¶When exploring different sides of an issue, a devil’s advocate can play-act an opposing perspective, but the exercise has limits. It’s better to talk to someone who genuinely disagrees with you.

¶When faculty members discuss intellectual diversity on college campuses, it’s not enough, she said, to “theoretically entertain what political conservatives might think.”

¶“Simply the fact that the Harvard Radcliffe Institute invited a significant number of political conservatives to discuss this question was astonishing to many people on the political right,” she said. “It just signals right off the bat: We’re going to take your opinion seriously; we’re inviting you to be equal partners in drafting this statement.”

¶I find this encouraging.

¶Universities, and their researchers and work product, are under the microscope and losing credibility. To maintain the value of higher education and the university as an institution, collective academia has to recognize the importance of the current moment and respond to it. And responding to it cannot be a sneer or dismissal. That’s what got us here in the first place. No, universities have to authentically engage the problem and show honest work and progress on it. They have to show that they are the inclusive spaces they’ve touted lo these many years. They have to be in the business of instructing students “how to think, not what to think, by engaging in all the real-world complexity of divergent ideas and messy discourse.” In short, universities should strive to be the true marketplace of ideas.

¶Harvard, it seems, is authentically working on it, which is encouraging.

¶From Google’s announcement of the rollback:

¶We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we’re rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.

¶It’s hard to imagine how Google didn’t anticipate people using this new feature to deepfake earth. And the apparent ease with which people created the fake crises listed in the linked article makes you wonder if Google had any guardrails on the feature at all. I do like the examples shown in Google’s announcement, and see tremendous value in a Google Earth that enables creation of enhanced content, but, apparently, it will be awhile before we can enjoy such things.

¶The hacks also raise new questions about what liability and consequences other AI makers might face if their own models are misused to hack into other companies.

¶One attorney called this “uncharted territory,” while others found little legal precedent to work from, suggesting it will likely be up to the courts to sort it out. Victim companies would likely have to develop novel legal arguments based on laws that were written decades before the arrival of large language models (LLMs).

¶In an interview with CNN, Hugging Face’s chief executive Clem Delangue said he doesn’t want to sue OpenAI. But he argued that companies should be held responsible....”We have to make sure that the legal frameworks keep these events really illegal,” and to hold companies accountable when they do make mistakes. “Otherwise we’re going to end up in a very different world.”

¶(emphasis added).

¶“Really illegal”. I like that that, but I’m not counting on it.