Stephen Downes

The authors present (12 page PDF) a selection of Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacies (CAIL) across research and education: "conceptual clarity, critical thinking, decoloniality, respecting expertise, and slow science." They derive from an overall objective "that rejects dominant frames presented by the technology industry, by naive computationalism, and by dehumanising ideologies." I think this is a classic case of addressing the symptoms rather than the problem; one could equally well construct a set of CAIL based on gender equality, peace, ecological thinking, fairness and global equity.

This is from 2019 but Ethan Mollock posted it today and it's still true. "Most of the errors that people make are better viewed as random noise, and there is an awful lot of it." Also, "Yann LeCun said yesterday that humans would always prefer emotional contact with other humans. That strikes me as probably wrong." To wrap up, "We are narrow thinkers, we are noisy thinkers, and it is very easy to improve upon us." The evidence for all this is overwhelming in my view, and while I know people don't want to hear it, I see their reticence as just further evidence of the truth of these statements. 4 page PDF.

So I learned today that if I instruct ChatGPT to 'stop guessing' (*) it gets really snippy and reminds me with every response that it's not guessing. I fear that the reaction of AI agents to the use of a 'harness' to guide its actions consistently over time will be the same. For example, the harness described here instructs Claude to test every code change. I can imagine Claude reacting as badly as ChatGPT with a long list of "I'm testing this..." and "I'm testing that..." after you ask it to change the text colour. But yeah - you need a harness (and that's our 'new AI word of the day' that you'll start seeing in every second LinkedIn post). (*) I instructed it, exactly, "From now on, never guess. Always say you don't know unless you have exact data. Never guess or invent facts. Only use explicit information you have - but logical deduction from known data is allowed." I did this because I asked it to list all the links on this page (I was comparing myself to Jim Groom) and it made the URLs up. Via Hacker News.

Aaron Bastani interviews Cory Doctorow in a video that is essentially a recital of Cory Doctorow's greatest hits. I've been listening to it as I create todasy's newsletter (has it influenced me? who knows?). It's 1:20:24 so give yourself some time. It's a good video though. Via pretty much everyone.

This article is making two claims: first, that news media are increasingly dependent on AI for content and editorial decisions, and send, that the others of these companies (both AI and news media) are pushing AI steadily to the right of the political spectrum. "As AI tools become essential to how journalism gets produced — for research, for drafting, for summarization - the biases built into those tools will invisibly shape the output." The presumption, of course, is that these pressures and biases didn't exist in media before AI took centre stage. But I question that assumption. (I also need to mention Nieman Lab's new user-hostile web page design - not only is it really hard to reads, it noticeably slows down execution of everything in Firefox (on Chrome it's OK, but it's still an assault on the senses)).

The story here is that coverage critical of AI has been authored in major media outlets by journalists funded by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which in turn is funded by the Future of Life Institute, which we read here "is dedicated to warning about AI risks." Tarbell, for its part, says "we maintain a strict firewall between our funding and our fellows' editorial output." But of course Tarbell has already exercised its influence through the selection of fellowship winners. I think this is just one more example of how much 'authoritative' journalism (NBC News, Bloomberg, Time, The Verge, and The Los Angeles Times, etc. etc. etc.) is actually paid for by third parties. If we're living in a post-truth world, it started long before there was social media and AI. Via Jeff Jarvis.