Posts in Ethics (3 found)
David Bushell 3 months ago

Apple deepfakes

Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote was a snoozefest but one section left me rather perplexed. Early in the show Apple gave a performance about “child safety” . Apple ended the show with their new AI photo mangler . That’s some serious cognitive dissonance! 404 Media recently reported on “How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart” . Kids are using deepfake apps (from Apple’s App Store) to victimise their classmates. Adults are doing it too, of course. Deepfakes on demand are a cornerstone of new Twitter . Apple front-loaded the keynote with a “we care about children” narrative that the media and fanboys lapped up. Then they advertised features that are suspiciously at odds (if you stop to think). It was a shrewd marketing stunt they’ve pulled before. In past events Apple has greenwashed the opening spiel before flogging a new iPhone model with an annual upgrade plan. Don’t worry, it’s all recycled. Totally eco-friendly to ship mass-produced luxury goods around the world to meet a manufactured demand. I’m sure Apple-branded slop will be harmless too, I remember someone telling me they care about this stuff. I’ve written about AI’s consent problem in more trivial context before. The AI industry simply cannot take “no” for an answer. You will use it. You will suffer it. You will be a victim. Jared White makes a point on this topic: I don’t know about y’all, but I think it should be illegal to generate slop imagery of other people without their consent. Apple really fell down hard on this feature (and I’ve been hearing other podcasters saying the exact same thing). I hope they come to their senses and realize the “ick” isn’t worth a flashy keynote demo. @[email protected] - Mastodon At the very least I implore the ‘court of public opinion’ to vilify generative AI. It’s seriously creepy, and not just the uncanny valley aesthetic. Jared makes a stronger point on the Vibe Coded podcast . What happens when someone deepfakes a person with a disability that wasn’t visible in the original photo? Good chance it’ll erase their disability. That ain’t okay. That might be traumatic for some people. But sure, Photoshop exists. We must accept that new technology can be misused, right? Seriously, whole lotta money riding on this! It’s just a tool. AI apologists are quick to abandon all moral and common sense for the most mediocre slop. Whether or not Apple’s own app is capable of anything doesn’t matter. Its presence will only help to normalise the dehumanising efforts of the AI industry. This future sucks! They did fix those rounded corners on macOS though. Thanks for reading! Follow me on Mastodon and Bluesky . Subscribe to my Blog and Notes or Combined feeds.

Ethics media Media ai AI
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mdubakov 1 years ago

SaaS Ethics Manifesto

Every vendor has some vibes, positive, neutral, or bad. To me, Notion Linear, or Ghost have positive vibes, Slack is kinda neutral, while ClickUp or Motion have bad vibes. Why is that? I analysed my feelings and it all lead to... ethics. As a result, I created my personal SaaS Ethics Manifesto. It's just a set of rules I will never break in companies I lead : I think these rules are self-explanatory, but let's dig into them anyway and find some examples. Exploring software should be easy. I personally don’t like any commitments behind paywalls. People tend to forget things, and surprising charges will follow. Some revenue for a vendor maybe, but headache for a person. In real life so many vendors are doing it... For example, Motion provides 7 days (quite short period, to be honest) free trial and asks for the credit card right away. I had to provide it and cancel right away to not forget. Moreover, there is only annual plan available, so in case of sudden charge you will loose $600! Huh. If someone feels the product isn’t right for them, we give their money back. Trust matters more than squeezing out some money. Speaking of which, if you forget to cancel your Motion trial in 7 days, your $600 are gone 🤯, because ... I think when you beg for it or make a public statement on Reddit you will get your refund anyway. By contrast, this is our policy: No one should have to beg support to leave. Make cancellation simple and easy. I have to admit, we broke this rule for years because we didn’t want to spend time building the functionality. We finally did it, but I still feel guilty for not doing it sooner 🥲. Mistakes and failures happen. I always choose honesty, accountability, and learning over silence. We didn't have many downtimes, but when we did , postmortems followed. Postmortems are often interesting to read, since they provide real life cases. Slack did it well , GitHub even decided to do monthly Availability reports , so cool! Data belongs to the people who create it — not to the vendor. Any vendor should ensure it’s always portable and accessible. I remember 10 years ago I had to purchase quite expensive Salesforce plan just because of API. This is crazy practice to me. I checked Salesforce today (for small business), and.., no change. I believe artificial urgency is harmful. I dislike when products push sales at any cost — whether it’s Black Friday hype, "50% off for 24 hours", or "only 3 tickets left". That’s why we never use these tactics. Udemy case is particularly telling. They used machine learning to show fake base price and make it look like you have a really good discount. Well, it costed them $4M. Udemy has agreed to pay $4,000,000 to settle a case alleging it advertised fake discounts for its courses. Remember: using fake reference prices to run sales is illegal under the FTC Act and California's laws. 1/ pic.twitter.com/faqA2tu9An Sometimes you visit a new startup and see some really cool logos, like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, etc. It is quite clear for any experienced SaaS vendor to feel that something is off. Maybe a single lead with @microsoft.com domain is enough to put the logo into the home page? Or maybe a pilot is enough? Very rare such things become public, so 11x.ai story is a nice exception. Recently I stumbled upon Breeze website. Quite small company, quite weak product, quite famous customers. Customers page has all these loud logos, but testimonials are from very small companies only. I think they mislead leads. We decided to not put logos at all on our homepage so far. While we do have some quite well known customers, they are not as famous as Disney or Red Hat. When we compare Fibery with other products, we try to do it honestly (and mention that the comparison is still biased ). Our goal is to inform and empower, not to just sell. This rule is so hard to follow and very few vendors are doing it. Even Notion can't resist putting all ✔️ into the Notion column (but still they're more honest than ClickUp). Notion vs. ClickUp vs. ClickUp vs. Notion We want to support communities that make the world better. Offering at least 50% off is one way we can help. I think this practice is widespread, which is good! We also decided to support startups 🚀 (6 months for free) and Ukrainian companies 🇺🇦 (50% discount). 🤔... P.S. I also hate SEO, but not sure it is fair to include it into the manifest. What are your rules? Trials are always free, with no credit card required Purchases and renewals are fully refundable within 30 days Users can cancel anytime, with service active until the paid period ends Downtime and security incidents are disclosed openly, with postmortems for major events Data is always exportable, and every plan includes full API access No fake scarcity No fake customers logos and testimonials Products comparisons are honest Nonprofits, open-source, and educational projects receive meaningful discounts 🤔 (did not come up with anything decent, provide your ideas to complete the list!)

programming Programming business Business Ethics
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Bill Mill 1 years ago

Triple Storyline for Ethical Design

A good user experience is only as good as the action it enables. Designing a system that makes it easy to do bad things is bad. A system that automates discrimination is, by Spinoza’s light, evil.

design Design Ethics
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