In the US, the top 10% of drivers use more fuel than the bottom 60%. CC-licensed photo by The Library of Congress on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Just a fiver’s worth. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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EU agrees ‘historic’ deal with world’s first laws to regulate AI • The Guardian

Lisa O’Carroll:

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The world’s first comprehensive laws to regulate artificial intelligence have been agreed in a landmark deal after a marathon 37-hour negotiation between the European Parliament and EU member states.

The agreement was described as “historic” by Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner responsible for a suite of laws in Europe that will also govern social media and search engines, covering giants such as X, TikTok and Google.

Breton said 100 people had been in a room for almost three days to seal the deal. He said it was “worth the few hours of sleep” to make the “historic” deal.

Carme Artigas, Spain’s secretary of state for AI, who facilitated the negotiations, said France and Germany supported the text, amid reports that tech companies in those countries were fighting for a lighter touch approach to foster innovation among small companies.

The agreement puts the EU ahead of the US, China and the UK in the race to regulate artificial intelligence and protect the public from risks that include potential threat to life that many fear the rapidly developing technology carries.

Officials provided few details on what exactly will make it into the eventual law, which would not take effect until 2025 at the earliest.

The political agreement between the European Parliament and EU member states on new laws to regulate AI was a hard-fought battle, with clashes over foundation models designed for general rather than specific purposes.

But there were also protracted negotiations over AI-driven surveillance, which could be used by the police, employers or retailers to film members of the public in real time and recognise emotional stress.

The European Parliament secured a ban on use of real-time surveillance and biometric technologies including emotional recognition but with three exceptions, according to Breton.

It would mean police would be able to use the invasive technologies only in the event of an unexpected threat of a terrorist attack, the need to search for victims and in the prosecution of serious crime.

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I’ll just emphasise that middle sentence: “few details on what exactly will make it into the eventual law”.
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Ex-commissioner for facial recognition tech joins Facewatch firm he approved • The Guardian

Mark Townsend:

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The recently-departed watchdog in charge of monitoring facial recognition technology has joined the private firm he controversially approved, paving the way for the mass roll-out of biometric surveillance cameras in high streets across the country.

In a move critics have dubbed an “outrageous conflict of interest”, Professor Fraser Sampson, former biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, has joined Facewatch as a non-executive director.

Sampson left his watchdog role on 31 October, with Companies House records showing he was registered as a company director at Facewatch the following day, 1 November. Campaigners claim this might mean he was negotiating his Facewatch contract while in post, and have urged the advisory committee on business appointments to investigate if it may have “compromised his work in public office”. It is understood that the committee is currently considering the issue.

Facewatch uses biometric cameras to check faces against a watch list and, despite widespread concern over the technology, has received backing from the Home Office, and has already been introduced in hundreds of high-street shops and supermarkets.

Mark Johnson, advocacy manager at Big Brother Watch, said the hiring of Sampson painted a “murky picture.” He added: “It cannot be acceptable for those in taxpayer-paid oversight roles to negotiate contracts with the very companies they scrutinise while still in post.”

“There is no specific law regulating the use of facial recognition surveillance in the UK. Given that this Orwellian technology is already operating in a legal vacuum, we cannot have a revolving door between those tasked with scrutinising the use of facial recognition surveillance and those selling it. When the independence of public officials is compromised by private interests, it undermines public trust in our institutions.”

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Astonishing. Sampson however says the government proposed to abolish his job and so he handed in his notice on August 1. Three months later is 1 November.
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Military briefing: the Israeli bombs raining on Gaza • FT

John Paul Rathbone:

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“We need three things from the US: munitions, munitions, and munitions,” the Israeli prime minister told a group of local government officials, according to a recording obtained by the Israel Hayom newspaper.

“There are huge demonstrations in western capitals,” added Netanyahu, who is concerned political pressure overseas might threaten the US arms shipments. “We need to apply counter-pressure . . . There have been disagreements with the best of our friends.”

Israel has expended vast amounts of ammunition in its war against Hamas in Gaza. The modern western weaponry used, from satellite-guided “bunker busting” bombs to pinpoint-accurate laser-guided missiles, have eroded Hamas’s military capabilities and, according to the Israel Defense Forces, killed more than 5,000 of the group’s estimated 30,000 fighters.

However, the damage wrought by Israel’s attack — triggered by Hamas’s assault on October 7 when it killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages — has been catastrophic.

Citing estimates of damage to urban areas, military analysts say the destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war.

“Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne — some of the world’s heaviest-ever bombings are remembered by their place names,” said Robert Pape, a US military historian and author of Bombing to Win, a landmark survey of 20th century bombing campaigns. “Gaza will also go down as a place name denoting one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns.”

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The real research behind the wild rumors about OpenAI’s Q* project • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

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OpenAI hasn’t published details on its supposed Q* breakthrough, but it has published two papers about its efforts to solve grade-school math problems. And a number of researchers outside of OpenAI—including at Google’s DeepMind—have been doing important work in this area.

I’m skeptical that Q*—whatever it is—is the crucial breakthrough that will lead to artificial general intelligence. I certainly don’t think it’s a threat to humanity. But it might be an important step toward an AI with general reasoning abilities.

In this piece, I’ll offer a guided tour of this important area of AI research and explain why step-by-step reasoning techniques designed for math problems could have much broader applications.

