November 2023 AI ethics Round-up
The November 2023 Edition of Things You Should Know About in AI and Tech Ethics
Hello from Sunday friends! If you are especially astute, you might have noticed that Sunday is not Thursday, my usual publication day. There are a few reasons for that, including but not limited to some personal life situations, an emergency veterinary visit, gargantuan amounts of day-job work, and some new developments that I can't wait to tell everyone about soon.
But, let's get into this week's regularly scheduled content - a monthly round-up. So what happened over the last few weeks? The big news story that blew up everyone's feed was the OpenAI and Sam Altman Drama. I wrote my take on it, which has largely played out like I expected it to.
The major takeaway is that a whole lot of stupidity happened, and Sam Altman "won" in such a way that seems to have simultaneously managed to cause damage to his company. I linked this in my original piece, but it’s so good, I wanted to draw your attention to it again.
Shortly after, a conveniently timed 'leak' from Reuters broke about Q*, a supposed OpenAI breakthrough that Altman fanatics latched onto as the second coming, despite having no real information about it. We still don't know much about it, but that hasn't stopped a tsunami of hype pieces about how Q* is going to change the world. Seriously, I saw someone on LinkedIn say the course of human history changed on November 20th. I gave myself a headache I rolled my eyes so hard.
It's clear what I think about this whole situation, but for all my disdain over the hubris and blind fanaticism of some folks in tech, I have to acknowledge that this situation rocked the whole of the tech industry. From an ethics and governance perspective, this whole situation showed just how much major companies couldn’t trust OpenAI and especially couldn’t trust Sam Altman.
has a longer piece on that I thought was interesting. I don't necessarily agree with all of their takeaways, particularly about the future of AI, but I found the piece overall a fascinating look at the situation.
And if you need a quick dose of reality about the whole Q* situation,
from has you covered.This brings us to the events of last week--Google launched Gemini, fore-fronting the multi-modal approach to AI, which started out creating a lot of positive buzz, then a lot of negative buzz after it came out that Google faked its demo, and hoped no one would notice. This situation, plus the Q* leak has reminded me that we need to remember to adjust our expectations when a company has a strong, fiscal drive to get as close as they can to lying about the capabilities of their solution.
by has a decent write-up of the situation, in all of its face-palm glory.Finally, just this weekend the EU reached an agreement on the EU AI Act. It's been a battle to get it across the finish line. But now that it’s there, I expect we’ll see a lot corporate movement to address, and the Brussels effect will start the first tiny ripples across the world. I’ll talk more about the finalized act in a future.
Alright folks - that’s it for this week. Cheers!