Some ebooks about mushroom foraging on Amazon seem to have been written by a chatbot – and so could kill their readers. CC-licensed photo by Stephen Bowler on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Back in the office? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
‘Life or death:’ AI-generated mushroom foraging books are all over Amazon • 404 Media
Samantha Cole:
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A genre of AI-generated books on Amazon is scaring foragers and mycologists: cookbooks and identification guides for mushrooms aimed at beginners.
Amazon has an AI-generated books problem that’s been documented by journalists for months. Many of these books are obviously gibberish designed to make money. But experts say that AI-generated foraging books, specifically, could actually kill people if they eat the wrong mushroom because a guidebook written by an AI prompt said it was safe.
The New York Mycological Society (NYMS) warned on social media that the proliferation of AI-generated foraging books could “mean life or death.”
“There are hundreds of poisonous fungi in North America and several that are deadly,” Sigrid Jakob, president of the New York Mycological Society, told me in an email. “They can look similar to popular edible species. A poor description in a book can mislead someone to eat a poisonous mushroom.”
A quick scan of Amazon’s mushroom and foraging books revealed a bunch of books likely written by ChatGPT, but are sold without any indication that they’re AI-generated and are marketed as having been written by a human when they’re very likely not.
“Edwin J. Smith” is the author listed on two books—The Ultimate Mushroom Books Field Guide Of The Southwest: An essential field guide to foraging edible and non-edible mushrooms outdoors and indoors and Psilocybin Mushroom Book: Field Guide To Identification, Growing, and Microdosing Psilocybin Mushroom for Safe Use and Health Remedies—but doesn’t have any other books, or an online presence otherwise. The only Edwin J. Smith I could find was a Professor Emeritus of medicine at Indiana University from a staff list that’s more than a decade old.
…After 404 Media reached out for comment and sent the company links to these suspected AI books, Amazon deleted The Ultimate Mushroom Books Field Guide Of The Southwest, Psilocybin Mushroom Book, and WILD MUSHROOM COOKBOOK FOR BEGINNER.
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Once again, journalists get the job of saving people from the bad decisions made by platforms – in this case, having no gatekeeping or quality function because it’s cheaper (= more profitable) not to.
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The AI revolution is coming, but not as fast as some people think • The New York Times
Steve Lohr:
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Lori Beer, the global chief information officer of JPMorgan Chase, talks about the latest artificial intelligence with the enthusiasm of a convert. She refers to AI chatbots like ChatGPT, with its ability to produce everything from poetry to computer programs, as “transformative” and a “paradigm shift.”
But it’s not coming soon to the nation’s largest bank. JPMorgan has blocked access to ChatGPT from its computers and told its 300,000 workers not to put any bank information into the chatbot or other generative AI tools.
For now, Ms. Beer said, there are too many risks of leaking confidential data, questions about how the data is used and about the accuracy of the AI-generated answers. The bank has created a walled-off, private network to allow a few hundred data scientists and engineers to experiment with the technology. They are exploring uses like automating and improving tech support and software development.
Across corporate America, the perspective is much the same. Generative AI, the software engine behind ChatGPT, is seen as an exciting new wave of technology. But companies in every industry are mainly trying out the technology and thinking through the economics. Widespread use of it at many companies could be years away.
Generative AI, according to forecasts, could sharply boost productivity and add trillions of dollars to the global economy. Yet the lesson of history, from steam power to the internet, is that there is a lengthy lag between the arrival of major new technology and its broad adoption — which is what transforms industries and helps fuel the economy.
Take the internet. In the 1990s, there were confident predictions that the internet and the web would disrupt the retailing, advertising and media industries. Those predictions proved to be true, but that was more than a decade later, well after the dot-com bubble had burst.
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Unlike the web3/crypto argument that “it’s only useless because it’s like the early internet!”, I think this argument holds water.
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The cheap radio hack that disrupted Poland’s railway system • WIRED
Andy Greenberg:
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On Friday and Saturday, August 25 and 26, more than 20 of Poland’s trains carrying both freight and passengers were brought to a halt across the country through what Polish media and the BBC have described as a “cyberattack.” Polish intelligence services are investigating the sabotage incidents, which appear to have been carried out in support of Russia. The saboteurs reportedly interspersed the commands they used to stop the trains with the Russian national anthem and parts of a speech by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Poland’s railway system has served as a key resource in the facilitating of Western weapons and other aid into Ukraine as NATO attempts to bolster the country’s defense against Russia’s invasion. “We know that for some months there have been attempts to destabilize the Polish state,” Stanislaw Zaryn, a senior security official, told the Polish Press Agency. “For the moment, we are ruling nothing out.”
