Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Mozilla is recuiting for an AI-powered recommendation engine (www.mozilla.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm a dev and I was browsing Mozilla's careers page and came across this. I find a privacy respecting company being interested in building an AI powered recommendation engine a little odd. Wouldn't they need to sift through the very data we want private in order for a recommendation engine to be good? Curious of what others think.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mozilla has a huge amount of information already submitted by volunteers to train their own specific-subject LLM.

And as we saw from Meta's nearly ethical-consideration-devoid CM3Leon (no i will not pronounce it "Chameleon") paper, you don't need a huge dataset to train if you supplement with your own preconfigured biases. For better or worse.

Just because something is "AI-powered" doesn't mean the training datasets have to be acquired without ethics. Even if there is something to be said for making material public and the inevitable consequences it can be used.

I hope whoever gets the job can help pave the way for ethics standards in AI research.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ironically, this comment reads just like an AI wrote it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

The irony of AI-generated responses being difficult to distinguish from the rules educators harassed me to comply with is something I've found pretty amusing lately. It's a bias built into the system, but has the opposite unintended effect of delegitimising actual human opinions. What an own-goal for civilisation.

I am regrettably all too human. I have even been issued hardware keys to prove it!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Interesting, but probably harmless if it's one-shot. In general, it seems like a bad idea. Not any better or worse than other recommendations systems. Mozilla should look into FHE.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AI topic is getting crazy, just got a request at work to investigate and figure out how AI can could be used at our own company. Not that there's real need, just to be sure...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

AI is probably at least smarter than the person who sent that request.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I don't think it's odd. They can use data, that they already have and make us of it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeeeeeah this is a little sus. AI is more about surveillance than actually providing a service but let them cook I guess? Maybe they're just following the marketing trends and the trends say put AI somewhere in your ad copy to get people to look at you. Just another buzzword...I hope.