Carolyn Ownbey, PhD

The purpose of a system is what it does

ICO writes to Meta over 'concerning' AI smart glasses report Videos, including of glasses-wearers using the toilet or having sex, are sometimes reviewed by a Kenya-based subcontractor.

Last year when I was checking into a hotel, the desk person was wearing Meta glasses. I kindly asked them to take them off. They were annoyed. I said, “I do not consent to you looking at my credit card and ID with Meta glasses on.” My instincts were correct: www.bbc.com/news/article...

Iran War Cost Tracker — $1 Billion Per Day The Pentagon estimates the war in Iran costs $1 billion per day. Track the running total in real time.

This war against Iran is costing US taxpayers approximately $11,500 per second.

According to iran-cost-ticker.com the total cost has already reached $5.5 billion.

Gotta say, the USian self-assessment of badness is probably more accurate than the inflated Canadian self-assessment of goodness.

Left can't resist being on wrong side of a war Whether it's Jeremy Corbyn or Zack Polanski, their foreign policy stances terrify voters outside core supporters

Well, here’s the thing about being antiwar as an ethical belief: it means you end up opposing most wars. Almost all of them, in fact. This is quite common in people who have consistent beliefs but looks insane to people who have none, or mostly just believe superior people should make the decisions.

A quote from me - “it’s pretty insulting to see scholarship used this way when the academic humanities are currently under attack from every possible angle — as though the actual people who do the thinking and produce the scholarship are reducible to their work itself, and can be removed entirely from the equation”

Went on record saying, essentially, “AI sucks, fund the humanities” today

Screenshot of text message conversation that reads: "[put] pdf into the search bar" "Omg I thought I did that! Amazing thank you!" "Hahaha. Do you use Google or Duck Duck Go? If Google, that's why" "Google 😒" "You should stop using that. Their AI fucked up its actual ability to search"

A reminder: if you're still using Google for search, you no longer have access to the whole internet... or probably to the thing you're looking for.

Case in point, my partner was just looking for the PDF of a book (that is, in fact, freely available online and the FIRST duck duck go search result):

When following The Rules becomes a virtue unto itself, the substance of those rules ceases to matter.

🧵

Spain Denies Use of Bases for US Forces Involved in War on Iran “Spanish bases are not being used for this operation,” Spain’s foreign minister said.

Spain has denied the use of its military bases to U.S. forces involved in the joint U.S.-Israel war on Iran, including for refueling, objecting to unprovoked attacks that Spanish officials say are a violation of international law.

🚨 It looks like the UK government is gearing up to upend copyright law in favour of AI companies, legalising the theft of their work.

This is despite creatives' huge protests, and despite previous proposals being roundly rejected by the public.

Please spread the word.

🧵 1/4

I know that I sound like a broken record but I think once this society was ok with accepting mass covid deaths just to be able to eat at Applebees then all bets were off.

Covid is not over but there's no prevention.

Normalization of mass infection, death and disability is eugenics, and this political choice leads us towards fascism.

Since 2020, many countries chose to legalize "assisted suicide", in the midst of a pandemic that is killing so many people.

yes and thank you for the excuse to share one of my all-time favorite tweets (from @longwall26.bsky.social)

pretty confident that if our own government bombed, say, Philadelphia, we'd just kind forget about it after a couple more Rocky movies

Rubio speaking to reporters now says the “imminent threat” the administration has referred to to justify US strikes on Iran was that they knew Israel was going to attack Tehran, and believed such an attack would prompt Iran to strike US bases and assets in the region

The threat to US forces was literally Israel.

And, yet, Canadian PM Carney dutifully called Iran the cause of all problems in the Middle East.

This is mass gaslighting. Again.

The General Assembly can recommend that its member states impose arms and trade embargoes on the U.S. and Israel. The General Assembly could also suspend the U.S. and Israel from its ranks. These decisions would require a vote of two-thirds of the 193 General Assembly member states.

BREAKING: Credible whistleblower discloses that FBI forensic experts were ordered to stand down from processing the scene where Renee Good was killed, because Kash Patel did not want Good referenced as a “victim” in the warrant.

As the laid off Middle East News Editor, I concur. Management eliminated the positions of every single staff correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East.

Protest sign that says “Hands off Iran!”

It’s freezing but we’re out here.

Take out the leader, grab all the oil and move on to the next target.

Warner: "There was no imminent threat to the United States by the Iranians. There was a threat to Israel. If we equate a threat to Israel as the equivalent of an imminent threat to the US, then we are in uncharted territory."

bigotry is a libidinal pleasure for a lot of people!

one under-discussed crisis in Silicon Valley is that startups are having to dig ever deeper into the lore of Tolkien to find their names

There's been discourse on Long Covid on this site the past few days. I think some people are thoroughly underestimating how hellish chronic illness can make you feel, even if you aren't at an immediate risk of dying.

The Covid-careless expect ppl who live w/ serious health challenges, in part bc of THEM, to show up perfectly to discuss it.
And yet they don’t show up at all other than to punch down on the ppl they passed infections to.

“If you had asked me nicer, I wouldn’t have infected you”…is abuser language.

A major challenge for our times is to avoid becoming callous. Some people seem to be truly failing the challenge.

m-f's i have a headache right now

Building benchmarks is only one way scholars can help steer AI development. We can also measure the effects of AI on students, build better datasets, or tune new open models. Openness itself could be our most important contribution. Universities have huge libraries, and the legal doctrine of fair use should protect models trained on those collections for a nonprofit educational purpose. At the moment, we are not pressing this advantage. Higher education has been so cautious about fair use that the private sector can now train more freely on our libraries (via Google Books) than is possible for academic AI researchers. We need to be bolder: It is our duty to ensure library collections remain open to the public in a form that empowers 21st-century readers. If our intellectual heritage gets enclosed in proprietary tools, we will find ourselves making the same bad bargain we made with scientific publishers, who sell our own research back to us at a steep markup.

We're in a strange situation rn where Google can train freely on books from university libraries—but researchers *at* universities have limited access. I'm optimistic this can be fixed, but if you're in admin or working at a foundation, please know: univs are failing here & resources are needed.