147 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
11 Nov 2024
Hi! After 16 years of posting on this platform (🤡), I'm closing up shop here and stepping away. You can find me over at Bluesky (bsky.app/profile/baricks.bsk…) and Mastodon (mastodon.social/@beccaricks) where I'll be posting more regularly.
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Becca Ricks retweeted
17 Oct 2024
Very happy to announce that @A__W______O and @mozilla have launched our report on researcher access to closed foundation models, written by @mathver and I!✍️
Check out the blog and full research here: blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/…
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Our methodology is inspired by Aaron and @dmehro’s Jalopnik piece on Uber and a Lyft fares and @dcalacci’s Shipt calculator SMS bot that offers pay transparency to Target gig workers.
jalopnik.com/uber-and-lyft-t…
dcalacci.net/papers/Calacci%…
10 Oct 2024
Really proud to work with @LeonYin, @natlungfy and @DeniseDSLu on this one. Imagine having to constantly tap a button in an app all day to find out if you're allowed to work. That's what Uber/Lyft drivers in NYC had to do all summer (and Lyft still does). bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-…
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Becca Ricks retweeted
7 Oct 2024
DATA VAMPIRES is a four-part series exploring the costs of hyperscale data centers and why tech billionaires are desperate to build more.
In Part 1, we examine where “the cloud” came from and how it expands Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s power.
Full ep: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/d…
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7 Oct 2024
Loved this reflection from @biancawylie on the use of AI to summarize meetings. She says that the "inefficiency" of transcribing & synthesizing notes forces us to sit with what requires our attention. biancawylie.medium.com/autom…
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Becca Ricks retweeted
24 Sep 2024
Great news! Bellingcat just launched the new Online Investigations Toolkit. In the toolkit you can discover tools for everything from satellite imagery analysis, to social media scraping, transportation tracking or archiving research material. bellingcat.com/resources/202…
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Becca Ricks retweeted
25 Sep 2024
NEW PAPER!
1. Small AI models often perform better than big in context.
2. Obsession w bigness has bad consequences, from climate, to power concentration, to surveillance, to research capture.
This & what to do c/o @GaelVaroquaux, @SashaMTL and me ♥️👇
arxiv.org/abs/2409.14160
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Becca Ricks retweeted
9 Sep 2024
was wating to have everything in order to make proper annoucmenet but alas, i need help so here we are. got some grant & should be starting a research lab soon focused on AI accountbility & I'm looking for someone who could help design logo & artwork for the website. hit me up
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Becca Ricks retweeted
5 Sep 2024
NEW: Armed with a fanny pack full of radios, WIRED investigated reports of a secretive surveillance technology being deployed at the DNC.
Here’s the story about what we found:
wired.com/story/dnc-hidden-s…
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🎉 New Grant Opportunity for #MozillaAlumni!📢
Today we open applications for our Alumni Connections Grants; a program built to support Mozilla Fellows and Awardees as they continue their critical work on issues that directly affect the future of #AI and the health of our internet⤵️ mzl.la/3XckM1V
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Becca Ricks retweeted
3 Sep 2024
If you haven't yet read Ted Chiang's essay on generative AI and art, get on it. For my money, it's one of the best things written on AI, period—it gets to the heart of what's so dismaying about AI in a single haunting sentence:
"It reduces the amount of intention in the world."
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Becca Ricks retweeted
14 Aug 2024
Meta is shutting down CrowdTangle, a tool popular among researchers to investigate disinformation on Facebook and Instagram.
@mozilla says over 50,000 people have signed letters and petitions asking Meta to stop or pause its plans - via @darakerr @NPR
npr.org/2024/08/14/nx-s1-507…
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Becca Ricks retweeted
We, along with @AINowInstitute and
@logic_magazine, are proud to support Surveillance Watch: an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.
surveillancewatch.io
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Becca Ricks retweeted
5 Aug 2024
New from 404 Media: we got a massive leak from inside Nvidia (emails, Slack chats, documents) which show how it created a yet-to-be-released AI model. The leak shows that Nvidia scraped YouTube en masse, had clearance from highest levels of the company 404media.co/nvidia-ai-scrapi…
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Becca Ricks retweeted
5 Aug 2024
📣 Introducing the eight initiatives now supported by the Data Empowerment Fund. It's a great group, empowering people with data to tackle the climate crisis, advocate for fair work, govern artificial intelligence and address other critical challenges: dataempowerment.fund/#initia…
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4 Jun 2024
RT @Abebab: “we find that while the term open source is widely used, many models are ‘open weight’ at best and many providers seek to evade…
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Becca Ricks retweeted
3 Jun 2024
New zine alert! Collective Action in Tech and @DAIRInstitute zine on workers stories and (mis)dealings with generative AI. It was a pleasure to work with an amazing team on this!!
3 Jun 2024
We're at #FAccT2024 giving away this new zine: A Time Capsule of Workers Stories in the Age of Gen AI. This is a window into the complex relationship between workers and the AI we use (or are forced to use) and produce, but also resist and subvert…
collectiveaction.tech/2024/b…
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Becca Ricks retweeted
29 May 2024
This was a sharp convo with Cynthia Conti-Cook, @paromitashah and @nassereledroos, a few of my co-authors on the shadow report - and makes clear how distant this industry-driven policymaking process was from the concerns orgs like ours have been working on for years.
28 May 2024
In this podcast convo with @justinhendrix @techpolicypress, AI Now and a few of our fellow authors of senateshadowreport.com - @JustFuturesLaw, @S_ResistanceLab, @ColorOfChange - debrief how it came together, and where we need to go next:
techpolicy.press/reading-the…
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