Notices by Prof. Catherine Flick (catherineflick@mastodon.me.uk), page 2

Exactly what I talked about in my TEDx talk the other night - the incentives just don’t align with making responsible technology. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/18/openai-putting-shiny-products-above-safety-says-departing-researcher #openai

Normally I love to watch and live-toot #eurovision but as Israel continues to be involved despite their horrific violence in Gaza, I can’t support the show tonight. Good luck to all the other contestants.

I'm really hoping you don't need me to tell you that using machine learning ("AI") systems to identify potential targets and then to suggest that they be targeted when at home with their family members, including children, is one of the most abhorrent, unethical, inhumane things I've ever seen. There is absolutely no excuse for developing these systems. Technology is never neutral. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

Alternatively, if any benevolent company would like to cover the costs of sending this group of kids to @emf for the day, let me know and I’ll wave my hands in the direction of our sponsorship people :D

Does anyone here know of any UK grants that I could apply for to get a group of kids from the disadvantaged parts of Leicester to a science festival on a day trip? (yes I'm talking about EMF)

I honestly thought this was a deepfake. Hilarious that it's true. What a grifter. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-68329886

This is quite the read on what's happening in Gaza. The sheer amount of death and destruction there from Israeli army action extends well beyond a proportional response, and our governments are funding and supporting it. It needs to stop. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/tom-stevenson/rubble-from-bone

Just blocked the first sealion I’ve had on mastodon in a long time. It was like seeing a rare, ugly butterfly. Fascinating but I’m happy to leave it in its own environment.

Addendum: yes the mastodon (and general fediverse) community is fairly fractured, with wildly different ideas about how the fediverse should operate and that's okay too. If that's going to be the case, make your thing opt-in. (See how the mastodon Search stuff was done for an example.)

As someone who did her PhD on consent I just want to flag a few things in the bsky bridge discussion. One: medical style disclosure based consent (terms and conditions, EULAs etc.) is totally inappropriate for this sort of situation and has been for decades. But it serves the needs of slow-moving legal requirements and companies that like people to forget they signed up to stuff (or were coerced into doing so for social or other reasons). See https://liedra.net/thesis for more details. (1/n)

Two: A community's normative expectations need to be taken into account, for example, that posts are only easily visible to a certain subsection of the fediverse. These expectations may (and often are) completely disconnected from the technical capabilities of the service (e.g. that posts are publicly available), and that's okay. We encounter these expectations of behaviour despite capabilities for different behaviour all the time in the real world. Social contracts regulate them.

Three: A normative expectation for mastodon is that posts stay on mastodon. There are many and varied reasons for this, many of which are reasonable, some of which are perhaps a bit paranoid, but how reasonable or paranoid they are does not invalidate them as reasons for normative expectations of behaviour within the mastodon environment for their community. You don't have to like or agree with it, but you should respect it when interacting with the community.

Finally: So discussions about the technical capabilities (all posts are public), reasonableness of expectations (people are paranoid) and all of these other objections are moot if you are a responsible person developing tech that interacts with that community. Engage with the community, respect that community, and don't get mad if that community rejects your tech if you didn't do the legwork to discover the normative expectations of behaviour within that community. #bsky #bluesky

Took down the Christmas decorations, will take the lights down tomorrow. Always sad to take the lights down as they’re lovely and cheery in a dark winter

mastodon.me.uk friends, we’ve temporarily limited mastodon.social due to a spam wave. You’ll still be able to interact with your friends etc from there, but it should pause unsolicited messages. I’ll review in the morning unless I get some sort of all clear before then (or another admin does).

@goatsarah @stokel haha they did!! And thank goodness

Another piece on #Grok that I was quoted in! Always nice to see Ross Anderson pop up too, I started down this whole ethics and computing thing writing my ugrad dissertation on trusted computing after reading his paper on it back in the early 2000s!

Thanks @stokel for your fine work as always!

https://www.fastcompany.com/90998360/grok-openai-model-collapse

@babe @aral I was even talking about how he made it sound like our electric car! And they still lectured! 😂😂😂 I mean I’ve been the sort of account tech people follow and RT for a long time so I’m kinda used to it, just find it funny these days. At least it’s better than death threats

@babe @aral ah yes like that time I posted a funny anecdote about my 1yo and a toy car and got lectured about how he should be playing with toy bikes because cars are bad for the environment

He just operates in a completely different world, doesn’t he? (Cloud Cuckoo Land) https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/angelo-carusone-responds-elon-musks-legal-threat-over-media-matters-reporting