Those travertine tiles in your bathroom might look nice, but what if they contain Neanderthal fossils? CC-licensed photo by Ken Doerr on Flickr.
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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.
Amazon ebooks: are the Mikkelsen twins running a scam? Here’s our investigation • Vox
Constance Grady:
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…to buy the book you want — to buy Kara Swisher’s Burn Book instead of Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist — you have to know what you’re looking for and pay a modicum of attention to your purchase.
Who wants to do that? Especially in a marketplace like Amazon, where we are trained to buy quickly and thoughtlessly with a single click and where writers have been trained to send their wares without even thinking about it because where else are you going to sell an ebook.
It’s so difficult for most authors to make a living from their writing that we sometimes lose track of how much money there is to be made from books, if only we could save costs on the laborious, time-consuming process of writing them.
The internet, though, has always been a safe harbour for those with plans to innovate that pesky writing part out of the actual book publishing. On the internet, it’s possible to copy text from one platform and paste it into another seamlessly, to share text files, to build vast databases of stolen books. If you wanted to design a place specifically to pirate and sleazily monetize books, it would be hard to do better than the internet as it has long existed.
Now, generative AI has made it possible to create cover images, outlines, and even text at the click of a button.
If, as they used to say, everyone has a book in them, AI has created a world where tech utopianists dream openly about excising the human part of writing a book — any amount of artistry or craft or even just sheer effort — and replacing it with machine-generated streams of text; as though putting in the labor of writing is a sucker’s game; as though caring whether or not what you’re reading is nonsense is only for elitists. The future is now, and it is filled with trash books that no one bothered to really write and that certainly no one wants to read.
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Sturgeon’s Law (90% of anything is crap) definitely applying here.
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December 2023: Humane AI’s pico laser projection: a $230m AI twist on an old scam • KGOnTech
Karl Guttag, writing in December 2023:
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Humane AI (Humane, hereafter) combines the mid-2010s failed concept of using a laser projector to project on the body with the early 2000s failed projector phone (something I wrote about in 2013), only they left out the phone’s flat panel display and have more feeble processing than a good smartphone. Rational people wonder what this does that a good smartphone can’t do much better, and you can count me as one of these people.
This blog has been written about various laser projector scams since the beginning of 2011. Scammers like to associate “laser” with near-mystic powers that violate all the laws of physics and rational thought. The other favorite word to deceive people is “Hologram” (when they are not). The new favorite buzzword is “AI .”
It looks like Humane started with an abysmally poor-quality laser projector in a phone-like device, and by saying it does “AI,” it is magically something new …laser scanning is a terrible way to generate a display image. In short, the scanning process is too slow and inaccurate to generate a high-resolution image, and the lasers can’t be controlled fast and accurately enough to give good color depth, not to mention the poor power efficiency.
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Seems to me this was the first and most damning review, and it hadn’t even come out yet. And he was really rude about it. But the collection of junk “laser projections onto your skin” down the ages also included in the post are eye-opening.
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Are AI mammograms worth the cost? • The New York Times
Knuvul Sheikh:
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Clinics around the country are starting to offer patients a new service: having their mammograms read not just by a radiologist, but also by an artificial intelligence model. The hospitals and companies that provide these tools tout their ability to speed the work of radiologists and detect cancer earlier than standard mammograms alone.
Currently, mammograms identify around 87% of breast cancers. They’re more likely to miss cancer in younger women and those with dense breasts. They sometimes lead to false positives that require more testing to rule out cancer, and can also turn up precancerous conditions that may never cause serious problems but nonetheless lead to treatment because it’s not possible to predict the risk of not treating them.
“It’s not a perfect science by any stretch,” said Dr. John Lewin, chief of breast imaging at Smilow Cancer Hospital and Yale Cancer Center.
…When an image is run through an AI program, the software highlights suspicious areas that require further attention from a radiologist. Some models can also score images to help busy radiologists prioritize which scans to look at first.
“I easily read 100 screening mammograms in a day,” said Dr. Carolyn Malone, a radiologist in the breast division at John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack University Medical Center. “I can start reading ones that the AI is saying are more complex.”
In one of the largest studies of AI mammography, a model used in Sweden improved breast cancer detection by 20%. In a trial involving 80,000 women, the software picked up six cases of cancer in every 1,000 women, while radiologists found five per 1,000 women.
…There is currently no billing code that radiologists can use to charge insurance providers for the technology. That means some centers may punt the cost to patients, charging between $40 to $100 out of pocket for an AI analysis. Other hospitals may absorb the cost and offer the additional analysis for free.
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How people are really using generative AI • Harvard Business Review
Marc Zao-Sanders:
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my company, Filtered Technologies, mined the web to find concrete examples of it being used in the wild. We’ve done this before, with Excel tips and productivity tips. We searched for specific use cases of individuals deriving benefit from LLMs, in business or life. It turns out the real treasure is buried deep in popular online forums (Quora, Reddit, etc.). Reddit, in particular, is a rich source of material for this study, as well as for the LLMs themselves; 10% of the company’s revenue is now generated by selling its user-generated content as training data to LLMs ahead of its mooted IPO.
My team and I filtered through tens of thousands of posts for our report. The volume was important. The detritus you’d expect from mostly anonymous online interactions was abundant: inanity, repetition, jibes, abuse and more. But there were plenty of diamonds in the rough too. By looking for these authentic, rich and often hilarious examples, use-case categories were unearthed, which eventually numbered well over 100. For each category we kept a tally of how many stories we found, and this became a major factor (along with some expert assessment) in ordering the list. We surface a selection of the authentic, positive, illuminating examples for your convenience and curiosity below.
There are many use cases for generative AI, spanning a vast number of areas of domestic and work life. The use of this technology is as wide-ranging as the problems we encounter in our lives. We divided the 100 categories we identified into six top-level themes, which give an immediate sense of what generative AI is being used for:
• Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting (23%)
• Content Creation & Editing (22%)
• Personal & Professional Support (17%)
• Learning & Education (15%)
• Creativity & Recreation (13%)
• Research, Analysis & Decision Making (10%)The themes provide an immediate demonstration the technology’s broad utility. It can be used for work and leisure. It can be useful for creative as well as technical endeavors. It can be used to help us think, learn, do, solve, create and enjoy.
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Odd: personally I look at the list and think that, knowing about chatbot hallucinations, I wouldn’t really use it for any of them. Perhaps it’s heavily reliant on your work. (Though I don’t find use for it in domestic situations either.)
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AI “deathbots” are helping people in China grieve • Rest of World
Viola Zhou:
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“Dad, were you suffering before you left?” Yancy Zhu texted.
“I was not in pain,” said the artificial intelligence bot, in a man’s voice that Zhu had chosen on chatbot platform Glow. “Even though I wasn’t able to watch you get married and have children, I will always remember you and love you.”
Zhu, then 28, was shocked by how much the avatar of her late father was able to speak to her heart — for a moment last year, she felt like she was speaking to her dad again. “The experience made up for what I missed out with my dad,” Zhu recently told Rest of World. She hopes that advancements in AI technology would enable her late father to attend her wedding in hologram form.
“Resurrecting” the dead has become a popular application of generative AI in China. It’s one element of an AI gold rush in the country, as entrepreneurs race to invent new consumer-facing apps on top of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. While LLMs could generate text messages, these businesses give the bots cloned voices and appearances that resemble those of the deceased.
It’s part of a global trend that has made it easier for people to create customized avatars featuring personas of their loved ones, celebrities, or themselves. Users around the world have shared stories of training ChatGPT to mimic their deceased family members. In Taiwan, a tech startup recently launched an app that can create AI avatars of deceased pets. US-based startup HereAfter AI offers to preserve users’ personas after death if they upload recordings of their memories.
