Category: Ethics as a Practice

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De Nederlandse overheid gaat mogelijk van Facebook af. In Duitsland is het overheidsgebruik van Facebook door de Duitse autoriteit persoonsgegevens stilgelegd in 2021, omdat Meta zich (uiteraard) niet aan de AVG houdt. De AP doet dat soort uitspraken sinds 2018 niet meer zelf, omdat Facebook in Ierland is gevestigd. De Duitse instantie heeft dat soort consideratie niet, en gaat uit van een eigen verantwoordelijkheid. In plaats van veel te lang wachten op een Iers oordeel over Facebook, steekt ze de hand in eigen boezem en stelt dat de eigen overheid in ieder geval niet aan de eigen AVG verplichtingen kan voldoen door Facebook pages te hebben.

Staatssecretaris van Digitalisering Alexandra van Huffelen bereidt nu mogelijk een besluit voor langs dezelfde lijnen. Terecht lijkt me. Meta houdt zich zelf niet aan de AVG, en bovendien is de algemene uitwisseling van Europese persoonsgegevens met de VS geheel niet juridisch gedekt op dit moment.

De overheid moet zelf het goede voorbeeld geven bij online interactie met burgers en de omgang met eigen gegevens. Dit geldt voor Meta, voor Twitter, maar ook voor cloud diensten en de Microsoft lock-in waar de overheid zich grotendeels in bevindt. Facebook zelf niet meer gebruiken is een bescheiden eerste signaal, dat al verrassend lastig lijkt voor de overheid om helder af te geven.

Ik hoop dat de staatssecretaris de knoop snel doorhakt.

Ein datenschutzkonformer Betrieb einer Facebook-Fanpage sei nicht möglich, schrieb Kelber in einem Brief an alle Bundesministerien und obersten Bundesbehörden.

Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragte

Bookmarked Target_Is_New, Issue 212 by Iskander Smit

Iskander asks what about users, next to makers, when it comes to responsible AI? For a slightly different type of user at least, such responsibilities are being formulated in the proposed EU AI Regulation, as well as the connected AI Liability Directive. There not just the producers and distributors of AI containing services or products have responsibilities, but also those who deploy them in practice, or those who use its outputs. He’s right that most discussions focus on within the established system of making, training and deploying AI, and we should also look outside the system. Where in this case the people using AI, or using their output reside. That’s why I like the EU’s legislative approach, as it doesn’t aim to regulate the system as seen from within it, but focuses on access conditions for such products to the European market, and the impact it has within society. Of course, these proposals are still under negotiation, and it’s wait and see what will remain at the end of that process.

As I wrote down as thoughts while listening to Dasha Simons; we are all convinced of the importance of explainability, transparency, and even interpretability, all focused on making the system responsible and, with them, the makers of the system. But what about the responsibility of the users? Are they also part of the equation, should they be responsible too? As the AI (or what term we use) is continuous learning and shaping, the prompts we give are more than a means to retrieve the best results; it is also part of the upbringing of the AI. We are, as users, also responsible for good AI as the producers are.

Iskander Smit

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Al in maart had ik in Utrecht een leuk gesprek met Martijn Aslander en Lykle de Vries als onderdeel van hun podcast-serie Digitale Fitheid. Digitale Fitheid is een platform over, ja precies dat, de digitale fitheid voor de kenniswerker.

In het gesprek hadden we het over persoonlijk kennismanagement (pkm) en de lange historie daarvan, en de omgang met digitale gereedschappen en de macht om die tools zelf vorm te geven. Maar ook over mijn werk, verantwoord datagebruik, de Europese datastrategie, Obsidian meet-ups, en ethiek. Er kwam aan het begin zelfs met veel kabaal een AWACS voorbij.

Een gesprek van een uur dat zo voorbij was. Achteraf denk je dan, heb ik wel coherente dingen gezegd? Terugluisterend nu bij publicatie, valt dat mee.

