The rise of AI programs like ChatGPT has triggered a tidal wave of ethical handwringing, most prominently from within the industries that it threatens to destroy. After all, just because you can get a robot to instantly write code or write contracts or provide customer support for free, should you? Well, the answer from the Writers Guild of America is a qualified yes. This week, the Writers Guild of America proposed that ChatGPT would absolutely be allowed to write scripts in the future, provided that the credit (and the money) goes to the human writer who came up with the prompts in the first place. The proposal paints a scary picture of the future; a future in which even the most human of arts are crushed under the wheels of an unthinking technology.

It's no secret that large models, such as DALL-E 2 and Imagen, trained on vast numbers of documents and images taken from the web, absorb the worst aspects of that data as well as the best. OpenAI and Google explicitly acknowledge this. Scroll down the Imagen website--past the dragon fruit wearing a karate belt and the small cactus wearing a hat and sunglasses--to the section on societal impact and you get this: "While a subset of our training data was filtered to removed noise and undesirable content, such as pornographic imagery and toxic language, we also utilized [the] LAION-400M dataset which is known to contain a wide range of inappropriate content including pornographic imagery, racist slurs, and harmful social stereotypes. Imagen relies on text encoders trained on uncurated web-scale data, and thus inherits the social biases and limitations of large language models. As such, there is a risk that Imagen has encoded harmful stereotypes and representations, which guides our decision to not release Imagen for public use without further safeguards in place."

Also see: Cath's two-fer on workplace diversity, Boy jobs and girl jobs – does'tech' put women off a career choice? SapphireNow 2017 roundup – how to get your fix – we published enough content from Sapphire Now to sap even the Sappiest of Saps. I won't do the full tour; here's how to get your info: Jon's grab bag – Not really a grab bag this time, more of a "hope you didn't miss Brian's opus" nudge. Brian just posted the fifth and final part of his epic cloud manufacturing ERP series, The State of Manufacturing ERP – part 5 – The Plex update. You can catch the whole series via Brian's author page, and learn why manufacturing workloads are now shifting to the cloud at a (fairly) rapid rate.

Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey. The experimental vehicle, developed by researchers at the chip maker Nvidia, didn't look different from other autonomous cars, but it was unlike anything demonstrated by Google, Tesla, or General Motors, and it showed the rising power of artificial intelligence. The car didn't follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it. Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it's also a bit unsettling, since it isn't completely clear how the car makes its decisions.