[Petit Fours #428] On health queries, power imbalances, and the microbiome
Hi, everyone,
Without further ado, here’s what I’ve got for you today:
#1 We’re hosting a workshop on Data/Work in Crisis at the Aarhus Decennial conference in August: “This one-day workshop aims to map data and its inherent connections to work (of all kinds) across a landscape of ongoing crises. The workshop brings together researchers and practitioners with an interest in data work that underpins automation, algorithmic systems and organizational and societal strives toward datafication. The workshop provides a forum for interdisciplinary discussions around controversies related to data and work – and data work in particular – with the aim to expand the toolbox for working with data by proposing and developing critical approaches, drawing on the rich contributions of the growing body of literature on data work and datafication. Through spatial and temporal mapping exercises, the workshop intends to both trace paths through past crises into a contemporary moment, and towards more hopeful futures.“
#2 Our FemTech and Feminist Tech focus period is approaching fast, and information about the first public seminar is now online: Ina Schuppe Koistinen from Karolinska Institutet will give a talk on May 15 on Deciphering the role of the microbiome for women’s health through population-based studies. You can join in-person at Digital Futures and online via Zoom.
#3 For more health research, check out this new paper by Tamir Mendel, Nina Singh, Devin M Mann, Batia Wiesenfeld, and Oded Nov: Laypeople’s Use of and Attitudes Toward Large Language Models and Search Engines for Health Queries: Survey Study
#4 And here’s a pointer to an actually interesting research paper on creative practitioners and AI, by Katy Ilonka Gero and colleagues: Creative Writers' Attitudes on Writing as Training Data for Large Language Models Here’s the abstract for starters: “The use of creative writing as training data for large language models (LLMs) is highly contentious and many writers have expressed outrage at the use of their work without consent or compensation. In this paper, we seek to understand how creative writers reason about the real or hypothetical use of their writing as training data. We interviewed 33 writers with variation across genre, method of publishing, degree of professionalization, and attitudes toward and engagement with LLMs. We report on core principles that writers express (support of the creative chain, respect for writers and writing, and the human element of creativity) and how these principles can be at odds with their realistic expectations of the world (a lack of control, industry-scale impacts, and interpretation of scale). Collectively these findings demonstrate that writers have a nuanced understanding of LLMs and are more concerned with power imbalances than the technology itself.“
-A