I will be in the July issue of Wired magazine. I want to thank the Bot Sentinel and Spoutible community. I also want to thank the Sussex Squad for supporting everything we are trying to do to change the landscape of social media
Amazon’s Ring doorbell was used to spy on customers, FTC says in privacy case Guardian Carla writes: “What a surprise. But this ridiculous fines routine has to stop. If a corporation is a person, throw the corporation in jail (their profits go to a charity — like for instance, reparations to African Americans and Indigenous People–for a year or whatever the jail term is. Or give ’em the death penalty: pull their corporate charter.”
Federal Judge Makes History in Holding That Border Searches of Cell Phones Require a Warrant EFF
The Woman Trying To Archive Black Twitter
Why won’t Google give a straight answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data? Skiff Blog: “… Google’s Smart Compose feature was trained on Gmail users’ private emails.Bard is not Google’s only language-focused machine learning model. Anyone who’s used Gmail in the past few years knows about the Smart Compose and Smart Reply features, which auto-complete sentences for you as you go.According to Google’s 2019 paper introducing Smart Compose, the feature was trained on “user-composed emails.” Along with the email’s contents, the model also made use of these emails’ subjects, dates and locations.
So it’s plainly true that some of Google’s language models have been trained on Gmail users’ emails. Google has not confirmed whether any training data is shared between these earlier models and Bard, but the idea that a new model would build on the strengths of another doesn’t seem far-fetched…the fact that both Smart Compose and Smart Reply were unambiguously trained on Gmail users’ data seems to be an underappreciated topic of public interest in its own right, which brings us to point 3…3. Google researchers have extensively documented the risk of leaking private data from their own machine-learning models, some of which are acknowledged to be trained on “private text communications between users.”In a 2021 paper, Google researchers laid out the privacy risks presented by large language models. They wrote:“The most direct form of privacy leakage occurs when data is extracted from a model that was trained on confidential or private data.
For example, GMail’s autocomplete model [10] is trained on private text communications between users, so the extraction of unique snippets of training data would break data secrecy.”As part of this research, Google’s scientists demonstrated their ability to extract “memorized” data — meaning raw training data that reveals its source — from OpenAI’s GPT-2.
They emphasized that — although they had chosen to probe GPT-2 because it posed fewer ethical risks since it was trained on publicly available data — the attacks and techniques they laid out in their research “directly apply to any language model, including those trained on sensitive and non-public data”, of which they cite Smart Compose as an example. 4. Google has never denied that Bard was trained on data from Gmail. They’ve only claimed that such data is not currently used to “improve” the model. This point is subtle but significant.
Following the controversy around AI researcher Kate Crawford’s tweet, Google crafted an official response to questions about Bard’s use of Gmail data (after having deleted a more immediate responsediscussed in point 1 above). That statement, which they added to Bard’s FAQ page, is:“Bard responses may also occasionally claim that it uses personal information from Gmail or other private apps and services. That’s not accurate, and as an LLM interface, Bard does not have the ability to determine these facts.
We do not use personal data from your Gmail or other private apps and services to improve Bard.”There are two important details in this statement. One is the use of the adjective “personal”. Google has not said that it’s inaccurate that Bard uses information from Gmail, only that it’s inaccurate that it uses personal information from Gmail.
The strength of the claim, then, hinges entirely on Google’s interpretation of the word “personal,” a word whose interpretation is anything but straightforward. The other, possibly more significant, detail is that Google has conspicuously never used the past tense in its denials of Bard’s use of Gmail data.
