Just imagine how much you’ll love having adverts streamed to you by your LG TV as it tries to boost corporate revenues. CC-licensed photo by LG Electronics PR on Flickr.
You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.
Last Friday, there was another post at the Social Warming Substack. It’s about news, politics and Threads.
A selection of 10 links for you. Inadvertent. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Woman’s iPhone photo of son rejected from Sydney competition after judges ruled it could be AI • The Guardian
Tory Shepherd:
»
Suzi Dougherty was chuffed when a happy snap she took of her son on her iPhone turned out so well.
She was so happy with the sharp, colour-saturated picture of him posing with mannequins at a Gucci exhibition that she had a copy printed off for her mum and entered it in a local photography competition.
Four judges considered the photo – and they loved it. Then they rejected it. They were suspicious it had been generated by artificial intelligence. Dougherty jokes that she’s just upset she didn’t win. “I was flattered,” she says, adding that her 18-year-old son, Caspar, thought it was hilarious.
The pair had been to Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum exhibition of props and sets used in advertising campaigns by the luxury fashion house.
“He was wearing a cardigan that matched, and posed for a happy snap,” Dougherty says. “We really liked it, so we had it printed for my mum who loves Gucci but couldn’t get there because she was sick.”
…Dr Patrick Hutchings studied the creative application of AI at Monash University, and is now the head of AI at generative music platform, Aimi. He says it used to be easier to tell if AI had been used on a picture – it is hard to get the hair and the eyes right – but the technology is now so good it’s really difficult.
“Generally the images look like they’ve had some digital processing, but a lot of photos have had digital processing either by the camera or someone’s put it through Photoshop,” he says, adding that people can also put photos through software to change the metadata and disguise the AI elements.
“I don’t believe you can tell for certain.”
«
It is a lovely picture – worth clicking through for. And now the next story..
unique link to this extract
Why AI detectors think the US Constitution was written by AI • Ars Technica
Benj Edwards:
»
If you feed America’s most important legal document—the US Constitution—into a tool designed to detect text written by AI models like ChatGPT, it will tell you that the document was almost certainly written by AI. But unless James Madison was a time traveler, that can’t be the case. Why do AI writing detection tools give false positives? We spoke to several experts—and the creator of AI writing detector GPTZero—to find out.
Among news stories of overzealous professors flunking an entire class due to the suspicion of AI writing tool use and kids falsely accused of using ChatGPT, generative AI has education in a tizzy. Some think it represents an existential crisis. Teachers relying on educational methods developed over the past century have been scrambling for ways to keep the status quo—the tradition of relying on the essay as a tool to gauge student mastery of a topic.
As tempting as it is to rely on AI tools to detect AI-generated writing, evidence so far has shown that they are not reliable. Due to false positives, AI writing detectors such as GPTZero, ZeroGPT, and OpenAI’s Text Classifier cannot be trusted to detect text composed by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
If you feed GPTZero a section of the US Constitution, it says the text is “likely to be written entirely by AI.” Several times over the past six months, screenshots of other AI detectors showing similar results have gone viral on social media, inspiring confusion and plenty of jokes about the founding fathers being robots. It turns out the same thing happens with selections from The Bible, which also show up as being AI-generated.
«
So we have humans thinking a human-generated picture is AI-generated, and AI systems thinking a human-generated piece of text is AI-generated. Bit of a theme there.
unique link to this extract
The Twitter bot tracking Elon Musk’s private jet resurfaces on Threads – The Verge
Jess Weatherbed:
»
Jack Sweeney, the college student and creator of the banned @ElonJet Twitter account that tracked the movements of Elon Musk’s personal jet, has now launched the tracking project on Meta’s rival platform, Threads. “ElonJet has arrived to Threads!” Sweeney posted to the new @elonmusksjet account on Thursday. As of Monday, July 10th, the Threads account currently has 80,000 followers. [Sunday 16th: 119,000 followers.]
Sweeney addressed his second posting on the @elonmusksjet Threads account directly to Mark Zuckerberg, asking the Meta founder if he can remain on the platform. Sweeney includes a shoutout in the Threads bio of @elonmusksjet to the @zuckerbergjet account dedicated to tracking the location of Zuckerberg’s private jet. That account hasn’t posted any live information yet, but Sweeney has been actively tracking the movements of Zuckerberg’s jet across Meta’s Facebook and Instagram services for some time.
