www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

This is FOMO-driven policy, accepting false framing and lip service to guardrails that don't work by design. The deal with "AI" companies is not founded in sound pedagogy and sells out students and teachers. AFT members deserve leadership willing to develop critical literacy.

Literally one of the reasons I’m skeptical of gAI is because I’m a historian and technology is one of the things I study, but also who looks at the recent history of Silicon Valley and trusts a single word they tell us

once again you fools have prejudged someone based on their previous patterns of behavior and existing incentives

It’s literally standard for every job anyone has ever worked

Obviously I only have what was reported in that story, but following instructions is a key part of college assignments. Writing about whatever one feels like = 0 in most classes.

All this case is about is some cis white woman who didn‘t even bother engaging with the assignment going after a trans TA because she‘s a bigoted cunt. She wrote a transphobic rant and it got put on blast by Turning Point USA. Nobody needs to argue about grading here.

I realize that 'solar anus' is probably not especially helpful for anyone not familiar with Deleuze, but God damn if it's not a perfect analogy. youtu.be/2lwr2fg2Ops?...

Kinda enjoy the stop in Athens before landing in Larnaca to really taper out the Dutchness of the past semester. Aegean serves pastitcho even in economy class, so they are really actively part of the slow transition to edible food and interpersonal kindness. 🥹

Disagreeing is a skill. Learn it. Train it. Teach it.

For generations, when you learned to program you were constantly being forced to be better at paying attention to the words on the screen. Noticing you'd made a typo, noticing you'd used the wrong argument, noticing shit in general. Over time, you got better at noticing the words on the screen.

Learning how to pay attention to small details, how to deliberately strain yourself to notice tiny details that are off, is a skill programmers learn the painful way. And, using a chatbot deskills you in this very extremely important skill of being able to pay attention to small details.

It's funny that everyone who has *ever* programmed, knows how important attention to detail is. Hours wasted because you made a typo, forgot to add a character, etc. The tiniest thing you literally don't notice is wrong, and your program screams at you and dies. This is a universal experience.

Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all under "AI".

I think it's useful to ask: * Could a human be hired to do this task? * What licensing/training and ethical standards would be required? * If an employee behaved in this way, would they be subject to discipline or legal liability? Also: what would whistleblowing look like?

In licensed professions, we need a broader view than how the products are officially advertised. Legislation is usually restricted to derivative products (advertised as "talk to a licensed therapist") while shielding products advertised as general-purpose that may claim to be a therapist in dialog.

Providing false/biased information (including as a "summary") to a human decision-maker should receive similar scrutiny to algorithmic decision systems. This is usually lost in legislation, and governments are using such systems without adequate testing based on incorrect assumptions of what they do

And the same pattern with cancer research. These people aren't interested in reducing suffering, they find it rhetorically useful for their empire-building.

Thanks for writing and re-upping this. I think terminology is important, but I don't think regulating based on technical or statistical properties (e.g., "generative" or "transformer") is appropriate. I think the mode of interaction and epistemic function is more important for regulation.

Also Roddenberry was VERY clear on how we get to space, structurally, and what Musk and Bezos are doing the pre-war stuff, not the post-war stuff

Please enjoy this photo of our formerly feral cat friend, Popsicle, kneading the air and using a rock as a pillow.

Yup. Also AI in healthcare is a known huge problem and not some amazing "cure for cancer" which has always been an embarrassing nonsense phrase anyway.

And even if "cure for cancer" was a remotely scientific phrase, if we took it charitably to the max, it doesn't actually justify all the harms AI (including emissions which cause cancers) actually verifiably has. See blue box here: ainowinstitute.org/publications...

But either way, the claims of AI being some amazing way to find "cures" are unscientific and damaging to our ability to discuss medical research. Modern AI is statistics and statistics just doesn't work that way (it cannot find cures); neither does clinical or any research (it cannot be automated).

If people want to read more see: bsky.app/profile/oliv...

Exactly! They miss this *and* fail at the very thing they claim to do: fulfilling science fiction dreams. Both spend their own, and mostly, taxpayer funds on rockets that are inferior to the spacecraft of the 60s, when Star Trek was new, such as the Apollo program's Saturn V.

Like Bezos and Musk growing up watching Star Trek and then complaining about the state on intergalactic travel...when Roddenberry was inspired by Gulliver's Travels and was trying to get by the censors to critique race & gender politics and the Vietnam War

Truly. The 'science fiction becomes science fact' idea is, as you know, commonly used by supposed journalists. It obscures the methods, possibilities and hard limits of actually existing science and technology and encourages the infantile disorders rife in tech circles

more here: "Orga is not Mecha: How Literal Readings of Fiction are Damaging the World" www.socialrobotfutures.com/themesissues...

lots of bad fiction out there, but "fiction," by definition, means the opposite of fact-based; decades of media headlines about fiction coming true & the gutting of the humanities (esp, literature depts) have obscured this point. Musk, Bezos, etc--reading fiction literally--has been a disaster!

gish gallop is right! I appreciate complexity, but what passes for "nuance" among AI bros is just a constant stream of sophistry and nonsense

Hard agree. In both academics and politics it often feels like folks disagree with their projection of what you’re saying. Often the disagreement with their projection is vehement.

But we have crackpot eugenicist RFK Jr, Thiel protégé Michael Kratsios, and VC billionaire crypto / AI czar David Sacks on their way to cure pediatric cancer with AI !! www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

I also have a limited experience, but there was an appalling case where a woman asked about MO being sexist: she was told to move the question to MetaMO, she did, and a bunch of men closed it immediately.

2) cross reference their own expertise and subjectivity against the synthetic text, 3) correct the synthetic text as appropriate. This must ALWAYS be done, because there is no transferable trust to future output if one summary is correct. It maybe saves some drafting time, if you're lucky. That's it