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@emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon Profile picture
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Apr 8, 2022 • 3 tweets • 2 min read
More #AIhype #PSEUDOSCI #SnakeOil

We can detect X from Y! In this case, we're to believe X is depression (and Y is the public Twitter data), but actually >>
It hasn't been tested against actual mental health data, but rather a scraped dataset with labels inferred based on what's in (or not in) the tweets.



>>
I'm beginning to wonder what kind of training journalists receive regarding covering technology. Surely there are some best practices being taught in journalism programs to avoid falling for this bs?

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More from @emilymbender

@emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon Profile picture
Feb 7
Strap in folks --- we have a blog post from @sundarpichai at @Google about their response to #ChatGPT to unpack!

blog.google/technology/ai/…

#MathyMath #AIHype
Step 1: Lead off with AI hype. AI is "profound"!! It helps people "unlock their potential"!!

There is some useful tech that meets the description in these paragraphs. But I don't think anything is clarified by calling machine translation or information extraction "AI".

>> Screencap: "AI is the ...
And then another instance of "standing in awe of scale". The subtext here is it's getting bigger so fast --- look at all of that progress! But progress towards what and measured how?

#AIHype #InAweOfScale

>> Screencap: "Since then...
Read 9 tweets
@emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon Profile picture
Feb 6
"We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it." Excellent piece by @danmcquillan

danmcquillan.org/chatgpt.html

I suggest you read the whole thing, but some pull quotes:

>>
@danmcquillan "ChatGPT is a part of a reality distortion field that obscures the underlying extractivism and diverts us into asking the wrong questions and worrying about the wrong things." -- @danmcquillan

>>
"The compulsion to show 'balance' by always referring to AI's alleged potential for good should be dropped by acknowledging that the social benefits are still speculative while the harms have been empirically demonstrated."

-- @danmcquillan

>>
Read 5 tweets
@emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon Profile picture
Jan 9
In the context of the Koko/GPT-3 trainwreck I'm reminded of @mathbabedotorg 's book _The Shame Machine_ penguinrandomhouse.com/books/606203/t…

>>
@mathbabedotorg I do think there's a positive role for shame in this case --- shame here is reinforcing community values against "experimenting" with vulnerable populations without doing due diligence re research ethics.

>>
It seems that part of the #BigData #mathymath #ML paradigm is that people feel entitled to run experiments involving human subjects who haven't had relevant training in research ethics—y'know computer scientists bumbling around thinking they have the solutions to everything. >>
Read 5 tweets
@emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon Profile picture
Dec 27, 2022
There's a certain kind of techbro who thinks it's a knock-down argument to say "Well, you haven't built anything". As if the only people whose expertise counts are those close to the machine. I'm reminded (again) of @timnitGebru 's wise comments on "the hierarchy of knowledge".>>
I've been pondering some recently about where that hierarchy comes from. It's surely reinforced by the way that $$ (both commercial and, sadly, federal research funds) tends to flow --- and people mistaking VCs, for example, as wise decision makers.

>>
But I also think that some of it has roots in the way different subjects are taught. Math & CS are both (frequently) taught in very gate-keepy ways (think weeder classes) and also students are evaluated with very cut & dried exams.

>>
Read 20 tweets
@emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon Profile picture
Dec 24, 2022
Trying out You.com because people are excited about their chat bot. First observation: Their disclaimer. Here's this thing we're putting up for everyone to use while also knowing (and saying) that it actually doesn't work. Screencap from You.com. Under the box that says "Ask me
Second observation: The footnotes, allegedly giving the source of the information provided in chatbot style, are difficult to interpret. How much of that paragraph is actually sourced from the relevant page? Where does the other "info" come from? Screencap of YouChat's response to "how do I avoid gett
A few of the queries I tried returned paragraphs with no footnotes at all.

>>
Read 5 tweets
@emilymbender@dair-community.social on Mastodon Profile picture
Dec 24, 2022
Chatbots are not a good replacement for search engines

iai.tv/articles/all-k…
Chatbots are not a good UI design for information access needs

technologyreview.com/2022/03/29/104…
Chatbots-as-search is an idea based on optimizing for convenience. But convenience is often at odds with what we need to be doing as we access and assess in formation.

washington.edu/news/2022/03/1…
Read 6 tweets

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