Real Garth Marenghi energy

RE: https://climatejustice.social/@ketan/117480486889964027

Microsoft making the racism underlying so much of the AI hype overt.

A nice list of companies and individuals in tech who are demonstrably part of the fascist movement https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware

Many users of ChatGPT and Grok have had seen their prompts become part of the public internet and showing up in search results. This is just a small sampling of the privacy issues that have come to light in the last few years.

In May 2025, generative AI vendor Luka was fined 5 million euros by Italy for illegally collecting user data via its Replika program. Meta's AI app made it easy for users to accidentally share their private usage of the chatbot to their public Facebook timelines. This year, ChatGPT has begun monitoring peoples chats in order to facilitate turning chats over to law enforcement.

AI vendors appear to have little to no interest in protecting user privacy. In 2024, Microsoft began to secretly collect LinkedIn user data without prior consent. Microsoft has also been developing programs like Copilot Recall and Copilot Vision that capture sensitive information including credit card numbers and social security numbers and share them with Microsoft.

ACM should not give LLMs access to the ACM Digital Library. There are many ethical concerns that arise when considering partnering with LLM vendors. A smattering of them are touched on below, although each point only scratches the surface.

If you need any inspiration, feel free to borrow from my reply. Keep in mind I largely cribbed it from an old talk I gave and I did so too early in the morning on too little coffee, so the coherence isn't always ideal as I was slapping paragraphs together from different parts of a library talk and tweaking them for this.

Response below:

RE: https://mastodon.acm.org/@ACM/116929782094395296

This would be a great time to tell ACM not to become part of the problem!

An old friend and independent journalist passed away unexpectedly. If you've got some money to spare, his family could use help covering funeral expenses https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-william-smiths-family-legacy

Pro-tip: If corporations spend billions to convince you something's inevitable, it isn't.

I forgot how fun Ruby can be

Being honest about AI means rejecting industry language and using words that actually describe what AI boosters seek to obscure.

I've learned, in writing about AI, that it's hard to do honestly because so much language used to discuss it is inaccurate, misleading, & anthropomorphizing.

"Hallucinations," "training data," "learning," none of these terms accurately describe what they refer to: garbage output, input data, and statistical weighting.

Even terms like "model" and the insistence on referring to "AI" as if the it were a being obscures that AI is just programs. They're just apps.

Here, at last, is the cause of all my recent AI snark: the more-or-less transcript of my presentation on the ethics of AI in libraries https://nausicaa.codes/blog/ethics-of-ai.html

Generative AI is a "solution" in search of a problem.

It does literally nothing as well as the people it's designed to replace.

It can't actually do anything useful, especially if you expect any sort of reliability.

It's inefficient to a mind-boggling degree.

Most (all?) commercial AI is a criminal enterprise.

It's all downsides with no upside.

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. [...] When we give in, we join the sales force." https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/

Was not expecting to include a Letterkenny reference in this presentation, but here we are.

"Beyond 'If We Use It Wisely': Character Ethics, the Virtue of Wisdom, and GenAI in Libraries https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/968500

"Beyond Information Literacy: Exploring AI's Impact on Labor in Academic Libraries" https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/968498