Emily and Alex tackle the White House hype about the 'voluntary commitments' of companies to limit the harms of their large language models -- but only some large language models, and only some, over-hyped kinds of harms.

Plus a full portion of Fresh Hell...and a little bit of good news.

References:

AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype, Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, Scientific American, August 11, 2023. “AI” Hurts Consumers and Workers — and Isn’t Intelligent, Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender, Tech Policy Press, August 4, 2023.

Emily’s blog post critiquing the “voluntary commitments”

Main course:

“Voluntary commitments”

White House press release The specific commitments

An “AI safety” infused take on regulation

Fresh AI Hell

Nate Silver, AI doomer

Future of Life Institute hijacks SEO for EU's Artificial Intelligence Act

LLMs for denying health insurance claims (start-up idea)

NHS using “AI” as receptionist: https://twitter.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1673469218283479040 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/26/ai-admin-nhs-robots-rishi-sunak-staff-overhaul/

Automated robots in reception

Can AI language models replace human research participants?

Are the straights okay? (the answer is always no)

A recipe-assistant chatbot taught users how to make chlorine gas

Using a fucking chatbot to pretend to interview Harriet Tubman

Worldcoin Orbs & iris scans (biometric data nightmare)

Martin Shkreli’s AI for health start up

Authors getting impersonated with fraudulent books on Amazon/Goodreads https://twitter.com/JaneFriedman/status/1688180228206530560?s=20 https://twitter.com/JaneFriedman/status/1688534372197011457?s=20 https://janefriedman.com/i-would-rather-see-my-books-pirated/

As if “curriculum learning” actually has anything to do with education of people

Some good news:

Zoom restores terms of service after backlash to AI training clause

Authors fight back on book-scanning model Prosecraft: https://gizmodo.com/prosecraft-books-shut-down-ai-algorithms-novel-fiction-1850715319 https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797121

You can check out future streams at http://twitch.tv/dair_institute.

Follow Emily at https://twitter.com/EmilyMBender and https://dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender Follow Alex at https://twitter.com/alexhanna and https://dair-community.social/@alex

Music: Toby Menon. Production: Christie Taylor.