To preserve your privacy, lie about your birthday online. Almost always. CC-licensed photo by Daniel M. Hendricks on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Younger every day. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Website that posted deepfake AI porn of Taylor Swift has been sharing explicit images of celebrities for YEARS • Daily Mail Online
Lewis Pennock:
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The website which shared explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift has been posting faked pornographic photos of the singer and other celebrities for years, seemingly with impunity.
Celeb Jihad is believed to be the origin of recent graphic images which depict Swift at a Kansas City Chiefs game. The images, which were created using AI software, were shared by the website on January 15 under a headline titled: ‘Taylor Swift Chiefs Sex Scandal Caught On Camera’.
The images were later posted on X with Celeb Jihad’s watermark, triggering a massive backlash from Swift’s fans and others who likened the pictures to a form of sexual assault.
The scandal is the latest of many involving Celeb Jihad, which was created by its anonymous founder in 2008. Along with deepfakes – the name given to hyper-realistic fake content – of Swift and other stars, the website has also published droves of leaked explicit photos of other celebrities, including images that were hacked from their cellphones. Astonishingly, the site claims its content is ‘satire’ and states it is ‘not a pornographic website’.
Swift’s legal team previously issued a warning to Celeb Jihad in 2011 after it published a faked photo which depicted the singer topless. The picture appeared with the caption ‘Taylor Swift Topless Private Pic Leaked?’
At the time, her lawyers threatened to file a trademark-infringement suit and accused it of spreading ‘false pornographic images’ and ‘false news’. The website appears to have published hundreds, and potentially thousands, more faked images of Swift since it was started.
Celeb Jihad was also involved in several massive leaks of private photos hacked from celebrities’ cellphones, including iCloud accounts, in 2017. The website was one of several which published illicitly-obtained photos of celebrities including Miley Cyrus and Tiger Woods and his former girlfriend Lindsey Vonn. Vonn said the leak was an ‘outrageous and despicable invasion of privacy’.
Several of the celebrities threatened legal action against Celeb Jihad, which removed pictures of some of the stars including Vonn and Woods.
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Swift’s legal team surely has the resources to sue this site utterly into the ground, though that surely won’t stop the production of images. But now it’s come to wider notice, it’s going to be hard to stop a bandwagon looking for regulation. Non-consensual nudity is, as Ex-Twitter said, already illegal to post in many countries. The problem is the platforms. Ex-T blocked searches for Taylor Swift, which is a terrible sticking plaster on a gaping wound.
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Lie about your birthday 🎂 • The Markup
Sisi Wei:
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Getting presents on your birthday can be really fun.
So I can understand if, when companies have asked you for your date of birth (so they can send you something special on your special day!), you shrugged and thought, “eh, what’s the harm,” and handed your data over.
But your birth date, like your phone number (get a burner number), is personal information that scammers can use to steal your identity or target you for fraud. Think back: How many times have you been asked to verify your date of birth in serious situations, like when recovering your login from your bank, or getting your medical information from your doctor office?
Is getting free stuff on your birthday worth taking that risk? For me, the answer is no.
That’s why I lie about my birthday on the Internet.
Now, there’s an art to this, so here are some general rules and tips.
• I only lie about my birthday when it’s a company trying to use that data to get me to buy more stuff from them. Do not lie about your birthday to your doctor. Or your bank. Or when you’re trying to get your driver’s license. You get my point.
• If you want to receive these promotions at the same time as your birthday, pick a fake birthday close to your real one. For example, if my birthday was December 13, 1989, like Taylor Swift, I could pick the first of the month, December 1, 1989, as my fake birthday. Or December 25, if I wanted everything to come around Christmas. Most companies run their birthday promotions for the entire birthday month, so you can still decide to use their promos on your actual birthday.
• Go back into your existing retail accounts, remove your real birthday and submit a fake one.
• But don’t be a jerk about it. Companies are on the lookout for people who try to change their birthday multiple times per year and double or triple dip. Pick a fake birthday and don’t change it again.
• When you’re creating new retail accounts in the future, remember to use your fake birthday the first time around.
• Finally, when I’m at a restaurant that gives birthday discounts and the only person who sees my birthday is the staff member glancing at my ID, I don’t worry about it.«
Personally I share a birthday with Unix – 1 January 1970 – for the purposes of the internet.
