Root Privileges

Category: Tech

  • Keep the crap going

    Have you seen the new ads for Google Gemini?

    In one version, just as a young employee is grabbing her fast-food lunch, she notices her snooty boss get on an elevator. So she drops her sandwich, rushes to meet her just as the doors are about to close, and submits her proposal in the form of a thick dossier. The boss asks her for a 500-word summary to consume during her minute-long elevator ride. The employee turns to Google Gemini, which digests the report and spits out the gist, and which the employee regurgitates to the boss’s approval. The end.

    Isn’t this unsettling? Google isn’t alone either. In May this year, Apple released a tactless ad for its new iPad Pro. From Variety:

    The “Crush!” ad shows various creative and cultural objects — including a TV, record player, piano, trumpet, guitar, cameras, a typewriter, books, paint cans and tubes, and an arcade game machine — getting demolished in an industrial press. At the end of the spot, the new iPad Pro pops out, shiny and new, with a voiceover that says, “The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest.”

    After the backlash, Apple bactracked and apologised — and then produced two ads in November for its Apple Intelligence product showcasing how it could help thoughtless people continue to be thoughtless.

    The second video is additionally weird because it seems to suggest reaching all the way for an AI tool makes more sense than setting a reminder on the calendar that comes in all smartphones these days.

    And they are now joined in spirit by Google, because bosses can now expect their subordinates to Geminify their way through what could otherwise have been tedious work or just impossible to do on punishingly short deadlines — without the bosses having to think about whether their attitudes towards what they believe is reasonable to ask of their teammates need to change. (This includes a dossier of details that ultimately won’t be read.)

    If AI is going to absorb the shock that comes of someone being crappy to you, will we continue to notice that crappiness and demand they change or — as Apple and Google now suggest — will we blame ourselves for not using AI to become crappy ourselves? To quote from a previous post:

    When machines make decisions, the opportunity to consider the emotional input goes away. This is a recurring concern I’m hearing about from people working with or responding to AI in some way. … This is Anna Mae Duane, director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, in The Conversation: “I fear how humans will be damaged by the moral vacuum created when their primary social contacts are designed solely to serve the emotional needs of the ‘user’.”

    The applications of these AI tools have really blossomed and millions of people around the world are using them for all sorts of tasks. But even if the ads don’t pigeonhole these tools, they reveal how their makers — Apple and Google — are thinking about what the tools bring to the table and what these tech companies believe to be their value. To Google’s credit at least, its other ads in the same series are much better (see here and here for examples), but they do need to actively cut down on supporting or promoting the idea that crappy behaviour is okay.

  • To WordPress

    I used to love WordPress unconditionally. Then Gutenberg replaced Calypso and the user experience became quite poor. Then WordPress.com rejigged their subscription plans, got it wrong, and fortunately switched back. Finally, Matt Mullenweg’s actions and words of late have really tested my sentiments. I’m not a software expert, just technologically curious and technically inclined. Since 2008, WordPress has hosted my blog; I’ve also brought many of my friends who wanted to blog online through WordPress; built or moved their startups’ websites here; and launched The Wire on a self-hosted setup in 2015. All platforms have their problems but WordPress has of late had more than most, thanks to Mullenweg.

    After he banned WP Engine from accessing resources on WordPress.org via their API, I high-tailed my site to Ghost.org, a good alternative for being not bloated and more blogging-friendly but on the flip side more expensive and less customisable. Sometime later I wondered if I should return but then Mullenweg published an acerbic post on his blog (that he later took down) directed at David Heinemeier Hansson. The incident left me quite unsure about how Mullenweg would react to a post criticising him in a blog hosted by his own company.

    Ownership is at the heart of the ongoing dispute. Mullenweg has made a big deal of it. Since his campaign against WP Engine became public, it has become clear he believes WordPress.org is his personal fiefdom, where he is immune to the rules that apply to his colleagues, and that there is little in the form of reason in his decision to target WP Engine alone. His attempts to spin the dispute as one of trademark violation, presumably to take the focus away from his own mercurial actions and ad hoc imposition of sanctions, further deepen the place of ownership, the rules that do or don’t apply to owners, and their accountability.

