A USB-C connector on the next iPhone is all but confirmed by the latest leaked pictures. CC-licensed photo by ajay_suresh on Flickr.
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On Friday, there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 10 links for you. Faster, pussycat, data, data! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Why ChatGPT is getting dumber at basic math • WSJ
Josh Zumbrun:
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new research released this week reveals a fundamental challenge of developing artificial intelligence: ChatGPT has become worse at performing certain basic math operations.
The researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley said the deterioration is an example of a phenomenon known to AI developers as drift, where attempts to improve one part of the enormously complex AI models make other parts of the models perform worse.
“Changing it in one direction can worsen it in other directions,” said James Zou, a Stanford professor who is affiliated with the school’s AI lab and is one of the authors of the new research. “It makes it very challenging to consistently improve.”
…They gave the chatbot a basic task: identify whether a particular number is a prime number. This is the sort of math problem that is complicated for people but simple for computers.
Is 17,077 prime? Is 17,947 prime? Unless you are a savant you can’t work this out in your head, but it is easy for computers to evaluate. A computer can just brute force the problem—try dividing by two, three, five, etc., and see if anything works.
To track performance, the researchers fed ChatGPT 1,000 different numbers. In March, the premium GPT-4, correctly identified whether 84% of the numbers were prime or not. (Pretty mediocre performance for a computer, frankly.) By June its success rate had dropped to 51%.
Across eight different tasks, GPT-4 became worse at six of them. GPT-3.5 improved on six measures, but remained worse than its advanced sibling at most of the tasks.
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Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.
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Air pollution linked to rise in antibiotic resistance that imperils human health • The Guardian
Andrew Gregory:
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The main drivers are still the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which are used to treat infections. But the study suggests the problem is being worsened by rising levels of air pollution.
The study did not look at the science of why the two might be linked. Evidence suggests that particulate matter PM2.5 can contain antibiotic-resistant bacteria and resistance genes, which may be transferred between environments and inhaled directly by humans, the authors said.
Air pollution is already the single largest environmental risk to public health. Long-term exposure to air pollution is associated with chronic conditions such as heart disease, asthma and lung cancer, reducing life expectancy.
Short-term exposure to high pollution levels can cause coughing, wheezing and asthma attacks, and is leading to increased hospital and GP attendances worldwide.
Curbing air pollution could help reduce antibiotic resistance, according to the study, the first in-depth global analysis of possible links between the two. It also said that controlling air pollution could greatly reduce deaths and economic costs stemming from antibiotic-resistant infections.
The lead author, Prof Hong Chen of Zhejiang University in China, said: “Antibiotic resistance and air pollution are each in their own right among the greatest threats to global health.
“Until now, we didn’t have a clear picture of the possible links between the two, but this work suggests the benefits of controlling air pollution could be twofold: not only will it reduce the harmful effects of poor air quality, it could also play a major role in combatting the rise and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
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Published in the Lancet Planetary Health journal. This is a rather counterintuitive result, to be honest, and makes one wonder if it’s just a correlation, rather than a causation.
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The Reddit protest is finally over. Reddit won • Gizmodo
Thomas Germain:
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The last major holdouts in the massive protest against Reddit’s controversial API pricing have relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the beloved TV host in certain dissident subreddits. It marks the end of months of fighting, which included site-wide blackouts. Now it seems the battle has come to a close. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
In June, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman decided to start charging for API access, establishing a fee for third-party apps that integrate with Reddit’s social network. That cut off essential tools used by the site’s legion of unpaid moderators. Immediately, tensions ran high. Moderators saw the change as a destructive and greedy cash grab, and more than 8,000 subreddits set themselves to private in protest, including many of Reddit’s largest communities, making it near-impossible to access their content. That action was so significant that a Google executive said in a private meeting it made search results worse.
…“More than a month has passed, and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people’s attention has shifted to other things,” an r/aww moderator wrote in a post about the rule change.
According to Reddark, a site that tracks the subreddit protest, 1,843 of the original 8,829 protesting communities are still dark. But most of these are small communities, and today only protesting subreddit with over 10 million subscribers is r/fitness.
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People underestimate corporate patience.
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‘Limitless’ energy: how floating solar panels near the equator could power future population hotspots • The Conversation
Andrew Blakers and David Firnando Silalahi:
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Vast arrays of solar panels floating on calm seas near the Equator could provide effectively unlimited solar energy to densely populated countries in Southeast Asia and West Africa.
Our new research shows offshore solar in Indonesia alone could generate about 35,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar energy a year, which is similar to current global electricity production (30,000TWh per year).
And while most of the world’s oceans experience storms, some regions at the Equator are relatively still and peaceful. So relatively inexpensive engineering structures could suffice to protect offshore floating solar panels.