…With the Chinese government keeping a tight control over religion and spirituality, AI avatars have offered those who have lost loved ones a new way to connect with the deceased.
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Subtle: you can squeeze religiosity down, but it will keep finding a way back to the surface.
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News publishers’ alliance calls on feds to investigate Google • Los Angeles Times
Wendy Lee and Taryn Luna:
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The News/Media Alliance, a journalism trade organization and advocacy group, on Tuesday asked federal government officials to investigate Google after the tech giant said it would limit links to California news outlets in its search results.
The alliance, which represents publishers in the news and magazine industry, said Google’s actions appear “to either be coercive or retaliatory, driven by Google’s opposition to a pending legislative measure in Sacramento.”
The proposed state measure in question, called the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), would require tech companies, including Google, who sell advertising alongside news content to pay news publishers.
In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice, News/Media Alliance Chief Executive Danielle Coffey called on regulators to “investigate whether Google is violating federal law in blocking or impeding their ability to find news that they rely upon for their business, their prosperity, their pleasure, their democracy and, sometimes, their lives.” The Los Angeles Times is a member of the News/Media Alliance.
Google called the claims in the News/Media Alliance’s letter “baseless” and the CJPA an “unworkable” bill that hurts “small local publishers to benefit large, out-of-state hedge funds.”
…News organizations in California say they are dealing with declining revenues, in part due to a digital ad market dominated by players like Google, and are struggling to build up their base of digital subscribers. Many news outlets including the LA Times, Business Insider and Vice have laid off staff to cut costs.
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This isn’t making Google pay for “content”, but for links, and speciically “news” links. It’s anti-web; a bad principle.
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How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile? • John Hawks
Hawks is a paleontologist:
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Gretchen shared with me an absolutely fascinating post on Reddit today: “Found a mandible in the travertin floor at my parents house”. The poster is a dentist and visited his parents house to see the new travertine they installed. It’s no surprise that he recognized something right away:
This travertine would get the notice of any anthropologist. Photo: Reddit user Kidipadeli75
A section cut at a slight angle through a very humanlike jaw! I’m working in South Africa currently and I showed the image to some of our fossil preparation specialists today. Everybody agreed it is pretty cool!The Reddit user who posted the story (Kidipadeli75) has followed up with some updates over the course of the day. The travertine was sourced in Turkey, and a close search of some of the other installed panels revealed some other interesting possible fossils, although none are as strikingly identifiable as the mandible. A number of professionals have reached out to offer assistance and I have no doubt that they will be able to learn a lot about the ancient person whose jaw ended up in this rock.
This naturally raises a broader question: How many other people have installed travertine with hominin fossils inside? …Consumers who buy travertine usually browse samples in a showroom to choose the type of rock, and they don’t see the actual panels or tile until installation. Tile or panels that are polished by machine and stacked in a workshop or factory for shipping are handled pretty quickly.
What this means is that there may be lots more hominin bones in people’s floors and showers.
Most will be hard to recognize. Random cross-sections of hominin bones are tough to make out from other kinds of fossils without a lot of training.«
Proposed FTC Order will prohibit telehealth firm Cerebral from using or disclosing sensitive data for advertising purposes, and require it to pay $7m • Federal Trade Commission
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Cerebral, Inc. has agreed to an order that will restrict how the company can use or disclose sensitive consumer data and require it to provide consumers with a simple way to cancel services to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the telehealth firm failed to secure and protect sensitive health data.
Under the proposed order, filed by the Department of Justice upon notification and referral from the FTC, Cerebral will also be required to pay more than $7m over charges that it disclosed consumers’ sensitive personal health information and other sensitive data to third parties for advertising purposes and failed to honor its easy cancellation promises. The order must be approved by the court before it can go into effect.
“As the Commission’s complaint lays out, Cerebral violated its customers’ privacy by revealing their most sensitive mental health conditions across the Internet and in the mail,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “To address this betrayal, the Commission is ordering a first-of-its-kind prohibition that bans Cerebral from using any health information for most advertising purposes.”
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For “most” advertising purposes, when it is being dinged with a fine this big? America’s lack of privacy continues to be exposed. The Markup news site reported on what was going on back in December 2022: a number of companies were sending the data to various big trackers.
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A random influx of DNA from a virus helped vertebrates become so stunningly successful • Scientific American
R. Douglas Fields:
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Charles Darwin proposed that evolution is driven by gradual variations in organisms that have a survival advantage in a changing environment. But University of Maryland evolutionary biologist Karen Carleton says that scientists have long grappled with the quandary that “evolution can happen abruptly, as described by Steven Jay Gould in [the theory of] punctuated equilibrium.” The question has always been: how does this happen?
A case in point is the sudden appearance of myelin, the multilayered sheath on nerve fibers that transformed the way neural impulses are conducted and turbocharged the transmission speed of these impulses. Myelin appears suddenly in vertebrates, animals with backbones that arose 500 million years ago. Not a trace of it is found in the ancestral line that preceded the arrival of vertebrates. A new study in the journal Cell provides an answer to this long-standing puzzle: the genetic instructions to make myelin were slipped into our vertebrate ancestor’s DNA by infection with a virus.
Myelin is arguably the most significant advance in nervous systems that ever occurred in the animal kingdom. The great boost in speed of information transmission over long distances in the body is largely responsible for the dramatic leap in cognitive ability in vertebrates, not to mention speed of movement and agility in dogs, dolphins and people, for example, when compared with invertebrates such as slugs, worms and starfish. Lacking myelin, neurons in invertebrates are clustered into groups (ganglia) situated near the body structures they control or that provide sensory input. There are ganglia next to every swimming leg in a shrimp’s tail, for example, but in vertebrates, neurons are massed together into one enormous central assembly, the brain. The concentration of billions of neurons into a brain enabled cognitive capabilities well beyond those of invertebrates.
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Retroviruses are the most remarkable aspects of our DNA, telling an amazing story of absorption. And that’s quite apart from the mitochondria, where our ancestral cells simply swallowed bacteria whole to make them work for us.
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Wrong couple divorced after computer error by law firm Vardag’s • BBC News
Jeremy Culley:
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A couple were divorced by mistake after a computer error at a family law firm.
A staff member at Vardag’s accidentally opened the file of a couple referred to in court papers as Mr and Mrs Williams, when trying to apply for a final divorce order for a different client.
Vardag’s applied three days later to rescind the order but judge Sir Andrew McFarlane dismissed the application. The firm’s head Ayesha Vardag said the judge’s decision effectively meant “the computer says no, you’re divorced”.
Court papers say that Mrs Williams applied for divorce in January 2023 following 21 years of marriage. The mistake was made by solicitors acting for Mrs Williams on 3 October last year on an online divorce portal operated by HM Courts and Tribunals Service. In his summary, Judge McFarlane noted that “with its now customary speed”, the system granted the order just 21 minutes later.
Vardag’s did not discover the error until 5 October, thinking the order had been made for another client, but then promptly applied for it to be rescinded.
The husband became aware of the situation only on 11 October, the same day Vardag’s wrote to his solicitors to explain the situation, court papers say. In the summary, Judge McFarlane, president of the High Court’s Family Division, said the issue arose against the background of “ongoing contested financial remedy proceedings”.
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What’s very unclear from the story is which Williams pairing actually wanted a divorce; or whether they all did, and it was hurried through by mistake for a pair who were still wrangling.
Of course, we only have Vardag’s word for it that this was a computer error; possibly the judge decided to treat the outputs as being from humans, since plenty of them should have looked over it before it was presented. (Though the Law Gazette portrays the same story from a completely different perspective, and suggests it was a mistake on a dropdown menu.)
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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 