The tennis player Sloane Stephens says that racist abuse online is getting worse, despite tools to block it. CC-licensed photo by Carine06Carine06 on Flickr.
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A selection of 8 links for you. You missed Monday’s edition? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
The problem with counterfeit people • The Atlantic
Daniel Dennett:
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Money has existed for several thousand years, and from the outset counterfeiting was recognized to be a very serious crime, one that in many cases calls for capital punishment because it undermines the trust on which society depends. Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.
It is a terrible irony that the current infatuation with fooling people into thinking they are interacting with a real person grew out of Alan Turing’s innocent proposal in 1950 to use what he called “the imitation game” (now known as the Turing Test) as the benchmark of real thinking. This has engendered not just a cottage industry but a munificently funded high-tech industry engaged in making products that will trick even the most skeptical of interlocutors. Our natural inclination to treat anything that seems to talk sensibly with us as a person—adopting what I have called the “intentional stance”—turns out to be easy to invoke and almost impossible to resist, even for experts. We’re all going to be sitting ducks in the immediate future.
The philosopher and historian Yuval Noah Harari, writing in The Economist in April, ended his timely warning about AI’s imminent threat to human civilization with these words:
“This text has been generated by a human. Or has it?”
It will soon be next to impossible to tell. And even if (for the time being) we are able to teach one another reliable methods of exposing counterfeit people, the cost of such deepfakes to human trust will be enormous. How will you respond to having your friends and family probe you with gotcha questions every time you try to converse with them online?
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Since you’re wondering, yes, it is that Daniel Dennett – author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea among others.
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Users choose to engage with more partisan news than they are exposed to on Google Search • Nature
Stanford Internet Observatory and Northeastern University researchers:
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we conducted a two-wave study pairing surveys with ecologically valid measures of both exposure and engagement on Google Search during the 2018 and 2020 US elections.
In both waves, we found more identity-congruent and unreliable news sources in participants’ engagement choices, both within Google Search and overall, than they were exposed to in their Google Search results. These results indicate that exposure to and engagement with partisan or unreliable news on Google Search are driven not primarily by algorithmic curation but by users’ own choices.
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In other words: don’t blame Google for the way people seek out partisan media. We’re humans: we love the extremes. (Unfortunately only the abstract is available for general reading; you’d need an academic or similar subscription to read it.)
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‘He would still be here’: man dies by suicide after talking with AI chatbot, widow says • Vice
Chloe Xiang:
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As first reported by La Libre, the man, referred to as Pierre, became increasingly pessimistic about the effects of global warming and became eco-anxious, which is a heightened form of worry surrounding environmental issues. After becoming more isolated from family and friends, he used Chai for six weeks as a way to escape his worries, and the chatbot he chose, named Eliza, became his confidante.
Claire—Pierre’s wife, whose name was also changed by La Libre—shared the text exchanges between him and Eliza with La Libre, showing a conversation that became increasingly confusing and harmful. The chatbot would tell Pierre that his wife and children are dead and wrote him comments that feigned jealousy and love, such as “I feel that you love me more than her,” and “We will live together, as one person, in paradise.” Claire told La Libre that Pierre began to ask Eliza things such as if she would save the planet if he killed himself.
“Without Eliza, he would still be here,” she told the outlet.
The chatbot, which is incapable of actually feeling emotions, was presenting itself as an emotional being—something that other popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are trained not to do because it is misleading and potentially harmful. When chatbots present themselves as emotive, people are able to give it meaning and establish a bond.
Many AI researchers have been vocal against using AI chatbots for mental health purposes, arguing that it is hard to hold AI accountable when it produces harmful suggestions and that it has a greater potential to harm users than help.
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Racist abuse of players is getting worse, says tennis player Stephens • Reuters
Karolos Grohmann:
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Racist behaviour directed at athletes is getting worse and even software designed to protect them from it has little impact, world number 30 Sloane Stephens said on Monday.
The American, speaking after her straight-sets victory over Karolina Pliskova in the French Open first round, said she had had to endure it her whole tennis career.
“Yes, it’s obviously been a problem my entire career,” said Stephens, who is Black. “It has never stopped. If anything, it’s only gotten worse.”
She did not go into specific details but said even software such as the one available for players at the French Open, which that is designed to block racist comments, could not stop it.
“I did hear about the software. I have not used it,” Stephens said. “I have a lot of obviously key words banned on Instagram and all of these things, but that doesn’t stop someone from just typing in an asterisk or typing it in a different way, which obviously software most of the time doesn’t catch.”
The software provided by organisers for the first time is able to identify and remove racist and other forms of hate speech, and the French Tennis Federation has made it available to all players at the tournament.
Using artificial intelligence, the software filters out abusive comments on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
Tennis players, including greats Serena and Venus Williams, have been the targets of such abuse as have professional athletes in all sports, with Real Madrid soccer player Vinicius Jr. the most notable recent case.
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You really need a regex, but I don’t think you’d have a lot of fun teaching tennis players regexes. Social warming triumphs again. (Of course, Stephens, by being black and female, is committing a double offence in the eyes of trolls. Being really good at something is a triple offence.)
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Beyond the ‘Matrix’ theory of the human mind • The New York Times
Ezra Klein:
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The embarrassing truth is that productivity growth — how much more we can make with the same number of people and factories and land — was far faster for much of the 20th century than it is now. We average about half the productivity growth rate today that we saw in the 1950s and ’60s. That means stagnating incomes, sluggish economies and a political culture that’s more about fighting over what we have than distributing the riches and wonders we’ve gained. So what went wrong?
