Group items tagged

"Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical. AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments. In other words, an AI-supported radiologist should spend exactly the same amount of time considering your X-ray, and then see if the AI agrees with their judgment, and, if not, they should take a closer look. AI should make radiology more expensive, in order to make it more accurate. But that's not the AI business model. AI pitchmen are explicit on this score: The purpose of AI, the source of its value, is its capacity to increase productivity, which is to say, it should allow workers to do more, which will allow their bosses to fire some of them, or get each one to do more work in the same time, or both. The entire investor case for AI is "companies will buy our products so they can do more with less." It's not "business custom­ers will buy our products so their products will cost more to make, but will be of higher quality.""

""Methbot" that generated $3M-$5M by creating 6,000 fake websites to embed videos in, then generating convincing bots that that appeared to watch 300,000,000 videos/day -- running virtual instances of various browsers (mostly Chrome) on virtual machines running MacOS X, from a huge pool of IP addresses"

"This effectively ensured that all South Koreans are forced to use Internet Explorer. To this day, OS X and Linux hasn't seen the same degree of adoption in Korea as it has in Europe, China and the United States. It also means that 75% of South Korean netizens use some variety of IE because… Well? They have to. It also means that many South Korean websites are fundamentally less advanced, less user friendly and much less secure than their Western counterparts. The cruel irony is that this government intervention effectively hamstrung an entire industry"

"A leaked MPAA document discloses the studios' lobbyists' plan to force ISPs to give it control over DNS (one of the key goals in SOPA), by using the arguments raised in the decade-old Brand X case, where the ISPs said that they were more than a "telecommunications service" and were, instead, an "information service" because they provided DNS (among other things)."

"A new algorithm, however, is attempting to identify specific syndromes much sooner by screening photos for characteristic facial features associated with specific genetic conditions, such as Down's syndrome, Progeria, and Fragile X syndrome."

"showing how they can create a 40cm x 40cm "patch" that fools a convoluted neural network classifier that is otherwise a good tool for identifying humans into thinking that a person is not a person -- something that could be used to defeat AI-based security camera systems. They theorize that the could just print the patch on a t-shirt and get the same result."

X to doubt

"This is because emojis - as many unfortunates have discovered (often gen X parents, but that I, a millennial in her early 30s, am increasingly, devastatingly, discovering) - do not always have clearcut meanings. This is true of all language of course - and emojis are a type of language, despite what the likes of John Humphrys et al have sneered in the past. A thumbs-up emoji, to take the example from the Canadian case, can, just as in offline life, be used sarcastically. (This was noted in the court ruling.) In some regions such as in the Middle East a thumbs-up can be offensive."

"Something that a lot of mourners find disconcerting is when they receive automated prompts from social networking platforms telling them to friend somebody who has died, or connect with their dead spouse. Some platforms such as Twitter [now known as X] and TikTok lack a mechanism to treat a profile as being that of a dead person. Or, as in the case of LinkedIn, a mechanism exists but most people are not aware of it or don't use it. And while most platforms do offer an ability to download your archive, which you can then bequeath, it is far from straightforward. These products emanate from people who haven't had to think too much about the messiness of human existence Platforms can also delete dormant accounts, which can have repercussions. And there are also no guarantees how long any of the platforms we participate in will survive. That death hasn't been baked into tech platforms to begin with is a sign of a particular kind of privilege: these products emanate from people who haven't had to think too much about the messiness of human existence."

"Curtin University internet studies professor Tama Leaver posted about some of his tests with Emu's sticker generation to X, formerly known as Twitter. Leaver found, for example, that the AI will block a phrase like "child with gun" and display a warning message about how the prompt doesn't follow Meta's Community Guidelines. Emu will, however, generate stickers with the similar, more niche prompt "child with grenade." It not only creates stickers of kids holding the weapon but also produces stickers of children holding guns."

"A promotional poster for the second season of Loki on Disney Plus has sparked controversy amongst professional designers following claims that it was at least partially created using generative AI. Illustrator Katria Raden flagged the image on X (formerly Twitter) last week, claiming that the image of the spiraling clock in the background "is giving all the AI telltale signs, like things randomly turning into meaningless squiggles" - a reference to the artifacts sometimes left behind by AI-image generators. The creative community is concerned that AI image generators are being trained on their work without consent and could be used to replace human artists. Disney previously received backlash regarding its use of generative AI in another Marvel series, Secret Invasion, despite the studio insisting that using AI tools didn't reduce roles for real designers on the project."

"The coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict on social media platforms has come under scrutiny from the UK government and Brussels, as tech firms including X and Meta were urged to deal with a surge in violent and misleading content on their sites. In the UK, the technology secretary summoned social media executives on Wednesday to demand the removal from their platforms of violent content related to the Hamas attacks on Israel."

"Google, which recently laid off thousands of employees globally, is now laying off the robots that cleaned cafeterias at its headquarters. A report by Wired recently said that Alphabet's "Everyday Robots" project - a unit under Google's experimental X laboratories - has been shut down by Google's chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai."

"For women who have been victims of the creation and sharing of nonconsensual deepfake pornography, the events of the past week will have been a horrible reminder of their own abuse, even if they may also hope that the spotlight will force legislators into action. But because the pictures were removed, Swift's experience is far from the norm. Most victims, even those who are famous, are less fortunate. The 17-year-old Marvel actor Xochitl Gomez spoke this month about X failing to remove pornographic deepfakes of her. "This has nothing to do with me. And yet it's on here with my face," she said."

"The rapid online spread of deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift has renewed calls, including from US politicians, to criminalise the practice, in which artificial intelligence is used to synthesise fake but convincing explicit imagery. The images of the US popstar have been distributed across social media and seen by millions this week. Previously distributed on the app Telegram, one of the images of Swift hosted on X was seen 47m times before it was removed."

"Actually, ChatGPT was freaking out in many ways yesterday, but one recurring theme was that it would be prompted with a normal question - typically something involving the tech business or the user's job - and respond with something flowery to the point of unintelligibility. For instance, according to an X post by architect Sean McGuire, the chatbot advised him at one point to ensure that "sesquipedalian safes are cross-keyed and the consul's cry from the crow's nest is met by beatine and wary hares a'twist and at winch in the willow.""

"Major technology companies signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt "reasonable precautions" to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world. Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. Twelve other companies - including Elon Musk's X - are also signing on to the accord."