🎙New commentary: ‘Generating reality and silencing debate: Synthetic data as discursive device’ by Paula Helm (Paula Helm ([email protected])), Benjamin Lipp (Benjamin Lipp), and Roser Pujadas (Roser Pujadas). #syntheticdata #AI #privacy #platformeconomy Read here: buff.ly/3JTHYMj

The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates | Mariana Mazzucato theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Academic colleagues, in case you are interested in visiting the UK:

🎉 Launching online today: "Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500." Dive into our large-scale interactive visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. 🧵 calculatingempires.net

The Government™ has made an ad about the existential threat that AI poses to humanity, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative 🤖

📢 Call for Abstracts! 📢 We are excited to invite abstracts for ‘The Future of Public Values in the Algorithmic Society’, a two-day international conference hosted by AlgoSoc. Deadline Sept 30, 2024: easychair.org/my/conference?… 🗓️ April 10-11, 2025 📍 Felix Meritis, Amsterdam

Chatbots have biases in what they say—but what about biases in what they WON'T say? Our new paper (w/Victoria Li & Yida Chen) shows that personal info like a user's race, age, or love for the Los Angeles Chargers decides if ChatGPT refuses a request. arxiv.org/abs/2407.06866

As an editor of the T&F Education Research journal Learning, Media and Technology, publishing critical work on tech, and an editor of a Routledge Books collection on AI in education, I'll be writing to our publisher on Monday about its $10m deal with Microsoft for AI training data thebookseller.com/news/academic-…

📢 We're hiring 📢 Join us at STEaPP as the Lecturer (Teaching) in Science, Engineering and Public Policy! This is a great opportunity to contribute to a program that mobilises expertise to change the world for the better! Apply by Friday August 16th 👇 buff.ly/3WhKUIs

Third-party cookie are staying in Chrome, I cannot f*cking believe it. Google has been misleading everyone for years, making regulators, policymakers and an entire industry think they will soon go away. Year-long deception at its finest, I take off my hat. privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/new…

Violence against women a ‘national emergency’ in England and Wales, police say theguardian.com/society/articl…

They came after me with the cat lady shit too. So please just sit down & listen. Misogyny is one of the deadliest weapons on earth. Misogyny is electoral interference. Misogyny is a national security threat so lethal we can’t even see it. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Examining the growing power of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in AI through their cloud platforms, our article of the week highlights how these companies shape the AI landscape, complicating regulation and creating dependencies for developers. By Dieuwertje Luitse | @dluitse.bsky.social buff.ly/3LLSw0J

France's #Paris2024 surveillance systems (run by the state hand in hand with private tech) include controversial use of experimental AI video surveillance, and are so extensive that the country had to change its laws to make the planned surveillance legal fastcompany.com/91158664/paris…

Is AI judging gymnastics or training from it to build and profit from a surveillance technology? Interesting article by Dvora Meyers

📚✨ We release #FakeYou - An Activist's Guide to Defeating Disinformation Don't blame the people; don't blame the Internet; blame the power. ✍️ Simona Levi et al. ⬇️ Free download. Please, share by all means :) 1/ 🧵👇 xnet-x.net/en/fakeyou-dis…

Far-right movements use TikTok bots and AI to power a resurgence in UK far-right violence. theguardian.com/politics/artic…

This week’s riots aren’t happening in a vacuum. We’re living and breathing on platforms that billionaires have optimised for outrage. This is the world that social media made. My piece for The Observer with contributions from the great Maria Ressa + more theguardian.com/media/article/…

Long thread; A lot of the violence we have seen over the last few days has been stoked by years of misinformation about migration, often from many of the politicians condemning it now. So, let's address some of that misinformation. 1/

"The history of AI is often told as the story of machines getting smarter over time. What's lost is the human element in the narrative, how intelligent machines are designed, trained, and powered by human minds and bodies." spectrum.ieee.org/untold-history…