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At the UN's AI for Good conference, Abeba Birhane was forced to remove any mention of Gaza and genocide.

She explains what happened in her post, and observes what trend this is an example of:

what “good” means is overwhelmingly shaped, defined, and actively curated by the tech industry that inherently holds invested interest in societal uptake of AI regardless of its risk or harm

(From: AI for Good [Appearance?] | AI Accountability Lab)

James Gleick reviewed The AI Con and points out that Turing didn't (try) to define intelligence, he defined how we can be fooled into not recognising machines. And it that's so:

The Turing test is done. We’ve proven that we can be fooled.

(From: The Parrot in the Machine | James Gleick | The New York Review of Books)

Websites allow search engines to crawl them, because these search engines then end up linking to the website. You'd get traffic in return.

LLM providers also crawl, but they link back less, say David Belson and Sam Rhea of Cloudflare:

These Large Language Models (LLMs) do their best to read the web to train a system that can repackage that content for the user, without the user ever needing to visit the original publication.

(From: The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers)

They share the numbers and it is, unsurprisingly, not a little bit less. LLMs refer back magnitudes less.

This is a problem, it makes writing on the web, as a business, even less attractive.

Intelligence has never been an objective quality that can be ascertained the way we measure the (actually increasing) carbon in the atmosphere. It is a political device that preserves power and care for those deemed worthy of it, and which simultaneously withdraws such care from everyone else.

(From: Toolmen | A Working Library)

When you have numbers to look at, it’s easy to care only about the numbers. If we want to truly care, we gotta kill the metrics in our heads.

(From: kill the metrics in your head | The Roof is on Phire)

Tina He explains our discomfort with AI:

What unsettles us is AI's supreme indifference, or commonly called "slop," which is also synonymous with the lacking of soul.

Software doesn’t hate, plot, or hold a grudge. It optimizes. That optimization, crucially, includes the effectiveness of language—words as system output, not as evidence of intent.

(From: AI, Heidegger, and Evangelion - by Tina He - Fakepixels)

And then explains that this indifference, that leads to humans being reduced to function, ‘cuts at the heart of our dignity’. Yup yup yup, and that's very, very dystopian.

The W3C published Privacy Principles as a Statement, meaning a document the Members approved.

It has definitions, meant to aid policy, as well as principles, to be more precise:

a set of privacy principles that should guide the development of the web as a trustworthy platform

(From: Privacy Principles)

Blogging ✨ works ✨!

4 years ago, I wrote A case for accessibility statements in app stores.

This week, Apple announced “Nutrition Labels“:

Accessibility Nutrition Labels bring a new section to App Store product pages that will highlight accessibility features within apps and games. These labels give users a new way to learn if an app will be accessible to them before they download it, and give developers the opportunity to better inform and educate their users on features their app supports. This includes VoiceOver, Voice Control, Larger Text, Sufficient Contrast, Reduced Motion, captions, and more.

jk, but very glad to see it, I think the visibility it brings will be helpful!

Can WCAG be applied to mobile? Well, sort of… it maps quite well, as long as you carefully assess how each criterion works in the mobile context.

That's what the W3C's Mobile Accessibility Task Force has done, with a group of experts. They've just published their first public working draft of WCAG2Mobile: Guidance on Applying WCAG 2.2 to Mobile Applications (WCAG2Mobile)

Ana is on point re the value of conferences:

The point of a conference shouldn't be to provide ready-made solutions to specific workplace problems. A 40 minute code-heavy presentation might offer some technical pointers, but these will never truly address your specific challenges.

(From: Oh Hello Ana - A forty minute tech talk might not fix a very specific code problem at work, but it might leave you inspired to fix everything else)