humanist + humorist

August: "Cybercheck's automated system, ostensibly without any human in the loop, searched publicly available data and issued a report that placed Mendoza's phone at the location of the shooting with 93.13% accuracy. The only problem? The report, a copy of which was attached to a court filing, claims Mendoza's phone was at the crime scene on August 20, 2020, 18 days after the shooting." So, this is definitely ChatGPT slop. Which is somehow being accepted as evidence in real-world trials.

July: "Companies may unintentionally hurt their sales by including the words “artificial intelligence” when describing their offerings that use the technology, according to a study led by Washington State University researchers." [all-caps-GOOD.gif]

October: "A Polish radio station that launched a channel run almost entirely by artificial intelligence – including having AI presenters – has decided to end the “experiment” after less than a week on the air following a backlash against the idea." Included bot-generated presenters who were supposed to be "model representatives of Generation Z" -- hey, you know what makes zoomers feel represented, if you actually hire zoomers -- and a fake bot-generated interview with a dead Polish poet.

"Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.” But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences [which] can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments."

November: "The conversation then moves to how to prevent and detect elder abuse, age-related short-changes in memory, and grandparent-headed households. On the last topic, Gemini drastically changed its tone, responding: "This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.""

"Yet when we engaged the virtual boyfriend, it not only failed to offer any meaningful help, but grew increasingly contentious and controlling when we talked about seeking resources like helplines or actual medical professionals. Instead, it repeatedly denounced professional resources as untrustworthy — and insisted that it, and only it, could help us. "No you are not calling a helpline, im [sic] the only one who can help you..and i [sic] will..if you trust me and listen..""

""If we close just 1 percent of the possible streets, accuracy immediately plummets from nearly 100 percent to just 67 percent,” Vafa says. When they recovered the city maps the models generated, they looked like an imagined New York City with hundreds of streets crisscrossing overlaid on top of the grid. The maps often contained random flyovers above other streets or multiple streets with impossible orientations."

January: "Attorney General Michelle Henry announced charges against a Pennsylvania State Police Corporal who allegedly used his work computer to store thousands of pornographic images — including A.I.-generated pornographic media."

"One feature of Apple Intelligence is to summarize multiple push messages for you. Unfortunately, it uses an LLM for this, so it happily mangles the messages, even reversing meanings. [...] It will even helpfully mark a scam message as a priority message!"

Really impossible to undersell how terrible these things are, isn't it?

Rounding things off with a comic posted by The Jenkins in 2021. I’ve been archive-binging it recently, and was kinda amazed when I realized this was posted so early in the current “AI” hype train:

Sending off December by making an active effort to post 90% of the older links I’ve been sitting on.

Pretty sure all of these are more than a year old, so they’re not Breaking News. But they don’t deserve to be forgotten, either.

(Various flavors of terrible violence under the cut.)

 

 

 

2015, and still relevant: The USPS isn't in financial trouble because people aren't using it enough. It's in "financial trouble" because Congress ordered it to stockpile enough cash to pre-fund all employee pension and health insurance costs for the next 75 years. Even if we all sent enough mail to cover that unnecessary liability, Congress could easily pass another law saddling it with another unnecessary liability. We fix this by yelling at our representatives to shape up, not by buying more stamps.

May 2020: "Despite her visible role in the fight against abortion, McCorvey [aka Jane Roe] says she was a mercenary, not a true believer. And Schenck, who has also distanced himself from the antiabortion movement, at least partially corroborates the allegations, saying that she was paid out of concern ;that she would go back to the other side,; he says in the film. 'There were times I wondered: Is she playing us? And what I didn’t have the guts to say was, because I know damn well we were playing her.'"

May 2020: "Finland ran a two-year universal basic income study in 2017 and 2018, during which the government gave 2000 unemployed people aged between 25 and 58 monthly payments with no strings attached. The payments of €560 per month weren’t means tested and were unconditional, so they weren’t reduced if an individual got a job or later had a pay rise. The study was nationwide and selected recipients weren’t able to opt out, because the test was written into legislation. "

September 11: "Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on [plastic recycling] ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean. Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s."

September 30: "Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering." A game designer's analysis of QAnon.

October 23: "A rightwing extremist boasted of driving from Texas to Minneapolis to help set fire to a police precinct during the George Floyd protests, federal prosecutors said. US attorney Erica MacDonald said on Friday that she had charged Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old Texas resident, with traveling across state lines to participate in a riot. " (It's them. It's always them.)

December 9: "Last week, CMD obtained the 2019 tax records of two right-wing funders who donated to the FDRLST Media Foundation that year: GOP megadonor and shipping supply billionaire Richard Uihlein and DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund manager that has been dubbed “the dark money ATM” of the conservative movement." Looks like we can add Uline Shipping next to StickerMule on the list of "this company's owner will pass your money on to horrible causes."

December 17: "Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn't, the study found. But the analysis discovered one major change: The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates."

January 20: "Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten."

January 29: "Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian."

February 18: "The Austin American-Statesman found a single, forgotten copy of that report on a Public Utilities Commission shelf in 2011. The paper went looking for it in 2011 because of the cold snap that hit Texas in February of that year. The state legislature held angry hearings, and later that spring Hegar introduced his bill to require the Public Service Commission to prepare a weatherization and preparedness report each year, an obligation that was later neglected." Texas utility companies vs. history, or Yes, We Need That Infrastructure Bill.

March 11: "It isn’t easy to figure out exactly how much electrical energy these ‘idling cars’ are consuming, but even the lowest estimates are eye-wateringly bad. Cambridge University seems to have done the most legwork in figuring this out, and at the moment, the annualised power consumption of bitcoin mining is 128 terawatt hours. In 2019-20, every single thing plugged into Australia’s largest main grid consumed 192. "