Octopus can’t be bred in farm conditions – but a Canary Islands location wants to try. Why farm yet another animal? CC-licensed photo by damn_unique on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born • The Verge
James Vincent:
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Earlier this year, I was researching AI agents — systems that use language models like ChatGPT that connect with web services and act on behalf of the user, ordering groceries or booking flights. In one of the many viral Twitter threads extolling the potential of this tech, the author imagines a scenario in which a waterproof shoe company wants to commission some market research and turns to AutoGPT (a system built on top of OpenAI’s language models) to generate a report on potential competitors. The resulting write-up is basic and predictable. (You can read it here.) It lists five companies, including Columbia, Salomon, and Merrell, along with bullet points that supposedly outline the pros and cons of their products. “Columbia is a well-known and reputable brand for outdoor gear and footwear,” we’re told. “Their waterproof shoes come in various styles” and “their prices are competitive in the market.” You might look at this and think it’s so trite as to be basically useless (and you’d be right), but the information is also subtly wrong.
To check the contents of the report, I ran it by someone I thought would be a reliable source on the topic: a moderator for the r/hiking subreddit named Chris. Chris told me that the report was essentially filler. “There are a bunch of words, but no real value in what’s written,” he said. It doesn’t mention important factors like the difference between men’s and women’s shoes or the types of fabric used. It gets facts wrong and ranks brands with a bigger web presence as more worthy. Overall, says Chris, there’s just no expertise in the information — only guesswork. “If I were asked this same question I would give a completely different answer,” he said. “Taking advice from AI will most likely result in hurt feet on the trail.”
This is the same complaint identified by Stack Overflow’s mods: that AI-generated misinformation is insidious because it’s often invisible. It’s fluent but not grounded in real-world experience, and so it takes time and expertise to unpick. If machine-generated content supplants human authorship, it would be hard — impossible, even — to fully map the damage. And yes, people are plentiful sources of misinformation, too, but if AI systems also choke out the platforms where human expertise currently thrives, then there will be less opportunity to remedy our collective errors.
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Newsguard points out in a new report that there are about 25 new AI-generated content farms begin generated every week; one of them produced 1,200 articles a day. And it’s either unreliable or useless. Increasingly, any sort of search leads to an ocean of junk.
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Experimental drug could offer more weight loss than any drug now on the market, study finds • NBC News
Berkeley Lovelace Jr:
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An experimental drug from Eli Lilly has the potential to provide greater weight loss benefits than any drug currently on the market.
The experimental drug, retatrutide, helped people lose, on average, about 24% of their body weight, the equivalent of about 58 pounds, in a mid-stage clinical trial, the company said Monday from the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting in San Diego. The findings were simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
If the results are confirmed in a larger, phase 3 clinical trial — which is expected to run until late 2025 — retatrutide could leapfrog another Lilly weight loss drug, tirzepatide, which experts estimated earlier this year could become the best-selling drug of all time. Tirzepatide is currently approved for Type 2 diabetes under the name Mounjaro; FDA approval of the drug for weight loss is expected this year or early next year.
The new findings, according to Dr. Shauna Levy, a specialist in obesity medicine and the medical director of the Tulane Bariatric Center in New Orleans, are “mind-blowing.”
Levy, who was not involved with the research, said the drug seems to be delivering results that are approaching the effectiveness of bariatric surgery. “It’s certainly knocking on the door or getting close,” she said.
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The reason why we’ve suddenly got weight loss drugs coming out of our ..ears is the development of GLP-1 agonists, which dates back to 2005. This has been a long time coming.
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Google Pixel Fold review: closing the gap • The Verge
Allison Johnson:
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To Google’s credit, the Pixel Fold is a much more approachable device than the [Samsung] Z Fold 4. Rather than overwhelm you with possibilities, the Pixel places guardrails around what you can and can’t do, like limiting multitasking on the inner screen to two apps. It’s a friendlier device to someone who’s fresh to foldables. But I have a hard time believing that anyone seriously considering the Pixel Fold (or any phone nearing $2,000) is afraid of a little complexity.
There are a couple of practical concerns that came up in my testing, too. Battery life was hit-and-miss, and the phone seems to drain more on standby than it should. I also have some concerns about long-term durability — first-generation Google hardware and all.
Still, I don’t want to dismiss what Google has achieved in the Pixel Fold. It’s a phone and a small tablet all in one device, and it’s a gadget I think most anybody could pick up and feel comfortable with right away. Walking to a coffee shop, unfolding the phone, and playing a game on the big screen, then folding it back up again for the walk home is just straight-up delightful. The form factor is lovely and familiar, and it allows you to do some of the things you’d normally have to put down your phone and pick up your laptop for. But it’s also fair to ask for more from this device, especially at $1,800, because right now, it doesn’t quite deliver.
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Sure, you could go to the cafe and unfold your phone. Or you could buy a phone, and also get an iPad mini ($499), which would fit in many pockets or handbags, or any small cheap Android tablet, and go to the cafe, and have lots of money left over. Foldables leave me cold; the last real innovation in phone form factors was Samsung pushing screen sizes past 6in.
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Victims speak out over ‘tsunami’ of fraud on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp • The Guardian
Jess Clark and Zoe Wood:
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The social media giant Meta is facing growing pressure from MPs, consumer groups and the UK banking sector over its failure to prevent a “tsunami” of fraud on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, where Britons are losing “life-changing” sums every day.
It comes as a Guardian investigation reveals the human stories behind scams that originate on Meta’s platforms, with a nationwide estimate released this week predicting the tech firm’s failure to stamp out fraud will cost UK households £250m during 2023.
With someone in the UK said to fall victim to a purchase scam starting on either Facebook or Instagram every seven minutes, the Guardian asked people who had been defrauded on these sites as well as its WhatsApp platform to get in touch.
One Facebook user told us she was defrauded of her life savings and got pulled into debt, losing a total of £70,000, after being duped by an investment scam. While some people lost large amounts of money, a stream of unsuspecting online shoppers reported being conned out of smaller amounts when they placed orders with bogus online shops advertised on Facebook and Instagram.
Among the most upsetting experiences shared were those of victims of the WhatsApp “Hi Mum” impersonation scam, where fraudsters impersonate family members to get them to send large sums of money.
Valerie, 73, one of the many victims, handed over £2,000 to someone pretending to be her son, a small business owner who had borrowed money in the past. Ill with long Covid, she said she would “never get over” the humiliation of being caught out this way.
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The URL of the embedded link there, from Lloyds Banking Group, tells its own story: two-thirds of all (UK) online shopping scams now start on Facebook or Instagram. Though Twitter is certainly also now host to a ton of scammy-looking drop shipping ads from Alibaba companies of uncertain reputation, including products that are illegal to own in the UK.
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Advertisers should beware being too creative with AI • Financial Times
John Gapper:
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beware of the AI hangover. The last technology revolution in ads that promised magical efficiency and exact consumer targeting was automated ad buying across the web. In practice, the ad tech industry, dominated by companies such as Google, has been a distinctly mixed blessing.
About a quarter of the $88bn spent on automated ad buying by US advertisers is wasted, their trade group complained this week, with the average spot running on 44,000 websites, some of them dodgy. “We went down the niche audience road with programmatic advertising a decade ago and we got seduced by technology,” observed Peter Mears, who heads Havas’s media agencies.
Generative AI undoubtedly has uses on the creative side of advertising. One is that it can help smaller businesses to level up against the big marketing spenders at Mars, Diageo and the like. The creative brains at the agencies occupying the prime hospitality spots in Cannes this week tend to be expensive to hire: they have to pay for all those parties somehow.
I came across a couple of examples, one at SiriusXM, the US radio broadcaster. It plans to use AI to produce ads for smaller companies, offering them choices of AI-generated pitches, and then getting their pick read by an AI voice, rather than by expensive “voice talent”. The result is unlikely to be as persuasive as a human production but it will be cheaper and faster.
Similarly, the marketing group McCann Worldgroup used AI to make 42,000 individual signs and menus for 8,400 owners of Mexican hot dog and hamburger stands who are customers of its client Bimbo, the bakery group. While having an AI-designed fast food display cannot put you on a par with McDonald’s or KFC, it all helps.
…I wonder if it’s worth it. Nvidia’s chips may be capable of processing billions of individual ads, but there are not that many reasons to buy ice cream or ketchup. In fact, we mostly eat them for the same reason as everyone else, which is how advertising has always worked. It may sound exciting to fragment ads, but is it sensible?
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Is the UK finally getting over the great Brexit schism? • Financial Times
Luke Tryl runs the More In Common polling thinktank:
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Nearly four years on from Johnson’s “Get Brexit Done” campaign — and seven years after the referendum — our latest research finds those divides, which seemed a lasting schism, are softening. Not only has EU membership tumbled down the list of important issues from first to 11th (and almost never comes up unprompted in our focus groups), but the number who say Brexit is an important part of their identity has fallen from 50% to 39%. Political allegiance has become once again a more important marker.
And that Brexit depolarisation has not been symmetrical. After the 2019 election, Leavers and Remainers were equally likely to say their Brexit vote was important to their identity. But now, the number of Leavers saying it is important has fallen by 19 points, while among Remain voters it has fallen by just four points. So what persists about Brexit identity is largely being driven by Remainers.