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What’s behind the tech industry’s mass layoffs in 2024? • NPR
Bobbly Allyn:
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All of the major tech companies conducting another wave of layoffs this year are sitting atop mountains of cash and are wildly profitable, so the job-shedding is far from a matter of necessity or survival.
Then what is driving it?
“There is a herding effect in tech,” said Jeff Shulman, a professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, who follows the tech industry. “The layoffs seem to be helping their stock prices, so these companies see no reason to stop.”
Some smaller tech startups are running out of cash and facing fundraising struggles with the era of easy money now over, which has prompted workforce reductions. But experts say for most large and publicly-traded tech firms, the layoff trend this month is aimed at satisfying investors.
Shulman adds: “They’re getting away with it because everybody is doing it. And they’re getting away with it because now it’s the new normal,” he said. “Workers are more comfortable with it, stock investors are appreciating it, and so I think we’ll see it continue for some time.”
Interest rates, sitting around 5.5%, have risen substantially from the near-zero rates of the pandemic. And some tech companies are reshuffling staff to prioritize new investments in generative AI. But experts say those factors do not sufficiently explain this month’s layoff frenzy.
Whatever is fueling the workforce downsizing in tech, Wall Street has taken notice. The S&P 500 has notched multiple all-time highs this month, led by the so-called Magnificent Seven technology stocks. Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft all set new records, with Microsoft’s worth now exceeding $3 trillion.
And as Wall Street rallies on news of laid-off tech employees, more and more tech companies axe workers.
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I get the impression that Shulman is actually saying “search me, makes no sense at all.”
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Amazon drops $1.4bn deal to buy iRobot after EU veto reports • The Guardian
Dan Milmo:
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Amazon has abandoned its planned $1.4bn (£1.1bn) acquisition of the robot vacuum cleaner company iRobot, amid EU opposition to the deal.
The e-commerce company will pay a $94m break fee to iRobot, which immediately announced plans to axe 31% of its workforce – or 350 employees – and the departure of its chief executive.
The Wall Street Journal reported on 18 January that the EU’s executive arm was preparing to block the acquisition of the Roomba maker and had informed Amazon of its proposed view.
Amazon and iRobot said in a joint statement the takeover had “no path to regulatory approval in the European Union, preventing Amazon and iRobot from moving forward together”.
David Zapolsky, the Amazon general counsel, said: “Undue and disproportionate regulatory hurdles discourage entrepreneurs, who should be able to see acquisition as one path to success, and that hurts both consumers and competition – the very things that regulators say they’re trying to protect.”
The European Commission formally raised concerns about the deal in November, saying it could restrict competition in the robot vacuum cleaner market. The commission’s concerns included Amazon reducing the visibility of rival vacuum cleaners on its retail platform.
Amazon announced the deal in August 2022. The online retailer, which already owns the Alexa smart speaker and Ring doorbell, was pushing to expand its stable of smart home devices.
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I think it’s difficult to perceive the robot vacuum cleaner market. There’s iRobot, and Dyson (very slightly at the top end). I don’t know of any others. Re mergers: Amazon/iRobot don’t merge: job cuts. Microsoft/Activision do merge: job cuts. Not sure what the message is here.
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Who would be affected by a ban on disposable vapes? A population study in Great Britain • ScienceDirect
Sara Jackson et al:
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The UK Government is consulting on banning disposable vapes. This appears to have widespread support from practitioners, politicians, and the general public. Alongside concerns about disposables’ negative environmental impact, a key concern motivating calls for a ban is the rapid rise in vaping among young people-particularly young “never smokers”–that has been driven by these products.
Our data show that adults under the age of 25 and those who have never regularly smoked are more likely to use disposable e-cigarettes than refillable or pod devices, suggesting banning disposables would particularly impact these target groups. We estimate that there are approximately 316,000 people in Great Britain aged between 18 and 24 who have never regularly smoked and are currently using disposable e-cigarettes. This number likely reflects some people who were diverted from using other nicotine products (e.g. rechargeable e-cigarettes or cigarettes), as well as others who would not have otherwise vaped or smoked.
However, our data also show that a ban would disproportionately affect the ∼1.2 million current smokers who make up around half of the population of disposable users. This is a group that would benefit from harm reduction if they switched completely to e-cigarettes.
It would also affect ∼242,000 people who have recently switched completely from smoking to vaping and ∼502,000 people who quit smoking more than a year ago. In the event of a ban, it would be important to encourage current and ex-smokers who use disposables to switch to other (rechargeable) types of e-cigarettes rather than going back to just smoking tobacco. In particular, it may be recent ex-smokers who are most likely to relapse: if they chose disposables as a preferable quitting method over other types of e-cigarettes, they may be more vulnerable to relapse even if offered other e-cigarette devices.
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The research was sponsored by Cancer Research UK, and carried out by a team from UCL, SPECTRUM (not the Captain Scarlet one, I guess?) and KCL. Rishi Sunak is proposing to ban disposables, which would have big environmental benefits (the lithium in each is essentially lost and screws up landfill), but this shows that there would have to be other handholding too for ex-smokers. Though I can’t understand why they wouldn’t go for the product that’s cheaper over the long term – a rechargeable vape.
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Automating creativity • One Useful Thing
Ethan Mollick:
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Each of the three papers [links in original article – Overspill Ed] directly compares AI-powered creativity and human creative effort in controlled experiments. The first major paper is from my colleagues at Wharton. They staged an idea generation contest: pitting ChatGPT-4 against the students in a popular innovation class that has historically led to many startups. The researchers — Karan Girotra, Lennart Meincke, Christian Terwiesch, and Karl Ulrich — used human judges to assess idea quality, and found that ChatGPT-4 generated more, cheaper and better ideas than the students. Even more impressive, from a business perspective, was that the purchase intent from outside judges was higher for the AI-generated ideas as well! Of the 40 best ideas rated by the judges, 35 came from ChatGPT.
A second paper conducted a wide-ranging crowdsourcing contest, asking people to come up with business ideas based on reusing, recycling, or sharing products as part of the circular economy. The researchers (Léonard Boussioux, Jacqueline N. Lane, Miaomiao Zhang, Vladimir Jacimovic, and Karim R. Lakhani) then had judges rate those ideas, and compared them to the ones generated by GPT-4. The overall quality level of the AI and human-generated ideas were similar, but the AI was judged to be better on feasibility and impact, while the humans generated more novel ideas.
The final paper did something a bit different, focusing on creative writing ideas, rather than business ideas. The study by Anil R. Doshi and Oliver P. Hauser compared humans working alone to write short stories to humans who used AI to suggest 3-5 possible topics. Again, the AI proved helpful: humans with AI help created stories that were judged as significantly more novel and more interesting than those written by humans alone. There were, however, two interesting caveats. First, the most creative people were helped least by the AI, and AI ideas were generally judged to be more similar to each other than ideas generated by people. Though again, this was using AI purely for generating a small set of ideas, not for writing tasks.
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Seems AI is useful for brainstorming, as I understand this.
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He died in a tragic accident. Why did the internet say he was murdered? • The New York Times
Andrew Keh and Stuart Thompson:
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Faisal Shah Khan, an internet marketer in India, knew nothing about Mr. Sachman. But suddenly, enough people were searching for “Matteo Sachman” to push his name up a list of trending Google search topics that Mr. Khan was monitoring as part of a digital moneymaking scheme.
To Mr. Khan, the rising interest meant that an audience for online content that did not yet exist was growing rapidly before his eyes. He was poised to deliver it.
Mr. Khan, 30, is part of a booming cottage industry online, in which enterprising people take advantage of the void of information in the wake of a sudden tragedy to drive web traffic to hastily assembled articles and YouTube videos. These so-called “obituary pirates” seem to know about the deaths of everyday Americans long before they have been reported publicly anywhere else.
Mr. Khan — whose website, FSK Hub, was the first site identified by The New York Times to post anything about Mr. Sachman’s death — agreed to walk The Times through his process.
Mr. Khan has spent the past five years building an online advertising business with websites devoted to celebrity news and tech reviews. But he said obituaries make up a huge part of his content farm. Working from his living room in New Delhi, he closely monitors Google Trends for activity related to certain grim keywords: obituary, accident, death.
Google allows anyone to track usage trends for search terms in windows of time as narrow as the previous hour. When Mr. Khan searches those keywords on Google Trends, the company shows what else people who are searching for those terms are actively searching for in the moment: “Matteo Sachman subway accident. Matteo Sachman obituary. Matteo Sachman death.” These were the kinds of searches for truth that precipitated the flow of misinformation back to the people doing the searching.
Based on related searches, like “subway accident,” Mr. Khan could surmise how Mr. Sachman had died. Mr. Khan could then conduct a cursory search of his own around the internet for any biographical information, leading him to a LinkedIn page detailing Mr. Sachman’s work history. And finally, he could prompt an artificial intelligence tool called a large language model to create a short article.
“The article should be written in a conversational style, using personal pronouns, rhetorical questions and analogies to engage the reader,” read one prompt intended for a language model, which was accidentally published on FSK Hub.
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Soon enough Khan will be cut out of the loop. What then? Who will the instigators be? Who gets the money?
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How beloved indie blog ‘The Hairpin’ turned into an AI clickbait farm • WIRED
Kate Knibbs:
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In 2018, the indie women’s website The Hairpin stopped publishing, along with its sister site The Awl. This year, The Hairpin has been Frankensteined back into existence and stuffed with slapdash AI-generated articles designed to attract search engine traffic. (Sample headlines: “What Does It Mean When You Remember Your Dreams?” and “White Town’s ‘Your Woman’ Explained.”) Some original articles remain but have been reformatted in a strange way, and the authors’ bylines have been replaced by generic male names of people who do not appear to exist. One piece by writer Kelly Conaboy about celebrity teeth now appears under the name “James Nolen,” of whom I can’t find a single trace online.
This would be a nasty end for any independent media property. For The Hairpin, it’s especially repulsive, because the site was the antithesis of a content mill. It never courted a huge audience or chased trending topics—it was a writer-led website that found an audience by being experimental and intimate and odd. It served as a launching pad for bona fide stars like former New York Times reporter Jazmine Hughes, Bojack Horseman designer Lisa Hanawalt, and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino precisely because it valued nurturing fresh ideas—and letting people make jokes!—not optimizing revenue per click.
In an attempt to understand the future of media, I tracked down The Hairpin’s new owner—a Serbian DJ named Nebojša Vujinović Vujo. He says the site is just the latest title in his stable of over 2,000 websites and admits that the majority of the new posts on The Hairpin are indeed AI-generated. “I buy new websites almost every day,” he says.
Vujinović Vujo was attracted to The Hairpin because of its “great reputation and excellent backlinks,” which he values because it helps with Google rankings. “It’s a common thing on the internet today.” He plans to “add all previous authors” back to the website in the future. His first priority, though, is ginning up more new algorithm-generated content.
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Will Meta be the Android of XR, or the Blackberry? • UploadVR
David Heaney:
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there’s a huge problem with the idea that Meta will be the equivalent of Android in the XR (AKA spatial computing) market.
Android is a semi-open software platform. Any phone maker can integrate the open-source core of Android for free and without permission, and can integrate Google’s services and the Google Play Store by agreeing to certain compatibility criteria and preinstalling Google’s suite of apps.
The Meta Quest platform on the other hand is exclusive to Meta’s own devices. Its strategy is more akin to wanting to be a second Apple than what Google did with Android. That sounds more like BlackBerry than Android, and the market combination of iPhone and Android killed off BlackBerry.
Further, Google itself is seemingly preparing to be the Android of XR with… Android. Google is building an ‘Android XR’ platform to power Samsung’s upcoming headset. It will be able to bring the full Android phone and tablet app ecosystem over, something it refused for Meta, while Samsung will be able to leverage its expertise in hardware and get priority access to key components like OLED microdisplays from its subsidiaries. And while Samsung may have a period of exclusivity, that almost certainly (and reportedly) won’t last forever.
On the other hand, a major difference between the XR market and the smartphone market renders these analogies of limited use.
Meta sells its mainline Quest headsets at cost price, and sometimes even at a loss. Barring an unprecedented revenue-sharing deal that would eat heavily into Google’s profits, hardware companies like Samsung likely won’t want to compete directly with mainline Quests any time soon, especially the rumored Quest 3 Lite. Samsung’s headset will reportedly be priced somewhere around $2000.
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Note this implicitly accepts the Vision Pro as the iPhone of XR, which is possible – but it might be the iPad.
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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 