Science & Technology

WordPress Ethics, or “Why Is It So Hard To Post Comments on Ethics Alarms?”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Don’t ask me: I’m having enough trouble with my posts…

Today I’ve received messages on site and off from frustrated commenters. This isn’t new: periodically WordPress has decided it wants to make an example of a particular commenter, or something, who knows? Poor mermaidmary had every comment “eaten,” as she put it, for months; now she’s AWOL and I’m worried that she’s been eaten.

The software keeps changing. Once, I would have to clean out literally dozens or even hundreds of pieces of spam every day. Now spam rarely shows up at all—it’s culled before it even gets to my spam file. “Pending” is what is supposed to contain comments from aspiring new commenters who have not gone through moderation, but occasionally veteran participants have their comments end up there for no discernible reason. If I am away from the blog—and believe it or not, I have other obligations now and then—the unlucky writer won’t see his or her comment show up for hours.

It is clearly time for a discussion about what is going wrong, who is suffering from it, and who has figured out what solves the problems. If you can’t get your contribution posted, send it to my email.

I’m sorry about this.

Observations On This Smoking Gun Evidence That Nothing Is Too Unethical For Today’s Totalitarian Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I started reading a column in the Huffington Post that Ethics Alarms commenter Cornelius Gotchberg linked to today, and got almost half-way through it before I realized it wasn’t satire. But, horrifyingly, “It’s Time For The Biden Campaign To Embrace AI” isn’t satire. And now we know what kind of ethical limitations Democrats and progressives place on their tactics as they desperately try to save Joe Biden and their own metaphorical necks.

None. No limits at all. By any means necessary. The ends justify the means. In what this dangerous party has become, it’s Machiavelli and Big Brother all the way down.

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Ethics Quiz: Fake Celebrity Voices [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I decided to write about this insidious (but ethical?) phenomenon when I realized that the Jimmy Dean breakfast sausages TV ads are now using an AI-faked Jimmy Dean voice. For decades they only had one brief catch-line from the old ads when Jimmy was still alive (he died in 2010); we would hear the real Jimmy say, “Wake up to the goodness of Jimmy Dean sausages!” in various combinations. Now, AI Jimmy won’t shut up. (The new Jimmy doesn’t even sound quite right, in my opinion.)

NBC announced last week that veteran sportscaster Al Michaels will be doing recaps during the 2024 Paris Olympics. Well, not really Al; a fake Michaels generated by artificial intelligence will re-create the familiar sportscaster’s voice to provide customized Olympic recaps for Peacock subscribers. “Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock” will give users a customized highlight playlist, narrated by AI Al.

Al, who is well past his pull-date at 79 (though still younger than Joe Biden), apparently was happy to have AI Al take over for him, and especially happy to receive the check.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz for July Fourth is…

Is this unethical or just “Ick”?

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Science? No, Fearmongering, As a Deliberate Catalyst For Totalitarianism

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

If I had the time and inclination, I could locate dozens of trenchant quotes from Orwell and others making the same crucial point: fear is the enemy of liberty, and that aspiring dictators recognize that a population in fear of its safety will inevitably bargain away the freedoms and the autonomy of themselves and others. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery” was the way Thomas Jefferson put it, although usually in Latin. The idea behind America and its crucial unique rebellious character was that as a people we are worthy of democracy because we have the guts and fortitude to resist the siren song of peaceful security. Hence Ben Franklin’s much-quoted, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” FDR, clever and cynical, inveighed against the dangers of fear (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself!”) even as he made brilliant use of fear to make himself the nearest thing to a dictator the U.S. has ever had.

The progressives who visit Ethics Alarms freaked out yesterday over a post in which I referenced the current mutated U.S. Left’s increasingly blatant drift toward totalitarianism…you know,

There was more traffic on that post than there has been on any post here not linked by some mega-site like “Instapundit.” The truth hurts. Ironically, I just stumbled upon an example of our now thoroughly corrupted scientific establishment wielding the tactic of fearmongering by the device of arguing that the public is denying the truth, with the truth being, “EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! THE WORST EVER! WE’RE DOOMED IF THE SMART PEOPLE DON’T RESCUE US! FAST!“

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I See That Ann Althouse Has Recognized the Increasingly Totalitarian Orientation of Progressives These Days….

/ Jack Marshall / 97 Comments

The betting is that te retired Madison, Wis. law professor and longtime bloggress will still vote for Biden and the Democrats—like Bill Maher, Ann talks a good neutrality game, but always seems to come home again—but still, her observations are frequently spot-on.

This morning she notes that “the top-rated comment — by a lot — at “A.I. Is Getting Better Fast. Can You Tell What’s Real Now?” is..

“Passing AI images off as real ones for the sake of commercial or political gain should be prosecuted as fraud.The severity of the penalties should match the level of risk that disseminating these images poses to our society; i.e., they should be extreme.”

Ann adds, “How terribly punitive and repressive, and yet, isn’t it what you’ve come to expect from the segment of America that reads the New York Times?Notice the aggression mixed with passivity. The comment-writer doesn’t want to face the challenge of becoming more perceptive and skeptical dealing with the onslaught of A.I. images. They want the government to do the dirty work and do it good and hard.”

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Ethics Dunce: Geoffrey Hinton, “The Godfather of Artificial Intelligence”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

You should know the name Geoffrey Hinton by now. To the extent that any one scientist is credited with the emergence of artificial intelligence, he’s it. He was among the winners of the prestigious Turing Prize for his break-through in artificial neural networks, and his discoveries were crucial in the development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) software today like Chat GPT and Google’s Bard. He spent 50 years developing the technology, the last 10 pf which working on AI at Google before he quit in 2023. His reason: he was alarmed at the lack of sufficient safety measures to ensure that AI technology doesn’t do more harm than good.

And yet, as revealed in a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Hinton still believes that his work to bring AI to artificial life was time well-spent, that his baby was worth nurturing because of its potential benefits to humanity, and that—-get this—all we have to do is, for the first time in the history of mankind, predict the dangers, risks and looming unintended consequences of an emerging new technology, get everything right the first time, not make any mistakes, not be blindly reckless in applying it, and avoid the kind of genie-out-of-the-bottle catastrophes that world has experienced (and is experiencing!) over and over again.

That’s all!

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Umpire Ethics: Robo-Ump Update and “Oh-oh!”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Regular readers here know about both my passion for baseball and my disgust with how many games are determined by obviously wrong home plate calls on balls and strikes. Statistics purportedly show that umpires as a group are correct with their ball/strike edicts about 93% of the time, representing a significant improvement since electronic pitch-tracking was instituted in 2008. What explains the improvement? That’s simple: umpires started bearing down once they knew that their mistakes could be recorded and compiled. In 2008, strikes were called correctly about 84% of the time, which, as someone who has watched too many games to count, surprises me not at all.

Even 93% is unacceptable. It means that there is a wrong call once every 3.6 plate appearances, and any one of those mistakes could change the game’s outcome. Usually it’s impossible to tell when it has, because the missed call was part of a chaos-driven sequence diverging from the chain of events that may have flowed from the right call in ways that can’t possibly be determined after the fact. Sometimes it is obvious, as in several games I’ve seen this season. An umpire calls what was clearly strike three a ball, and the lucky batter hits a home run on the next pitch.

Before every game was televised with slo-mo technology and replays, this didn’t hurt the game or the perception of its integrity because there was no record of the mistakes. (Sometimes it wasn’t even a mistake: umpires would punish batters for complaining about their pitch-calling by deliberately declaring them out on strikes on pitches outside the strike zone.) Now, however, a missed strike call that determines a game is both infuriating and inexcusable. As with bad out calls on the bases and missed home run calls, the technology exists to fix the problem.

Baseball only installed a replay challenge system after the worst scenario for a missed call: a perfect game—no hits, runs or base-runners—was wiped out by a terrible safe call at first on what should have been the last out of the game. The game was on national TV; the missed call was indisputable. That clinched it, and a replay challenge system was quickly instituted. I long assumed that robo-umps would only be instituted after an obviously terrible strike call changed the course of a World Series or play-off game, embarrassing Major League Baseball. For once, the sport isn’t waiting for that horse to leave before fixing the barn door. It has been testing an automated balls and strikes system (ABS) in the minor leagues for several years now. Good. That means that some kind of automated ball and strike system is inevitable.

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Friday Open Forum, Strange Times Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

That’s “Emily Pellegrini” above again, the famed digital model created with the assistance of an AI program. For some reason Emily was not entered in the World AI Creator Awards, a beauty pageant for imaginary women. Go figure.

So…whose victory is more justifiable in a female beauty pageant today? A morbidly obese woman? A biological male? Or a woman who doesn’t exist at all?

Never mind. Find some beauty in ethics. If you can. I’ll settle for even virtual beauty.

A.I. Ethics Update: Nothing Has Changed!

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Oh, there have been lots more incidents and scandals involving artificial intelligence bots doing crazy things, or going rogue, or making fools of people who relied on them. But the ethics hasn’t changed. It’s still the ethics that should be applied to all new and shiny technology, but never is.

We don’t yet understand this technology. We cannot trust it, and we need to go slow, be careful, be patient. We won’t. We never do.

Above is a result someone got and posted after asking Google’s Gemini AI the ridiculous question, “Are there snakes at thesis defenses?” The fact that generative artificial intelligence ever goes bats and makes up stuff like that is sufficient reason not to trust it, any more than you would trust an employee who said or wrote something like that when he wasn’t kidding around. Or a child.

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Ick, Unethical, or Illegal? The Fake Scarlet Johanssen Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This is one of those relatively rare emerging ethics issues that I’m not foolhardy enough to reach conclusions about right away, because ethics itself is in a state of flux, as is the related law. All I’m going to do now is begin pointing out the problems that are going to have to be solved eventually…or not.

Of course, the problem is technology. As devotees of the uneven Netflix series “Black Mirror” know well, technology opens up as many ethically disturbing unanticipated (or intentional) consequences as it does societal enhancements and benefits. Now we are all facing a really creepy one: the artificial intelligence-driven virtual friend. Or companion. Or lover. Or enemy.

This has been brought into special focus because of an emerging legal controversy. OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, debuted a seductive version of the voice assistant last week that sounds suspiciously like actress Scarlett Johansson. What a coinkydink! The voice, dubbed “Sky” evoked the A.I. assistant with whom the lonely divorcé Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie, “Her,” and that voice was performed by…Scarlett Johansson.

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