Mijn gesprek in de Digitale Fitheid podcast staat nu online. Kijk vooral ook even naar de andere gesprekken, die zijn zeker de moeite waard.

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In the past weeks I’ve been playing at times in OpenAI’s GPT-3 playground. You give GPT-3 a prompt and then it will provide some generated text. You could use that as prompt again, or add something yourself and let GPT-3 continue.

This morning, I read Liam Porr’s 2020 posting about a GPT-3 generated blog he kept for a few weeks. (I think keeping it up longer and positioning it like a personal blog would mean certain detection as generated or inauthentic. Unlike when Porr did his experiment, GPT-3 is now available to many, and more people would also be suspicious of texts as potentially generated to begin with.)

For fun I prompted the GPT-3 playground with the title and first few lines of my last posting on my recent use of the Hypothes.is social annotation tool.

My post remade by GPT-3

Below is the result GPT-3 gave me. After pasting the block-quoted part from the original as prompt, it generated the grey coded part.

10 Thoughts After Making 100 Annotations in Hypothes.is

I’ve now added over 100 annotations using Hypothes.is (h.), almost all within the last month. This includes a few non-public ones. Two weeks ago I wrote down some early impressions, to which I’m now adding some additional observations.

1) 100 annotations (in a month) don’t seem like a lot to me, if h. is a regular tool in one’s browsing habit.

2) The act of annotation feels good, even empowering. It’s a way of taking control of the web, or at least of one’s web experience.

3) Annotations can be very short, even just a single word. This is both good (e.g. for quickly annotating a lot of text) and bad (e.g. when trying to make a more nuanced point).

4) The annotation interface could be improved. In particular, it would be nice to have an easy way to see all annotations on a page, without having to open each one individually.

5) Annotations can be a great way to start a conversation. I’ve had a few annotations that have generated discussion, which is gratifying.

6) Annotations can also be a great way to keep track of thoughts and ideas. I’ve found myself using h. as a kind of “digital scratchpad”, jotting down things that I want to remember or follow up on later.

7) The fact that annotations are public by default is both good and bad. On the one hand, it encourages people to be thoughtful and considerate in their annotations. On the other hand, it can be intimidating, and I’ve found myself self-censoring on occasion.

8) The fact that annotations are tied to a specific URL can be both good and bad. On the one hand, it ensures that annotations are always relevant to the context in which they were made. On the other hand, it can be frustrating when the context changes (e.g. an article is updated) and the annotation is no longer relevant.

9) The fact that annotations are stored centrally (on h.'s servers) is both good and bad. On the one hand, it makes it easy to access and share annotations. On the other hand, it raises privacy and security concerns.

10) Overall, I’m very happy with h. and find it to be a valuable tool. I’m looking forward to using it more in the future.

Some first reactions to that GPT-3 text

  • The title (10 things about…) and partly adding the first numbered element, created the expected 10 point list. It’s a common enough marketing/personal branding type format for GPT-3 to pick up on. (Why did I use it yesterday? Because I was too lazy to categorize my observations, so I just listed and numbered them as I wrote them.)
  • Ignoring obvious things like the repetitiveness of the text, after reading you’re left with feeling like you’ve read a bunch of words but you remain unsure if you read anything of substance. The text suggests there’s substance though, the first person perspective, mentioning specific aspects. Yet then doesn’t really follow up. It reads like marketing text, content farmed text. It mentions things but doesn’t answer questions, nor pose them. Not a surprise, but it does show how much empty stuff there’s already out there (on which GPT-3 was trained in the first place). I recognise it as low-info text but not necessarily as generated text.
  • No links! No links, other than sporadic internal links, is the default in the media, I know. Yet hyperlinks are the strands the Web is made of. It allows pointing to side paths of relevance, to the history and context of which the posting itself is a result, the conversation it is intended to be part of and situated in. Its absence, the pretense that the artefact is a stand alone and self contained thing, is a tell. It’s also a weakness in other online texts, or any text, as books and journals can be filled with links in the shape of footnotes, references and mentions in the text itself)
  • No proof of work (to borrow a term) other than that the words have been written is conveyed by the text. No world behind the text, of which the text is a resulting expression. No examples that suggest or proof the author tried things out, looked things up. Compare that to the actual posting that in point 1 talks about social connections around the topic, links to other h. user profiles as data points for comparison, and elsewhere points to examples of behaviour, lists of h. users found created and shared, references other tools (Zotero, Obsidian) and larger scope (PKM workflows) outside the topic at hand, and experimental changes in the site it is published on itself. That all tells of some exploration, of which the posting is the annotation. This also goes back to my earlier remark of using a 10 point list as laziness in the face of categorising things as I’ve done in other posts (see what I did there? No links, cause lazy).

I think that’s the biggest thing that I take from this: any text should at least hint at the rich tapestry of things it is resulting from, if not directly discuss it or link to it. A tapestry not just made from other texts, but other actions taken (things created, data collected, tools made or adapted), and people (whose thoughts you build on, whose behaviour you observe and adopt, who you interact with outside of the given text). Whether it’s been GPT-3 generated or not, that holds.

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Earlier this month saw the announcement of this years Brands With a Conscience Awards (BWAC) by the Medinge group of which I am a member. The Medinge Group is an international think-tank on branding and business. In the Group’s opinion, these diverse organizations show that it is possible for brands to succeed as they contribute to the betterment of society by sustainable, socially responsible and humanistic behaviour.

The international collective of brand practitioners meets annually in August at a secluded location outside Stockholm, Sweden, and collaborate on the list, judging nominees on principles of humanity and ethics, rather than financial worth. The Brands with a Conscience list is shaped around criteria including evidence of the human implications of the brand and considering whether the brand takes risks in line with its beliefs. Evaluations are made based on reputation, self-representation, history, direct experience, contacts with individuals within the organizations, media and analysts and an assessment of the expressed values of sustainability.
Two years ago the group added a unique category commendation, the Colin Morley Award, recognizing exceptional achievement by an NGO. Mr Morley, a member of the Medinge Group, died in the London Underground bombings on July 7, 2005. The award commemorates his visionary work in humanistic branding.

For 2009, the group has singled out the following organizations as Brands with a Conscience:
Chhatra Sagar—an eco-resort in Rajasthan (India)
Ekomarine—environmentally responsible paint (Sweden)
Kiva—microfinance lending (USA)
One Water—enlightened bottled water (UK)
Ragbag—Fair-Traded fashion accessories from recyclable materials (the Netherlands)
TOMS shoes—developing nations’ shoe distribution (USA)

2009 Colin Morley Award
The third Colin Morley Award for a non-governmental organization is given to the American actor and philanthropist Paul Newman in posthumous recognition for an exemplary life of truth-telling and generosity.

Early next month, on February 5th, the BWAC Awards will be given to the mentioned organisations, at a private ceremony at the Management Institute of Paris.
This years list of nominees was excellent, with nominations that represented a wider spectrum of geographic origin as well as a wider range of products and services. This made choosing and voting a bigger, but more worthwile, task than before.

As I was last year, I am very pleased to spread the word on the brands we have selected this year. Ever since I joined the Medinge initiative, now 6 years ago, I have enjoyed the discussion and energy in this world wide group of people. It thoroughly changed my outlook on the role of branding, from a mere marketing perspective, to how a brand can be the focal point of energy for everything I think is crucial in true collaboration within organisations, and stakeholder networks. For me knowledge and change management and branding overlap greatly. Acknowledging those organisations for whom their brand is the expression of how they see themselves as part of society, where the bottom-line is not the only and unique yard stick to measure success, seems therefore a logical extension of my vision on knowledge work, innovation and learning in a globally networked world.


Members of the Medinge Group at last years Paris meeting