At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, LG is showing off its new (optionally) see-through TV. Think it will ever go on sale? CC-licensed photo by LG on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Magic: The Gathering publisher admits using AI art after banning AI art • Polygon

Oli Welsh:

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Magic: The Gathering publisher Wizards of the Coast has been forced to admit that it published a marketing image for the game featuring “some AI components,” despite an initial insistence that the art was “created by humans and not AI.” Wizards of the Coast had banned the use of AI artwork in its products in 2023, after AI-generated artwork appeared in a Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook and caused an outcry.

The image, since deleted, was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by the official Magic: The Gathering account on Jan. 4. It showed five Magic cards resting on a valve-powered device next to a pressure gauge, in a brass-and-wood-filled steampunk laboratory setting. “It’s positively shocking how good these lands look in retro frame,” the post read.

Many fans were quick to point out elements in the image that bore the hallmarks of generative AI — in particular, difficulty rendering fine details in a consistent way (around bunches of cables, for example, or on the dial of the pressure gauge). But the Magic account initially dismissed these claims.

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However…

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“Well, we made a mistake earlier when we said that a marketing image we posted was not created using AI,” the Magic account said in a statement posted to X on Jan. 7. “As you, our diligent community pointed out, it looks like some AI components that are now popping up in industry standard tools like Photoshop crept into our marketing creative, even if a human did the work to create the overall image.”

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AI hypocrisy is going to catch a lot of people out this year.
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OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles • The Verge

Emilia David:

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In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI claims it’s attempted to reduce regurgitation from its large language models and that the Times refused to share examples of this reproduction before filing the lawsuit. It said the verbatim examples “appear to be from year-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites.” The company did admit that it took down a ChatGPT feature, called Browse, that unintentionally reproduced content.

However, the company maintained its long-standing position that in order for AI models to learn and solve new problems, they need access to “the enormous aggregate of human knowledge.” It reiterated that while it respects the legal right to own copyrighted works — and has offered opt-outs to training data inclusion — it believes training AI models with data from the internet falls under fair use rules that allow for repurposing copyrighted works.

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Essentially, OpenAI says “regurgitation” of training data is a problem that can occur when the same article appears many times in training data, and that the NYT examples of that are from intentionally careful prompts.

I wonder how the court case will work, if it gets that far: will OpenAI be required to have a version of ChatGPT that was running when the NYT did its prompts? Seems a big ask, yet also necessary for the case.
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Dutch man sabotaged Iranian nuclear program without Dutch government’s knowledge: report • NL Times

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In 2008, a Dutchman played a crucial role in the United States and Israeli-led operation to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. The then 36-year-old Erik van Sabben infiltrated an Iranian nuclear complex and released the infamous Stuxnet virus, paralyzing the country’s nuclear program. The AIVD recruited the man, but Dutch politicians knew nothing about the operation, the Volkskrant reports after investigating the sabotage for two years.

A few years ago, the Volkskrant revealed that the Dutch intelligence services AIVD and MIVD had recruited the infiltrator in this sabotage operation. But at the time, it was believed to have been an Iranian engineer. In the meantime, the newspaper continued to investigate the matter, speaking to dozens of people involved, including 19 employees of the AIVD and MIVD.

They told the newspaper that Dutchman Van Sabben infiltrated the underground nuclear complex in the city of Natanz and installed equipment infected with the highly sophisticated Stuxnet virus. According to the newspaper, the software cost over a billion dollars to develop. It caused a large number of nuclear centrifuges to break down, delaying the nuclear program by several years, according to estimates.

No one in the Netherlands knew that this new type of cyber weapon was being used in the operation, the Volkskrant wrote. According to the investigative journalists, the intelligence services knew they were participating in the sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program but not that their agent was bringing in Stuxnet. “The Americans used us,” one intelligence source told the Volkskrant.

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Oh yes but that’s not really spy stu–

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Van Sabben immediately left Iran after successfully sabotaging the country’s nuclear program, the researchers concluded. He died two weeks later in a motorcycle accident near his home in Dubai. Nothing points to foul play, the Volkskrant said after speaking with people at the crash scene. Though, an anonymous MIVD employee told the newspaper that Van Sabben “paid a high price.”

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One of the two writers on the Volksrant piece (subscriber-only, paywalled) is Kim Zetter, who literally wrote the book on Stuxnet, so this is highly likely to be accurate.
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I want my Vision Pro(TV)! • On my Om

Om Malik:

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The rumour machine can finally turn itself off — Apple has announced that its spatial computer, Vision Pro, is going on sale on January 19. It will start taking pre-orders for the $3,500 device, which ships on February 2nd. And I am excited. Let me rephrase that — I am super excited. My excitement stems from my hands-on experiences with the device.

Apple touts Vision Pro as a new canvas for productivity and a new way to play games. Maybe, maybe not. Just as the Apple Watch is primarily a health-related device that also does other things, including phone calls, text messages, and making payments. Similarly, the primary function for Vision Pro is ‘media’ — especially how we consume it on the go. Give it a few weeks, and more people will come to the same conclusion.

…There will be a lot of talk about Vision Pro. There will be obvious commentary about it being a disappointment. In time, we will come to realize that this was Steve Jobs’ parting gift to the company he co-founded. He told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, who then shared this in his book:

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….[Jobs] “very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. ‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.” No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’”

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I don’t know about you, but I am excited and will be getting up early to order a unit for myself.

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Spatial video of sports is going to be really interesting, and surely a key selling point.
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iPhone owners get $92 payouts from Apple in phone-throttling settlement • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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US-based iPhone users are finally getting long-awaited payments to compensate them for Apple’s decision to throttle the performance of iPhones with degraded batteries.

Apple agreed to settle with iPhone users in March 2020, but class-action lawsuits and settlements often take years to be resolved and paid out. This case took a few years because the settlement’s court approval was temporarily vacated on appeal but later reinstated.

The settlement was for a minimum of $310m and a maximum of $500m, including attorney’s fees of $80.6m and the costs of distributing the settlement fund. Apple agreed to provide $25 payments to affected users for each eligible iPhone, though that amount could have increased or decreased based on the number of approved claims.

It seems the standard payment increased, as various people reported getting $92.17 payments this past weekend. I was one of the people who received an email notice stating I was eligible for the settlement about 3.5 years ago, and I submitted a claim on July 24, 2020. I received a $92.17 deposit to my bank account on Saturday that was labeled “IN RE APPLE INC Payouts.”

iPhone owners were required to submit their claims by October 6, 2020. The payments were for US-based owners of an iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, or SE who “experienced diminished performance” on their devices while running affected versions of iOS before December 21, 2017.

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The UK version of this case got its go-ahead near the end of last year (Apple denies its claims), so shall we put a date in the diary for 2030?
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SWATting: the new normal in ransomware extortion tactics • The Register

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle:

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Extortionists are now threatening to “swat” hospital patients — calling in bomb threats or other bogus reports to the police so heavily armed cops show up at victims’ homes — if the medical centers don’t pay the crooks’ ransom demands.

After intruders broke into Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s IT network in November and stole medical records – everything from Social Security numbers to diagnoses and lab results – miscreants threatened to turn on the patients themselves directly.

The idea being, it seems, that those patients and the media coverage from any swatting will put pressure on the US hospital to pay up and end the extortion. Other crews do similar when attacking IT service provider: they don’t just extort the suppliers, they also threaten or further extort customers of those providers.

“Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center was aware of cyber criminals issuing swatting threats and immediately notified the FBI and Seattle police, who notified the local police,” a spokesperson told The Register today. “The FBI, as part of its investigation into the cybersecurity incident, also investigated these threats.”

The cancer center, which operates more than 10 clinics in Washington’s Puget Sound region, declined to answer additional comments about the threats.

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Of course, if American police weren’t on a hair trigger to go and shoot people, there wouldn’t be the same risk. Good luck getting British police to turn up with guns in response to a random phone report.
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I’ve looked through LG’s new transparent OLED TV and seen something special • The Verge

Chris Welch has gone to CES so none of us has to:

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LG has seemingly decided that the time has come to ship a real, bona fide transparent TV that people will actually be able to buy this year. At some undisclosed date. For what’s certain to be an exorbitant amount of money.

The company has announced the OLED Signature T (you can guess what the T stands for) here at CES 2024. The product that LG demoed for press in Las Vegas isn’t exactly “final.” The 77-inch display won’t be changing at all, but the company hasn’t decided whether it’ll come bundled with all the side furniture you see in these photos or if it’ll sell those items separately.

Behind the OLED T’s transparent panel is a contrast film that, with the push of a button on the remote, can be raised to make the TV look like any regular OLED, or lowered if you want to see what’s behind the screen.

The TV has custom widgets that take up only a lower section of the screen, which seems like an idea that LG carried over from its roll-up TV.

…here’s one downside: when the contrast filter is up, the OLED T technically isn’t on par with LG’s very best conventional OLEDs like the G series. It lacks the Micro Lens Array technology that has led to major brightness improvements for that line. I’m an unabashed display nerd, so if I owned this thing, I think it would constantly eat at me that it’s an inferior TV compared to the G4 or, if you want to go even fancier, LG’s wireless M series, which does include MLA. And this TV is destined to cost far more than either of those.

