oh i see that someone who got his phd at the media lab decided to use ChatGPT as a therapy standin for thousands of patients without their clear consent, was surprised when the patients hated it, and is now surprised that people are pissed about it.
wild.
oh i also see that he declared the study exempt from IRB and ethics review because it was for a business with no intent to publish in an academic journal and he thinks filing for IRB approval is hard.
_wild_.
i suppose this is also the time to note that the Media Lab was founded as the pseudo independent entity it is because Negroponte hated doing grant reporting and ethics review and a substantial part of its whole _vibe_ is dropping untested technologies on populations with little supervision and nebulous consent.
it is really not surprising to me that someone who got their PhD there in 2014 (so we would have overlapped) thinks that this is an ok way to treat people
@oddletters I would like to widen this criticism to MIT as a whole, it’s not like the media lab stands out.
based on what, exactly?
@oddletters for some reason hadn't yet heard of THE CHARISMA MACHINE, thanks for the recommendation :)
@oddletters oh wow I had no idea.
@oddletters "According to... the MIT Technology Review, in response to the controversy of the MIT Media Lab accepting funding from Jeffrey Epstein five years after Epstein's conviction for sex trafficking minors, Negroponte told MIT staff, "If you wind back the clock, I would still say, 'Take it.'"
Negroponte was reported to have said that in the fund-raising world these types of occurrences were not out of the ordinary, and they shouldn’t be reason enough to cut off business relationships."
if you would like to know more about the history of the Media Lab and the way it encourages these practices in its students and spinoff companies, i highly recommend Molly Wright Steenson's ARCHITECTURAL INTELLIGENCE and Morgan Ames's THE CHARISMA MACHINE