Thank you for writing this and analysing these documents for us. I look forward to reading these thoughts, but acute AI blues is preventing me at the moment. Our university recently opted into Blackboard AI Assistant. Course leaders can now create chatbots trained on course content and equip them with personalities and AI generated portraits for students to chat with. Blackboard can now also spit out assignments that students undoubtedly use as ready-made prompts for AI's. I am sure that other colleagues sitting through a demo of these functionalities thought the same as I did: this is ridiculous nonsense, useless, harmful, a waste of time, nobody asked for this. It all looks like some Futurama joke. Yet, out of politeness to our colleagues we all pretended that 'this is fine'.
This is a sharp analysis of how the UK government's embrace of AI, under the guise of innovation, seems to be more about feeding the private tech ecosystem than benefiting the public. The focus on "sovereign compute" and "data pools" really speaks to the direction we're heading: a corporate-controlled landscape where AI’s supposed benefits for society are sidelined in favor of business profits and surveillance.
Thank you for writing this and analysing these documents for us. I look forward to reading these thoughts, but acute AI blues is preventing me at the moment. Our university recently opted into Blackboard AI Assistant. Course leaders can now create chatbots trained on course content and equip them with personalities and AI generated portraits for students to chat with. Blackboard can now also spit out assignments that students undoubtedly use as ready-made prompts for AI's. I am sure that other colleagues sitting through a demo of these functionalities thought the same as I did: this is ridiculous nonsense, useless, harmful, a waste of time, nobody asked for this. It all looks like some Futurama joke. Yet, out of politeness to our colleagues we all pretended that 'this is fine'.
This is a sharp analysis of how the UK government's embrace of AI, under the guise of innovation, seems to be more about feeding the private tech ecosystem than benefiting the public. The focus on "sovereign compute" and "data pools" really speaks to the direction we're heading: a corporate-controlled landscape where AI’s supposed benefits for society are sidelined in favor of business profits and surveillance.