Ben Gansky

grew up in a theater. wandering through the borderlands of data, critical theory, politics, power, culture, democracy &&&. phd in progress @ ASU.

[giulio quaggiotto @gquaggiotto]

"The challenge of 'keeping up' with digital transformation is not 'to integrate these tools as rapidly as possible'; it's to secure the core integrity of professionals’ responsibilities in a rapidly digitizing world" https://t.co/HLRuhkXi47 @seanmmcdonald @bengansky

[CIGI @CIGIonline]

Bridging the gap between digitally transformed professional practice and professional governance will require training new professionals to do so.

@seanmmcdonald and @bengansky explore the role of professional education programs to address this.

Details:https://t.co/uB1YlHY8Bv

[CIGI @CIGIonline]

How do professional governance organizations teach their members how to navigate digital transformation in their fields of practice?

This paper by @seanmmcdonald and @bengansky explains:
https://t.co/fmaQNIf6ri

[Ben Gansky @bengansky]

Looking for accounts of how Google changed intra-org comms and other infrastructure in response to Maven protests and 2018 walkout campaign... (referenced but not detailed in this LOGIC interview, for instance: https://t.co/LViD0KbPAr)... @mer__edith @bentarnoff help me out 🙏?

[Ali Alkhatib @_alialkhatib]

the frauds who claim that this is a credible threat are charlatans

the billionaires who fund their work are robber barons

the institutions that give them titles and honors are money-laundering schemes

the government officials who parrot this bullshit back out are useful idiots

[Ana Brandusescu @anabrandusescu]

This is the same Scale AI that is involved in the recent US announcement of taking "New Actions to Promote Responsible AI Innovation that Protects Americans’ Rights and Safety". https://t.co/gC7sGaX8Cq

[Ana Brandusescu @anabrandusescu]

"Rights groups and labor researchers say Scale AI is among a number of American AI companies that have not abided by basic labor standards for their workers abroad." https://t.co/hqNErV85g5

[Ben Gansky @bengansky]

@mer__edith Feels like @daphnehk might have or be able to point to?

[Meredith Whittaker @mer__edith]

📢NEW PAPER!

Where @davidthewid, @sarahbmyers & I unpack what Open Source AI even is.

We find that the terms ‘open’ & ‘open source’ are often more marketing than technical descriptor, and that even the most 'open' systems don't alone democratize AI 1/

https://t.co/xRwEBc5LvO

[Abeba Birhane @Abebab]

A major bottlenecks to this work has been compute constraints. Open source without access to compute only serves big corp & elite insts.

eg. only downloading LAION 2B-en requires 6.2TB of storage + additional compute to carry out analyses such as running Pysentimiento.

36/

[Abeba Birhane @Abebab]

These datasets are of 2 types: open, “freely available”, & mainly scraped from the CommonCrawl (e.g. LAION-400M & LAION-5B), & those that are closed datasets curated internally by Big Tech corp labs (such as Google’s ALIGN 1.7B/ALIGN 6.6B, JFT-5B, & OpenAI’s WebImageText-WIT.

5/

[Abeba Birhane @Abebab]

“Scrape-first-ask-questions-later” data filtering culture, generating plausibly illegal gargantuan datasets & models has elicited a slew of copyright lawsuits, enmasse fetishization of women’s bodies, outright ban of model outputs from forums & marquee of poor quality datasets
7/

[Abeba Birhane @Abebab]

New paper!📢
On Hate Scaling Laws for Data-Swamps with @vinayprabhu, Sang Han & @VishnuBoddeti
Paper: https://t.co/cOSdEhU0bR
Code: https://t.co/rfK541SIql

WARNING: Contains examples of hateful text & NSFW images that might be disturbing, distressing, &/or offensive

Long 🧵
1/

[Roel Dobbe @[email protected] @roeldobbe]

Deeply disturbing insights from @algorithmwatch's newsletter:

The C4 data set, which is used to train large language models such as ChatGPT, is extremely biased towards seeing AI as a super-intelligence over what it is - (part of) a socio-technical system.

[Ben Gansky @bengansky]

@NiNanjira !

[Ben Gansky @bengansky]

🎯

[Nanjira @NiNanjira]

Fascinating to note that a new imaginary in tech global governance architecture— from information environment (mis/disinformation) to AI — is to “borrow” from scientific bodies.
Three major ones thrown out are CERN, IAEA and IPCC.
/1

[Ben Gansky @bengansky]

@sarahbmyers @JaaiVipra @GaneshSitaraman

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

You really, really should not be relying on AI detectors for classroom use.

This new paper shows that not only are they very easy to defeat by just prompting a couple of times, but they have insane false-positive rates against non-native English speakers. https://t.co/SxRWCkagHV

[Sarah Myers West @sarahbmyers]

I strongly agree w concerns about the concentration of AI power, but disagree that open source AI provides respite. In many respects increased corporate control has happened not in spite of OSS but through capturing it. More soon on this from @davidthewid @mer__edith and me.

[Tim Hwang @timhwang]

this kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most american cities