Today it announced a fitness band that makes 3D scans of your body and monitors your tone of voice: theverge.com/2020/8/27/2140…
Holy crap. A major insurer, John Hancock, has already partnered with Amazon to give people free Halos in exchange for feeding it their intimate personal data, which it will use to adjust premiums.
The idea that you could face discrimination on goods like insurance if you opt out of big tech's surveillance-for-profit regime used to be held up as a theoretical worst-case scenario. But as John Hancock's Amazon partnership shows, it's already here. onezero.medium.com/want-a-free-am…
You'd have to be pretty dense not to notice that these "perks" and "rewards" and "discounts" on premiums for people who let Amazon monitor their every move are directly equivalent to penalties for people who don't let Amazon monitor their every move. onezero.medium.com/want-a-free-am…
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This visual deep dive into one of the largest AI language datasets is nonstop fascinating and troubling and anyone who is remotely interested in how LLMs really work, their biases, or intellectual property should read it. washingtonpost.com/technology/int…
"Content without consent" is a concern that I could see catching on as more people gradually realize the content they've published and posted over the years is being secretly used to train for-profit AI models. washingtonpost.com/technology/int…
If your AI chatbot is spouting some disturbing views, it could be because the websites that contributed the most language tokens to its training dataset include the likes of RT, Breitbart and VDare. washingtonpost.com/technology/int…
Asked for examples of sexual harassment at law schools, ChatGPT named a GW prof accused of touching a student on a class trip to Alaska, citing a WashPost story.
ChatGPT generated the fake scandal involving law prof @JonathanTurley in response to prompts from @VolokhC last week. Turley wrote about it in a @USATODAY op-ed Monday.
Today we tested the same prompt on Microsoft's Bing AI. And guess what...
@JonathanTurley@VolokhC@USATODAY Now Bing is *also* claiming Turley was accused of sexually harassing a student on a class trip in 2018. It cites as a source for this claim Turley's own USA Today op-ed about the false claim by ChatGPT, along with several other aggregations of his op-ed.
Amazing. Now Twitter has suspended my colleague, Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell, without explanation--apparently for his tweet critical of Musk, which included a screenshot of Mastodon's tweet.
Musk's Twitter now appears to be rapidly suspending the accounts of journalists and others who tweet screenshots of tweets from other banned account. It's a free-speech bonanza!
bizarre as it sounds, i think this is actually the clearest and most plausible explanation yet for how musk justifies this entire twitter boondoggle to himself
musk saw twitter as the root of the “woke mind virus” which he blamed for everything from the media criticizing him to his employees complaining about racism & sexism to liz warren pushing a billionaire tax. and he thought buying it could put a stop to all that.
and then he added this longtermist rationale where if the woke mind virus continued unabated, great geniuses like him would forever be plagued and smothered by critics and regulators like in an ayn rand novel and then we’d never build rockets and then we’d never make it to mars.
There are some mildly interesting details in here but presenting it as some new and shocking and secret finding is either ignorant or disingenuous. There have been whole news cycles about Twitter shadowbans. I know because I’ve written about them multiple times over the years.
Sorry, I do have more to say about this, just have to finish putting the kid to bed first lol
Twitter first announced—yes, announced! publicly! they even held briefings for me and other reporters on it!—the set of moderation practices that critics would later dub “shadowbanning” in May 2018. I called it “Twitter purgatory.” slate.com/technology/201…
New: The war has sent *8 million* Ukrainians fleeing to Europe. With Russia shelling infrastructure ahead of a frigid winter, more are on the way. Germans and Poles have welcomed them—so far.
In 2016, Russian trolls famously used social media to sow division in the US around race, immigration, Hillary etc.
Today, they're trying to do something analogous in Germany, a critical Ukraine ally—tearing apart its consensus on Ukraine from the inside. washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
"Russian disinfo" gets thrown around a lot, but it's not always clear what it looks like, how it works, and the complex ways it plays out in the real world. Our goal with this story was to dive into that, combining new research by @ISDglobal w/ on-the-ground reporting in Germany.