«
Sweeney clearly has a keen sense of humour. I suspect Mark Zuckerberg will find it convenient enough not to ban the account (only 6,000 Threads followers) for the nose-tweaking that allowing both to exist on his network provides to his self-important rival.
unique link to this extract
Every time you click this link, it will send you to a random Web 1.0 website • Wilby.me
»
Every time you click this link, it will send you to a random Web 1.0 website
«
Certainly is a reminder of what Web 1.0 was like: not pretty.
unique link to this extract
Elon Musk says Twitter’s cash flow still negative as ad revenue drops 50% • Reuters
Jahnavi Nidumolu and Krystal Hu:
»
Twitter’s cash flow remains negative because of a nearly 50% drop in advertising revenue and a heavy debt load, Elon Musk said on Saturday, falling short of his expectation in March that Twitter could reach cash flow positive by June.
“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” Musk said in a tweet replying to suggestions on recapitalization.
Musk said on Sunday in another tweet that Twitter did not see the increase in advertising revenue that had been expected in June, adding, “July is a bit more promising.” Twitter Spaces also hasn’t generated revenue yet and is “all-cost”, Musk said.
…After laying off thousands of employees and cutting cloud service bills, Musk had said the company reduced its non-debt expenditures to $1.5bn from a projected $4.5bn in 2023. Twitter also faces annual interest payments of about $1.5bn as a result of the debt it took on in the $44bn deal that turned the company private.
It is unclear what time frame Musk was referring to by the 50% drop in ad revenue. He has said Twitter was on track to post $3bn in revenue in 2023, down from $5.1bn in 2021.
«
Anyway, wait until Threads turns on its advertising and see how bleak things look then.
unique link to this extract
FaceTime on Apple TV with tvOS 17 is actually a pretty cool feature • 9to5 Mac
Filipe Espósito:
»
tvOS 17 lets users FaceTime directly from the TV, and while I first underestimated this feature, I’m now in love with it.
Now that the first public beta of tvOS 17 is available, I gave it a shot and installed it on one of my Apple TVs (more specifically, the 2021 4K version with the A12 chip). Immediately, I saw the FaceTime icon on the Home Screen and thought “I need to check how that works.” Of course, Apple TV has no built-in camera, so Apple’s solution was to bring a feature from macOS to tvOS: Continuity Camera. When you open the FaceTime app on your Apple TV, your iPhone immediately asks if you want to connect it to your TV.
If you tap to connect, you’ll see an instruction to put your iPhone in landscape mode with the rear camera facing you. After that, your iPhone becomes the webcam for your Apple TV. It’s that simple (sometimes, because the feature is still quite buggy in the beta versions, and I often had to ty pairing my phone multiple times before it worked).
When your iPhone is connected, the FaceTime app shows a very similar interface to the app on iPad and Mac, with a column showing your contacts on the right side of the screen. From there, you can start a FaceTime call with anyone you want.
FaceTime on Apple TV uses the iPhone’s ultra-wide lens as default. As a result, you can enable Center Stage so that the image is always focused on you, even when you move around. There are also options to enable Portrait Mode and 3D reactions. In short, it works pretty much the way you would expect.
«
However, he points out, you do have to put the phone in front of your TV – which is a bit odd in itself. You’d perhaps want a zoom control.. except that would be on your phone, which is currently being your camera. A zoom control on the TV remote, perhaps?
unique link to this extract
Google rolls out AI chatbot Bard in EU • POLITICO
Clothilde Goujard, Pieter Haeck and Gian Volpicelli:
»
Google is rolling out its artificial intelligence chatbot Bard in the European Union next Thursday, it announced, after resolving concerns raised by the bloc’s key privacy regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission.
The U.S. technology giant in June delayed the release of its competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the Irish regulator said the company had given insufficient information about how its tool respected the EU’s privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The Irish watchdog is Google’s main data regulator in the EU because the U.S. firm has its European headquarters there.
“Google have made a number of changes in advance of [the] launch, in particular increased transparency and changes to controls for users,” the Irish regulator’s deputy commissioner and spokesperson Graham Doyle told POLITICO in a statement ahead of the announcement.
Google’s senior product director Jack Krawczyk told reporters ahead of the launch that Google enhanced Bard with new features to boost “transparency,” “control,” and “choice” for users. Users will be able to know how their information is being used, to opt out of some uses and to control what conversations with Bard are saved or deleted by Google.