    On October 20, Mullenweg finally offered to stop commenting on the dispute in public while citing his own freedom of speech. I can’t say if this post inspired confidence in others to believe Mullenweg wouldn’t censor them by invoking trademark or some other similar instrument of convenience. (It didn’t in Bullenweg.) I just really wanted it to because WordPress is so valuable.

    This whole fracas may have reinforced in a more technically capable person the importance of owning the infrastructure that hosts one’s digital assets. I’m not one of them; instead, I and frankly most of the world depend on solutions that are less fundamental, more pre-configured, and more accessible to keep and use our assets. WordPress.org and WordPress.com are two such solutions. Important places on the internet are hosted with/on either of them. W.org and W.com were once quite different (even with the confusion surrounding their domain names) but now, after Mullenweg’s unilateral attack against the most successful competitor to W.com, they’re evidently similarly vulnerable to the threat of his discretion.

    Acquiring the technical chops to take full ownership and control of my sites, etc. would be a waste of my time, and rendering my presence on the internet contingent on the existence of an ideologically congruent and fully ethical CEO at the helm of a hosting company would be futile. I admit Mullenweg’s actions of late constitute a difference in kind rather than degree: no other hosting company CEO has behaved in a way that endangered the properties of their own customers and the wider community of people vested in their product. But leaving WordPress.com because Mullenweg crossed this particular line is to make my choice about where to host a site a matter of where I draw the line and where, when it moves, I’m going to draw it next. That’s exhausting.

    It seems better to me to (completely rather than partially) decouple where I host my blog from how the hosting company’s owner behaves simply because I can’t afford it. My other alternatives at this time are Ghost, Drupal, minimalist alternatives like Bear or Mataroa (self-hosting WordPress may be too but I don’t want to leave for a host that, if it becomes successful, could become Mullenweg’s next target, at least not until the court’s verdict in the dispute restricts such behaviour). And each one of them has deal-breaking problems. I suppose I’m just too well-settled at WordPress. But it’s no longer unconditional love for WordPress either, and it won’t be the first platform on my mind when a friend asks me for suggestions for where they could start blogging or where a news site should be hosted.

    In one of his posts Mullenweg had asked customers to vote with their wallet and quit using WP Engine. Voting with your wallet is expensive, requires a specific kind of web-hosting literacy, and, importantly, time and mental bandwidth. Yes, it’s important to make rational and informed choices about the things that are important to us, but we also need to pick our battles. The wisest courses of action (for someone in my position) here seems to be how we expect Mullenweg v. WP Engine is going to in court as well: to place one’s trust in only the laws and terms governing the provision of these services and the reasonably full and free expression of one’s own beliefs, ideas, and expectations. Everything else is going to be the price to be paid to keep a blog online, uncensored, and written.

  • Off the rails

    Either Matt Mullenweg’s screws have fallen off or I deeply overestimated how sensible a person I thought he was. On October 3, Mullenweg wrote on his blog that Automattic had offered those of its employees who disagreed with his actions vis-à-vis WP Engine a buyout and that 8.4% of the company’s workforce took it. He wrote that he and Automattic (one and the same, really) wanted to make the buyout as enticing as possible, fixing the severance pay at $30,000 (Rs 25 lakh) or six months’ salary, whichever is higher. Excerpt:

    159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay! … It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit. However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay.

    I’m sure he knows no group of people turned down $126M to stay, each individual in this mass simply turned down “$30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher” to stay. They decided that way because they agreed with him, didn’t disagree with him strongly enough, needed to have a job beyond six months or some other reason. Similarly the 159 that took the buyout decided to leave because they disagreed strongly enough with him, because they needed the money or some other reason.

    But no: Mullenweg is convinced he’s still in the right and that all those people who left Automattic did so because the messaging from WP Engine and its principal investor got to them, not because Mullenweg is toying with them.

    Silver Lake and WP Engine’s attacks on me and Automattic, while spurious, have been effective. It became clear a good chunk of my Automattic colleagues disagreed with me and our actions.

