AI experimental church service in Germany, at least the first one drew a crowd
Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence: Crowd Workers Widely Use Large Language Models for Text Production Tasks – Veniamin Veselovsky, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Robert West 13 June 2023. “Large language models (LLMs) are remarkable data annotators. They can be used to generate high-fidelity supervised training data, as well as survey and experimental data. With the widespread adoption of LLMs, human gold–standard annotations are key to understanding the capabilities of LLMs and the validity of their results.
However, crowdsourcing, an important, inexpensive way to obtain human annotations, may itself be impacted by LLMs, as crowd workers have financial incentives to use LLMs to increase their productivity and income. To investigate this concern, we conducted a case study on the prevalence of LLM usage by crowd workers.
We reran an abstract summarization task from the literature on Amazon Mechanical Turk and, through a combination of keystroke detection and synthetic text classification, estimate that 33-46% of crowd workers used LLMs when completing the task. Although generalization to other, less LLM-friendly tasks is unclear, our results call for platforms, researchers, and crowd workers to find new ways to ensure that human data remain human, perhaps using the methodology proposed here as a stepping stone.” Code/data: this https URL
Gary Cantrell, known as Lazarus “Laz” Lake, is an endurance race designer and director. His races include the Barkley Marathons, Big’s Backyard Ultra, the Barkley Fall Classic, Vol State 500K, A Race for the Ages, the Last Annual Heart of the South, and the Strolling Jim 40. In 2018, Lake covered the United States on foot, starting in Rhode Island and ending in Oregon.
A largely fringe figure known only within the world of ultrarunning, Cantrell gained worldwide recognition following a 2014 documentary called The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young.
His races are known to be especially grueling. Trail Runner magazine called him an “evil genius,” “The Leonardo da Vinci of pain,” “A master of sadomasochistic craft.” Yet, his races have developed an almost cult-like following. The Bitter Southerner magazine described Cantrell as a “Bearded Saint” and “The Godfather of the Woods.”
Generative Artificial Intelligence and Data Privacy. A Primer May 23, 2023: “Since the public release of Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and other similar systems, some Members of Congress have expressed interest in the risks associated with “generative artificial intelligence (AI).” Although exact definitions vary, generative AI is a type of AI that can generate new content—such as text, images, and videos—through learning patterns from pre-existing data. It is a broad term that may include various technologies and techniques from AI and machine learning (ML). Generative AI models have received significant attention and scrutiny due to their potential harms, such as risks involving privacy, misinformation, copyright, and non-consensual sexual imagery. This report focuses on privacy issues and relevant policy considerations for Congress. Some policymakers and stakeholders have raised privacy concerns about how individual data may be used to develop and deploy generative models. These concerns are not new or unique to generative AI, but the scale, scope, and capacity of such technologies may present new privacy challenges for Congress.”
See also CRS In Focus, June 9, 2023: Generative Artificial Intelligence: Overview, Issues, and Questions for Congress
The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens
Wired – The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens “A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans…
Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device’s location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge’s sign-off.
But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.” It is no secret, the report adds, that it is often trivial “to deanonymize and identify individuals” from data that was packaged as ethically fine for commercial use because it had been “anonymized” first.
Such data may be useful, it says, to “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.” Such civil liberties concerns are prime examples of how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.”
What’s more, information collected for one purpose “may be reused for other purposes,” which may “raise risks beyond those originally calculated,” an effect called “mission creep.” Most Americans have at least some idea of how a law enforcement investigation unfolds (if only from watching years of police procedurals).
This idea imagines a cop whose ability to surveil them, turn their phone into a tracking device, or start squeezing records out of businesses they frequent, are all gated behind evidentiary thresholds, like reasonable doubt and probable cause…”
- See also ODNI Senior Advisory Group Panel Declassified Report on Commercially Available Information – As part of our ongoing transparency efforts to enhance public understanding of the Intelligence Community’s (IC) work and to provide insights on national security issues, ODNI today is releasing this declassified IC report dated January 2022. Download the report here.
- See also WSJ – U.S. Spy Agencies Buy Vast Quantities of Americans’ Personal Data, U.S. Says. Commercially available data from cars, phones and web browsers rivals results from wiretaps, cyber espionage and physical surveillance
First It Was Quiet Quitting, Now Workers Are Facing Off With Their Bosses WSJ
Neoliberal Keywords: Creative, Passionate, Confident Public Books
US Has 12 Or More Alien Spacecraft, Say Military And Intelligence Contractors Public
