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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“The internet was loaded with earnest content and search engines proved vital to indexing and recalling every last morsel of it. There was a sense of abundance: you could read about anything and research everything.”
“As U.S. et al. v. Google goes to trial, the echoes of the landmark federal suit against Microsoft, a quarter-century ago, are unmistakable.”
Time magazine identifies the 100 people that drive the current AI boom and the conversations around it in a special issue. In addition to staple industry names like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario and Daniela Amodei, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Time 100 AI also highlights the work of AI researchers Kate Crawford, Timnit Gebru, and Meredith Whittaker, and artists Stephanie Dinkins, Sougwen Chun, and Holly Herndon, who “grapple with profound ethical questions” and try to use AI “to address social challenges.”
Aram Bartholl bids farewell to his 2010 Google Streetview performance 15 Seconds of Fame, after the company updated its severly outdated Berlin image set. In October 2009, the German artist interrupted his coffee break on Borsigstraße to run after a passing Google Streetview car, creating the whimsical chase sequence that’s been online since the service launched in Germany in 2010. “15 Seconds of Fame turned into almost 15 years,” Bartholl jokes on Instagram. “The work is finally complete.”
“How do we prevent these language models from scraping our archives? But if they are going to scrape our archives, how do we at least make sure that we’re getting paid for that?”
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
“What just drives me up the wall is that we appear to have decided the way AI is going to work is through a competitive dynamic between Google, Microsoft, and Meta.”
“The breakneck deployment of half-baked AI, and its unthinking adoption by a load of credulous writers, means that Google—where, admittedly, I’ve found the quality of search results to be steadily deteriorating for years—is no longer a reliable starting point for research.”
“The Google Street View data set is often stunning and often useful. But as a project, it was a grotesque violation of worldwide privacy norms that absolutely never should have happened.”
“LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence.”
Ethiopian American AI scholar and computer scientist Dr. Timnit Gebru announces the launch of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research institute (DAIR). With $3.7 million in funding from several foundations, the independent, community-rooted institute aims to “counter Big Tech’s pervasive influence on the research, development and deployment of AI.” The announcement comes on the one-year anniversary of her sudden ouster from Google, where she co-led the Ethical AI team.
“Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of US dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary—paid to them directly by Facebook.”
The University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum opens “Don’t Be Evil,” the second iteration of the “Conflict in My Outlook” exhibition series curated by Anna Briers. Named after Google’s former corporate motto (insidiously axed in 2015), the show “materialises the invisible power structures beneath the surface of networked technologies” with works by Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman, Simon Denny, Xanthe Dobbie, Forensic Architecture, Kate Geck, Eugenia Lim (image: ON DEMAND, 2019), Suzanne Treister, and many others.
“The closer the research started getting to search and ads, the more resistance there was. Those are the oldest and most entrenched organizations with the most power.”
Artist-researchers Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace, in collaboration with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), launch Exposing.AI, an online tool that lets users find out whether their Flickr photos have been used for training commercial face recognition and biometric analysis systems. The web app scans across twelve notorious datasets and provides deep analysis: MegaFace (image), for example, includes 3,311,471 Flickr photos used by Amazon, Google, and other corporate giants.
“Silencing marginalized voices like this is the opposite of the NAUWU [Nothing About Us Without Us] principles which we discussed. And doing this in the context of ‘responsible AI’ adds so much salt to the wounds.”
Google AI offshoot DeepMind announces a major breakthrough in solving the “protein folding problem”—determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. Considered one of biology’s grand challenges due to myriad possible configurations, DeepMind’s AI system AlphaFold has demonstrated it can predict protein structures with high accuracy, vastly outperforming other more laborious, costly techniques. “It’s a game-changer,” says Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany. “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything.”
“Google’s ‘Universal Texture’ facilitates an endless consumption of the earth, like the escalator carrying shoppers frictionlessly through a mall.”
Citing the economic upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic, Google smart city affiliate Sidewalk Labs cancels its much-maligned ‘city of tomorrow’ redevelopment plan for a neglected portion of Toronto’s waterfront.
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