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_.
@oddletters Who/what are we talking about here?
@oddletters @justusthane gotta say that the kind of replies he received make me miss twitter. No hold barred, they called him out for harm to others, immorality and lack of ethics. I got called out here for using the entirely average word “weird” in an entirely innocuous fashion. The twitter pile on was most appropriate
@oddletters @justusthane
Is there a way to save that Twitter thread? There is so much there worthy of discussion and I'd hate to see it deleted or lost if Twitter goes belly-up.
@oddletters Holy shit.
“It worked great until people found out they were talking to a robot, then they didn’t like it before”
…two minutes later…
“No no no, you guys got it all wrong, everyone was informed and consented from the beginning”
@oddletters @justusthane I went poking around and there’s so much yikes to be found here:
Originally incorporated as a for profit 5 years ago https://venturebeat.com/business/koko-raises-2-5-million-to-put-human-empathy-inside-every-virtual-assistant/
People raised concerns about data use back then too https://www.reddit.com/r/selfharm/comments/5nr1gf/message_from_mods_koko_ai_on_rselfharm/
The current nonprofit entity is called Koko AI, Inc. (Though their TOS/PP says Koko, Inc.) - incorporated in Delaware in 2020, foreign registered in Cali in Feb 2022. Unclear what happened to the for-profit entity that raised the $2.5M back in 2017.