Episode 15: The White House And Big Tech Dance The Self-Regulation Tango, August 11 2023

Emily and Alex tackle the White House hype about the 'voluntary commitments' of companies to limit the harms of their large language models: but only some large language models, and only some, over-hyped kinds of harms.
Plus a full portion of Fresh Hell...and a little bit of good news.

References:
White House press release (whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releas…) on voluntary commitments (whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Ensu…)
Emily’s blog post critiquing the “voluntary commitments” (medium.com/@emilymenonbender/ensuring-safe-sec…)
An “AI safety” infused take on regulation (vox.com/future-perfect/23775650/ai-regulation-…)

AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype (scientificamerican.com/article/we-need-to-focu…)
“AI” Hurts Consumers and Workers — and Isn’t Intelligent (techpolicy.press/ai-hurts-consumers-and-worker…)

Fresh AI Hell:
Future of Life Institute hijacks SEO for EU's AI Act (artificialintelligenceact.eu)
LLMs for denying health insurance claims (mastodon.roundpond.net/@arthegall/110174924084…)
NHS using “AI” as receptionist (telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/26/ai-admin-nhs-r…)
Automated robots in reception (aldebaran.com/en/blog/news-trends/how-can-huma…)
Can AI language models replace human research participants? (cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1…)00098-0)
A recipe chatbot taught users how to make chlorine gas (theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/10/pak-n-save-s…)
Using a chatbot to pretend to interview Harriet Tubman (twitter.com/CiCiAdams_/status/1681310375319584…)
Worldcoin Orbs & iris scans (news.artnet.com/art-world/worldcoin-orb-ai-234…)
Martin Shkreli’s AI for health start up (twitter.com/SashaMTL/status/168663086979924377…)
Authors impersonated with fraudulent books on Amazon/Goodreads (janefriedman.com/i-would-rather-see-my-books-p…)

Good News:
Zoom restores terms of service after backlash to AI training clause (variety.com/2023/digital/news/zoom-ai-training…)
Authors fight back on book-scanning model Prosecraft (gizmodo.com/prosecraft-books-shut-down-ai-algo…)
Check out future streams on Twitch (twitch.tv/dair_institute). Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see (thecon.ai/submit-fresh-ai-hell).
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Alex
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Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park (naomipleasurepark.com).
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.