In their first tweet on the subject, Google said Bard “is not trained on Gmail data” and in the official FAQ, they write that they do not “use personal data from your Gmail or other private apps and services to improve Bard.” Neither of these statements is inconsistent with Bard having been trained on Gmail data in the past…”
My excellent Conversation with Seth Godin
Here is the audio, video, and transcript from a very good session. Here is part of the episode summary:
Seth joined Tyler to discuss why direct marketing works at all, the marketing success of Trader Joe’s vs Whole Foods, why you can’t reverse engineer Taylor Swift’s success, how Seth would fix baseball, the brilliant marketing in ChatGPT’s design, the most underrated American visual artist, the problem with online education, approaching public talks as a team process, what makes him a good cook, his updated advice for aspiring young authors, how growing up in Buffalo shaped him, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If you were called in as a consultant to professional baseball, what would you tell them to do to keep the game alive?
GODIN: [laughs] I am so glad I never was a consultant.
What is baseball? In most of the world, no one wants to watch one minute of baseball. Why do we want to watch baseball? Why do the songs and the Cracker Jack and the sounds matter to some people and not to others? The answer is that professional sports in any country that are beloved, are beloved because they remind us of our parents. They remind us of a different time in our lives. They are comfortable but also challenging. They let us exchange status roles in a safe way without extraordinary division.
Baseball was that for a very long time, but then things changed. One of the things that changed is that football was built for television and baseball is not. By leaning into television, which completely terraformed American society for 40 years, football advanced in a lot of ways.
Baseball is in a jam because, on one hand, like Coke and New Coke, you need to remind people of the old days. On the other hand, people have too many choices now.
And another:
COWEN: What is the detail you have become most increasingly pessimistic about?
GODIN: I think that our ability to rationalize our lazy, convenient, selfish, immoral, bad behavior is unbounded, and people will find a reason to justify the thing that they used to do because that’s how we evolved. One would hope that in the face of a real challenge or actual useful data, people would say, “Oh, I was wrong. I just changed my mind.” It’s really hard to do that.
There was a piece in The Times just the other day about the bibs that long-distance runners wear at races. There is no reason left for them to wear bibs. It’s not a big issue. Everyone should say, “Oh, yeah, great, done.” But the bib defenders coming out of the woodwork, explaining, each in their own way, why we need bibs for people who are running in races — that’s just a microcosm of the human problem, which is, culture sticks around because it’s good at sticking around. But sometimes we need to change the culture, and we should wake up and say, “This is a good day to change the culture.”
COWEN: So, we’re all bib defenders in our own special ways.
GODIN: Correct! Well said. Bib Defenders. That’s the name of the next book. Love that.
COWEN: What is, for you, the bib?
GODIN: I think that I have probably held onto this 62-year-old’s perception of content and books and thoughtful output longer than the culture wants to embrace, the same way lots of artists have held onto the album as opposed to the single. But my goal isn’t to be more popular, and so I’m really comfortable with the repercussions of what I’ve held onto.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And here is Seth’s new book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
It was just a simulation run…designed to create that problem
Please don’t be taken in by the b.s.! The rapid and uncritical spread of this story is a good sign of the “motivated belief” operating in this arena. And if you don’t already know the context here, please don’t even bother to try to find out, you are better off not knowing. There may be more to this story yet — context is that which is scarce — but please don’t jump to any conclusions until the story is actually out and confirmed.
Funny how people accuse “the AI” of misinformation, right?
Addendum: Here is a further update, apparently confirming that the original account was in error.
The art of prompting is just at its beginning
And here are some results for Minecraft. I would like to see confirmations, but these are credible sources and this is all quite important if true.
Is growing conference size a problem?
In practice, they [scientists] more so blamed the human organization problems — essentially administrative issues — that they saw all around them. The growing conference sizes made it much more difficult to keep up with adjacent fields and scientific meetings. Seminars began to cater to narrower and narrower sub-branches of work rather than broad ones.
These were the places that many researchers leveraged to actually keep up to date on new work and problems in their fields as well as others. But, as money began to funnel into their field in the post-War era, there were more and more researchers and logistical decisions had to be made on how to do things like run conferences and decide who sits in what seminars.