«
Doesn’t seem like a lot to have to change. You’d even think that Google would have had this already prepared before it came to the regulators, so there could be stroking of the corporate chin and “let us get back to you” and then quick implementation. After all, it’s not as though this has been much of a holdup.
unique link to this extract
LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions • The Register
Laura Dobberstein:
»
LG Electronics has outlined its ambition to grow the conglomerate’s revenue from $51bn to $78bn over the next six and a half years, thanks in part to ads streamed to its tellies and subscription services for its appliances.
“LG will innovate with a platform-based service business model that continuously generates profits, such as content and services, subscriptions and solutions, to the hardware-oriented businesses, which generate sales and profits at the time of purchase,” the company said on Wednesday.
LG called this a “customer engagement” centered business model that relies on appliances already present in customers’ homes, such as 200-million strong fleet of its smart TVS currently already in use. Those tellies, including the premium end OLED and QNED TVs, will soon have content, services and product ads expanded in an attempt to turn the company into a media and entertainment service provider.
LG has already offered a taste of its intentions: in 2022 it revealed a scheme called “Evolving Appliances For You” that promised software upgrades to home appliances. The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions.
«
Hard nope on that one. Smartphones didn’t cut it, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to all accept tons of ads on our TVs.
unique link to this extract
Elon Musk’s Twitter employees seem happy using Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads • Daily Beast
Noah Kirsch and Emily Shugerman:
»
Ever since Meta launched its competitor to Twitter last week, Elon Musk has been attempting to tear it down, denouncing Threads’ approach to content moderation, threatening to sue for the supposed theft of “trade secrets,” and even challenging Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a penis-measuring competition.
Some of his employees, however, are thoroughly enjoying the new app.
“I’m going to get fired for this, but I work at Twitter right now and have never really used it. Threads is just better,” a current staffer wrote on Threads last week. “Here’s to a new world!”
“[Not gonna lie] the signup flow was really nice,” another Twitter employee posted, referring to the process by which users register for an account.
The Daily Beast took a random sample of 133 current Twitter employees, identified by their LinkedIn accounts, and found that 31 of them—nearly a quarter—appeared to already be on Threads. Musk said in April that Twitter employed roughly 1,500 people, suggesting that hundreds of its workers may be using its rival.
A portion of those staffers may simply be sniffing out the competition. One Twitter employee threaded that he was “here to learn stuffs,” while another staffer’s sole post read “Test 1.”
But others appeared to be there for their own enjoyment—or, in some cases, to trash talk their boss. One user re-threaded a post making fun of Musk for the dick-measurement challenge and another that read “somebody check up on elon. he’s not taking this well.”
…Esther Crawford, a product manager who was reportedly laid off in February, once cheered Musk’s draconian management style. In November, she slept on the ground at Twitter headquarters to help meet his deadlines, according to a tweet she cheerfully hashtagged “SleepWhereYouWork.”
Now Crawford is railing against her old boss. “I’ve repeatedly thought ‘it doesn’t have to be this way’ and yet I’m repeatedly disappointed that it is,” she wrote on Threads this week, referring to Musk’s Twitter overhaul. “This is what happens when a powerful person lives in an echo chamber of their own creation.”
«
Meta cut election teams months before Threads launch, raising concerns for 2024 • CNN Business
Donie O’Sullivan and Sean Lyngaas:
»
Meta has made cuts to its teams that tackle disinformation and coordinated troll and harassment campaigns on its platforms, people with direct knowledge of the situation told CNN, raising concerns ahead of the pivotal 2024 elections in the US and around the world.
Several members of the team that countered mis- and disinformation in the 2022 US midterms were laid off last fall and this spring, a person familiar with the matter said. The staffers are part of a global team that works on Meta’s efforts to counter disinformation campaigns seeking to undermine confidence in or sow confusion around elections.
The news comes as Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is celebrating the unparalleled success of its new Threads platform, surpassing 100 million users just five days after launch and opening a potential new avenue for bad actors.
A Meta spokesperson did not specify, when asked, how many staffers had been cut from its teams working on elections. In a statement to CNN on Monday night, the spokesperson said, “Protecting the US 2024 elections is one of our top priorities, and our integrity efforts continue to lead the industry.”
The spokesperson did not answer CNN questions about what additional resources had been deployed to monitor and moderate its new platform. Instead, Meta said the social media giant had invested $16 billion in technology and teams since 2016 to protect its users.
«
One feels that Meta has something of a “oh sod it, too hard” attitude to the whole election disinformation topic. It’s not just the US; there are elections going on all over the world, in some of which Meta’s apps are the most-used social networks by far.
unique link to this extract
| • 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 