A bit of an older article I'm bumping into again. It lays out fairly well the current limits and issues with Free Software as it is defined today. I'm unconvinced it can be solved via licenses but the debate needs to happen... I feel that somehow it's too much ignored.

Excellent piece from Cory Doctorow, it's a good summary of where the real debates about AI should be... and it's nowhere near the OpenAI soap opera.

Lays out the ethical problems with the current trend of AI system very well. They're definitely not neutral tools and currently suffer from major issues.

This is early research of course but still the results are interesting. Once again, we're much easier to influence than we'd like.

Nice piece, not perfect, good food for thought still. We definitely need more ethics in our craft.

Very good interview. She really point out the main issues. Quite a lot of the current debate is poisoned by simplistic extrapolations based on sci-fi. This distracts everyone from the very real and present problems.

Excellent opinion piece. Sure, "A.I." is a tool, but who is wielding that tool currently? Whom needs is it designed to fulfill? This is currently very much of a problem. The comparison with McKinsey although surprising is an interesting thought.

Also I appreciate the clarification on the Luddites movement... they were not anti-technology.

Are we surprised? Not at all... this is an ethical problem, this is a legal risk. The alternatives will hopefully know better.

Definitely this! Major FOSS projects should think twice before giving their street creds to such closed systems. They've been produced with dubious ethics and copyright practices and since they're usable only through APIs the induced vendor lock-in will be strong.

Good reasons to leave indeed. Better host your projects somewhere else.

The lack of transparency is staggering... this is purely about hype and at that point they're not making any effort to push science forward anymore.

Well, people asking relevant questions slow you down obviously... since the goal about the latest set of generative models is to "move them into customers hands at a very high speed" this creates tension. Instead of slowing down they seem hell bent at throwing ethics out of the window.

This is an excellent piece. Very nice portrait of Emily M. Bender a really gifted computational linguist and really bad ass if you ask me. She's out there asking all the difficult questions about the current moment regarding large language models and so far the answers are (I find) disappointing. We collectively seem to be way too fascinated by the shiny new toy and the business opportunities to pay really attention to the impact on the social fabric of all of this.

When they changed their statutes it was the first sign... now it's clear all ethics went through the window. It's about fueling the hype to drive money home.

There's really something rotten in this AI "arms race"... they're clearly making mistakes to go fast for PR purposes and using tools the wrong way. This can only lead to large scale disinformation if they don't correct course quickly. This has more political impacts than it looks at first sight.

The human labor behind AI training is still on going. This is clearly gruesome and sent over to other countries... ignoring the price for a minute this is also a good way to hide its consequences I guess.

Very good piece about that dangerous moment in the creation of the latest large language models. We're about to drown in misinformation, can we get out of it?

This is indeed very much true... there's a clear crisis in research. It turned into a hamster wheel of publishing articles at a constantly faster pace. The incentives are misguided which pushes that behavior to even have a career. Meanwhile, knowledge building suffers.

Not much new in this article regarding Stable Diffusion. That being said the section about ethics is spot on. This is the toughest part to grapple with regarding the latest batch of generative AIs. The legal traceability of the training set might end up being required (even though I doubt it will happen).

Slightly depressing when it's laid out like this... still there is some truth to it. Maybe it's time to rethink a few things.