The inhuman touch
For the first time ever, a call to AppleCare got me an AI agent rather than a human being. The agent solved my problem, but made me feel sad, because AppleCare’s people provided a human connection, just we get from the people behind the Apple Stores’ Genius Bars. Are they the next to go?
Works in progress
The RSL (really simple licensing) standard is out there. In this section, it says,
Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is an evolution of the early ideas behind the widely adopted RSS standard, which provided a machine-readable framework for publishers to syndicate content to third-party clients and crawlers in exchange for traffic.
The RSL standard extends and generalizes these concepts to include explicit licensing terms, enabling publishers to define machine-readable compensation and usage conditions for crawling and processing their content. The RSL Technical Steering Committee leads the evolution of RSL in collaboration with internet publishers, technology companies, industry associations, and other stakeholders.
One problem with the RSS comparison is that RSL is not simple. Here’s the 1.0 draft of the standard. Copied into Microsoft Word, it weighs in at 16,928 words. Compare that to the RSS 2.0 spec at Harvard Law (where it has lived as a finished thing, since 2003).
It also creates yet another namespace: a consent ID.
Clearly, it comes from the entertainment industry (see RSL Media), and works to solve a serious problem: massive unpermitted harvesting and repurposing of copyrighted works for AI training and commercial re-use purposes by parties other than the rightsholders. If RSL succeeds, it will join Creative Commons and MyTerms as tools in the private rights protection box.
So why have the AI bigs shut down their ethics teams?
IBM says and asks, Investing in AI ethics makes good business sense, but why? One excerpt:
Building that trust pays off: companies investing in AI ethics reported 22% improvement in customer satisfaction and retention, 20% better incident prevention and 19% higher AI adoption rates. A majority (59%) of executives say their ethics efforts delivered results.
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