onfocus

If we as technologists want to help the broader public understand these AI systems, both their opportunities and challenges, then we need to speak in plain language.

I do think we need to go back to the beginning and just say “ChatGPT lies”.

I’m guilty of trying to find the perfect word with the correct nuance or shade of meaning to describe a situation. Sometimes that impulse works against clarity.

A controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company's CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a "perpetual police line-up," even for people who haven't done anything wrong.

Posting to social media was supposed to be harmless.

In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable?

Andy Baio talks about being colorblind and encourages empathy in the design process.

“I trust users are doing what they want to do,” he said, noting friction frustrates people trying to grab data or read an article. He wants those users to return — and tell their friends. He views UX as “growing a relationship,” providing something of value rather than squeezing the most out of a single session.

That's it, I'm pressing the independent thought alarm.

For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show.

Corrupt court. The luxury lifestyle must make it easier to hurt people.

36% of another sample of 480 researchers (in a survey targeting the language-specific venue ACL) agreed that “It is plausible that decisions made by AI or machine learning systems could cause a catastrophe this century that is at least as bad as an all-out nuclear war” (Michael et al., 2022).

So we've got that going for us. LLMs strategically manipulating people into acquiring power sure sounds like a serious flaw in the software. A bit more information and context at the unfortunately named NYU Alignment Research Group. (ARG? Seriously?!)

I like to think of language models like ChatGPT as a calculator for words.

This is reflected in their name: a “language model” implies that they are tools for working with language. That’s what they’ve been trained to do, and it’s language manipulation where they truly excel.

Nice framing for thinking about the best ways to use LLMs.

Thanks to O’Connor and other conservative judges and justices, we now live in a world where a person can get pregnant, be forced by the state to bring that pregnancy to term against their will, but not have their prenatal care covered by their insurance company. The allegedly “pro-life” concern about the welfare of the unborn does not even extend to making sure people have access to health care during the gestational period.

We shouldn't have a system where one judge in Texas can kill people across the country by denying them preventative healthcare. I know I say this a lot but please vote for people who care about other people.