But as disruptive as the railway sabotage has been, on closer inspection, the “cyberattack” doesn’t seem to have involved any cyber at all, according to Lukasz Olejnik, a Polish-speaking independent cybersecurity researcher and consultant, and the author of the forthcoming book Philosophy of Cybersecurity. In fact, the saboteurs appear to have sent simple “radio-stop” commands via radio frequency to the trains they targeted. Because the trains use a radio system that lacks encryption or authentication for those commands, Olejnik says, anyone with as little as $30 of off-the-shelf radio equipment can broadcast the command to a Polish train—sending a series of three acoustic tones at a 150.100 megahertz frequency—and trigger their emergency stop function.
“It is three tonal messages sent consecutively. Once the radio equipment receives it, the locomotive goes to a halt,” Olejnik says, pointing to a document outlining trains’ different technical standards in the European Union that describes the radio-stop command used in the Polish system.
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Seems like a bit of an oversight when you have a potential aggressor just over your border.
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South Africa’s Competition Commission takes aim at Google • Rest of World
Damilare Dosunmu:
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According to the commission’s report, Google’s model disadvantages new, small, and underfunded South African businesses. The report indicates that the US tech giant has not only become direct competition to its clients by offering some of the services they render (including shopping and travel), but it is also playing unfairly by prioritizing its offerings over theirs.
The commission released a set of remediations for Google to follow, including providing a South African badge and search filter to enable consumers to find and identify local platforms quickly. It also asked Google to introduce a new feature that displays smaller South African platforms relevant to consumer search, especially in travel and shopping. Google also has to provide support programs worth 330m rand ($17.6m) over five years, with 180m rand ($9.6m) of that investment going into advertising credits. The remaining amount goes to technical training, credits for other Google products, startup training, and networking, among other things.
Industry experts and analysts were divided on whether Google’s power over the digital economy needed more regulation or if the watchdog’s move was anti-market. They told Rest of World the commission’s report might begin a decade-long regulatory back-and-forth with the tech giant.
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Meta rejects recommendation to suspend former Cambodian prime minister • The Hill
Rebecca Klar:
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Meta, the parent company of Facebook, rejected a recommendation from its Oversight Board to suspend the account of former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, according to a decision announced Tuesday.
Meta said it would not be suspending Hun Sen’s Facebook or Instagram page after determining that doing so would “not be consistent with our policies, including our protocol on restricting accounts of public figures during civil unrest.”
Hun Sen, who handed power to his son Hun Manet after July’s national election, had preemptively removed his Facebook page after the Oversight Board recommendation in June, and banished Facebook representatives from operating in the country.
However, he returned to the platform three weeks later, after briefly using Telegram as his main tool of public communication. His Cambodian People’s Party won a large majority in the National Assembly after the main opposition party was barred from competing.
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Thus demonstrating that the Oversight Board is a pointless exercise in pencil-sharpening. It’s not even a figleaf now. May as well dissolve it and give the money to charity.
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As Canada burns and California floods, Facebook and Twitter are MIA • The Washington Post
Will Oremus:
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As wildfires ravage western Canada, Canadians can’t read the news about them on Facebook or Instagram. This month, Facebook parent company Meta blocked links to news organizations on its major social networks in Canada to protest a law that would require it to pay publishers for distributing their content.
As a freak tropical storm flooded swaths of Southern California over the weekend, residents and government agencies who turned to X, formerly known as Twitter, for real-time updates struggled to discern fact from fiction. That has gotten far more difficult, officials say, since Elon Musk jumbled the site’s verification policies, removing the blue check marks from verified journalists and media outlets — instead granting them to anyone who pays a monthly fee.
Facebook and Twitter spent years making themselves essential conduits for news. Now that government agencies, the media and hundreds of millions of people have come to rely on them for critical information in times of crisis, the social media giants have decided they’re not so invested in the news after all.
Tech titans Mark Zuckerberg and Musk may not agree on much. But both have pulled back, in different ways, from what their companies once saw as a responsibility, to both their users and society, to connect people with reliable sources of information. A drumbeat of natural disasters, probably intensified by climate change, is highlighting the consequences of that retrenchment.
“Just a few years ago, Twitter was a really valuable way for us to communicate with the public,” said Brian Ferguson, deputy director of crisis communications for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “It’s much more challenging now because of some of the changes that have happened.”
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These two things aren’t quite like each other, though. Twitter is simply abrogating the responsibility it used to feel as the place where the world found the news – which Musk is still claiming was his desire for it. Meta, on the other hand, has never truly pretended to be the place where you find the news about the world – and the Canadian government wrote a terrible law which offered Meta a simple get-out by not including links. Bad laws that you can evade are going to be evaded.
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Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter • The Verge
Casey Newton:
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Earlier this year, like many productivity tools, Notion added a handful of AI features. I use two of them in my links database. One extracts the names of any companies mentioned in an article, creating a kind of automatic tagging system. The other provides a two- or three-sentence summary of the article I’m saving.
Neither of these, in practice, is particularly useful. Tags might theoretically be useful for revisiting old material, but databases are not designed to be browsed. And while we publish summaries of news articles in each edition of Platformer, we wouldn’t use AI-written summaries: among other reasons, they often miss important details and context.
At the same time, the database contains nearly three years of links to every subject I cover here, along with the complete text of thousands of articles. It is here, and not in a note-taking app, that knowledge of my beat has been accreting over the past few years. If only I could access that knowledge in some way that went beyond my memory.
It’s here that AI should be able to help. Within some reasonable period of time, I expect that I will be able to talk to my Notion database as if it’s ChatGPT. If I could, I imagine I would talk to it all the time.
Much of journalism simply involves remembering relevant events from the past. An AI-powered link database has a perfect memory; all it’s missing is a usable chat interface. If it had one, it might be a perfect research assistant.
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Like Newton, I’ve tried a lot of note-taking apps, and concluded they’re never going to replace the connections you make in your head. For assembling lots of information, I like Scrivener (used it to write all three of my books), but it didn’t make my thinking any clearer.
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Elon Musk to remove headlines from news articles shared on X • Fortune
Kylie Robison:
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X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, is planning a major change in how news articles appear on the service, stripping out the headline and other text so that tweets with links display only an article’s lead image, according to material viewed by Fortune.
Roughly four hours after the publication of this article, Elon Musk confirmed these plans, posting that “this is coming from me directly,” and it “will greatly improve the esthetics.”
The change means that anyone sharing a link on X—from individual users to publishers—would need to manually add their own text alongside the links they share on the service; otherwise the tweet will display only an image with no context other than an overlay of the URL. While clicking on the image will still lead to the full article on the publisher’s website, the change could have major implications for publishers who rely on social media to drive traffic to their sites as well as for advertisers.
According to a source with knowledge of the matter, the change is indeed being pushed directly by X owner Elon Musk. The primary objective appears to be to reduce the height of tweets, thus allowing more posts to fit within the portion of the timeline that appears on screen. Musk also believes the change will help curb clickbait, the source said.
“It’s something Elon wants. They were running it by advertisers, who didn’t like it, but it’s happening,” the source said, adding that Musk thinks articles occupy excessive space on the timeline.
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You can imagine how this panned out: Musk scrolling and declaring that “all these articles [which he doesn’t read – he doesn’t strike me as a person consumed by curiosity] take too much space. How many more ads could we show if we cut these? That many, huh? OK let’s do that.” It’s not intended for users. It’s him and his personal plaything; there’s no sense of having any responsibility to all the other users of Twitter, who may derive value from the headlines and text.
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Apple’s September iPhone event: how to watch and what to expect • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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One of the biggest changes coming to this year’s iPhone lineup is the addition of USB-C. For the first time, the iPhone 15 is expected to come with the widely used port instead of Apple’s proprietary Lightning connector. This doesn’t come as a surprise, as Apple confirmed last year that it would make the change to USB-C to comply with the European Union’s incoming regulations.
Although reports indicate that all phones in the iPhone 15 lineup will get the USB-C port, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says only the Pro and Pro Max will benefit from higher data transfer rates. Both premium models will come with “at least” USB 3.2 or Thunderbolt 3, while the base iPhone 15 and 15 Plus will support USB 2.0, according to Kuo. Either way, 9to5Mac reports that all iPhone 15 models should have faster 35W charging rates thanks to the switch.
Additionally, supply chain analyst Ross Young reported last year that all models of the iPhone 15 will come with the Dynamic Island. That’s a change from what Apple currently offers, as it only includes the pill-shaped cutout on the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max. This time around, the most significant changes coming to the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are reported to be a titanium frame, thinner bezels, and a potentially more expensive price.
Both premium models may also come with an action button similar to the one on the Apple Watch Ultra, as reported by MacRumors and 9to5Mac. This button is supposed to replace the mute toggle and could allow you to assign shortcuts to different apps and utilities. And while early rumors suggested that Apple will replace the volume rocker and the power button on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max with solid-state toggles, recent reports from Kuo and leaker Unknownz21 suggest they’ll stay the same for now.
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The event is on Tuesday September 12. Also coming: faintly updated Apple Watches. And there you go – enough to drive hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. But the days when iPhone reveals were a) dramatic surprises and b) actually real news events are long past.
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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 