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Gordon Hull
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Recall that ChatGPT a couple of months ago did a total face plant on the topic of Kierkegaard's knight of faith from the knight of infinite resignation. Well, with the fullness of time and an upgrade, it's a lot better now: (screen grabs below the fold) The previous version was... Continue reading
By Gordon Hull In the previous two posts (here and here) I’ve developed a political account of authorship (according to which whether we should treat an AI as an author for journal articles and the like is a political question, not one about what the AI is, or whether its... Continue reading
As if Sartre didn't produce enough words all by himself! ChatGPT's response to the following prompt is instructive for those of us who are concerned about ChatGPT being used to cheat. Read past the content of the answer to notice the made-up citations. The "consciousness is a question..." line is... Continue reading
By Gordon Hull As I argued last time, authorship is a political function, and we should be applying that construction of it to understand whether AI should be considered an author. Here is a first reason for doing so: AI can’t really be “accountable.” (a) Research accountability: The various journal... Continue reading
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You know how sometimes your students don't do the reading? And then how, when you give them a writing prompt based on it, they try to guess their way to a good answer from the everyday meaning of the words in the prompt? And how, sometimes, the outcome is spectacularly,... Continue reading
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The MA Program at UNC Charlotte has a number of funded lines for our two-year MA program in philosophy. We're an eclectic, practically-oriented department that emphasizes working across disciplines and philosophical traditions. If that sounds like you, or a student you know - get in touch! You can email me... Continue reading
By Gordon Hull Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT burst into public consciousness sometime in the second half of last year, and Chat-GPT’s impressive results have led to a wave of concern about the future viability of any profession that depends on writing, or on teaching writing in education. A... Continue reading
By Gordon Hull Last time, I introduced a number of philosophy of law examples in the context of ML systems and suggested that they might be helpful in thinking differently, and more productively, about holding ML systems accountable. Here I want to make the application specific. So: how do these... Continue reading
By Gordon Hull AI systems are notoriously opaque black boxes. In a now standard paper, Jenna Burrell dissects this notion of opacity into three versions. The first is when companies deliberately hide information about their algorithms, to avoid competition, maintain trade secrets, and to guard against gaming their algorithms, as... Continue reading
In the previous two posts (first, second), I took up the invitation provided by a recent paper by Daniele Lorenzini to develop some thoughts on the relationship between Foucault’s thought and theorizing around epistemic injustice. In particular, Miranda Fricker’s account both draws heavily from Foucault and pushes back against his... Continue reading
Now published in Critical Review. Here's the abstract: Foucault distanced himself from Marxism even though he worked in an environment—left French theory of the 1960s and 1970s—where Marxism was the dominant frame of reference. By viewing Foucault in the context of French Marxist theoretical debates of his day, we can... Continue reading
By Gordon Hull Last time, I took the opportunity provided by a recent paper by Daniele Lorenzini to develop some thought on the relationship between Foucault’s thought and theorizing around epistemic injustice. Lorenzini’s initial point, with which I agree fully, is that Fricker’s development of epistemic injustice is, on her... Continue reading
By Gordon Hull Those of us who have both made extensive use of Foucault and made a foray into questions of epistemic injustice have tended to sweep the question of the relation between the two theoretical approaches under the rug. Miranda Fricker’s book, which has basically set the agenda for... Continue reading
I wrote a piece a little more than a year ago about how intellectual property rights are getting in the way of global vaccine equity, condemning a lot of people to die in lower-income countries. There have been various initiatives to address the situation. A piece in Nature by Amy... Continue reading
From the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion, here is the abstract for my new paper, "Dirty Data Labeled Dirt Cheap: Epistemic Injustice in Machine Learning Systems:" "Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) systems increasingly purport to deliver knowledge about people and the world or to assist people in doing so.... Continue reading
By Gordon Hull UPDATE: 6/14: Here's a nice takedown ("Nonsense on Stilts") of the idea that AI can be sentient. I don’t remember where I read about an early text-based chatbot named JULIA, but it was likely about 20 years ago. JULIA played a flirt, and managed to keep a... Continue reading
By Gordon Hull As a criterion for algorithmic assessment, “fairness” has encountered numerous problems. Many of these emerged in the wake of ProPublica’s argument that Broward County’s pretrial detention system, COMPAS, was unfair to black suspects. To recall: In 2016, ProPublica published an investigation piece criticizing Broward County, Florida’s use... Continue reading
Luke Stark argues that Facial recognition should be treated as the “plutonium of AI” – something so dangerous that it’s use should be carefully controlled and limited. If you follow the news, you’ll know that we’re currently treating it as the carbon dioxide of AI, a byproduct of profit-making that... Continue reading
People make snap judgments about those they see the first time – mentally categorizing someone as friendly, threatening, trustworthy, etc. Most of us know that those impressions are idiosyncratic, and suffused with cultural biases along race, gender and other lines. So obviously I know what you’re thinking… we need an... Continue reading
in refusing to grant copyright registration to an AI creation. I suspect this one to be litigated for a while, since the person who has been trying to get protection for the picture has declared limiting copyright to human authors as something that would be unconstitutional (I also think it... Continue reading
First read this piece by Abeba Birhane, who warns about neocolonial exploitation of people in Africa by AI and big tech. Then read this detailed account of content moderation for Facebook in Kenya and abuse of the workers involved. Continue reading
If you want to use their website; WaPo has the story here. But it's one of those public/private partnerships where data leaks and hacks and thefts happen. To their credit, the Post went to Joy Buolamwini, whose work proved that facial recognition systems work best on white men and worst... Continue reading
The SCOTUS decision yesterday striking down OSHA’s vaccine mandate is based on some of the most sophomoric reasoning the Court has issued in a long time. And I am aware of what Court I’m talking about. The gist of the argument is that OSHA is only authorized to enact safety... Continue reading
By Gordon Hull Machine Learning (ML) applications learn by repetition. That is, they come to recognize what, say, a chair looks like, by seeing lots of images of chairs that have been correctly labeled as such. Since the machine is trying to figure out a pattern or set of characteristics... Continue reading
This is not what critical race theory says: "Critical race theory, Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the... Continue reading