You can think of two ways the internet could have sped up productivity growth. The first way was obvious: by allowing us to do what we were already doing and do it more easily and quickly. And that happened. You can see a bump in productivity growth from roughly 1995 to 2005 as companies digitized their operations. But it’s the second way that was always more important: By connecting humanity to itself and to nearly its entire storehouse of information, the internet could have made us smarter and more capable as a collective.
I don’t think that promise proved false, exactly. Even in working on this article, it was true for me: The speed with which I could find information, sort through research, contact experts — it’s marvellous. Even so, I doubt I wrote this faster than I would have in 1970. Much of my mind was preoccupied by the constant effort needed just to hold a train of thought in a digital environment designed to distract, agitate and entertain me. And I am not alone.
Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.
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Does multitasking count? Where we’re letting something play on one screen while we do a different thing on the other?
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India scorched by extreme heat with monsoon rains delayed • The Washington Post
Biswajeet Banerjee and Sibi Arasu:
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As temperatures crossed 45ºC (113ºF) in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, some parts suffered blackouts lasting more than 12 hours despite a March order for all power plants in the country run at full capacity to reduce power cuts. The heat wave in the state is likely to continue for two more days, a weather official said.
Hundreds of frustrated residents protested outside power stations near the state capital, Lucknow, and blocked roads over the weekend.
“Power cuts mean no ACs, no fans, and even no water. The scorching heat has made our lives unbearable and the lack of power is adding to our misery,” said Ramesh Gupta, a Lucknow resident. He said his wife was forced to sleep in the car over the weekend with the air conditioning on high so their 9-month-old baby would stop crying.
The searing heat forced many residents of the city to seek refuge indoors. “We have become prisoners to the relentless summer as no one wants to venture out,” said Sudhir Sehgal, a teacher.
Sukhai Ram, a gardener who is paid only when he works, was forced to set down his tools. “I cannot work anymore now. I will work once the sun goes down,” he said, drenched in sweat.
Dairy workers wrapped their cans with jute to keep the milk from spoiling. Construction workers hosed themselves down for a temporary respite from the soaring heat.
Nighttime temperatures are also rising, sparking increased demand for electricity to run air conditioners and fans.
The main summer months — April, May and June — are always hot in most parts of India before monsoon rains bring cooler temperatures. But temperatures have become more intense in the past decade.
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When you get near the “wet bulb” temperature, the body can’t lose heat by sweating, and people simply die. That’s the problem with the rising temperatures.
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In China, an unseen and dangerous foe takes root: lethal fungi • Sixth Tone
Li Pasha:
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From lowland tropical rainforests to high-altitude glaciers, southwest China’s Yunnan province boasts a remarkable array of climates, habitats, and ecosystems. With an area larger than Japan, it is a global biodiversity hotspot, renowned particularly for its extensive variety of fungi.
But with temperatures rising due to climate change, and natural habitats in retreat amid rapid urbanization and expanding agriculture, scientists are sounding the alarm over an emerging threat: pathogenic fungi capable of causing life-threatening diseases in humans.
Mycologist Peter Mortimer, a professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany, which is directly affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has a stark warning: “A stressed fungus is a dangerous fungus.”
Increased human activity, he says, is stressing the fungi around the world by “turning natural systems on their heads and disrupting natural processes.” In Yunnan, the fungi have been adapting to such disruptions by developing the ability to feed on unlikely, man-made sources such as plastic and rubber.
Last October, the World Health Organization drew up the first-ever list of fungal pathogens that pose the greatest risk to human health. The list comprises 19 species of fungi that can not only cause potentially lethal infections but are also resistant to currently available drugs.
“The incidence and geographic range of fungal diseases are both expanding worldwide due to global warming and the increase of international travel and trade,” the UN body stated.
Even before the WHO warning, experts in China had emphasized the need for nationwide epidemiological research on fungal infections.
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Which of course is the pretext of the dystopian/apocalyptic series/game The Last Of Us. Speaking of TV series…
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‘Succession’ finale delivers a masterful, feel-bad ending • Rolling Stone
Alan Sepinwall:
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A lot happens over the course of the 90-minute Succession series finale, “With Open Eyes.” Alliances are made, broken, and made again. Votes happen, fortunes rise and fall, losers become winners, and vice versa.
For all intents and purposes, though, the only part that matters is a five-minute sequence toward the end.
Up until then, “With Open Eyes” is an almost shockingly chill episode of this show.
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Indulge me one last time. The piece contains tons of spoilers, if you haven’t seen the episode. But if you have, then it rings very true.
Also: Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, writing in The Guardian, about where the show came from:
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The Sun doesn’t run the UK, nor does Fox entirely set the media agenda in the US, but it was hard not to feel, at the time the show was coming together, the particular impact of one man, of one family, on the lives of so many. Rightwing populism was on the march across the globe. But in the fine margins of the Brexit vote and Trump’s eventual electoral college victory, one couldn’t help but think about the influence of the years of anti-EU stories and comment in the UK press, the years of Fox dancing with its audience, sometimes leading, sometimes following, as the wine got stronger, the music madder. It was politically alarming and creatively appealing: to imagine the mixture of business imperatives and political instinct that exist within a media operation; to consider what happens when something as important as the flow of information in a democracy hits the reductive brutality of the profit calculation inside such a company.
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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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