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If you choose to read all of this (long) piece, you will understand the current problems with LLMs very well.
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52 things I learned in 2023 • Magnetic Notes on Medium

Tom Whitwell with his usual selection of fascinating discoveries:

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25. The top 10% of US motorists use more petrol than the bottom 60%. [Robert N. Charette]

26. New research shows that placebos are effective in reducing feelings of guilt, but they work less well on shame. [Shayla Love, Dilan Sezer]

27. People in historically rice-farming areas are less happy and compare themselves socially more than people in wheat-farming areas. [Thomas Talhelm]

28. French Champagne is too cheap. [Daniel Langer]

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Also unmissable: No.4 about payola guitars (Bruce Springsteen uses what used to be one) and No.13 (human heights over history; you won’t come close to guessing this one). Though they’re all fascinating.
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The Copia Institute tells the Copyright Office again that copyright law has no business obstructing AI training • Techdirt

Cathy Gellis:

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trying to use copyright to obstruct development of the technology instead creates its own harms, especially when applied to the training aspect.

One of those harms, as we reiterated here, is that it impinges on the First Amendment right to read that human intelligence needs to have protected, and that right must inherently include the right to use technological tools to do that “reading,” or consumption in general of copyrighted works. After all, we need record players to play records – it would do no one any good if their right to listen to one stopped short of being able to use the tool needed to do it. We also pointed out that this First Amendment right does not diminish even if people consume a lot of media (we don’t, for instance, punish voracious readers for reading more than others) or at speed (copyright law does not give anyone the right to forbid listening to an LP at 45 rpm, or forbid watching a movie on fast forward). So if we were to let copyright law stand in the way of using software to quickly read a lot of material to it would represent a deviation from how copyright law has up to now operated, and one that would undermine the rights to consume works that we’ve so far been able to enjoy.

Which is why we also pointed out that using copyright to deter AI training distorted copyright law itself, which would be felt in other contexts where copyright law legitimately applies. And we highlighted a disturbing trend emerging in copyright law from other quarters as well, this idea that whether a use of a work is legitimate somehow depends on whether the copyright holder approves of it. Copyright law was not intended, or written, to give copyright owners an implicit veto over any or all uses of works – the power of a copyright is limited to what its exclusive rights allow control over and fair use doesn’t otherwise justify.

A variant of this emerging trend also getting undue oxygen is the idea that profiting from a use of a copyrighted work used for free is somehow inherently objectionable and therefore ripe for the copyright holder to veto. But, again, such would represent a significant change if copyright law could work that way. Copyright holders are not guaranteed every penny that could potentially result from the use of a copyrighted work, and it has been independently problematic when courts have found otherwise.

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I find this argument persuasive.
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Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science? • Nature

Philip Ball:

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During the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020, testing kits for the viral infection were scant in some countries. So the idea of diagnosing infection with a medical technique that was already widespread — chest X-rays — sounded appealing. Although the human eye can’t reliably discern differences between infected and non-infected individuals, a team in India reported that artificial intelligence (AI) could do it, using machine learning to analyse a set of X-ray images1.

The paper — one of dozens of studies on the idea — has been cited more than 900 times. But the following September, computer scientists Sanchari Dhar and Lior Shamir at Kansas State University in Manhattan took a closer look2. They trained a machine-learning algorithm on the same images, but used only blank background sections that showed no body parts at all. Yet their AI could still pick out COVID-19 cases at well above chance level.

The problem seemed to be that there were consistent differences in the backgrounds of the medical images in the data set. An AI system could pick up on those artefacts to succeed in the diagnostic task, without learning any clinically relevant features — making it medically useless.

Shamir and Dhar found several other cases in which a reportedly successful image classification by AI — from cell types to face recognition — returned similar results from blank or meaningless parts of the images. The algorithms performed better than chance at recognizing faces without faces, and cells without cells. Some of these papers have been cited hundreds of times.

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Classic cases of not realising what it is you’re training, but the potential for AI to make the content space explode means a real prospect of non-reproducibility.
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Apple cuts off Beeper Mini’s access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Was it too good to be true? Beeper, the startup that reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users, is experiencing an outage, the company reported via a post on X on Friday. And Apple is to blame, it seems. Users, including those of us at TechCrunch with access to the app, began seeing error messages when trying to send texts via the newly released Beeper Mini and messages are not going through.

The error message reads: “failed to lookup on server: lookup request timed out” spelled out in red letters.

In a response to a question on Reddit as to whether or not the app was broken, a Beeper team member had earlier replied, “Report a problem from the app, give us a chance to look into it.”

However, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky responded to TechCrunch’s inquiry about Beeper Mini’s status by pointing us to the X post acknowledging the outage, and providing more detail. Asked if possibly Apple found a way to cut off Beeper Mini’s ability to function, he replied, “Yes, all data indicates that.”

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Apple confirmed this on Sunday, with a statement saying in part ““We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.”

This was inevitable: Beeper worked by using faked credentials, as Apple notes in the full statement. So it’s going to be blocked just as a(ny) hacker would be.

I still don’t get the desire to create cross-platform iMessage, though, beyond hackers’ fascination with doing something. Encrypted cross-platform messaging apps exist (Signal, WhatsApp). iMessage isn’t even the best messaging app out there. All of which makes Senator Elizabeth Warren’s intervention look even more foolish.
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Verizon gave phone data to armed stalker who posed as cop over email • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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The FBI investigated a man who allegedly posed as a police officer in emails and phone calls to trick Verizon to hand over phone data belonging to a specific person that the suspect met on the dating section of porn site xHamster, according to a newly unsealed court record. Despite the relatively unconvincing cover story concocted by the suspect, including the use of a clearly non-government ProtonMail email address, Verizon handed over the victim’s data to the alleged stalker, including their address and phone logs. The stalker then went on to threaten the victim and ended up driving to where he believed the victim lived while armed with a knife, according to the record.

The news is a massive failure by Verizon who did not verify that the data request was fraudulent, and the company potentially put someone’s safety at risk.

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I think “massive failure” is putting it mildly. “Culpable near-homicide” gets closer.
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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.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified