Julia Angwin pops out of her Pulitzer-winning hole

[ericbarbour]

to give us a nice fat hand-wringing essay about the evils of using AI to replace people like her.....

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/23/opin ... wsuit.html
Note this part:

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

Ha ha ha. Wondering why she would say this? Check her adulatory Wikipedia biography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Angwin

A November 23, 2009 article by Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler, entitled "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages" on the "unprecedented numbers of the millions" of Wikipedia editors that were quitting, was featured on the front page.[17]

I remember that article. It was one of the first media reports to reveal that WP editing was in decline. It is routinely listed in things they can't deny but would like to, such as Criticism of Wikipedia and Predictions of the end of Wikipedia. But hey it was from way back in 2009, and since WP didn't collapse, ignore it.
Also in her article:

In April 2018, Angwin and Jeff Larson left ProPublica to found The Markup, described on their website as a "nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom" that will produce "data-centered journalism" to uncover "societal harms of technology".[21] They were joined by Sue Gardner, as a co-founder, and several ProPublica staff members.[22][23]

Sue Gardner being the longest-lasting WMF director to date.

In support of The Markup's mission to investigate technology and its effect on society, Craig Newmark committed $20 million to the publication alongside philanthropic gifts from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative, a joint project of the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society.[23]

All of which have ALSO been giving armloads of cash to the WMF and/or raving about how wonderful it is.

Summary: Julia is plugged high and deep into the "Digerati Rectum", where logrolling and backrubbing are a daily occurrence. One of them dreams up a kooky idea for the "digital future" and the others write essays about what a "shining visionary" so-an-so is. Very few of these geniuses predicted that AI would be used to replace THEM--the creative "chattering classes".

[ericbarbour]

PS, her bio was almost entirely written by only two accounts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Oceanflynn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikisolipsist
Both of which I suspect of paid or COI editing.

[ericbarbour]

Another quote from her article.

Consider, for instance, that the volunteers who build and maintain Wikipedia trusted that their work would be used according to the terms of their site, which requires attribution. Now some Wikipedians are apparently debating whether they have any legal recourse against chatbots that use their content without citing the source.

She failed to mention that one of the WMF's leading insiders and a longtime en-WP administrator, Karen Brown, also worked for the IBM Watson AI project. Which used Wikipedia's text, along with other online sources, to built its own language and knowledge model. IBM press releases occasionally noted that Watson was "trained" on free-to-use language data like Wikipedia. I will let you decide where that counts as "attribution" according to WP's own terms of use.

Brown was diddling WP and fighting with the other idiots on Wikipedia IRC channels while her employer was scraping it to build a database. She married Brad "Courcelles" Brown, another admin as well as an Arbcom member. No one EVER talks about THAT "conflict of interest".