Aisling Crean

I do love an Irish bus queue. A bunch of strangers hanging around together pretending not to queue.

And he looked great in turquoise.

Charles Brooks looks inside a 250 year old French Violin. Photographed with a Medical Laparoscope adapted to a Lumix G9ii Camera. 1770 violin by Augustin Chappuy. #music #art #photography

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement Disagreement is one of the deepest and most pervasive topics in philosophy; arguably its very bedrock, and is an ever-increasing feature of politics, ethics, public policy, science and many other area...

41 new articles on disagreement - coming out in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement (released on 26 Nov). A pleasure co-editing this with Maria Baghramian and Rach Cosker-Rowland, and a long time in the making (thx to our fantastic contributors) www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...

Screencap: "UK ministers are piloting the use of generative artificial intelligence to analyse responses to government consultations and write draft answers to parliamentary questions. Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, will on Thursday unveil tools that the AI “crack squad” at the heart of Whitehall is trialling with a view to wider rollouts across central departments and public services."

It seems like there are just endless bad ideas about how to use "AI". Here are some new ones courtesy of the UK government.

... and a short thread because there is so much awfulness in this one article.
/1

www.ft.com/content/f2ae...

"We had four lawyers, three privacy experts, and two campaigners look at Microsoft's new Service Agreement, and none of our experts could tell if Microsoft plans on using your personal data..."

foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns...

Llegint l'article hi pots identificar tots els problemes d'aplicar tecnologies digitals a educació amb serveis que no són propis, no només del tema IA. El penso estampar a la sala de profes.

Neat post! Thanks for writing this, Ben.

I'm tempted to do that too. Going to Krakow in July and want to learn a little Polish beforehand, so I may cave in yet...

Ah, that's interesting! Thanks!

Maybe Duolingo -- I used to like it but it's so chock full of ads now that I never use it anymore. It wasn't always like that.

This is what I was looking for! Thanks!

Hey @mattweiner19.bsky.social! I looked to see what MC said about this a while ago on Twitter/X -- couldn't find the thread. (Long story why I'm curious about this!). Interesting that it's not actually a recording as e/o usually thinks...

When think tanks, consultancies, industry etc recommend more "AI tools" in education they are either naively or deliberately obfuscatory. AI isn't "tools" - it's infrastructure. Institutions will pay licenses to access it. Its owners will take rent. It will hustle its users to follow its scripts.

Midjourney-generated image, prompt was: a family enjoying a barbecue, upside down --v 6.0

AI image synthesis is inherently wasteful. As we all know but often ignore, anything called AI today consumes enormous energy resources and computing power. Also, it relies on the mass exploitation of human labor on a planetary scale. But there’s more to it …
1/6

Arlington Reservoir, January 2018

On the matter of the British Library cyber incident The most important lesson to figure out is why it is taking so long to restore services. That will tell us how to prevent such a calamity in other vital national institutions.

My best attempt at making sense of what has been happening at the British Library and more importantly how to learn from it

ciaranmartin.substack.com/p/on-the-mat...

Mass layoffs with translators being replaced by AI (ChatGPT4) are being rumored. This will probably result in a worse user experience (all those fun humorous phrases). When OpenAI put in their charter that AI ought to benefit humanity, what exactly were they thinking? How is it going to do this?

To read:

Epistemic Rights in the Era of Digital Disruption

link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

A 1558 book on left, CD on top-right, and 3.5" floppy disk bottom-right.

I'm not a Luddite or technophobe. I just know that after 466 years the thing on the left can be read fine. The thing top-right is 15 years old & uses tech that already no longer comes standard on computers. And the 30-yr-old thing bottom-right needs specialized antique hardware & software to read.

British Library to burn through reserves to recover from cyber attack London-based institution faces spending millions of pounds to rebuild most digital services

Depressing news: to rebuild after the cyber attack, the British Library "will now be forced to spend . . . £6mn-£7mn . . . consuming a sizeable proportion of its £16.4mn in unallocated reserves" www.ft.com/content/4be5...

Here's a paragraph from my paper in the brand new, open access, collection What Is Structural Injustice?
edited by Jude Browne and Maeve McKeown.

fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/...

The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it, the lawsuit said.

The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html