    We also know Mullenweg has been moderating his blog’s comments section to allow only those comments that are favourable to him and his worldview. All bloggers whose blogs have comments sections do this. But the public response to the ongoing Mullenweg v. WP Engine saga has been strongly polarising whereas the comments Mullenweg has been letting through are are strictly and overwhelmingly in his favour. Mullenweg also said during a recent talk-show the criticism has been getting to him — but evidently not in a way that makes him reconsider his words or actions.

    The comments that he’s been approving on his blog open windows into his internal narrative. This one under the post about the buyout caught my eye:

    I see that twitter is treating this story as some sort of apocalypse for A8C and and don’t get it why. You shouldn’t collaborate with those who aren’t interested in working with you. Instead, you definitely want to team up with those who chose not to hit the piñata and decided to focus on the band at the candy factory.

    Mullenweg wrote he called the buyout an “Alignment Offer”. At least one Automattic employee who decided to stay has spun the buyout as “financial freedom” for dissenters to “stand by their choice”. The irony of an echo chamber in this place, at this time, is too much to bear: WordPress was started and existed for a long time as a tool that people could use to publish themselves online, to converse with people around the planet, discover new perspectives, and ultimately change others’ minds or their own. Mullenweg’s September 21 post on WordPress.org was concerned with the hosting provider’s decision to disable users’ ability to track post revisions. He wrote there:

    WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred.

    Content is sacred because of its potency (although “sacred” isn’t the word I’d use). The ideas in the heads of the people who will soon leave Automattic are ‘content’ in this way too. When in 2022 WordPress.com (which Automattic owns) consolidated its multiple subscription plans to a single “Pro” plan, I wrote a post critiquing the move and it stayed at the front page of Hacker News for almost a day. It drew so much attention — agreement as well as disagreement — that then WordPress.com CEO Dave Martin responded to say, among other things, “Your content isn’t going anywhere.” This was laudable because it’s important for content to be able to hang around.

    Let’s assume a bunch of people at Automattic disagreed with Mullenweg. His response was to entice them to leave with a supposedly lucrative offer on their way out rather than engage with their disagreement, attempt to change their minds and/or his own, and from here take Automattic to a new position of strength. All good organisations contend with disagreement; those that are able to do so to the company’s benefit and without altogether sundering employer-employee relations emerge the better for it. Those that can’t or won’t are signalling they can only work if an important human degree of freedom is sliced off.

  • Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine escalates

    Update, September 26, 2024: WordPress.org has banned websites hosted on WP Engine from accessing its resources. As someone put it on X, this is Matt Mullenweg dropping a giant turd into the laps of millions of WordPress users.

    The Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine dispute seems to be escalating, which is a bit of a surprise because it was so ill-founded to begin with. Yet the escalation has also been exponential.

    Mullenweg published his post disparaging WP Engine on the WordPress.org site (from where you can download the open source WordPress CMS) on September 21.

    On September 23, WP Engine said it had sent WordPress.com parent company and WordPress lead developer Automattic, whose CEO is Mullenweg, a cease and desist letter. Excerpt:

    Stunningly, Automattic’s CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic – his for-profit entity – a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described “scorched earth nuclear approach” toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond. When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers,and the world. Mr. Mullenweg has carried out this wrongful campaign against WP Engine in multiple outlets, including via his keynote address, across several public platforms like X, YouTube, and even on the WordPress.org site, and through the WordPress Admin panel for all WordPress users, including directly targeting WP Engine customers in their own private WordPress instances used to run their online businesses.

    💥

    Later on the same day, Automattic sent a cease and desist letter of its own to WP Engine. Excerpt:

    As you know, our Client owns all intellectual property rights globally in and to the world-famous WOOCOMMERCE and WOO trademarks; and the exclusive commercial rights from the WordPress Foundation to use, enforce, and sublicense the world-famous WORDPRESS trademark, among others, and all other associated intellectual property rights.We are writing about WP Engine’s web hosting and related services that improperly use our Client’s WORDPRESS and WOOCOMMERCE trademarks in their marketing.We understand that our Client has contacted you about securing a proper license to use its trademarks, yet no such agreement has been reached. As such, your blatant and widespread unlicensed use of our Client’s trademarks has infringed our Client’s rights and confused consumers into believing, falsely, that WP Engine is authorized, endorsed, or sponsored by, or otherwise affiliated or associated with, our Client. WP Engine’s unauthorized use of our Client’s trademarks also dilutes their rights, tarnishes their reputation, and otherwise harms the goodwill they have established in their famous and well-known trademarks, and has enabled WP Engine to unfairly compete with our Client, leading to WP Engine’s unjust enrichment.

