Select Essays
In late 2022, then director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, shared on Twitter that 80% of his code was written by AI, adding: “I don’t even really code, I prompt and edit”.
Artificial intelligence that can generate data (generative AI) promises to revolutionize the world of work, and yet this new technology comes with ethical risks. Applications like ChatGPT are essentially predictive models, anticipating the word that might most reasonably follow in a sequence. But they lack any connection with the real-world context of those words – so the results could be brilliant insights, fluent nonsense or even wide-scale misinformation. Moreover, a surge in use of generative AI might have severe impacts on energy use and worsen climate change.
“You were really good at talking about ethics.”
“Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent.”
This is a small excerpt of a chat between journalist Kelsey Piper and former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX Sam Bankman-Fried, also known as SBF, just after his billion dollar crypto empire collapsed. FTX was one of the world’s largest exchanges for cryptocurrencies.
SBF was instrumental to the exchange’s meteoric rise, not least because he spoke in a language that appealed to Big Tech, investors and regulators. As one of the most prominent effective altruists, he donated swathes of money to social and political causes. Effective altruism is a movement that aims to do the most good for the greatest number of people. Yet, one of the movement’s most influential members turned out to run a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that has done the greatest financial damage imaginable to a large number of people.
Tech platforms took unprecedented steps to stem the tide of election-related misinformation and disinformation in the lead up to, and in the weeks following, the highly contentious 2020 US elections. Concerned by the potential impact of misinformation on the democratic process, we tracked the relevant policy changes of four major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok. Here we offer a visualized retrospective of these changes, starting from the year before Election Day through the two chaotic and violent months that followed it.
Mozilla is publishing this election misinformation policy timeline to help policymakers, journalists, researchers and the public better understand what happened during the US election, both to shed light on misinformation on various platforms and to better prepare for future elections around the world.
Our key takeaway: While platforms made numerous public changes during the period in question, there remains a persistent lack of data about how well these policies were enforced and their impact on election misinformation. Public access to this data would improve trust and create a better understanding of which policies should be adopted for future elections.
It is now well understood that social media platforms and other high-risk services play a critical role in the spread of election mis- and disinformation. These platforms have a range of interventions at their disposal, as demonstrated by the steps they took in 2020-21, as well as the actions they chose not to take. As they consider actions in further elections, we recommend that platforms should be more proactive and engage early; sustain their efforts beyond the immediate run-up to elections; create more transparency about their efforts and greater access to data for researchers; and apply all these efforts to elections beyond the US context.
Application to elections around the world: Major platforms need to be clear about how they will apply these policies beyond the US election context. Elections around the world face serious threats from mis- and disinformation. Whether the German elections in Fall 2021 or a dozen other contests across Latin America, Asia and Africa with a high risk of misinformation, platforms now have little excuse not to intervene. These efforts will demand increased resources in language and cultural understanding to appropriately engage within a national context. Are platforms prepared to make that investment around the world?
Artists in the City: SPACE in ’68 and beyond explores the early history of an artist-led organisation which broke new ground by taking on large properties for artist studios in London, which it has continued doing for 50 years, finding space for artists in a changing city. The model of artists seizing the initiative and working with city authorities and landlords to provide studios was new and hugely influential. It was copied around the world, for example at PS1 New York and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.
Described by both Art Quarterly and Art Monthly as a ‘Who’s who of artists in London from the last 50 years’, the book stands as a wonderful testament to SPACE’s history and continuing importance in today’s art world.
The four interviews collected in this volume were done in an attempt to understand the value of art and to foreground its importance. four by three magazine editors Christine Jakobson and Bernard Hay have spoken with leading philosophers Paul Guyer and Andrew Bowie, as well as with Palme d’Or winning director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Turner Prize winning artist Susan Philipsz, in order to illustrate the ways in which artworks reflect on fundamental historical, political and ethical issues, while giving voice to the deep affinities and differences that philosophy and art share.