Category: AI

Inappt

Recently, it took a flatwoven wool rug cmore than two weeks to travel from Luton, Bedfordshire to southwest London. The rug’s source – an Etsy seller – and I sent back and forth dozens of messages. It would be there tomorrow. Oh, no, the courier now says Wednesday. Um, Friday. Er, next week. I can send you a different rug, if you want to choose one. No.

In the end, the rug arrived into my life. I don’t dare decide it’s the wrong color.

I would dismiss this as a one-off aberration, except that a few weeks ago the intended recipient of a parcel sent at the beginning of November casually mentioned they had never received it. Upon chasing, the courier company replied: “Despite an extensive investigation, we have not been able to locate your parcel.”

I would dismiss those as a two-off aberration except that late last year the post office tracking on yet another item went on showing it stuck in some unidentifiable depot somewhere for two weeks. Eventually, I applied brain and logic and went down to the nearest delivery office and there it was, waiting for me to pay the customs fee specified on the card I never received. It was only a few days away from being sent back.

And I would dismiss those as a three-off aberration except that two weeks ago I was notified to expect a package from a company whose name I didn’t recognize between 7pm and 9pm. I therefore felt perfectly safe to go into the room furthest from the front door, the kitchen, and wash some dishes at 5:30. Nope. They delivered at 5:48, I didn’t hear them, and I had a hard time figuring out whom to contact to persuade them to redeliver.

The point about all this is not to yell at random couriers to get off my lawn but to note that at least this part of the app-based economy has stopped delivering the results it promised. Less than ten years since these companies set out to disrupt delivery services by providing lower prices, accurate information, on-time deliveries, and constant tracking, we’re back to waiting at home for unspecified numbers of hours wondering if they’re going to show and struggling to trace lost packages. Only this time, there’s no customer service, working conditions and pay are much worse for drivers and delivery folk, and the closure of many local outlets has left us all far more dependent on them.

***

Also falling over this week, as widely reported (because: journalists), was Twitter, which for a time on Wednesday barred posting new tweets unless they were posted via the kind of scheduling software that the site is limiting). Many of us have been expecting outages ever since November, when Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic and Chris Stokel-Walker at MIT Technology Review interviewed Twitter engineers past and present. All of them warned that the many staff cuts and shrinking budgets have left the service undersupplied with people who can keep the site running and that outages of increasing impact should be expected.

Nonetheless, the “Apocalypse, Now!” reporting that ensued was about as sensible as the reporting earlier in the week that the Fediverse was failing to keep the Tweeters who flooded there beginning in November. In response, https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/08/lazy-reporters-claiming-fediverse-is-slumping-despite-massive-increase-in-usage/ Mike Masnick noted at TechDirt how silly this was. Because: 1) There’s a lot more to the Fediverse than just Mastodon, which is all these reporters looked at; 2) even then, Mastodon had lost a little from its peak but was still vastly more active than before November; 3) it’s hard for people to change their habits, and they will revert to what’s familiar if they don’t see a reason why they can’t; and 4) it’s still early days. So, meh.

However, Zeynep Tufekci reminds that Twitter’s outage is entertainment only for the privileged; for those trying to coordinate rescue and aid efforts for Turkey, Twitter is an essential tool.

***

While we’re sniping at the failings of current journalism, it appears that yet another technology has been overhyped: DoNotPay, “the world’s first robot lawyer”, the bot written by a British university student that has supposedly been helping folks successfully contest traffic tickets. Masnick (again) and Kathryn Tewson have been covering the story for TechDirt. Tewson, a paralegal, has taken advantage of the fact that cities publish their parking ticket data in order to study DoNotPay’s claims in detail.

TechDirt almost ran a skeptical article about the service in 2017. Suffice to say that now Masnick concludes, “I wish that DoNotPay actually could do much of what it claims to do. It sounds like it could be a really useful service…”

***

The pile-up of this sort of thing – apps that disrupt and then degrade service, technology that’s overhyped (see also self-driving cars), flat-out fraud (see cryptocurrencies), breathless media reporting of nothing much – is probably why I have been unable to raise any excitement over the wow-du-jour, ChatGPT. It seems obvious that of course it can’t read, and can’t understand anything it’s typing, and that sober assessment of what it might be good for is some way off. In the New Yorker, Ted Chiang puts it in its place: think of it as a blurred JPEG. Sounds about right.

Illustrations: Drunk parrot (taken by Simon Bisson).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard – or follow on Mastodon or Twitter.