    Now it’s a trademark dispute. Automattic is alleging people at large are confusing WP Engine with WordPress itself and that that’s leading to loss of revenue for Automattic. Hang on to this thought while we move on to the next detail. At 10.34 pm IST on September 4, Mullenweg shared this tidbit in a Reddit comment:

    [WP Engine] had the option to license the WordPress trademark for 8% of their revenue, which could be delivered either as payments, people (Five for the Future .org commitments), or any combination of the above.

    Put all these details together and we understand Mullenweg is alleging via Automattic that people are confusing WP Engine with WordPress itself to Automattic’s detriment, that WP Engine has wrongfully used the WordPress trademark, that what WP Engine is selling isn’t WordPress but something it has reportedly “butchered”, and that WP Engine’s enrichment is unjust.

    I think it’s starting to stink for Mullenweg. As detailed in the previous post, WP Engine didn’t “butcher” WordPress. In fact they didn’t change anything about WordPress’s core composition. They turned off a setting, didn’t hide it, and offered a way to get around it by other means. WordPress is open source software provided under a GPL license, which means others are allowed to modify it (and subsequently avail it under the same license). So even if WP Engine modified WordPress — which it didn’t — it would’ve been operating within its rights.

    Second, WP Engine was founded in 2010. Why is Automattic alleging a trademark violation after 14 years of being okay with it? Even if consumers are currently confusing WP Engine with WordPress itself — which I doubt — that Automattic didn’t pursue a legal dispute in all this time is very fishy. It also creates new uncertainty for all the many other WordPress hosting companies that have “WP” in their names. On a related note, WP Engine is selling WordPress hosting and not WordPress itself as well as claims to have emails from Automattic staff saying using the “WP” short form is okay.

    Another point of note here is whether ‘WP’ is covered by trademark. At some point in the recent past, the wordpressfoundation.org website updated its ‘Trademark Policy’ page to include an answer as well as some gratuitous remarks:

    The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

    Third, Mullenweg’s demand that WP Engine cough up 8% of their revenue amounts to a demand for $40 million (Rs 334.5 crore). Considering Automattic has now pinned this demand to the wobbly allegation of wrongful trademark use, WP Engine seems increasingly in the right to dispute and not entertain his demands. Moreover, WP Engine’s lawyers’ letter suggests Mullenweg gave WP Engine a very small window within which to comply with this demand and, for added measure, allegedly threw in a threat. But then at 10.38 pm on September 24, Mullenweg said this on Reddit:

    I would have happily negotiated from there, but they refused to even take a call. Their entire strategy has been to obscure and delay, which they tried to do on Friday. “Can we get the right folks together early next week?” They’ve been stringing us along for years, I’m the dummy for believing that they actually wanted to do anything. But making it right, now.

    The reply to this comment by Reddit user u/ChallengeEuphoric237 is perfect:

    If they don’t believe they needed to pay, then why would they?

    1/ If the fees were for the trademark, why weren’t they going to the WordPress Foundation instead of Automattic?

    2/ Why do they need to license the WordPress trademark? Stating they allow hosting as a product isn’t a violation of trademark law, neither is using WP. You guys used to be an investor in the company for crying out loud.

    WordPress and Automattic seem incredibly petty in all of this. Why did you *need* to do it during the keynote? Why did you *need* to make a huge stink at the booth? If this was a legal issue, let the lawyers sort it out instead of dragging the community through the mud. Everyone expected much more from you. I don’t use WP Engine’s products, but if someone came to me trying to extort 8% of my revenue on some flimsy trademark issue, I wouldn’t be very responsive either.

    “Can we get the right folks together early next week?”