Our high-resolution global heat maps show the Indonesian archipelago and equatorial West Africa near Nigeria have the greatest potential for offshore floating solar arrays.
On current trends, the global economy will be largely decarbonised and electrified by 2050, supported by vast amounts of solar and wind energy.
About 70 square kilometres of solar panels can provide all the energy requirements of a million affluent people in a zero-carbon economy. The panels can be placed on rooftops, in arid areas, colocated with agriculture, or floated on water bodies.
But countries with high population densities, such as Nigeria and Indonesia, will have limited space for solar energy harvesting.
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Nice idea, though I wonder a bit about what all that lovely salt water would do to the silicon. Have the authors heard of boats? They tend to need a lot of looking after. Even in calm waters.
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It’s time to change how we cover Elon Musk • Platformer
Casey Newton:
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By now, we have countless examples of Musk making an announcement and walking it back. In February, for example, Musk said the company would begin sharing ad revenue with creators “today” — an announcement that was widely covered. After issuing just one payment last month to a small, hand-picked group of creators last month, the company said that it had gotten too many applications and would have to delay the start of payments indefinitely.
And even when Musk does deliver, the fine print is sometimes enough to ruin the whole proposition. Last week, for example, the company said it would make good on a promise to let subscribers to X Premium — formerly Twitter Blue — hide their verified checkmarks, which have become a badge of dishonor and mockery among the wider user base.
But as Ivan Mehta noted at TechCrunch, quoting from the company’s help page, “hiding” in this case is a relative term. Emphasis mine:
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“As a subscriber, you can choose to hide your checkmark on your account. The check mark will be hidden on your profile and posts. The checkmark may still appear in some places and some features could still reveal you have an active subscription. Some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden. We will continue to evolve this feature to make it better for you,” the page reads.
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Given the hold he has on the popular imagination, these “Musk says” posts aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon. (In fact, once generative AI can credibly spit out 300 words of context underneath anything he might say, I imagine we’ll see more of them.)
But if “Musk says” posts are going to exist, they ought to be much more skeptical than the ones we’ve seen lately. For starters, assume that anything he says about a prospective fight with Zuckerberg isn’t true unless Zuckerberg or Meta confirm it.
And about those lawsuits? Maybe wait until X covers a single user’s legal bills before giving it ink.
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It is exhausting to point out that if what he says is accurate, we’d have people walking on Mars right now.
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Tracking AI-enabled misinformation: over 400 ‘unreliable AI-generated news’ websites (and counting), plus the top false narratives generated by AI tools • NewsGuard
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From unreliable AI-generated news outlets operating with little to no human oversight, to fabricated images produced by AI image generators, the rollout of generative artificial intelligence tools has been a boon to content farms and misinformation purveyors alike.
This AI Tracking Center is intended to highlight the ways that generative AI has been deployed to turbocharge misinformation operations and unreliable news. The Center includes a selection of NewsGuard’s reports, insights, and debunks related to artificial intelligence.
To date, NewsGuard’s team has identified 408 Unreliable AI-Generated News and information websites, labeled “UAINs,” spanning 14 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Turkish.
These websites typically have generic names, such as iBusiness Day, Ireland Top News, and Daily Time Update, which to a consumer appear to be established news sites. This obscures that the sites operate with little to no human oversight and publish articles written largely or entirely by bots — rather than presenting traditionally created and edited journalism, with human oversight. The sites have churned out dozens and in some cases hundreds of generic articles, about a range of subjects including politics, technology, entertainment, and travel. The articles have sometimes included false claims, such as celebrity death hoaxes, fabricated events, and articles presenting old events as if they just occurred.
…In addition to the sites included in the Tracker, NewsGuard analysts also identified a Chinese-government run disinformation website using AI-generated text as authority for the false claim that the U.S. operates a bioweapons lab in Kazakhstan infecting camels to endanger people in China.
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Newsguard first started doing this report in May. At that time it identified 50 sites. An extra 350 in a couple of months? And of course the revenue model is programmatic advertising.
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USB-C confirmed for the iPhone 15 in new leaked part images • Macworld
Michael Simon:
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We’ve known that the iPhone is switching to USB-C for a while now, but there was always a possibility that Apple would stick with Lightning for one more year. Based on the latest leaked images, however, Apple is all-in on USB-C for the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro models, with USB-C parts for the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, and iPhone 15 Pro Max all shown in a leaked image by X user fix Apple. The account doesn’t have much of a track record for Apple leaks but they have recently begun posting pictures and videos of iPhone 15 parts and assembly.
While the USB-C port is slightly bigger than Lightning, it shouldn’t affect the thickness of the iPhone or the design, though Apple is expected to adopt curved edges for the first time since the iPhone 11.
With the switch to USB-C, nearly all of Apple’s devices will have adopted the new standard, with only AirPods, Mac accessories, and the iPhone SE remaining aside from older iPhones and the 9th-gen iPad. Apple is expected to continue selling the iPhone 13 and 14 for two more years, so Lighting isn’t going anywhere just yet.
