If we can figure out how to converse with humpback whales, could that help us talk to aliens? CC-licensed photo by marneejill on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Human. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Fears of Putin swinging elections behind EU’s Meta crackdown • The Guardian
Lisa O’Carroll:
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Fears that Vladimir Putin is trying to fill the European parliament with more pro-Russia MEPs were behind the EU’s blunt message to the Silicon Valley owner of Facebook on Tuesday.
It gave Meta just five days to explain how it will root out fake news, fake websites and stop adverts funded by the Kremlin or face severe measures.
Forty days out from the European parliamentary elections – and during a year in which countries with more than half the world’s population go to the polls – deep concerns about how Facebook is dealing with fake news were behind the warning.
“The integrity of the election is an enforcement priority,” said Thierry Breton, the commissioner for internal market, warning that the European Commission would be quick to respond if Facebook did not rectify the problems within the week.
“We expect Meta to inform us of the actions they are taking to address these risks in five working days or we will take all necessary measures to defend our democracy,” he said.
…Officials declined to give precise examples but some are blatant, including adverts paid for by foreign agents. “It is fundamentally wrong they [Facebook] are making money on this,” said an official.
They also say the tools to flag illegal or suspicious content are not visible enough. Links to fake news platforms, known as “doppelganger sites”, are not being removed quickly enough or at all, the EU suggests.
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How whales could help us speak to aliens • Nautilus
Claire Cameron:
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On Aug. 19, 2021, a humpback whale named Twain whupped back. Specifically, Twain made a series of humpback whale calls known as “whups” in response to playback recordings of whups from a boat of researchers off the coast of Alaska. The whale and the playback exchanged calls 36 times.
On the boat was naturalist Fred Sharpe of the Alaska Whale Foundation, who has been studying humpbacks for over two decades, and animal behavior researcher Brenda McCowan, a professor at the University of California, Davis. The exchange was groundbreaking, Sharpe says, because it brought two linguistic beings—humans and humpback whales—together. “You start getting the sense that there’s this mutual sense of being heard.”
In their 2023 published results, McGowan, Sharpe, and their coauthors are careful not to characterize their exchange with Twain as a conversation. They write, “Twain was actively engaged in a type of vocal coordination” with the playback recordings. To the paper’s authors, the interspecies exchange could be a model for perhaps something even more remarkable: an exchange with an extraterrestrial intelligence.
Sharpe and McGowan are members of Whale SETI, a team of scientists at the SETI Institute, which has been scanning the skies for decades, listening for signals that may be indicative of extraterrestrial life. The Whale SETI team seeks to show that animal communication, and particularly, complex animal vocalizations like those of humpback whales, can provide scientists with a model to help detect and decipher a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. And, while they’ve been trying to communicate with whales for years, this latest reported encounter was the first time the whales talked back.
…Doyle recounted a talk he gave to other SETI scientists. He had only five minutes and decided to spend one of them playing a humpback whale song. “I played a humpback whale song that lasted for maybe a minute. And then I said, ‘What if that had come from space? Is that intelligent?’ And everybody got it almost right away. They’re like, ‘Wow, we are not prepared, are we?’”
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Shades of the film Arrival (one of the five best sci-fi films ever made. Another is Alien. Don’t ask for the other three just now.)
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AI startups have plenty of cash. They often don’t yet have a business • WSJ
Berber Jin:
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Artificial intelligence startup Imbue has hoodies branded with its circular orange logo, an office in the heart of San Francisco and marquee investors who lavished the company with more than $210m.
Work and life blend together for its few dozen employees, who share their emotions with one another at a weekly event called “Feelings Friday” to build trust and connection.
More than two years into its founding, what the startup doesn’t have is a business—or a product that could create one.
Despite a broad downturn in the startup sector, investors chasing the stock market successes of Nvidia and Microsoft have deluged AI upstarts with record levels of funding, minting dozens of companies with billion-dollar valuations in the past year. The investment frenzy is already fueling concerns of a bubble as startups struggle to translate the hype into revenue.