The following Richard Feynman excerpt — taken from a 1973 oral history interview, which was one of a series of interviews between Charles Weiner and Feynman — goes into why, in the early 1970s, Feynman felt physics conferences had begun to grow far less useful than they were during the initial interviews for the series — where Feynman had told positive stories about the state of conferences as recently as 1956…
The conference size hypothesis almost surely is not the main problem, yet this is a new and interesting set of claims. The discussion of conference size comes fairly late in this piece by Eric Gilliam, plus there is a discussion of poetry toward the very end. For the pointer I thank Henry Oliver.
Orwell Against Progress
Orwell was deeply suspicious of technology and not simply because of the dangers of totalitarianism as expounded in 1984. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell argues that technology saps vigor and will. He quotes disparagingly, World Without Faith, a pro-progress book written by John Beever, a proto Steven Pinker in this respect.
It is so damn silly to cry out about the civilizing effects of work in the fields and farmyards as against that done in a big locomotive works or an automobile factory. Work is a nuisance. We work because we have to and all work is done to provide us with leisure and the means of spending that leisure as enjoyably as possible.
Orwell’s response?
…an exhibition of machine-worship in its most completely vulgar, ignorant, and half-baked form….How often have we not heard it, that glutinously uplifting stuff about ’the machines, our new race of slaves, which will set humanity free’, etc., etc., etc. To these people, apparently, the only danger of the machine is its possible use for destructive purposes; as, for instance, aero-planes are used in war. Barring wars and unforeseen disasters, the future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress; machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organization, more machines–until finally you land up in the by now familiar Wellsian Utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in Brave New World, the paradise of little fat men.
What’s Orwell’s problem with progress? He is a traditionalist. Orwell thinks that men need struggle, pain and opposition to be truly great.
…in a world from which physical danger had been banished–and obviously mechanical progress tends to eliminate danger–would physical courage be likely to survive? Could it survive? And why should physical strength survive in a world where there was never the need for physical labour? As for such qualities as loyalty, generosity, etc., in a world where nothing went wrong, they would be not only irrelevant but probably unimaginable. The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain, or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain, and difficulty.
..The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard.
I will give Orwell his due, he got this right:
Presumably, for instance, the inhabitants of Utopia would create artificial dangers in order to exercise their courage, and do dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles which they would never be obliged to use.
Orwell’s distaste for technology and love of the manly virtues of sacrifice and endurance to pain naturally push him towards zero-sum thinking. Wealth from machines is for softies but wealth from conquest, at least that makes you brave and hard! (See my earlier post, Orwell’s Falsified Prediction on Empire). Orwell didn’t favor conquest but it’s part of his pessimism that he sees the attraction.
Another of Orwell’s tragic dilemmas is that he doesn’t like progress but he does favor socialism and thus finds it unfortunate that socialism is perceived and being favorable to progress:
…the unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress…The kind of person who most readily accepts Socialism is also the kind of person who views mechanical progress, as such, with enthusiasm.
Orwell admired the tough and masculine miners he spent time with in the first part of Wigan Pier. In the second part he mostly decries the namby-pamby feminized socialists with their hippy-bourgeoise values, love of progress, and vegetarianism. I find it very amusing how much Orwell hated a lot of socialists for cultural reasons.
Socialism is too often coupled with a fat-bellied, godless conception of ’progress’ which revolts anyone with a feeling for tradition or the rudiments of
an aesthetic sense.…One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
…If only the sandals and the pistachio coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!
What Orwell wanted was to strip socialism from liberalism and to pair it instead with conservatism and traditionalism. (I am speaking here of the Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier).
It’s still easy today to identify the sandal wearing, socialist hippies at the yoga studio but socialism no longer brings to mind visions of progress. Today, fans of progress are more likely to be capitalists than socialists.
Indeed, socialism is more often allied with critiques of progress–progress destroys the environment, ruins indigenous ways of life and so forth. A traditionalist socialism along Orwell’s lines would add to this critique that progress destroys jobs, feminizes men, and saps vitality and courage. Thus, Orwell’s goal of pairing socialism with conservatism seems logically closer at hand than in his own time
