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Your Gmail and Instagram are training AI. There’s little you can do about it.
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 18, 2023

Sept. 18, 2023

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/08/gmail-instagram-facebo…> It’s your Gmail. It’s also Google’s artificial intelligence factory. Unless you turn it off, Google uses your Gmail to train an AI to finish other people’s sentences. It does that by analyzing how you respond to its suggestions. And when you opt in to using a new Gmail function called Help Me Write, Google uses what you type into it to improve its AI writing, too. You can’t say no. Your email is just the start. Meta, the owner of Facebook, took a billion Instagram posts from public accounts to train an AI, and didn’t ask permission. Microsoft uses your chats with Bing to coach the AI bot to better answer questions, and you can’t stop it. Increasingly, tech companies are taking your conversations, photos and documents to teach their AI how to write, paint and pretend to be human. You might be accustomed to them selling your data or using it to target you with ads. But now they’re using it to create lucrative new technologies that could upend the economy — and make Big Tech even bigger. We don’t yet understand the risk that this behavior poses to your privacy, reputation or work. But there’s not much you can do about it. Sometimes the companies handle your data with care. Other times, their behavior is out of sync with common expectations for what happens with your information, including stuff you thought was supposed to be private. Skip to end of carousel How your data trains Big Tech’s AI Meta says it can use the contents of photos and videos shared to “public” on its social networks to train its AI products. You can make your Instagram account private or change the audience for your Facebook posts. Gmail, by default in the U.S., uses how you respond to its Smart Compose suggestions to train the AI to better finish people’s sentences. You can opt out. Microsoft uses your conversations with its Bing chatbot to “fine-tune” the AI and share with its partner OpenAI. There is no way to opt-out as a consumer. Google learns from your conversations with its Bard chatbot, including having some reviewed by humans. You can ask Google to delete your chat history, but it will still hold on to chats for up to 72 hours. Google uses what you type and other “interactions” with its Workspace Labs AI in Gmail, Docs, Slides and Sheets to help its AI become a better creative coach. You cannot opt out if you want to use these functions. Google uses your private text or voice conversations with its Assistant to “fine-tune” the responses of Assistant or Bard. You can opt out by adjusting your Google privacy settings to not save your activity. Google says it can use “publicly available information” to train its AI, including the contents of YouTube videos and Google Docs that have been published to the Web. End of carousel Zoom set off alarms last month by claiming it could use the private contents of video chats to improve its AI products, before reversing course. Earlier this summer, Google updated its privacy policy to say it can use any “publicly available information” to train AI. (Google didn’t say why it thinks it has that right. But it says that’s not a new policy and it just wanted to be clear it applies to its Bard chatbot.) If you’re using pretty much any of Big Tech’s buzzy new generative AI products, you’ve likely been compelled to agree to help make their AI smarter, sometimes including having humans review what you do with them. Lost in the data grab: Most people have no way to make truly informed decisions about how their data is being used to train AI. That can feel like a privacy violation — or just like theft. “AI represents a once-in-a-generation leap forward,” says Nicholas Piachaud, a director at the open source nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. “This is an appropriate moment to step back and think: What’s at stake here? Are we willing just to give away our right to privacy, our personal data to these big companies? Or should privacy be the default?” New privacy risks It isn’t new for tech companies to use your data to train AI products. Netflix uses what you watch and rate to generate recommendations. Meta uses what you like, comment on and even spend time looking to train its AI how to order your news feed and show you ads. Yet generative AI is different. Today’s AI arms race needs lots and lots of data. Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, recently bragged to his biographer that he had access to 160 billion video frames per day shot from the cameras built into people’s cars to fuel his AI ambitions. “Everybody is sort of acting as if there is this manifest destiny of technological tools built with people’s data,” says Ben Winters, a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), who has been studying the harms of generative AI. “With the increasing use of AI tools comes this skewed incentive to collect as much data as you can upfront.” All of this brings some unique privacy risks. Training an AI to learn everything about the world means it also ends up learning intimate things about individuals, from financial and medical details to people’s photos and writing. Some tech companies even acknowledge that in their fine print. When you sign up to use Google’s new Workspace Labs AI writing and image-generation helpers for Gmail, Docs, Sheets and Slides, the company warns: “don’t include personal, confidential, or sensitive information.” The actual process of training AI can be a bit creepy. Companies employ humans to review some of how we use products such as Google’s new