Why is this? An obvious reason is that we did ultimately leave the EU; defending the status quo arouses less passion than a campaign. But our research suggests a more important driver of that asymmetry — the perception that Brexit has, so far, been a failure.
Nearly two-thirds of voters in our research, including almost half of Leave voters, say that Brexit has been unsuccessful. Were a new referendum to be held today, Britons would vote to rejoin by a margin of 58:42 — with one in seven Leavers switching their vote.
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As Tryl also notes, politicians have noticed this. But the Tories are completely hamstrung by having backed Brexit, and being in thrall to the right wing of their party.
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World’s first octopus farm proposals alarm scientists • BBC News
Claire Marshall:
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A plan to build the world’s first octopus farm has raised deep concerns among scientists over the welfare of the famously intelligent creatures.
The farm in Spain’s Canary Islands would raise about a million octopuses annually for food, according to confidential documents seen by the BBC.
They have never been intensively farmed and some scientists call the proposed icy water slaughtering method “cruel.” The Spanish multinational behind the plans denies the octopuses will suffer.
The confidential planning proposal documents from the company, Nueva Pescanova, were given to the BBC by the campaign organisation Eurogroup for Animals. Nueva Pescanova sent the proposal to the Canary Islands’ General Directorate of Fishing, which has not responded to a BBC request for comment.
Octopuses caught in the wild using pots, lines and traps are eaten all over the world, including in the Mediterranean and in Asia and Latin America.
The race to discover the secret to breeding them in captivity has been going on for decades. It’s difficult as the larvae only eat live food and need a carefully controlled environment, but Nueva Pescanova announced in 2019 that it had made a scientific breakthrough.
The prospect of intensively farming octopus has already led to opposition: Lawmakers in the US state of Washington have proposed banning the practice before it even starts.
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I eat meat, but that’s from animals that we’ve farmed. I eat fish, but not intelligent fish (ie whales or dolphins). I don’t think we should start farming a clearly intelligent animal, just as we wouldn’t start farming chimpanzees for food.
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Publishers Clearing House settles ‘dark patterns’ suit for $18.5m • The New York Times
J. Edward Moreno:
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Publishers Clearing House, the direct marketing company that uses sweepstakes to sell magazine subscriptions, agreed on Monday to pay $18.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which accused the company of using what’s known as dark patterns to trick customers into paying for products or giving up their data.
The company coerced customers through false suggestions that making a purchase was the only way to enter its popular sweepstakes or that doing so would increase their chances of winning, the complaint says. The company is also accused of charging customers hidden fees during purchases, sending deceptive marketing emails and misleading customers about how their data was being used.
Many of the customers who fell victim to these tactics are older and have lower incomes, according to the suit, which was filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. On top of paying $18.5m, which the FTC said it would use to refund customers, the company agreed to adjust its interface to prevent more confusion.
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Nasty. It’s not a new tactic, but the difference is that the internet makes it much easier to reach more people and scam them. Meanwhile the FTC last week filed a similar lawsuit against Amazon over the signup process for Amazon Prime. Order popcorn.
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NASA analog astronauts ‘depart’ for year inside mock Mars base • collectSPACE
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The next time that Kelly Haston, Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones and Anca Selariu will see blue sky, a year will have gone by on Earth.
Not that the four “analog astronauts” are leaving the planet, but for the next 12 months they will live inside a mock Mars base located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they will be remotely observed and studied by scientists. As the first of three planned Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, crews, Haston, Brockwell, Jones and Selariu will help inform the space agency how to better design and plan for future human missions on the real Martian surface.
Mission 1 gets underway tonight (June 25) as the four volunteers enter the 1,700-square-foot (158-square-meter) habitat, known as “Mars Dune Alpha,” at 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT). They will not leave the 3D-printed structure — other than to conduct the occasional Mars-walk within an adjoining 1,200-square-foot (111-square-meter), enclosed Mars “sandbox” — until Sunday, July 7, 2024.
“To me, this is really exciting because one of the things that’s different than some of our previous analogs at NASA is people will be in isolation as a crew for 378 days,” Suzanne Bell, lead for NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, said in an interview with collectSPACE. “We also do analogs in something called HERA, the Human Exploration Research Analog, and our missions there have been 45 days. And then we collect data at other analogs, too, with varying lengths, but this will be three, over one yearlong missions, which is a really great extended isolation.”
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Is it really isolation, though, when you know that everything’s just in reach if you really shout loudly enough? Where you aren’t at risk of dust storms that cut you off from contact for days or months at a time. Or suddenly losing all your water supply. (Or are the experiment controllers going to play some games?)
Anyway, after Mr Deep Sea, we have a new isolation experiment to keep track of.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 