You’re making objective sacrifices for the transparency trick, so it’s worth considering how quickly the novelty of this TV might wear off. For certain people, maybe never. But me? I can’t help but feel like I’d be over the whole schtick within a matter of days.

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Um, back up a minute. LG’s roll-up TV? Ah, a 2019 thing that.. never appeared anywhere. As this won’t.
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May 2022: Lessons of Boeing’s cultural decline–and how it can recover • From Day One

Jennifer Haupt, in May 2022:

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Boeing, a creator of the jet age, was once seen as a prestigious American corporate icon. Yet the company’s relationships with employees, investors, and business partners went into a tailspin after its merger with rival McDonnell Douglas in 1997. That’s the thesis of journalist Peter Robison, author of Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, who spoke at a From Day One conference in Seattle about how this revered corporation went astray by neglecting some of its original core values, and what other companies can learn from this cautionary tale.

“The conflict ensued almost immediately with a strike that was the largest white-collar strike in U.S. history at the time,” said Robison, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg and Bloomberg Businessweek. “A federal mediator talked with an engineer I also interviewed who said, ‘This company is doomed.’ The reason he gave was that on one side you had hunter- killer assassins, the McDonnell Douglas side, which was more stockholder focused, and on the Boeing side, you had boy scouts who were customer- and product-focused. So when you look at the Max tragedy, you have to look at the DNA that started with that merger. It had impacts that lasted that long,” he said in a fireside chat with Marissa Nall, staff reporter of the Puget Sound Business Journal.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the Boeing 737 MAX airliner worldwide between March 2019 and December 2020 after 346 passengers died in two crashes.

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..and now the 737 Max 9 is grounded. And things are getting worse, as this from The Air Current published on Monday suggests:

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United Airlines has found loose bolts and other parts on 737 Max 9 plug doors as it inspects its fleet of Boeing jets following the Friday rapid depressurization aboard an Alaska Airlines jet of the same make, according to three people familiar with the findings.

The discrepant bolts and other parts on the plug doors have been found on at least five aircraft, one of the people told The Air Current.

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Not saying the company is doomed, but things aren’t looking too clever right now.
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How to put right a grave British miscarriage of justice • FT

The FT’s Editorial Board (ie, this is the view of the paper):

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The most talked-about holiday TV viewing in Britain was not a Hollywood blockbuster or a Netflix fantasy drama. It was a dramatisation of the real-life scandal of hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly accused by the Post Office of theft and false accounting that were in fact the result of a faulty computer system. Many were jailed or ruined. Some convictions have been overturned, and a public inquiry is under way. Yet the TV drama has galvanised public outrage and pressure to end delays in compensating victims. This is one of the UK’s widest miscarriages of justice in recent years. It is a lesson for organisations everywhere, especially in the era of AI, in the perils of putting blind trust in technology.

Between 1999, when the Post Office introduced the Horizon IT system supplied by Fujitsu, and 2015, more than 700 local sub-postmasters — who provide post office services often as part of wider businesses — were prosecuted for alleged shortfalls in accounts. For historical reasons, the Post Office can bring its own prosecutions, without the police, and sub-postmasters’ contracts with the state-owned company made them liable for making good any losses. Lives were destroyed and reputations besmirched. At least four people took their own lives.

…A final priority is to secure accountability, via the public inquiry and a police investigation, for what went wrong. No executives of the Post Office or Fujitsu, which took control of the British computer company ICL in 1998, have been punished. Yet Post Office managers, including former chief executive Paula Vennells, continued to insist Horizon was “robust”, and to allow sub-postmasters to be hounded, even as evidence to the contrary piled up.

It is surely time to strip the Post Office of its anachronistic right to bring private prosecutions. Police are now investigating potential “fraud offences” related to the Post Office’s clawback of millions of pounds from sub-postmasters that was never actually missing. But that process could take years.

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An obvious move would be to call for whistleblowers from inside Fujitsu and the Post Office, and offer them protection from prosecution. And then grind the liars and those who were responsible into the dust.
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My presentations • Douglas McCarthy

As a followup to yesterday’s item about the National Gallery no longer being able to charge for images of non-copyright items, here’s a set of presentations made by McCarthy, who describes himself as an “open access and cultural heritage specialist”.

Of particular interest is the one called “Insert Coin”, which if you work through it shows that a lot of museums (etc) which charge for image licensing actually lose money on it because of the cost of getting people to look after licences, etc. So they should be happy about the recent Court of Appeal ruling.
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified