Instead of starting to gather my random thoughts I spent 10 minutes looking up WordPress themes. Every once in a while I think I might want to change things around here. Then I have a look and think…. noooo! Too much change! I can’t take that at the moment. I feel old as fuck a lot of times these days.
Sleep: Solid 7+ hours. Yay.
Coffee: From a new mug, I bought at the home textile store yesterday. It’s closing down as more and more specialised stores are these days, which is sad. I went to make good use of the “closing / sell out” discount and there wasn’t all that much stock left yet. Got a new set of towels and sheets and all. And a maritime mug. As you do…
Language & Gender Bias: Not sure if that’s a right prompt. I am an advocate to use gender specific nouns in German (or any language that has it) – like actress for a female actor – because, even though we women are supposedly always also meant to be included in the generic masculine, our brains often don’t work like that. Millenniums of patriarchy so it’s no wonder. My Daily Calm meditation this morning was a parable about a poet and a juggler. Of course I – even I – automatically pictured the male version of it and thus was surprised when the narrator mere moments later used”she” and “her” about both these persons.
Daily AI (x3): This might become a prompt category, because it is EVERYWHERE these days. Every once in a while I think I should sit down and write a long post about what I think about AI. Most of it is critical and negative and I realize a lot of it might have today that it’s new and overwhelming and I feel so old for not being well informed or experienced in using it.
#1 Yesterday I read an article about how the BKA (Germany’s central police agency) is starting to use it. They seem to be doing it quite responsibly re: personal data and which company in which country will gain access to the data. I was positively surprised, especially about what the people interviewed said about the Palantir software, which some federal states are already using. With help from Palantir staffers and without really know what happens to the data they feed in.
#2 comes from the latest newsletter of the wonderful Caroline Criado Perez. If you don’t follow her yet, what’s stopping you? Go subscribe, follow and all that.
[….] that will make everything…well, worse actually because AI is trained on existing scripts and as you may remember from Invisible Women AI doesn’t just reflect our biases back to us, it amplifies them. A lot. For example, when an algorithm was trained on an image database where pictures of kitchens were 33% more likely to have a woman than a man in them, the algorithm then went on to associate pictures of kitchens with women 68% of them. That is, it was labelling men as female simply because they were standing in a kitchen. [….]
So much more interesting – aka enraging – information about biased language on children’s TV and much more. Seriously, read and subscribe.
#3 happened during an online workshop on “plain language” this afternoon, where in the end we were asked to use AI to help us simplify our words so that people, who don’t speak much or none German or who are cognitively impaired understand what we are trying to bring across. What can I say: AI does it so much quicker and better than any human could have done. That’s the whole point, right? I’m impressed, but still not a fan. Like I said… old AF.
Privilege: I was a bit of an outsider at a workshop today, which mainly was meant for people who work with refugees, immigrants or families with such background, of which the city I work in has quite a lot. All the women – because of course this kind of social work / care work is 95% female – in the workshop seemed motivated to learn how to simplify their own language to better reach the people they want to reach. And that was heartening to see and hear. Takeaways from the workshop for me: I am so glad I live in a country where I’m fluent in the spoken language and also that I’ve had the chance to develop the skill to maybe learn another language or to work out the basics of it. Some of the exercises we did, gave us a tiny glimpse of how hard it is, if you can’t understand what’s in the letter the council is sending to you or you can’t express what you need. A privilege to be able to express these random thoughts in writing. In a different language than the one I’m actually speaking. A privilege to be able to read! For information, for education, but also for fun. Which I will keep doing after I’ve published this….
