Five Links #28
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Absorbing
Five links for your inbox from this week.
1. Copilot investigation
The new hotness in tech seems to be training AI on datasets without the owner/subject’s knowledge or consent and using that to produce features or products to sell. See Clearview’s scraping of faces for facial recognition tech, AI art generators scraping artists’ works and more (not unrelated: Cambridge Analytica and the whole surveillance ads market).
AI advocates say this content is public and therefore fair game – “artists use everything they’ve seen to inform their work, this is no different”.
However, an artist’s limited, personal and somewhat curated experiences eventually produce a unique style after years of honing their craft. Companies training AI on every image that’s ever been digitised – without a single copyright owner’s consent – with the aim of selling access to their dataset (or getting a $bn exit) is quite a different prospect. The different in scale is a key differentiator.
Another example of this is GitHub’s Copilot which is essentially an intelligent code autocomplete. The underlying dataset was trained on open source repositories without owner permission.
Now a group of lawyers are investigating to see if there’s potential for a lawsuit. One to watch.
2. Web Dev Patterns
As problematic as Google is, there’s no denying their web development education tools are excellent. Here are several common web patterns with corresponding code snippets.
3. Daily UI
A free daily design challenge to improve your UI skills.
4. Quick accessibility tests anyone can do
A helpful list of accessibility checks – one to read and bookmark.
5. Shoutout
Curate your Twitter mentions in an embeddable wall of tweets.
Projects + other things
- Scruples is on hiatus, so I’m available for work
- Why I switched from a Popular Backup Service™
- My Unoffice Hours are available every other Wednesday. Next slot: November 16th.
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Until next time,
Dave