Amanda Unvarnished

Plus: Elon traffics in Russian propaganda

A GOP celebration of a mass-killing machine on the House floor is on-brand for a nihilistic party that prides deadly individualism over problem-solving.

Hooking into the Block Editor’s Post Publish Panel (with Copilot) by Brian Coords (briancoords.com)

A walkthrough of Copilot and I attempting to add some content to the post-publish panel in the block editor.

You open up a database of pictures used to train artificial intelligence systems. At first, things seem straightforward. You’re met with thousands of images: apples and oranges, birds, dogs, horses, mountains, clouds, houses, and street signs. But as you probe further into the dataset, people begin to appear: cheerleaders, scuba divers, welders, Boy Scouts, fire walkers, and flower girls. Things get strange: A photograph of a woman smiling in a bikini is labeled a “slattern, slut, slovenly woman, trollop.” A young man drinking beer is categorized as an “alcoholic, alky, dipsomaniac, boozer, lush, soaker, souse.” A child wearing sunglasses is classified as a “failure, loser, non-starter, unsuccessful person.” You’re looking at the “person” category in a dataset called ImageNet, one of the most widely used training sets for machine learning.

Something is wrong with this picture.

Where did these images come from? Why were the people in the photos labeled this way? What sorts of politics are at work when pictures are paired with labels, and what are the implications when they are used to train technical systems?

In short, how did we get here?

My hope is that we won't simply replace one monolithic platform with another. That we'll take this disruption in routine as an opportunity to further disrupt a status quo that has needed disruption for some time. That we'll try new things, build new things, find new ways to connect that don't simply replicate the patterns of the past but instead move toward a future that feels better for everyone.

And Republicans should stop treating them as ordinary violence.