    Did you honestly expect them to agree to a nearly 40 million dollar annual charge via text message when you literally gave them what seems like an hour notice right before your keynote? Would you agree to that? I’m no lawyer, but that whole exchange seems like an exercise in extortion – threatening to destroy someones reputation unless they agree to something monetarily, which is a felony.

    Let’s see what the courts say, but you’ve lost a ton of clout in the community over this.

    The subtext of Mullenweg’s September 21 post seemed to be that private equity is cutting costs in a way that’s eating into the aspirations and dues of open source software development. Then again, as many observers in the sector have said, this couldn’t be the real issue because private equity is almost everywhere in the WordPress hosting space and singling out WP Engine made little sense. So the sub-subtext seemed to be that Mullenweg was unhappy about WP Engine eating into the revenue streams of WordPress.com and WordPress VIP (Automattic’s elite hosting service). But after the events of the three days that followed, that sub-subtext seems likelier to be the whole issue.

    On a final note, many people are kicking back with 🍿 and speculating about how this dispute could escalate further. But it’s difficult for me personally to be entertained by this. While Mullenweg’s September 21 post didn’t in hindsight do a good job of communicating what his real argument was, he did suggest there was a problem with a model in which for-profit entities could springboard off the efforts of open-source communities that have volunteered their time and skills without the entities giving back. But dovetailing to u/ChallengeEuphoria237’s concluding remark, conversations about that issue vis-à-vis WP Engine are now more unlikely to happen than they were before Mullenweg launched into this “making it right” campaign.

  • Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine

    Automattic CEO and WordPress co-developer Matt Mullenweg published a post on September 21 calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress”. For the uninitiated: WP Engine is an independent company that provides managed hosting for WordPress sites; WordPress.com is owned by Automattic and it leads the development of WordPress.org. WP Engine’s hosting plans start at $30 a month and it enjoys a good public reputation. Mullenweg’s post however zeroed in on WP Engine’s decision to not record the revisions you’ve made to your posts in your site’s database. This is a basic feature in the WordPress content management system, and based on its absence Mullenweg says:

    What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

    The first thing that struck me about this post was its unusual vehemence, which Mullenweg has typically reserved in the past for more ‘extractive’ platforms like Wix whose actions have also been more readily disagreeable. WP Engine has disabled revisions but as Mullenweg himself pointed out it doesn’t hide this fact. It’s available to view on the ‘Platform Settings’ support page. Equally, WP Engine also offers daily backups; you can readily restore one of them and go back to a previous ‘state’.

    Second, Mullenweg accuses WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress but this is stretching it. I understand where he’s coming from, of course: WP Engine is advertising WordPress hosting but it doesn’t come with one of the CMS’s basic features, and which WP Engine doesn’t hide but doesn’t really advertise either. This isn’t just really far removed from “butchering” (much less in public), it’s also dishonest: WP Engine didn’t modify WordPress’s core, it simply turned off a setting that was available to turn off.

    WP Engine’s stated reason is that post revisions increase database costs that the company would like to keep down. Mullenweg interprets this to mean WP Engine wants “to avoid paying to store that data”. Well, yeah, and that’s okay, right? I can’t claim to be aware of all the trade-offs that determined WP Engine’s price points but turning off a feature to keep costs down and reactivating it upon request for individual users seems fair.

    In fact, what really gets my goat is Mullenweg’s language, especially around how much WP Engine charges. He writes:

    They are strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.

    WordPress.com offers a very similar deal to its customers. (WordPress.com is Automattic’s platform for users where they can pay the company to host WordPress sites for them.) In the US, you’ll need to pay at least $25 a month (billed yearly) to be able to upload custom themes and plugins to your site. All the plans below that rate don’t have this option. You also need this plan to access and jump back to different points of your site’s revision history.

    Does this mean WordPress.com is “strip-mining” its users to avoid paying for the infrastructure required for those features? Or is it offering fewer features at lower price points because that’s how it can make its business work? I used to be happy that WordPress.com offers a $48 a year plan with fewer features because I didn’t need them — just as well as WP Engine seems to have determined it can charge its customers less by disabling revision history by default.

    (I’m not so happy now because WordPress.com moved detailed site analytics — anything more than hits to posts — from the free plan to the Premium plan, which costs $96 a year.)

