Slow Takes Ep. 17: Hands on the Wheel cover art

Slow Takes Ep. 17: Hands on the Wheel

Slow Takes Ep. 17: Hands on the Wheel

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Every Monday, Leor from Exploring ChatGPT and I go through the week’s AI news without the hype. Catch the episode live on Substack, on YouTube, or as a podcast wherever you get yours, so you can pick the format you enjoy. Use this for the facts, the links and a little extra context.For the first time, the government told an AI company to hold a model backThe US government has asked OpenAI to stagger the release of its next model, GPT-5.6, letting only a short list of trusted partners in first and approving access customer by customer. The request came from two federal agencies worried the model could be misused before it is properly security-tested. It is the first time Washington has preemptively told an American AI firm to restrict a launch, and it lands two weeks after Anthropic pulled Fable 5 under separate pressure. On the episode, Leor put the sharper point: public model launches may now be over, and a model the government waves through untested quietly signals it was not powerful enough to fear. Who gets to use these models is becoming a decision made over our heads.Meta paused a tool that was logging its own staff to train its AIMeta has paused the Model Capability Initiative, a programme that tracked employees’ keystrokes, mouse clicks and screen content to gather training data for its AI. More than 1,600 workers signed a petition against it, and the pause only came after Reuters and Wired reported that the collected data, including private conversations and full transcripts, had been left open to anyone inside the company. Zuckerberg told staff that AI learns from watching really smart people do things. The real truth is that these systems are built on human work that is rarely asked for and rarely paid.America’s second-largest school district lost its chief over a failed AI chatbotAlberto Carvalho, superintendent of Los Angeles Unified, resigned after months on paid leave during a federal investigation. Part of it concerns ‘Ed’, an AI chatbot the district bought to support students and parents. LAUSD paid the developer, AllHere, $3m towards a $6m contract, despite the company having reportedly booked only around $11,000 in revenue, before it furloughed most of its staff and its founder was later charged with securities fraud, wire fraud and identity theft. When the rush to adopt AI outruns the dull work of due diligence, the children are the ones left relying on it.Nearly 400 local newspapers sued OpenAI and MicrosoftA coalition of almost 400 community and regional papers sued OpenAI and Microsoft in New York, alleging the companies scraped their articles, bypassed paywalls and reproduced near-verbatim excerpts in ChatGPT and Copilot without permission or payment. These are the small, already-gutted papers that cover town councils and local courts, a world away from the national giants of The New York Times case. The training data has to come from somewhere, and here is who paid for it: local reporters who were never asked.The good one: AI read a scroll that Vesuvius sealed two thousand years agoFor the first time, researchers have read a rolled Herculaneum scroll end to end without ever opening it. Charred and sealed when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it was scanned with high-resolution X-rays and read by machine-learning models trained to find ink on burnt papyrus, then checked column by column by human papyrologists. The text is a treatise on Stoic ethics, and one recovered line reads:“Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them.”This is the version that works, because the AI found the ink and people read the meaning.The first four stories are what happens when control over these tools slips to people who never asked us. The last one shows what changes when human experts keep a hand on the wheel. Ask who is steering the machine before you trust where it takes you.Go slow. Get full access to Slow AI at theslowai.substack.com/subscribe
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