Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness
2 stars
This novelette involves chatbots, machine learning, harassment, free speech, and who is ultimately responsible for potential ills that can arise. The style here is written as a non-fiction piece; I could imagine this sort of thinkpiece being written in WIRED or some such, with a personal hook and bringing in (literal html) links to the larger context. It's somewhat fantastical, in that it posits a rogue hacking bot that harasses people who have done shitty things, but is otherwise grounded in reality by these many references to real world events.
I don't think that this format worked for me. It was mostly the thinkpiece style of bringing up many questions for the reader: who is responsible, is this free speech, are engineers responsible for how they train these things (yes). Maybe I just am angry enough already about the way these tools are created and misused these days already that …
This novelette involves chatbots, machine learning, harassment, free speech, and who is ultimately responsible for potential ills that can arise. The style here is written as a non-fiction piece; I could imagine this sort of thinkpiece being written in WIRED or some such, with a personal hook and bringing in (literal html) links to the larger context. It's somewhat fantastical, in that it posits a rogue hacking bot that harasses people who have done shitty things, but is otherwise grounded in reality by these many references to real world events.
I don't think that this format worked for me. It was mostly the thinkpiece style of bringing up many questions for the reader: who is responsible, is this free speech, are engineers responsible for how they train these things (yes). Maybe I just am angry enough already about the way these tools are created and misused these days already that this wasn't particularly effective for me.