ChatGPT Harm Reduction for Writing Assignments
A Google Doc from Miriam Posner at UCLA with the pros and cons of different strategies for dealing with students using ChatGPT for writing
Tag: AI
The confusing reality of AI friends
Fascinating piece in The Verge about intimacy, chatbots, capricious chatbots, and the capricious companies who run them.
Who and What comprise AI Skepticism?
9+ factions of AI Skepticism (pushing back against Casey Newton’s facile take on AI skeptics). Which one are you?
AI Company That Made Robots For Kids Goes Under, Robots Die
Gonna pair this article about IRL dying virtual friends with Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" in next semester's Critical AI class.
Unwritten songs (Internal exile)
Another banger post by @robhorning.bsky.social. "The proliferation of cameras and editing suites means that 'images' and 'memories' have less and less to do with each other." Thanks to AI in apps like Google Photos, even our so-called memories are premediated.
Companionship without companions
Another characteristically insightful post from Rob Horning about social media, parasociality, and chat bots. "Friendship doesn’t require friends; it only requires our imagination and some material that it can productively go to work on."
When grief and AI collide: These people are communicating with the dead
By virtue of teaching my "Death in the Digital Age" course, my beat has become AI griefbots that appear to let you talk to dead loved ones. Spoiler 1: they do not. Spoiler 2: capitalism.
ArtificialIntelligenceToolkit/aitk
AITK is a fantastic set of Google Colab notebooks for getting non-computer science undergrads working with the basics of machine learning and neural networks, designed by 3 SLAC professors. Gonna use this in my "Critical AI Studies" course next spring.
Can This Chatbot Really Save Lives?
“A recent Stanford study found that some people credit Replika for saving their lives. But chatbots can be unpredictable, and users have also blamed the chatbot app for throwing them into mental crises.”
OpenAI’s GPT-4o Isn’t ‘Her,’ It’s ‘Metropolis’
AI girlfriends have been seen as a harbinger of chaos for a long, long time.
Generative AI like Midjourney creates images full of stereotypes
Showing how AI image generators reduce much of the world to stereotypes (for example, making all "Indian Man" into an old man with a gray beard.
Debunking robot rights metaphysically, ethically, and legally
The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud
Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.
Voices of the dead: shooting victims plead for gun reform with AI-voice messages
Voices of people lost to gun violence have been re-created using AI to call for action, now six years to the day after the Parkland shooting that killed 17
Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem
Experiments with Midjourney and DALL-E 3 show a copyright minefield
Database of 16,000 Artists Used to Train Midjourney AI Goes Viral
AI and the American Smile. How AI misrepresents culture
Article on how something culturally specific like smiles are generalized by AI
Lensa’s viral AI art creations were bound to hypersexualize users
Good overview of the recent crop of AI image generators (including Lensa) and their problems.
Deep Nostalgia edition | by Marisa Parham | salt.codes
Better Images of AI
Explaining Artificial Intelligence. Part 3 – what does AI look like?
Why CAPTCHA Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing | by Clive Thompson
The Ethics of a Deepfake Anthony Bourdain Voice in “Roadrunner”
STET by Sarah Gailey
Short experimental fiction with a fresh take on the AI trolley problem.
STET by Sarah Gailey
Short experimental fiction with a fresh take on the AI trolley problem.
AI Literacy: The basics of machine learning
Just discovered this great AI primer from Liz Daly. Perfect for the syllabus.
AI Literacy: The basics of machine learning
Just discovered this great AI primer from Liz Daly. Perfect for the syllabus.