In Birmingham, trams make the city much more connected than buses do, because they’re more reliable. CC-licensed photo by Mac McCreery on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about outrage (and how to avoid it).
A selection of 9 links for you. Tracking well. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Microsoft accused of damaging Guardian’s reputation with AI-generated poll • The Guardian
Dan Milmo:
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The Guardian has accused Microsoft of damaging its journalistic reputation by publishing an AI-generated poll speculating on the cause of a woman’s death next to an article by the news publisher.
Microsoft’s news aggregation service published the automated poll next to a Guardian story about the death of Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach who was found dead with serious head injuries at a school in Sydney last week.
The poll, created by an AI program, asked: “What do you think is the reason behind the woman’s death?” Readers were then asked to choose from three options: murder, accident or suicide.
Readers reacted angrily to the poll, which has subsequently been taken down – although highly critical reader comments on the deleted survey were still online as of Tuesday morning. A reader said one of the Guardian reporters bylined on the adjacent story, who had nothing to do with the poll, should be sacked. Another wrote: “This has to be the most pathetic, disgusting poll I’ve ever seen.”
The chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, Anna Bateson, outlined her concerns about the AI-generated poll in a letter to Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith. She said the incident was potentially distressing for James’s family and had caused “significant reputational damage” to the organisation as well as damaging the reputation of the journalists who wrote the story.
“This is clearly an inappropriate use of genAI [generative AI] by Microsoft on a potentially distressing public interest story, originally written and published by Guardian journalists,” she wrote. Bateson added that it had demonstrated “the important role that a strong copyright framework plays in enabling publishers to be able to negotiate the terms on which our journalism is used”.
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The poll is just terrible, and is a perfect example of how the AI Summit (linked below) misses the point. It’s mistakes like this which really show AI undermining the normal operation of things.
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Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty on all seven counts • TechCrunch
Jacquelyn Melinek:
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Sam Bankman-Fried, the co-founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, has been found guilty on all seven counts related to fraud and money laundering.
The defendant is “charged with a wide-ranging scheme to misappropriate billions of dollars of customer funds deposited with FTX and mislead investors and lenders to FTX and to Alameda Research,” a release from the US attorney’s office at the Southern District of New York stated.
The decision was handed down on Thursday, following a five-week trial that dug deep into how one of the biggest crypto exchanges and its sister trading company, collapsed about a year ago. The US Department of Justice charged 31-year-old Bankman-Fried about 11 months ago.
The jury took about four hours to come to a verdict on six counts relating to fraud and one count relating to money laundering.
Bankman-Fried fell quickly from the top of the crypto totem pole after a faulty Alameda balance sheet was unveiled by CoinDesk in November 2022, which resulted in industry-wide panic and concern around FTX and its liquidity.
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That’s remarkably quick – both the verdict, and the case coming to trial. Some people will think it was easy, but for the prosecutor, making the case would be tough. However, it certainly helps when the prosecution can persuade various insiders to turn state’s evidence.
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Sunak plays eager chatshow host as Musk discusses AI and politics • The Guardian
Kiran Stacey:
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For 25 minutes, the prime minister quizzed Musk on his views on the summit and AI in general.
“What do we need to do to make sure we do enough [to regulate AI]?” asked Sunak. Later he suggested that technology was now developing even faster than “Moore’s law”, which suggests that computing power roughly doubles every two years, before checking himself. “Is that fair?” he asked Musk.
At one point Sunak even appeared to ask the controversial technology entrepreneur his views on international diplomacy. “Some people said I was wrong to invite China [to the summit],” he said. “Should we be engaging with them? Can we trust them? Was that the right thing to have done?”
In case Musk took objection to any of the questions, Sunak made sure to frame them with flattery. “You are known for being such a brilliant innovator and technologist,” he said at one point.
Downing Street had been worried that the famously unpredictable Musk might say something off-colour or undiplomatic. Earlier this week he told Rogan he was worried that environmentalists might harness AI deliberately to eliminate all of mankind. He regularly rails against the “woke mind virus” and has said he bought X to prevent a “zombie apocalypse”.
Officials were so concerned that they changed what had been billed as a live broadcast on X into a recorded conversation, to be edited and put online after the pair had finished speaking.
They need not have worried, however. The blunt and often abrasive Musk familiar to millions of users of his social media platform was replaced by a softly-spoken personification of charm.
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There’s also five takeaways (not the food kind) from the UK AI summit.
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AI summit: education will blunt AI risk to jobs, says Rishi Sunak • BBC News
Paul Seddon and Becky Morton:
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At the summit, hosted at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, several leading technology companies agreed to allow governments to safety-test their next generation of AI models before they are deployed.
The voluntary document was signed by 10 countries and the EU, including the UK, US, Singapore and Canada. China was not a signatory.
In a statement, the UK government said it would work with the Alan Turing Institute, a research body, to assess possible risks such as the potential for bias and misinformation. Mr Sunak said the testing regime would provide some “independent assurance” – adding that the firms developing new models cannot be expected to “make their own homework”.
His government has so far declined to announce legislation to regulate AI, arguing that existing regulators are best placed to mitigate the risks whilst the technology evolves. Mr Sunak told reporters that binding rules would “likely be necessary,” but stressed that the technology was still evolving and it was necessary to ensure it is done in “the right way”.
Before the summit, various unions and campaign groups warned the event would prove a “missed opportunity”. In an open letter, they argued the event should have focused more on topics such as the impact of AI on employment law and smaller businesses, as well as policing and identity profiling.
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Predictably blah, though some of the people on steering groups are pleased about the “safety tests”. Except China isn’t going to participate. And it’s voluntary. Apart from that, solid job, people.
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How is Israel using military AI in Gaza strikes? And why won’t it tell us? • Los Angeles Times
Brian Merchant:
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In response to a request for comment, an IDF spokesperson declined to discuss the country’s military use of AI.
In a year when AI has dominated the headlines around the globe, this element of the conflict has gone curiously under-examined. Given the myriad practical and ethical questions that continue to surround the technology, Israel should be pressed on how it’s deploying AI.
“AI systems are notoriously unreliable and brittle, particularly when placed in situations that are different from their training data,” said Paul Scharre, the vice president of the Center for a New American Security and author of “Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” Scharre said he was not familiar with the details of the specific system the IDF may be using, but that AI and automation that assisted in targeting cycles probably would be used in scenarios like Israel’s hunt for Hamas personnel and materiel in Gaza. The use of AI on the battlefield is advancing quickly, he said, but carries significant risks.
“Any AI that’s involved in targeting decisions, a major risk is that you strike the wrong target,” Scharre said. ”It could be causing civilian casualties or striking friendly targets and causing fratricide.”
One reason it’s somewhat surprising that we haven’t seen more discussion of Israel’s use of military AI is that the IDF has been touting its investment in and embrace of AI for years.
In 2017, the IDF’s editorial arm proclaimed that “The IDF Sees Artificial Intelligence as the Key to Modern-Day Survival.” In 2018, the IDF boasted that its “machines are outsmarting humans.” In that article, the then-head of Sigma, the branch of the IDF dedicated to researching, developing, and implementing AI, Lt. Col. Nurit Cohen Inger wrote that “Every camera, every tank, and every soldier produces information on a regular basis, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”
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One has to love the optimism of asking the IDF how it’s using AI in the midst of its latest conflict. Though one would also point out that it sure didn’t spot Hamas planning its incursion on October 7.
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Transport Open Data in 2023 • Tom Forth
Tom Forth has been analysing bus and tram open data for various cities since 2019 :
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On 6 December 2022 I tracked every bus in Great Britain for three hours. This produced a large but manageable 2GB of data. For the same day I downloaded the Great Britain bus timetable in GTFS format.
Focusing just on Leeds and Bristol I matched every bus that ran to its timetable and produced a version of the Great Britain bus timetable in GTFS format reflecting only those buses that ran and their recorded positions every minute.
I loaded the GTFS files representing the real bus movements and timetabled bus movements into Open Trip Planner 2.2 and using the Isochrone feature I calculated the reachable area of Leeds from the Corn Exchange within 45 minutes with only walking and taking the bus as allowed methods of travel.
[Diagram omitted for Overspill inclusion, but really worth looking at.]We see clearly that in reality the accessibility of Leeds by bus is nowhere near that suggested by the timetable.
As part of this work, we’ve been developing tools for comparing population and public transport networks internationally. I have made a web version of those tools that works just for circles.
Behind the scenes, and not available via that website, we can calculate comparable population estimates for any polygon, including the two accessibility polygons for Leeds. Using this tool we show that the population within 45 minutes of central Leeds by bus on a typical December late afternoon is 445,000 according to the bus timetable – but 165,000 according to the buses that ran and the speed that they ran at.
This is an even larger reduction in effective size than our previous work has shown in Birmingham. We suspect that this is because Leeds has no tram, our work does not currently consider trains, and because congestion was particularly bad on this day due to Christmas shopping and ongoing roadworks.
We found similar results in Bristol though without local knowledge we have chosen not to do any further analysis of what we found.
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Apparently this work has had some effect inside government – hooray! – though it’s faintly depressing how badly buses serve such major cities. There’s much more in the post, including maps showing the dramatic difference between theory and practice for getting around the cities. His 2019 post on Birmingham will make you think we should put trams everywhere.
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Scientists create artificial protein capable of degrading microplastics in bottles • Phys.org
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Every year, around 400 million tons of plastics are produced worldwide, a number that increases by around 4% annually. The emissions resulting from their manufacture are one of the elements contributing to climate change, and their ubiquitous presence in ecosystems leads to serious ecological problems.
One of the most used is PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is found in many packaging and beverage bottles. Over time, this material wears down into smaller and smaller particles—so-called microplastics—which aggravates environmental problems. PET already accounts for more than 10% of global plastic production and recycling is scarce and inefficient.
Now, scientists from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center—Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), together with research groups from the Institute of Catalysis and Petrochemistry of the CSIC (ICP-CSIC) and the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), have developed artificial proteins capable of degrading PET microplastics and nanoplastics and reducing them to their essential components, which would allow them to be broken down or recycled.
They have used a defense protein from the strawberry anemone (Actinia fragacea), to which they have added the new function after design using computational methods. The results are published in the journal Nature Catalysis.
“What we are doing is something like adding arms to a person,” explains Víctor Guallar, ICREA professor at the BSC and one of the authors of the work. These arms consist of just three amino acids that function as scissors capable of cutting small PET particles. In this case, they have been added to a protein from the anemone Actinia fragacea, which in principle lacks this function and which in nature “functions as a cellular drill, opening pores and acting as a defense mechanism,” explains the researcher.
Machine learning and supercomputers such as the BSC’s MareNostrum 4 used in this protein engineering allow “predicting where the particles are going to join and where we must place the new amino acids so that they can exert their action,” says Guallar. The resulting geometry is quite similar to that of the PETase enzyme from the bacterium Idionella sakaiensis, which is capable of degrading this type of plastic and was discovered in 2016 in a packaging recycling plant in Japan.
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Avid readers will recall the August 2022 piece on that Japanese bacterium.
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Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase finally helped these obsessives quit • Slate
Luke Winkie:
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on the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk’s acquisition and transformation of the company, a broader group of users is clearly feeling a loss. Twitter was a home for everyone: inveterate gamers, breathless BTS stans, transcendent trolls, and—yes—a whole lot of political reporters. Complaints about its usability, functionality, and overall impact on one’s mental well-being long predate the Elon era, and yet, I’ve surprised myself by my ability to be wistful about what we’re all now calling the good old days.
That’s why I reached out to eight people—some archetypal Twitter addicts, others who don’t fit the mold—who’ve left the site in the past year to ask them why they made the decision to board up shop. (I’ve withheld some of their last names at their request.) The reasons for their departures vary. Some find the proximity to someone with Musk’s vindictive, charmless tweets (and they’re hard to escape) to be viscerally unpleasant; others simply dislike how shoddy, gouging, and feature-poor the platform has become in his wake. Some deleted their accounts; others just ignore them now. Their stories, in loose order of departure, present a kind of alternative history of the Musk takeover and a broad view of his digital carnage. It isn’t just bleeding-heart liberals who are disgusted by the state of Twitter. Some users just miss when the site worked.
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Yes, I’m sure you’ve read a gazillion of these sorts of things, but what’s neat about this roundup is that Winkie finds people who quit at different times, for different reasons: two days after Musk bought it, a few days later when all the banned accounts were let back on, when “verification” started being sold, and so on. The last one is “When the For You Feed Suddenly Felt Like It Was for Someone Else”, which is neat. But the For You feed has always been for someone else – the person who wants to be outraged and infuriated.
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Apple in 2013: “Android is a massive tracking device” • The Verge
Tom Warren:
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‘Android is a massive tracking device.’That was the message from Apple in an internal strategy document from 2013. It has been revealed as part of the ongoing US v. Google antitrust trial. The document details Apple’s approach to privacy to differentiate from competitors like Google and Microsoft. Apple later went on to make privacy an even bigger part of its marketing pitch in iPhone commercials in 2019, with the “privacy matters” slogan.
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The slideshow is no great shakes, to be honest (definitely made in Keynote – good dogfooding, Apple!) but does show how clearly how Apple decided to double down on its strategy credit (the opposite of a strategy tax; something which is boosted by the way you run your business) of not collecting user data if it can avoid it.
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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 