🗞️AI is still a stochastic parrot, trust & safety is being outsourced, and autonomous vehicles aren't autonomous.

PLUS: The Facilitation Leadership Lab has two new offerings.

Hi, it’s Charley. You might be wondering, ‘Hey, I didn’t get an email from you about all the OpenAI drama.’ I’m not built for covering real-time news, and I don’t think we’re smarter for piping the Sam Altman drama straight into our brains. So I’ll just say this: I very much look forward to the day when OpenAI appoints qualified women and people of color to its board.

Anyway, since I am in the ‘long-form essays that stand the test of time’ business, I thought I’d re-surface the piece I wrote on Altman’s flawed mental model for technology’s relationship to social systems. Give it a read!

Speaking of conflict and organizational dynamics, Kate Krontiris and I are running two courses soon:

1. A one-day workshop on Managing Conflict - the last day to enroll is December 5th.

2. A new and improved version of the Facilitation Leadership Lab - price discount ends December 1st.

Here’s a nice li’l testimonial from one of the participants in the Managing Conflict workshop.

Now on to the show!

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Is ChatGPT a stochastic parrot or will it one day surpass human intelligence? One recent research paper interrogated this question and sided with Team Parrot. Along the way, though, it observed something interesting: the chatbot’s responses demonstrated an “underlying bias towards mental unhealth – depression, victimhood, anxiety – all wrapped in a veneer of feel-good responses.” Mental health issues just beneath the surface of confident-sounding outputs?? Maybe these tools are human! I kid.

Now that many tech companies fired their trust and safety teams, those functions are being outsourced to third parties. An article in Wired overviews the rise of this trend and offers a few reasons it might be problematic: the use of third-party providers obfuscates accountability for critical decisions; errors in the third-party models will propagate across platforms; and the use of third parties separates important insights from product development. Yikes. Just wait until we’re all trust and safety workers!