It's tempting to see the recent UK AI Safety Summit as a damp squib, preempted by an Executive Order on AI from the Whitehouse and roundly criticised by civil society for excluding everyone but tech execs. Unfortunately, none of the current debate gets to the heart of the matter: AI is already a flop, and we are being hoodwinked by a mixture of corporate and ideological agendas that will wreck…
Some quick notes on the EU's AI Act . These were written the morning after so I might update them as more details emerge. The whole thing is premised on a risk-based approach( 1 ) This is a departure from GDPR, which is rights-based with actionable rights Therefore it's a huge victory for industry( 2 ) It's basically a product safety regulation that regulates putting AI on the market The intention…
My evidence to the House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee inquiry into Large language models is available on the parliament.uk website . Executive summary Large language models contain foundational flaws which mean they are unable to live up to the hype and make it likely that the current bubble will burst. They will continue to require vast amounts of invisibilised labour to…
Opening remarks for the panel on 'Political Interventions in Data and AI' at #DataJustice2023 The political intervention that we need right now is a social movement to resist AI, because a real challenge to algorithmic violence requires structural change. AI isn't sci-fi but a radical continuity of modernity, of bureaucracy, of austerity; of the anti-worker, anti-poor contempt that stretches from…
Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in 'The cat sat on the [BLANK]'). Despite the impressive technical ju-jitsu of transformer models and the billions of parameters they learn, it's still a computational guessing game. ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a 'bullshit…
Chapter abstracts for 'Resisting AI - An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence' Available from Bristol University Press chapter 0 - introduction The introduction starts by grounding AI, for the purposes of the book, as the computational methods of deep learning and the associated institutions and ideologies. It sets out the reasons for resisting AI that are covered in Chapters 1 to 4,…
A talk given to the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the History of AI, University of Cambridge, June 23rd 2021 It's time to talk about the Ludding times. That's how they talked about it, those who were there, when readying themselves for an insurrection a few years later. The Ludding times of 1811 to 1816, when communities in Nottinghamshire, Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire rose up against…
The speakers notes for a 6.5 minute talk given at the Data Justice Lab in Cardiff, June 7th 2019. 1. not transformation but intensification The introduction of process automation and predictive analytics via machine learning is not a transformation, it's an intensification. Machine learning and bureaucracy are both generalisable modes of rational ordering based on abstraction and deriving…
A talk given at the launch of the 'All Access AI' network at Goldsmiths, Unversity of London 1st April 2019. This talk refers to a text developed for Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, published by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and MIT Press (forthcoming November 2019). intro This talk is about some pressing issues with AI that don't usually make the headlines, and why…
This talk was given at the conference 'Rethinking the legacy of 1968: Left fields and the quest for common ground' held at The Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London on September 22nd 2018 http://rethinking1968.today/ There's a definite resonance between the agitprop of '68 and social media. Participants in the UCU strike earlier this year, for example, experienced Twitter…