Signal's Meredith Whittaker: AI is fundamentally 'a surveillance technology' | TechCrunch

To the extent that large language models (and I should note that while I’m focusing on image generation, there are a whole host of companies working on text output as well) are dependent not on carefully curated data, but rather on the Internet itself, is the extent to which AI will be democratized, for better or worse.

sensationalist headlines conjuring fears of a techno-dystopian near-future overshadow more material issues over AI ethics that already exist – including how they reflect human biases, and the many ways in which they’re capable of manipulating users.

Just as factory owners of the 19th century dismissed the skills of their workers in favor of profit and productivity, so do the tech leaders of today dismiss human craft in favor of what they believe is “good enough” productivity. It’s telling that in the development of AI, tech companies often use the term “ median human ” to describe the aspirati... See more

Artificial Intelligence is a watershed moment for the media, where liars and scammers and hucksters get rich every time that a fanciful claim is left untouched, and where products are built upon a foundation of stolen content interpreted by a model that doesn’t actually know anything — because AI can’t, by definition, know anything. And yet we’re s... See more

With AI/ML technologies making the leap in recent years, the seductive illusion of data has only grown. More Founders are falling prey to the idea we had at Tickle: the phantom value and defensibility of data. Collecting data is easy now, but turning that exhaust into value is not trivial. Further, a world of abundant data, it’s getting harder to d... See more