Adam’s parents say that he had been using the artificial intelligence chatbot as a substitute for human companionship in his final weeks, discussing his issues with anxiety and trouble talking with his family, and that the chat logs show how the bot went from helping Adam with his homework to becoming his “suicide coach.”
Angela Yang, Laura Jarrett, Fallon Gallagher
The family of teenager who died by suicide alleges OpenAI’s ChatGPT is to blame (NBC News)
It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it is trying to convey excitement, its pitch rises rapidly, producing a digital shriek. How many people, I wonder, had to agree that this was a good idea to get us to this moment? I feel like I’m losing my mind watching it.
Charlie Warzel
AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event (The Atlantic)
I posted about how gross it felt to use generative AI to create an avatar of a dead person back in May (AI Necromancy), and now there is another example with Jim Acosta interviewing a piece of video generating software that is making use of a dead kid’s appearance. This feels so incredibly wrong, and everyone involved, from Acosta and the parents to the developers building the software, should be ashamed of themselves.
Jim Acosta, the former CNN chief White House correspondent who now hosts an independent show on YouTube, has published an interview with an AI-generated avatar of Joaquin Oliver, who died at age 17 in the Parkland school shooting in 2018.
Ethan Shanfeld
I wish I could say this is not a sustainable model for the internet, but honestly there’s no indication in Pew’s research that people understand how faulty the technology that powers Google’s AI Overview is, or how it is quietly devastating the entire human online information economy that they want and need, even if they don’t realize it.
Emanuel Maiberg
Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain (404 Media)
Never underestimate the power of saying no. Just as AI hypers say that the technology is inevitable and you need to just shut up and deal with it, you, the reader, can just as well say “absolutely not” and refuse to accept a future which you have had little hand in shaping. Our tech futures are not prefigured, nor are they handed to us from on high. Tech futures should be ours to shape and to mold.
Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna
I recently read The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. It was a solid summary of problems with the current wave of “Artificial Intelligence” that has so completely captured the attention of tech leaders over the past few years. It examines how these pieces of software have numerous negative impacts with very little real upside, and how talk of achieving artificial general intelligence or superintelligence is just marketing with no real substance behind it. While the concepts covered won’t be new if you’ve followed the authors or other critics of the current AI push, like Timnit Gebru, it was a great collection of the information in one place. If you haven’t been paying attention to them, then it is definitely worth reading for a perspective that is often missing from coverage of AI companies and products.
The AI bubble is likely to pop, because the amount of investment in the technology in no way correlates with its severe lack of profit. Sooner rather than later, this will become clear to investors, who will start to withdraw their investments. In this piece, I’m interested in thinking about what the world will look like when the AI bubble pops. Will AI go away completely? What happens to the world economy? What will our information ecosystems look? All of these are quite impossible to predict, but let’s try anyway.
What happens when the AI bubble bursts? (Ada Ada Ada – Patreon)
Claims of “AGI” are a cover for abandoning the current social contract. Instead of focusing on the here and now, many people who focus on AGI think we ought to abandon all other scientific and socially beneficial pursuits and focus entirely on issues related to developing (and protecting against) AGI. Those adherents to the myth of AGI believe that the only and best thing humans can do right now is work on a superintelligence, which will bring about a new age of abundance.
Alex Hanna, Emily M. Bender
The Myth of AGI (TechPolicy.Press)
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
Dan Sinker
The Who Cares Era (Dan Sinker /blog)
A whole lot of people – including computer scientists who should know better and academics who are usually thoughtful – are caught up in fanciful, magical beliefs about chatbots. Any sufficiently advanced technology and all that. But why chatbots specifically?
Jeffrey Lockhart
it’s the interface (scatterplot)
Using any means to put words into the mouth of a dead person feels grotesque, especially for the purposes of a legal case. Generative AI unfortunately makes it easy to accomplish in a rather compelling way.
An AI avatar made to look and sound like the likeness of a man who was killed in a road rage incident addressed the court and the man who killed him: “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the AI avatar of Christopher Pelkey said. “In another life we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and a God who forgives. I still do.”
It was the first time the AI avatar of a victim—in this case, a dead man—has ever addressed a court, and it raises many questions about the use of this type of technology in future court proceedings.
Matthew Gault, Jason Koebler
‘I Loved That AI:’ Judge Moved by AI-Generated Avatar of Man Killed in Road Rage Incident (404 Media)
Scott Boehmer 