“Everyone believes that AI is the future, so we are going to see an extraordinary amount of investment until proven otherwise,” said Alex Clayton, a general partner at the venture firm Meritech. “The problem is that we don’t know what these business models are going to look like at scale. You can have theories about it, but you really don’t know.”
Fears of rising startup valuations aren’t new in Silicon Valley. But the AI gold rush is notable because investors are writing massive checks—sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars—just to get these companies off the ground.
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The argument (by the startups) of course being “AI is really expensive to bootstrap! We need a long runway!” Always finding a better reason to have more money, though never with any more idea.
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Wind generation declined in 2023 for the first time since the 1990s • US Energy Information Administration (EIA)
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US wind capacity increased steadily over the last several years, more than tripling from 47.0 GW in 2010 to 147.5 GW at the end of 2023. Electricity generation from wind turbines also grew steadily, at a similar rate to capacity, until 2023. Last year, the average utilization rate, or capacity factor, of the wind turbine fleet fell to an eight-year low of 33.5% (compared with 35.9% in 2022, the all-time high).
The 2023 decline in wind generation indicates that wind as a generation source is maturing after decades of rapid growth. Slower wind speeds than normal affected wind generation in 2023, especially during the first half of the year when wind generation dropped by 14% compared with the same period in 2022. Wind speeds increased later in 2023, and wind generation from August through December was 2.4% higher than during the same period in 2022. Wind speeds had been stronger than normal during 2022.
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Added 6.2GW of wind capacity (4%) but lower wind speeds make a difference. Even so, the chart on the story shows a solid upward slope for installed capacity. And the wind will keep blowing, one way or another.
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Eight daily newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI • The New York Times
Katie Robertson:
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The publications — The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun Sentinel of Florida, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register and The St. Paul Pioneer Press — filed the complaint in federal court in the US Southern District of New York. All are owned by MediaNews Group or Tribune Publishing, subsidiaries of Alden, the country’s second-largest newspaper operator.
In the complaint, the publications accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of copyrighted articles without permission to train and feed their generative AI products, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. The lawsuit does not demand specific monetary damages, but it asks for a jury trial and said the publishers were owed compensation from the use of the content.
The complaint said the chatbots regularly surfaced the entire text of articles behind subscription paywalls for users and often did not prominently link back to the source. This, it said, reduced the need for readers to pay subscriptions to support local newspapers and deprived the publishers of revenue both from subscriptions and from licensing their content elsewhere.
“We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” Frank Pine, the executive editor overseeing Alden’s newspapers, said in a statement.
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Oddly, OpenAI responded with mollifying noises rather than just brushing this off. There’s some suggestion that this case might get rolled together with the NY Times one against OpenAI, because it was filed in the same court.
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Do you like these AI images of dying, mutilated children, Facebook algorithm wonders • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the platform’s expanding “AI recommendation system,” which pushes posts into users’ feeds from all over Facebook, was leading to greater engagement on the platform. “Right now, about 30% of the posts on Facebook feed are delivered by our AI recommendation system. That’s up 2x over the last couple of years,” Zuckerberg said.
Some of the posts Facebook’s recommendation engine is putting into users’ feeds are AI-generated images of starving, drowning, amputated, bruised, and otherwise suffering and mutilated children.
Two different 404 Media readers have told me that posts from accounts called “Little Ones” and “Cuddle Bugs” have been recommended into their feeds. “It’s my special day! Hoping for some extra love and good vibes today!” One of the images shows a child whose leg is amputated below the knee and holds a sign reading “Today is my birthlday pleaase like.” That image has 70,000 likes and 3,000 comments. Another image is of a girl face-down in the ocean wearing an oxygen mask that is connected to a floating birthday cake. Variations of this specific image have shown up on multiple pages; one version I saw has 5,000 likes and 211 comments, another version has 267,000 likes and 13,400 comments.
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This stuff is absolutely insane, and so are the people making the images, and the people liking them. There’s clearly a weird arms (oh) race going on with the image makers: they’re in a contest with each other for what works better, and we’re only a few months in.
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Early bitcoin investor charged with tax fraud • United States Department of Justice
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An indictment was unsealed yesterday charging Roger Ver, an early investor in bitcoins, with mail fraud, tax evasion and filing false tax returns. Ver was arrested this weekend in Spain based on the US criminal charges. The United States will seek Ver’s extradition to stand trial in the United States.
According to the indictment, Ver formerly of Santa Clara, California, owned MemoryDealers.com Inc. and Agilestar.com Inc., two companies that sold computer and networking equipment. Starting in 2011, Ver allegedly began acquiring bitcoins for himself and his companies. He also allegedly avidly promoted bitcoins, even obtaining the moniker “Bitcoin Jesus.”
On Feb. 4, 2014, Ver allegedly obtained citizenship in St. Kitts and Nevis and shortly thereafter renounced his US citizenship in a process known as expatriation. As a result of his expatriation, Ver allegedly was required under US law to file tax returns that reported capital gains from the constructive sale of his world-wide assets, including the bitcoins, and to report the fair market value of his assets. He was also allegedly required to pay a tax – referred to as an “exit tax” – on those capital gains. By Feb. 4, 2014, Ver and his companies allegedly owned approximately 131,000 bitcoins that traded on several large exchanges for around $871 each. MemoryDealers and Agilestar allegedly held approximately 73,000 of those bitcoins.
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Those 131,000 bitcoins were worth, at that time, about $114m. (Now, with the price at $59,000: $7.7bn.) His Wikipedia entry is quite a read.
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Cats suffer H5N1 brain infections, blindness, death after drinking raw milk • Ars Technica
Beth Mole:
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On March 16, cows on a Texas dairy farm began showing symptoms of a mysterious illness now known to be H5N1 bird flu. Their symptoms were nondescript, but their milk production dramatically dropped and turned thick and creamy yellow. The next day, cats on the farm that had consumed some of the raw milk from the sick cows also became ill. While the cows would go on to largely recover, the cats weren’t so lucky. They developed depressed mental states, stiff body movements, loss of coordination, circling, copious discharge from their eyes and noses, and blindness. By March 20, over half of the farm’s 24 or so cats died from the flu.
In a study published on Monday in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers in Iowa, Texas, and Kansas found that the cats had H5N1 not just in their lungs but also in their brains, hearts, and eyes. The findings are similar to those seen in cats that were experimentally infected with H5N1, aka highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI). But, on the Texas dairy farm, they present an ominous warning of the potential for transmission of this dangerous and evolving virus.
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Watching brief. It’s just a watching brief. (Don’t buy milk from American farmers’ markets, though.)
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Roku wants to use home screen for new types of ads to customers while also improving content discovery • Streamable
David Satin:
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Roku wants to take the term “ad-supported” to another level. The company held its quarterly earnings conference call on Thursday, and revealed that 81.6 million households used a Roku device or smart TV to stream video in the first three months of the year. As part of the report, company CEO Anthony Wood laid out ideas for how the company would increase revenues in 2024. Unsurprisingly, advertising will be an important centrepiece of that strategy, and Wood provided some details on what Roku users can expect from their ad experience going forward.
…Wood said that he believes that a video-enabled ad unit on the Roku home screen will be “very popular with advertisers,” considering that Roku devices have the reach to put ads in front of 120 million pairs of eyes every day. He also said that the company is “testing other types of video ad units, looking at other experiences” that it can bring to the Roku home screen.
The idea of putting video ads on Roku home screens sounds highly reminiscent of what Amazon has done with home screens on its Fire TV streaming players and smart TVs. Fire TV devices began playing full-screen video ads automatically when activated in November, and now it appears that Roku is ready to try something similar.
As another way to boost ad revenues, Wood suggested that the company’s home screen experiences could be leveraged to deliver more ads.
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“Very popular with advertisers”. And the viewers? Do we know what their expected reaction is? At some point in the future we’re going to hear how the Neuralink in-brain system is a great delivery system for advertising, aren’t we.
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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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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 