AI-fueled search called SGE. In its fine print for Workspace Labs, Google warns it may hold your data seen by human reviewers for up to four years in a manner not directly associated with your account. Even worse for your privacy, AI sometimes leaks data back out. Generative AI that’s notoriously hard to control can regurgitate personal info in response to a new, sometimes unforeseen prompt. It even happened to a tech company. Samsung employees were reportedly using ChatGPT and discovered on three different occasions that the chatbot spit back out company secrets. The company then banned the use of AI chatbots at work. Apple, Spotify, Verizon and many banks have done the same. The Big Tech companies told me they take pains to prevent leaks. Microsoft says it de-identifies user data entered in Bing chat. Google says it automatically removes personally identifiable information from training data. Meta says it will train generative AI not to reveal private information — so it might share the birthday of a celebrity, but not regular people. Okay, but how effective are these measures? That’s among the questions the companies don’t give straight answers to. “While our filters are at the cutting edge in the industry, we’re continuing to improve them,” says Google. And how often do they leak? “We believe it’s very limited,” it says. It’s great to know Google’s AI only sometimes leaks our information. “It’s really difficult for them to say, with a straight face, ‘we don’t have any sensitive data,’” says Winters of EPIC. Perhaps privacy isn’t even the right word for this mess. It’s also about control. Who’d ever have imagined a vacation photo they posted in 2009 would be used by a megacorporation in 2023 to teach an AI to make art, put a photographer out of a job, or identify someone’s face to police? When they take your information to train AI, companies can ignore your original intent in creating or sharing it in the first place. There’s a thin line between “making products better” and theft, and tech companies think they get to draw it. Your data, their rules Which data of ours is and isn’t off limits? Much of the answer is wrapped up in lawsuits, investigations and hopefully some new laws. But meanwhile, Big Tech is making up its own rules. I asked Google, Meta and Microsoft to tell me exactly when they take user data from products that are core to modern life to make their new generative AI products smarter. Getting straight answers was like chasing a squirrel through a funhouse. They told me they hadn’t used nonpublic user information in their largest AI models without permission. But those very carefully chosen words leave a lot of occasions when they are, in fact, building lucrative AI businesses with our digital lives. Not all AI uses for data are the same, or even problematic. But as users, we practically need a degree in computer science to understand what’s going on. Google is a great example. It tells me its “foundational” AI models — the software behind things like Bard, its answer-anything chatbot — come primarily from “publicly available data from the internet.” Our private Gmail didn’t contribute to that, the company says. However, Google does still use Gmail to train other AI products, like Smart Compose (which finishes sentences for you) and the new creative coach Help Me Write that’s part of its Workspace Labs. Those uses are fundamentally different from “foundational” AI, Google says, because it’s using data from a product to improve that product. The Smart Compose AI, it says, anonymizes and aggregates our information and improves the AI “without exposing the actual content in question.” It says the Help Me Write AI learns from your “interactions, user-initiated feedback, and usage metrics.” How are you supposed to know what’s actually going on? Perhaps there’s no way to create something like Smart Compose without data about how you use your email. But that doesn’t mean Google should just switch it on by default. In Europe, where there are stricter data laws, Smart Compose is off by default. Nor should access to your data be a requirement to use its latest and greatest products, even if Google calls them “experiments.” Meta told me it didn’t train its biggest generative AI model, called Llama 2, on user data — public or private. However, it has trained other AI, like an image-identification system called SEER, on people’s public Instagram accounts. To avoid that, you’d have to have set your account to private, or quit Instagram. And Meta wouldn’t answer my questions about how it’s using our personal data to train generative AI products it is expected to unveil soon. After I pushed back, the company said it would “not train our generative AI models on people’s messages with their friends and families.” At least it agreed to draw some kind of red line. Microsoft updated its service agreement this summer with broad language about user data, and it didn’t make any assurances to me about limiting the use of our data to train its AI products. Microsoft tells me it does not use our data from Word or other Microsoft 365 programs to “train underlying foundational models,” but that’s not the question I was asking. The consumer advocates at Mozilla also launched a campaign calling on Microsoft to come clean. “If nine experts in privacy can’t understand what Microsoft does with your data, what chance does the average person have?” Mozilla says. It doesn’t have to be this way. Microsoft has lots of assurances for lucrative corporate customers, including those chatting with the enterprise version of Bing, about keeping their data private. “Data always remains within the customer’s tenant and is never used for other purposes,” says a spokesman. Why do companies have more of a right to privacy than all of us?

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Generative AI exists because of the transformer
by Luigi Scorca Sept. 18, 2023

Sept. 18, 2023

https://ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

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Effetto selezione
by Filippo Barbera Sept. 18, 2023

Sept. 18, 2023

Qui un paper che mi pare molto interessante e solido: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06297-w ‘ t would appear people are in echo chambers because they are polarized, not that they are polarized because they are in echo chambers’ 🖖 -- https://unito.webex.com/meet/filippo.barbera New!!! My new book The Foundational Economy and Citizenship <https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-foundational-economy-and-ci…> is out now and available at 20% discount when you order from Policy Press <https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-foundational-economy-and-ci…> . *Useful Links* Book page: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-foundational-economy-and-ci… To order your book on e-inspection: http://policypress.einspections.eb20.com/Requests/Step1/9781447353393 Filippo Barbera, PhD Professor of Economic Sociology, Department of Cultures, Politics & Society, Univ.of Torino, Campus Einaudi Fellow, Collegio Carlo Alberto Honorary Visiting Professor, Cardiff University Member, Forum Diseguaglianze e diversità email: filippo.barbera(a)unito.it twitter: @FilBarbera Skype: filippo.barbera_to

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Fwd: [SmartData@PoliTO - People] SmartSeminar by Alessandro Epasto on Privacy in clustering: applications and algorithms (September 18, 11:30)
by Marco Mellia Sept. 18, 2023

Sept. 18, 2023

Carissime, carissimi, Solo un reminder per questo interessante talk all’intersezione tra privacy e data monetization. Un caro saluto, M Hi everyone, Just to remind you of the SmartSeminar in Sala Ciminiera, today 11:30 AM. Alessandro in working on very interesting topics at Google New York, I believe it's worth a listen 🙂 Best, Nikhil ________________________________ From: People <people-bounces(a)smartdata.polito.it<mailto:people-bounces@smartdata.polito.it>> on behalf of Eliana Pastor <eliana.pastor(a)polito.it<mailto:eliana.pastor@polito.it>> Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2023 11:17 AM To: smartdaters(a)smartdata.polito.it<mailto:smartdaters@smartdata.polito.it> <smartdaters(a)smartdata.polito.it<mailto:smartdaters@smartdata.polito.it>>; people(a)smartdata.polito.it<mailto:people@smartdata.polito.it> <people(a)smartdata.polito.it<mailto:people@smartdata.polito.it>> Subject: [SmartData@PoliTO - People] SmartSeminar by Alessandro Epasto on Privacy in clustering: applications and algorithms (September 18, 11:30) Dear SmartDaters, we are pleased to announce the next SmartSeminar of the SmartData@PoliTo Center. - Who: Alessandro Epasto - What: Privacy in clustering: applications and algorithms - When: Monday, September 18th, 2023 11:30 - Where: Sala Ciminiera, 5th floor Corso Castelfidardo 34 - Abstract and details: https://smartdata.polito.it/privacy-in-clustering-applications-and-algorith… - Flyer: https://smartdata.polito.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Alessandro_Epasto_Lo… You are welcome to invite anyone who might be interested. Additional info on the SmartSeminars of the SmartData@PoliTO center are available on https://smartdata.polito.it/category/seminars/ Best regards, Eliana and Nikhil _______________________________________________ People mailing list People(a)smartdata.polito.it<mailto:People@smartdata.polito.it> https://mail.tlc.polito.it/mailman/listinfo/people _______________________________________________ People mailing list People(a)smartdata.polito.it<mailto:People@smartdata.polito.it> https://mail.tlc.polito.it/mailman/listinfo/people

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AI and the end of programming
by Alberto Cammozzo Sept. 17, 2023

Sept. 17, 2023

Segnalo questo pezzo, a mio giudizio molto equilibrato e competente, di Brian Hayes /contra/ Welch, con un gustoso confronto tra Knuth e ChatGpt. Il punto cruciale per me è questo: "we should blame the [] unavoidable weakness of a protocol in which the most frequent answer is, by default, the right answer". <http://bit-player.org/2023/ai-and-the-end-of-programming> Earlier this year Matt Welsh <https://www.mdw.la/> announced the end of programming <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3570220>. He wrote, in /Communications of the ACM:/ I believe the conventional idea of “writing a program” is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed. In situations where one needs a “simple” program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand. A few weeks later, in an online talk <https://acm-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vf0SPZY7TeWMH-5_IaloIQ#/registr…>, Welsh broadened his deathwatch. It’s not only the art of programming that’s doddering toward the grave; all of computer science is “doomed.” (The image below is a screen capture from the talk.) [...] I wanted a problem that can be solved by computational means, but that doesn’t call for doing much arithmetic, which is known to be one of the weak points of LLMs. I settled on a word puzzle invented 150 years ago by Lewis Carroll and analyzed in depth by Donald E. Knuth in the 1990s. [...] At this point I must concede that ChatGPT, with a little outside help, has finally done what I asked of it. It has written a program that can construct a valid word ladder. But I still have reservations. Although the programs written by GPT-4 and by Knuth produce the same output, the programs themselves are not equivalent, or even similar. [...] Why do the chatbots favor the inferior algorithm? You can get a clue just by googling “word-ladder program.” Almost all the results at the top of the list come from websites such as Leetcode <https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder/>, GeeksForGeeks <https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/word-ladder-length-of-shortest-chain-to-reach…> and RosettaCode <https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Word_ladder>. These sites, which apparently cater to job applicants and competitors in programming contests, feature solutions that call for generating all 125 single-letter variants of each word, as in the GPT programs. Because sites like these are numerous—there seem to be hundreds of them—they outweigh other sources, such as Knuth’s book (if, indeed, such texts even appear in the training set). Does that mean we should blame the poor choice of algorithm not on GPT but on Leetcode? I would point instead to the unavoidable weakness of a protocol in which the most frequent answer is, by default, the right answer. [...] For decades, architects of AI believed that true intelligence (whether natural or artificial) requires a mental model of the world. To make sense of what’s going on around you (and inside you), you need intuition about how things work, how they fit together, what happens next, cause and effect. Lenat insisted that the most important kinds of knowledge are those you acquire long before you start reading books. You learn about gravity by falling down. You learn about entropy when you find that a tower of blocks is easy to knock over but harder to rebuild. You learn about pain and fear and hunger and love—all this in infancy, before language begins to take root. Experiences of this kind are unavailable to a brain in a box, with no direct access to the physical or the social universe. LLMs appear to be the refutation of these ideas. After all, they are models of language, not models of the world. They have no /embodiment/, no physical presence that would allow them to learn via the school of hard knocks. Ignorant of everything but mere words, how do they manage to sound so smart, so worldly? [...]

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Il capo dello Stato: «Evitare la concentrazione di potere nelle imprese e nelle istituzioni».
by Daniela Tafani Sept. 16, 2023

Sept. 16, 2023

Mattarella agli industriali: «No al capitalismo di rapina» [...] «Qual è un principio fondamentale della democrazia? Evitare la concentrazione del potere, a garanzia della libertà di tutti. Vale per le istituzioni e per le imprese. E la lotta ai monopoli ne rappresenta un capitolo importante», spiega il presidente. No quindi al «dirigismo economico e al protezionismo tipici delle esperienze autoritarie». «Vanno rifiutate», spiega, «spinte di ingiustificate egemonie delle istituzioni nella gestione delle regole o, all’opposto, di pseudo-assolutismo imprenditoriale, magari veicolato dai nuovi giganti degli “Over the top” che si pretendono, spesso, “legibus soluti”». [...] https://ilmanifesto.it/mattarella-agli-industriali-no-al-capitalismo-di-rap…

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Magnani, "Il Digital services act. Addio articolo 21 della Costituzione?"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 16, 2023

Sept. 16, 2023

Carlo Magnani è stato recentemente ospite dal Centro Nexa (https://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-162) jc * Il Digital services act. Addio articolo 21 della Costituzione? * 16 Set 2023 Carlo Magnani Il 25 agosto è entrato in vigore il Digital Services Act, per ora per le piattaforme online più grandi (quelle con più di 45 milioni di utenti), sino a che sarà applicabile a tutti gli operatori di servizi online a partire dal 17 febbraio 2024. I soggetti interessati sono tutti gli intermediari online, i motori di ricerca e le piattaforme di comunicazione sociale (mercati online, social network, piattaforme di condivisione di contenuti, app store e piattaforme di viaggio e alloggio online) che saranno soggetti a obblighi specifici e crescenti in ragione della dimensione della impresa. Tanto i lavori preparatori di adozione che l’entrata in vigore sono stati accompagnati da una enfasi – la solita, quando si tratta di prodotti confezionati dalla Unione europea – che non ha lesinato toni entusiastici ed euforici. Finalmente nuove regole e nuovi diritti sul web, maggiore tutela per gli utenti per ciò che attiene la protezione da contenuti illegali (terrorismo, pornografia, truffe online, vendita prodotti pericolosi), dall’incitamento all’odio (ovviamente, immancabile), ma anche da contenuti non illegali ma qualificati come dannosi (la disinformazione). Il metodo prescelto per attuare tali regole – che rimandano comunque alle legislazioni nazionali per ciò che va considerato illegale, cioè penalmente o amministrativamente rilevante – è quello della co-regolamentazione. Quindi, non una vigilanza esterna da parte di soggetti istituzionali terzi, ma il coinvolgimento diretto delle piattaforme attraverso procedure concertate con organismi tecnici dipendenti direttamente dalla Commissione europea. [...] continua qui: https://www.lafionda.org/2023/09/16/il-digital-services-act-addio-articolo-…