Re-centralizing

But first, a housekeeping update. Net.wars has moved – to a new address and new blogging software. For details, see here. If you read net.wars via RSS, adjust your feed to https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net. Past posts’ old URLs will continue to work, as will the archive index page, which lists every net.wars column back to November 2001. And because of the move: comments are now open for the first time in probably about ten years. I will also shortly set up a mailing list for those who would rather get net.wars by email.

***

This week the Ada Lovelace Institute held a panel discussion of ethics for researchers in AI. Arguably, not a moment too soon.

At Noema magazine, Timnet Gebru writes, as Mary L Gray and Siddharth Suri have previously, that what today passes for “AI” and “machine learning” is, underneath, the work of millions of poorly-paid marginalized workers who add labels, evaluate content, and provide verification. At Wired, Gebru adds that their efforts are ultimately directed by a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires whose interests are far from what’s good for the rest of us. That would be the “rest of us” who are being used, willingly or not, knowingly or not, as experimental research subjects.

Two weeks ago, for example, a company called Koko ran an experiment offering chatbot-written/human-overseen mental health counseling without informing the 4,000 people who sought help via the “Koko Cares” Discord server. In a Twitter thread. company co-founder Rob Morris said those users rated the bot’s responses highly until they found out a bot had written them.

People can build relationships with anything, including chatbots, as was proved in 1996 with the release of the experimental chatbot therapist Eliza. People found Eliza’s responses comforting even though they knew it was a bot. Here, however, informed consent processes seem to have been ignored. Morris’s response, when widely criticized for the unethical nature of this little experiment was to say it was exempt from informed consent requirements because helpers could opt whether to use the chatbot’s reponses and Koko had no plan to publish the results.

One would like it to be obvious that *publication* is not the biggest threat to vulnerable people in search of help. One would also like modern technology CEOs to have learned the right lesson from prior incidents such as Facebook’s 2012 experiment to study users’ moods when it manipulated their newsfeeds. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg apologized for *how the experiment was communicated*, but not for doing it. At the time, we thought that logic suggested that such companies would continue to do the research but without publishing the results. Though isn’t tweeting publication?

It seems clear that scale is part of the problem here, like the old saying, one death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic. Even the most sociopathic chatbot owner is unlikely to enlist an experimental chatbot to respond to a friend or family member in distress. But once a screen intervenes, the thousands of humans on the other side are just a pile of user IDs; that’s part of how we get so much online abuse. For those with unlimited control over the system we must all look like ants. And who wouldn’t experiment on ants?

In that sense, the efforts of the Ada Lovelace panel to sketch out the diligence researchers should follow are welcome. But the reality of human nature is that it will always be possible to find someone unscrupulous to do unethical research – and the reality of business nature is not to care much about research ethics if the resulting technology will generate profits. Listening to all those earnest, worried researchers left me writing this comment: MBAs need ethics. MBAs, government officials, and anyone else who is in charge of how new technologies are used and whose decisions affect the lives of the people those technologies are imposed upon.

This seemed even more true a day later, at the annual activists’ gathering Privacy Camp. In a panel on the proliferation of surveillance technology at the borders, speakers noted that every new technology that could be turned to helping migrants is instead being weaponized against them. The Border Violence Monitoring Network has collected thousands of such testimonies.

The especially relevant bit came when Hope Barker, a senior policy analyst with BVMN, noted this problem with the forthcoming AI Act: accountability is aimed at developers and researchers, not users.

Granted, technology that’s aborted in the lab isn’t available for abuse. But no technology stays the same after leaving the lab; it gets adapted, altered, updated, merged with other technologies, and turned to uses the researchers never imagined – as Wendy Hall noted in moderating the Ada Lovelace panel. And if we have learned anything from the last 20 years it is that over time technology services enshittify, to borrow Cory Doctorow’s term in a rant which covers the degradation of the services offered by Amazon, Facebook, and soon, he predicts, TikTok.

The systems we call “AI” today have this in common with those services: they are centralized. They are technologies that re-advantage large organizations and governments because they require amounts of data and computing power that are beyond the capabilities of small organizations and individuals to acquire. We can only rent them or be forced to use them. The ur-evil AI, HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey taught us to fear an autonomous rogue. But the biggest danger with “AIs” of the type we are seeing today, that are being put into decision making and law enforcement, is not the technology, nor the people who invented it, but the expanding desires of its controller.

Illustrations: HAL, in 2001.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns back to November 2001. Comment here, or follow on Mastodon or Twitter.