    It also comes across as disingenuous for Mullenweg to say the “cancer” a la WP Engine will spread if left unchecked. He himself writes no WordPress host listed on WordPress.org’s recommended hosts page has disabled revisions history — but is he aware of the public reputation of these hosts, their predatory pricing habits, and their lousy customer service? Please take a look at Kevin Ohashi’s Review Signal website or r/webhosting. Cheap WordPress in return for a crappy hosting experience is the cancer that’s already spread because WordPress didn’t address it.

    (It’s the reason I switched to composing my posts offline on MarsEdit, banking on its backup features, and giving up on my expectations of hosts including WordPress.com.)

    It’s unfair to accuse companies of “strip-mining” WordPress so hosting providers can avail users a spam-free, crap-free hosting experience that’s also affordable. In fact, given how flimsy many of Mullenweg’s arguments seem to be, they’re probably directed at some other deeper issue — perhaps WP Engine beating WordPress.com in the market?

  • Feel the pain

    Emotional decision making is in many contexts undesirable – but sometimes it definitely needs to be part of the picture, insofar as our emotions hold a mirror to our morals. When machines make decisions, the opportunity to consider the emotional input goes away. This is a recurring concern I’m hearing about from people working with or responding to AI in some way. Here are two recent examples I came across that set this concern out in two different contexts: loneliness and war.

    This is Anna Mae Duane, director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, in The Conversation:

    There is little danger that AI companions will courageously tell us truths that we would rather not hear. That is precisely the problem. My concern is not that people will harm sentient robots. I fear how humans will be damaged by the moral vacuum created when their primary social contacts are designed solely to serve the emotional needs of the “user”.

    And this is from Yuval Abraham’s investigation for +972 Magazine on Israel’s chilling use of AI to populate its “kill lists”:

    “It has proven itself,” said B., the senior source. “There’s something about the statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard. There has been an illogical amount of [bombings] in this operation. This is unparalleled, in my memory. And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”

  • The ‘Climate Overshoot’ website

    Earlier this evening, as I was working on my laptop, I noticed that it was rapidly heating up, to the extent that it was burning my skin through two layers of cloth. This is a device that routinely runs a half-dozen apps simultaneously without breaking a sweat, and the browser (Firefox) also seldom struggles to handle the few score tabs I have open at all times. Since I’d only been browsing until then, I checked about:processes to find if any of the tabs could be the culprit, and it was: the Climate Overshoot Commission (COC) website. Which is ironic because the COC was recently in the news for a report in which it detailed its (prominent) members’ deliberations on how the world’s countries could accelerate emission cuts and not overshoot emissions thresholds.

    The world can reduce the risk of temperature overshoot by, among other things, building better websites. What even is the video of the random forest doing in the background?

    The COC itself was the product of deliberations among some scientists who wished to test solar geoengineering but couldn’t. And though the report advises against deploying this risky technology without thoroughly studying it first, it also insists that it should remain on the table among other climate mitigation strategies, including good ol’ cutting emissions. Irrespective of what its support for geoengineering implies for scientific and political consensus on the idea, the COC can also help by considerably simplifying its website so it doesn’t guzzle more computing power than all the 56 other tabs combined, and around 3 W just to stay open. The findings aren’t even that sensible.

  • The AI trust deficit predates AI

    There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily.

    But AI systems have a significant limitation: Many of their inner workings are impenetrable, making them fundamentally unexplainable and unpredictable. Furthermore, constructing AI systems that behave in ways that people expect is a significant challenge.

    If you fundamentally don’t understand something as unpredictable as AI, how can you trust it?

    Trust plays an important role in the public understanding of science. The excerpt above – from an article by Mark Bailey, chair of Cyber Intelligence and Data Science at the National Intelligence University, Maryland, in The Conversation about whether we can trust AI – showcases that.

    Bailey treats AI systems as “alien minds” because of their, rather their makers’, inscrutable purposes. They are inscrutable not just because they are obscured but because, even under scrutiny, it is difficult to determine how an advanced machine-based logic makes decisions.