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"Contro lo smartphone - per una tecnologia più democratica"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Sept. 16, 2023

Sept. 16, 2023

Care e cari, consentitemi di segnalare che il 22 settembre uscirà "Contro lo smartphone - per una tecnologia più democratica", prefazione di Gustavo Zagrebelsky (ADD Editore). Dopo "Università futura - tra democrazia e bit" <https://www.universitafutura.it/>, uscito nel 2017, è il mio secondo libro; l'obiettivo è offrire sia una sorta di economia politica dello smartphone realmente esistente, sia possibili alternative. Per maggiori informazioni, oltre alla scheda dell'editore <https://www.addeditore.it/catalogo/juan-carlos-de-martin-contro-lo-smartpho…>, rimando alla prima intervista <https://www.vita.it/storie-e-persone/contro-gli-smartphone-no-ma-occhio-a-u…> uscita sull'argomento. Tra un anno rilascerò il libro con una licenza Creative Commons. Segnalo infine che il 23 settembre <https://www.pensarecontemporaneo.it/eventi/contro-lo-smartphone/> alle 12:30 parlerò - con Stefano Moroni- a Piacenza, nel contesto del Festival del pensare contemporaneo. Il 28 settembre alle 18:00, invece, ci sarà la prima presentazione torinese presso la libreria Bodoni (via Carlo Alberto 41), in dialogo con Gustavo Zagrebelsky e con la collega dell'Università di Torino Alessandra Quarta (locandina in allegato). Grazie per la vostra attenzione e grazie, ancora una volta, per questa straordinaria lista, così ricca di riflessioni intelligenti e di segnalazioni preziose! Un caro saluto, juan carlos

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la tecnologia comanda il mondo (Giuseppe Attardi)
by alessandro marzocchi Sept. 15, 2023

Sept. 15, 2023

Nell'oggetto ho sintetizzato l'opinione di Giuseppe Attardi - lun 11 set 2023 nexa Digest, Vol 173, Issue 12 -, suoi i meriti, mia la responsabilità della sintesi. Condivido totalissimamente: qui l'enfasi è voluta, con altre parole è quanto scrive Pierluigi Contucci - https://www.rivistailmulino.it/a/ia-perch-difficile-da-disciplinare? -: "" dobbiamo ancora capire la natura delle relazioni con la nuova intrusa, tra IA e noi, tra IA e le macchine nella moderna robotica e presto dovremo pensare anche a come gestire le relazioni tra le varie IA. Oltre a far sì che l'IA si allinei alla nostra etica è opportuno cercare di capire come e dove distribuire la responsabilità dell’operato di ognuno e identificare metodi innovativi per assicurarci il buon funzionamento di queste nuove entità diverse da noi ma non più semplici strumenti."" Il rischio che temo è che l'animale umano diventi sempre più semplice strumento: come capire ciò che (forse) non si può capire? Forse dobbiamo ripensare Protagora: l'uomo è la misura di tutte le cose? A me, ultaottantenne, importa poco ... Grazie e cari auguri. Duccio (Alessandro Marzocchi)

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On Robots Killing People
by maurizio lana Sept. 15, 2023

Sept. 15, 2023

dal blog di Bruce Schneier, «On Robots Killing People» https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/09/on-robots-killing-people.html ( "the lessons of aviation and workplace safety demonstrate that accidents are preventable when they are openly discussed and subjected to proper expert scrutiny. AI and robotics companies don’t want this to happen.") che commenta un articolo di cui è coautore con Davi Ottenheimer uscito su The Atlantic: «Robots Are Already Killing People. The AI boom only underscores a problem that has existed for years.» https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/robot-safety-standar… Maurizio ------------------------------------------------------------------------ but just one question still remains to which we must respond two roads lead from where we are, which side are you on? arlo guthrie, which side ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Maurizio Lana - 347 7370925

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