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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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
MIT Technology Review – If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms. Erik Carter. “We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. For …
“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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Gizmodo: “OpenAI’s world-famous chatbot is free to rummage through the internet’s darkest corners. The company declared Tuesday that the “Browse with Bing” feature is ready for prime time for those ChatGPT users paying for Plus or Enterprise editions. This lets ChatGPT access up-to-date information, rather than being limited to the training data that was cut …
ZDNet: “I tried 5 online tools to find out With the sudden arrival of ChatGPT, educators and editors are facing a worrying surge of automated content submissions. We look at the problem and what might be done. When I first looked at the question of whether it’s possible to fight back against AI-generated plagiarism, and …
Scientific American: “Artists and writers are up in arms about generative artificial intelligence systems—understandably so. These machine learning models are only capable of pumping out images and text because they’ve been trained on mountains of real people’s creative work, much of it copyrighted. Major AI developers including OpenAI, Meta and Stability AI now face multiple …