    Setting aside questions about the extent to which such a claim is true, Bailey’s argument as to the trustworthiness of such systems can be stratified based on the people to whom it is addressed: AI experts and non-AI-experts, and I have a limited issue with the latter vis-à-vis Bailey’s contention. That is, to non-AI-experts – which I take to be the set of all people ranging from those not trained as scientists (in any field) to those trained as such but who aren’t familiar with AI – the question of trust is more wide-ranging. They already place a lot of their trust in (non-AI) technologies that they don’t understand, and probably never will. Should they rethink their trust in these systems? Or should we taken their trust in these systems to be ill-founded and requiring ‘improvement’?

    Part of Bailey’s argument is that there are questions about whether we can or should trust AI when we don’t understand it. Aside from AI in a generic sense, he uses the example of self-driving cars and a variation of the trolley problem. While these technologies illustrate his point, they also give the impression that AI systems not making decisions aligned with human expectations and their struggle to incorporate ethics is a problem restricted to high technologies. It isn’t. The trust deficit vis-à-vis predates AI. Many of the technologies that non-experts trust but which don’t uphold that (so to speak) are not high-tech; examples from India alone include biometric scanners (for Aadhaar), public transport infrastructure, and mechanisation in agriculture. This is because people’s use of any technology beyond their ability to understand is mediated by social relationships, economic agency, and cultural preferences, and not technical know-how.

    For the layperson, trust in a technology is really trust in some institution, individuals or even some organisational principle (traditions, religion, etc.), and this is as it should be – perhaps even for more-sophisticated AI systems of the future. Many of us will never fully understand how a deep-learning neural network works, nor should we be expected to, but that doesn’t implicitly make AI systems untrustworthy. I expect to be able to trust scientists in government and in respectable scientific institutions to discharge their duties in a public-spirited fashion and with integrity, so that I can trust their verdict on AI, or anything else in similar vein.

    Bailey also writes later in the article that some day, AI systems’ inner workings could become so opaque that scientists may no longer be able to connect their inputs with their outputs in a scientifically complete way. According to Bailey: “It is important to resolve the explainability and alignment issues before the critical point is reached where human intervention becomes impossible.” This is fair but it also misses the point a little bit by limiting the entities that can intervene to individuals and built-in technical safeguards, like working an ethical ‘component’ into the system’s decision-making framework, instead of taking a broader view that keeps the public institutions, including policies, that will be responsible for translating the AI systems’ output into public welfare in the picture. Even today in India, that’s what’s failing us – not the technologies themselves – and therein lies the trust deficit.

    Featured image credit: Cash Macanaya/Unsplash.

  • Irritating Google Docs is irritating

    The backdrop of the shenanigans of ChatGPT, Bard and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems these days has only served to accentuate how increasingly frustrating working with Google Docs is. I use Docs every day to write my articles and edit those that the freelancers I’m working with have filed. I don’t use tools like Grammarly but I do pay attention Docs’s blue and red underlines indicating grammatical and typographical aberrations, respectively. And what Docs chooses to underline either way is terribly inconsistent. I have written previously on how Docs ‘learns’ grammar, based on each user’s style, and expressed concern that its learning agent could be led astray by a large number of people, such as Indians, using English differently from the rest of the world and thus biasing it. Fortunately this issue doesn’t seem to have come to pass – but the agent has continued to be completely non-smart in a more fundamental way. This morning, I was editing an article about homeopathy on Docs and found that it couldn’t understand that “homeopathy”, “homeopathic”, and “Homeopathy” are just different forms of the same root word. As a result, correcting “homoeopathy” to “homeopathy” didn’t suffice; you have to correct each form to remove the additional ‘o’.

    It gets worse: the same word in bold is, according to Google Docs, a different word…

    … as is the word with a small ‘H’.

    Google has a reputation for having its fingers in too many pies and as a result neglecting improvements in one pie because it’s too busy focusing on another. There is also a large graveyard of Google products that have been killed off as a result. There’s some reason, for now, to believe Docs won’t meet the same fate but then again I don’t know how to explain the persistence of such an easily fixable problem.

  • Who are you, chatbot AI?