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I very much expect that in the presentation, Apple will tout the superior data speeds of USB-C compared to Lightning: 40Gbps v 480Mbps, or more than 80x faster. For some years, the cameras on the iPhone have been able to record at 4K 60fps, but getting that data off is really slow: a minute is 700MB, or 11 seconds of top-speed downloading (which you’re unlikely to get).
It won’t say that the EU’s requirement to have USB-C for charging had anything to do with it.
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YouTube experiments with AI auto-generated video summaries • TechCrunch
Lauren Forristal:
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YouTube is running a new test to auto-generate video summaries with the use of AI. As noted on the support page, the summaries have begun appearing on the watch and search pages, but are only available for a limited number of English-language videos and viewers.
The video platform explains that the AI auto-generated summaries provide a quick overview of a video, letting the user decide if it’s the right one for them. However, YouTube also notes, “While we hope these summaries are helpful and give you a quick overview of what a video is about, they do not replace video descriptions (which are written by creators!).”
No screenshots of the experiment were shared, so we’re not sure how viewers will differentiate a user-created video summary from one that was written by AI.
AI-powered YouTube video summarizer tools already exist, including Clipnote.ai, Skipit.ai and Scrivvy, among others. However, some YouTube creators say these tools fail to summarize longer videos.
“On my longer videos, it was complete nonsense,” wrote one Reddit user about Clipnote.ai. “It mostly just copied the first lines of what I had in my description. It basically served zero purpose. I was just curious to see if it could write a better description than I did, but it sadly performed horribly.”
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Wonder how quickly people will just give over to letting the AI write it. I’d imagine it’ll be pretty quick, especially if they can do a quick edit afterwards to bring it up to scratch.
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AI comes for YouTube’s thumbnail industry • Rest of World
Nilesh Christopher:
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For YouTubers, thumbnails are serious business, as they can make or break a videos’ reach. Top creators such as MrBeast test up to 20 different thumbnail variations on a single video, paying designers a reported $10,000 for a single video. This has spawned a microeconomy of freelance YouTube thumbnails artists around the world, who hone their design skills to attract clicks.
Designers and artists who spoke with Rest of World said they’re treating the rise of text-to-image generation AI tools such as Midjourney and AlphaCTR with a mix of anxiety and curiosity. Rest of World spoke to four YouTube thumbnail artists in India, Qatar, and France who said they have either already incorporated, or will soon incorporate, AI tools such as Midjourney or Photoshop’s Generative Fill into their workflows.
“I’ve heard from so many junior artists who are absolutely petrified because they’ve gone to university; they’ve put years of work and resources and experience into this skill that, quite frankly, may not ever get used,” U.K.-based senior digital designer Edd Coates told Rest of World. “From a technical standpoint, what we’re talking about is a piece of software that you have fed other people’s work into, and then that software is generating work that will replace the people who you’ve taken the work from.” Coates said it’s his responsibility as a senior digital designer in the gaming industry to push back against the use of such tools.
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AI-generated summaries, AI-generated thumbnails. This stuff is seeping into the world and displacing things we were hardly aware of.
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MPs fiddled with voter ID as electoral data security burned • The Guardian
Heather Stewart, in an analysis of the story about the UK’s Electoral Commission being hacked:
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It turns out that while Conservative ministers were spending hours of parliamentary time in 2021-22 introducing requirements for voters to produce ID at polling stations – to protect elections against a threat most experts believed was negligible – the Electoral Commission was being hacked by “hostile actors”.
These hackers, who have not been identified and whose motivations are unclear, were able to access the data, such as home addresses, of millions of voters, many of whom choose not to make that information publicly available.
It took the commission – the body charged with upholding the integrity of the election system – almost a year to announce the breach; a delay it explained by saying it needed to “remove the actors and their access to our system” and put extra security in place, before going public.
The commission’s chief executive, Shaun McNally, is correct when he says accessing the electoral register is a long way from being able to directly influence a poll. In the UK, there are no electronic voting machines to hack – voting is still done with pencil and paper, and counting takes place in town halls under the beady eyes of party observers.
As McNally put it: “The UK’s democratic process is significantly dispersed and key aspects of it remain based on paper documentation and counting. This means it would be very hard to use a cyber-attack to influence the process.”
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My realisation when writing a book about hacking was that, when it comes to being hacked, there are two sorts of organisations: those that have been hacked, and those that are going to be hacked. It’s hard to think there’s a lot of value in the raw data; a more intriguing possibility, raised by a former head of GCHQ, is that by comparing who’s in the register with who’s known to be at an address, you can find “hidden” people. It feels like a huge slog – very Slough House – but perhaps with a big payoff in spook terms.
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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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