OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics. We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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What's the Ethical Use of AI-Generated Art?
John Scalzi, Whatever, 2022/11/30

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John Scalzi's version of ethical is this: "In all other circumstances, and especially when there'™s a commercial intent or application, or when I would otherwise hire an artist, I will seek out artists and commission art from them." Why would this be the most ethical approach? Do we purchase only hand-crafted furniture, meals created by our personal chef, or books written by hand? Of course not. The role of ethics in addressing the replacement of work by artificial intelligence is to ensure that the wealth and benefits produced by the AI are shared equally across society, so that being out of work for the artist isn't equivalent to being sentenced to poverty.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A better moderation system is possible for the social web
Erin Alexis Owen Shepherd, ~erin/blog, 2022/11/30

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We're so focused on avoiding the failure of Twitter we forget that ActivityPub - the standard behind fediverse applications such as Mastodon - must also avoid the core failure of email: spam. And it isn't there yet. And blocklists are not sufficient. As the author writes, "The trust one must place in the creator of a blocklist is enormous, because the most dangerous failure mode isn'€™t that it doesn'€™t block who it says it does, but that it blocks who it says it doesn't and they just disappear." And in the case of email, in my view, this trust has been abused, and made it essentially impossible to host our own email service, forcing us into the hands of a few large email providers. Exactly the same thing will happen if we rely on blocks and blocklists in the federation. The suggestion here, and in a related proposal here, under the heading of object capabilities (ocaps), is that we allow people into our personal feed if (and only if?) they are already in the feed of someone we're linked to.

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