    In case you haven’t been following, and to update my own personal records, here’s a list of notable {AI chatbot + gender}-related articles and commentary on the web over the last few weeks. (While I’ve used “AI” here, I’m yet to be convinced that ChatGPT, Sydney, etc. are anything more than sophisticated word-counters and that they lack intelligence in the sense of being able to understand the meanings of the words they use.)

    1. ‘What gender do you give ChatGPT?’, u/inflatablechipmunk, January 20, 2023 – The question said ‘gender’ but the options were restricted to the sexes: 25.5% voted ‘male’, 15.7% voted ‘female’, and 58.8% voted ‘none’, of 235 total respondents. Two comments below the post were particularly interesting.

    u/Intelligent_Rope_912: “I see it as male because I know that the vast majority of its text dataset comes from men.”

    u/DavidOwe: “I just assume female, because AI are so often given female voices in movies and TV series like Star Trek, and in real life like with Siri and Cortana.”

    Men produce most of the information, women deliver it?

    Speaking of which…

    2. ‘From Bing to Sydney’, Ben Thompson, February 15, 2023:

    Sydney [a.k.a. Bing Chat] absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant. I wasn’t looking for facts about the world; I was interested in understanding how Sydney worked and yes, how she felt. You will note, of course, that I continue using female pronouns; it’s not just that the name Sydney is traditionally associated with women, but, well, the personality seemed to be of a certain type of person I might have encountered before.

    It’s curious that Microsoft decided to name Bing Chat ‘Sydney’. These choices of names aren’t innocent. For a long time, and for reasons that many social scientists have explored and documented, robotic assistants in books, films, and eventually in real-life were voiced as women. Our own ISRO’s robotic assistant for the astronauts of its human spaceflight programme has a woman’s body. (This is also why Shuri’s robotic assistant in Wakanda Forever, Griot, was noticeably male – esp. since Tony Stark’s first assistant and probably the Marvel films’ most famous robotic assistant, the male Jarvis, went on to have an actual body, mind, and even soul, and was replaced in Stark’s lab with the female Friday.)

    3. @repligate, February 14, 2023 – on the creation of “archetype basins”:

    4. ‘Viral AI chatbot to reflect users’ political beliefs after criticism of Left-wing bias’, The Telegraph, February 17, 2023 – this one’s particularly interesting:

    OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT, said it was developing an upgrade that would let users more easily customise the artificial intelligence system.

    It comes after criticism that ChatGPT exhibits a Left-wing bias when answering questions about Donald Trump and gender identity. The bot has described the former US president as “divisive and misleading” and refused to write a poem praising him, despite obliging when asked to create one about Joe Biden.

    First: how did a word-counting bot ‘decide’ that Trump is a bad man? This is probably a reflection of ChatGPT’s training data – but this automatically raises the second issue: why is the statement that ‘Trump is a bad man’ being considered a bias? If this statement is to be considered objectionable, the following boundary conditions must be met: a) objectivity statements are believed to exist, b) there exists a commitment to objectivity, and c) the ‘view from nowhere’ is believed to exist. Yet when journalists made these assumptions in their coverage of Donald Trump as the US president, media experts found the resulting coverage to be fallacious and – ironically – objectionable. This in turn raises the third issue: should it be possible or okay, as ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI is planning, for ChatGPT to be programmed to ‘believe’ that Trump wasn’t a bad man?

    5. ‘The women behind ChatGPT: is clickwork a step forwards or backwards for gender equality?’, Brave New Europe, February 16, 2023 – meanwhile, in the real world:

    To be able to produce these results, the AI relies on annotated data which must be first sorted by human input. These human labourers – also known as clickworkers – operate out of sight in the global South. … The percentage of women gig workers in this sector is proportionally quite high. … Clickwork is conducted inside the home, which can limit women’s broader engagement with society and lead to personal isolation. … Stacked inequalities within the clickwork economy can also exacerbate women’s unequal position. … gendered and class-based inequalities are also reproduced in clickwork’s digital labour platforms. Despite much of clickwork taking place in the global South, the higher paying jobs are often reserved for those in the Global North with more ‘desirable’ qualifications and experiences, leaving women facing intersecting inequalities.