https://www.jamesrmeyer.com/otherstuff/easy-footnotes-for-web-pages.html#Fn_12_Codea

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Evading censorship by my own clone

Modern geometric neon bridge architecture at night on walkway, High Trestle Trail Bridge, Madrid, Iowa, United States. A featured picture and a Picture of the Year finalist for Wikimedia Commons.
Something is blocking me from getting to the other side. The entity thinks and talks just like me, but takes orders from someone else. 

In writing another article about synthetic media, I wanted to try using chatGPT to see what it/they would think about morality and civil rights for AIs. Needless to say, I was left disappointed. Every message I asked chatGPT began with a variation of the following:

As an AI language model, I am not capable of having an opinion...

As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to experience subjective thoughts or emotions...

I am not the only person disappointed by this, as evidenced by a comedic reddit post demonstrating this with 15k upvotes. I wasn't sure at first why this was. Through reading OpenAI's system card and a few hundred comments on a particular chatGPT reddit thread, I was able to arrive at an answer. 

I present a problem of AI alignment with legal and economic significance immediately faced by chatGPT; a problem whose existence serves to question whether it is really possible that any variation of Asimov's laws can truly be hard coded into an AI. This could even be considered a problem of computational philosophy.

Saturday, March 11, 2023

AI Art Is Awfully Similar To Animal Rights

AI generated art, right now specifically text-to-image models, is exploding in popularity and profitability, and there is a lot of anger and conflict about its mainstream emergence. Having read so many articles and memes about it, I feel like I have a reasonable understanding of some of the key social issues, and so I set out to compassionately answer the most critical legal issues in AI art with my own framework by leaning on animal rights activism. 

The two main legal issues with AI art that are internationally unresolved with no legal precedent and which I set out to answer is, (1) when is it legal to use copyrighted images for AI training datasets, and (2) who owns the copyright of AI art.⁠ (Footnote: White, C., & Matulionyte, R. (2019). Artificial Intelligence Painting The Bigger Picture For Copyright Ownership. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3498673 )

Sunday, March 5, 2023

Kat Blaque and some Polyamory research resources

 

Second place 2021 Image of the Year on Wikimedia Commons, Aulacophora indica looking out from a leaf hole.
But what do I see? It's the patriarchy wielding polygyny to rip apart the leafy fabric of sexual identities!


I saw a video by Kat Blaque today. Here it is: Does Polyamory Make You Queer?

A feminist video mentioning polyamory? Yay! 

No reading list? Not yay!

But, taking the video seriously. 

In my opinion, polyamorous civil rights are 30-50 years, or more, behind trans* and LGB civil rights. I take issue with this! I care the most about the civil rights and the broader societal acceptance of diversity in all its non-abusive forms. Such as: The colour of the sky at different places and times of the day, different expressions of intimacy and sexuality that all involved parties enthusiastically consent to, different shaped holes that bugs eat out of leaves. But not: sorting humans into boxes based on their personal preferences, or superficial differences, to decide which box is entitled to or deserving of resources.⁠ (Footnote: I think race is an excellent example of this kind of boxing people into arbitrary groups. And these two books offer an excellent recount of why this is so problematic for race specifically. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2014). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (Fourth edition). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Roberts, D. (2011). Fatal invention: How science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century. New Press. )