Police in Britain could get “Ghostbusters-style backpacks” firing targeted EMPs to stop stolen e-bikes. So the police say, at least. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.
You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.
There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.
A selection of 11 links for you. Streaming, uncrossed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
As Google AI search rolls out to more people, websites brace for carnage – The Washington Post
Gerrit De Vynck and Cat Zakrzewski:
»
As the tech giant gears up for Google I/O, its annual developer conference, this week, creators like [Easy Family Recipes website owner Kimber] Matherne are worried about the expanding reach of its new search tool that incorporates artificial intelligence. The product, dubbed “Search Generative Experience,” or SGE, directly answers queries with complex, multi-paragraph replies that push links to other websites further down the page, where they’re less likely to be seen.
The shift stands to shake the very foundations of the web.
The rollout threatens the survival of the millions of creators and publishers who rely on the service for traffic. Some experts argue the addition of AI will boost the tech giant’s already tight grip on the internet, ultimately ushering in a system where information is provided by just a handful of large companies.
“Their goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to find the information they want,” Matherne said. “But if you cut out the people who are the lifeblood of creating that information — that have the real human connection to it — then that’s a disservice to the world.”
Google calls its AI answers “overviews” but they often just paraphrase directly from websites. One search for how to fix a leaky toilet provided an AI answer with several tips, including tightening tank bolts. At the bottom of the answer, Google linked to The Spruce, a home improvement and gardening website owned by web publisher Dotdash Meredith, which also owns Investopedia and Travel + Leisure. Google’s AI tips lifted a phrase from The Spruce’s article word-for-word.
A spokesperson for Dotdash Meredith declined to comment.
The links Google provides are often half-covered, requiring a user to click to expand the box to see them all. It’s unclear which of the claims made by the AI come from which link.
«
Of course Google will have the answer to those worried about being pushed out of sight by SGE: buy an advert! It’ll be prominent above the SGE! And thus the conversion from “search engine which doesn’t take payment for placement” to “search engine where without payment you’re invisible, so you might as well pay”.
unique link to this extract
Facebook news referrals: no sign of the slowdown stopping • Press Gazette
Aisha Majid:
»
Facebook referral traffic continues to plummet for news publishers as Meta’s turn away from the news industry continues.
New data shared with Press Gazette from publisher analytics firm Chartbeat and digital intelligence platform Similarweb show just how steep that fall has been.
Aggregate Facebook traffic to a group of 792 news and media sites that have been tracked by the Chartbeat since 2018 shows that referrals to the sites have plunged by 58% in the last six years from 1.3bn in March 2018 to 561m last month. Traffic from Facebook fell by 50% in the last 12 months alone as the decline shows little sign of slowing.
As a share of total page views coming from external, search and social, Facebook referrals are now less than a quarter of their 2018 level, down from 30% in March 2018 to 7% in March 2024.
Changes to the Google search algorithm over the last 18 months have led to falling traffic for many news publishers, with matters compounded for many by the last series of updates rolled out in March.
The UK’s biggest commercial news publisher Reach has reported page views down by a third in the first three months of 2024.
«
Reach, in particular, is going to be in trouble: it’ heavily dependent on ad-driven page views for revenue. Meanwhile Facebook is turning into AI spam.
unique link to this extract
Google is building Gemini Nano AI right into Chrome • The Verge
Emma Roth:
»
Google is building its Gemini AI into Chrome on desktop. During its I/O event on Tuesday, Google announced that Chrome 126 will use Gemini Nano to power on-device AI features such as text generation.
Gemini Nano is the lightweight large language model Google introduced to the Pixel 8 Pro last year — and, later, the Pixel 8. To get Gemini Nano on Chrome, Google says it tweaked the model and optimized the browser to “load the model quickly.”
The integration will let you do things like generate product reviews, social media posts, and other blurbs directly within Chrome. Microsoft similarly added its AI assistant Copilot to Edge last year, letting you ask questions and summarize the information on your screen. Unlike Gemini Nano in Chrome, Copilot in Edge doesn’t run locally on your device.
Google also announced that it will make Gemini available in Chrome DevTools, which developers use to debug and tune their apps. Gemini can provide explanations for error messages as well as suggestions on how to fix coding issues.
«
AI everywhere, whether you want it or not. And what’s with “generate product reviews, social media posts, and other blurbs”? It makes me even less inclined to write product reviews.
unique link to this extract
Laughing, chatting, singing, GPT-4o is AI close to human, but watch out: it’s really not • The Guardian
Chris Stokel-Walker:
»
The smooth interactivity that OpenAI has laboured hard to enable does well to paper over the cracks of the underlying technology. When ChatGPT first elbowed its way noisily into our lives in November 2022, those who had been following the technology for decades pointed out that AI in its current form was little more than snazzy pattern-matching technology – but they were drowned out by the excited masses. The next step towards human-like interaction is only going to amplify the din.
That’s great news for OpenAI, a company already valued at more than $80bn, and with investment from the likes of Microsoft. Its CEO, Sam Altman, tweeted last week that GPT-4o “feels like magic to me”. It’s also good news for others in the AI space, who are capitalising on the ubiquity of the technology and layering it into every aspect of our lives. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint now come with generative AI tools folded into them. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is putting its AI chatbot assistant into its apps in many countries, much to some users’ chagrin.
But it’s less good for ordinary users. Less friction between asking an AI system to do something and it actually completing the task is good for ease of use, but it also helps us forget that we’re not interacting with sentient beings. We need to remember that, because AI is not infallible; it comes with biases and environmental issues, and reflects the interests of its makers. These pressing issues are explored in my book, and the experts I spoke to tell me they represent significant concerns for the future.
So try ChatGPT by all means, and play about with its voice and video interactions. But bear in mind its limitations, and that this thing isn’t intelligent, but it certainly is artificial, no matter how much it pretends not to be.
«
I went to China and drove a dozen electric cars. Western automakers are cooked • Inside EVs
Kevin Williams:
»
It would be naive to assume that China doesn’t have its finger on the scale for EV production. But believing that the success of China’s electrified vehicle industry is all the sole result of a brutish government forcing its citizens to buy its domestic products rings false in an almost childlike, sour-grapes way.
I spent a week in China for the Beijing Auto Show, the country’s biggest car industry event. As a guest of the Geely Group along with a few other international journalists, I drove more than a dozen vehicles, sat in many more, and had a lot of important conversations. The real story is far more nuanced than a simplistic “Us vs. Them”; a story of a China that has fraudulently over-invested in electric cars and is desperately seeking a space to dump their inferior products.
That narrative is false. Western automakers are cooked. And a lot of this is probably their damn fault.
…Chinese EVs are so good now—as is much of its urban infrastructure—that concerns about range or charging just aren’t as pertinent to the average consumer as they once were.
Zeekr representatives said that now, the brand must figure out ways to attract consumers that don’t involve range or charging speed. Hell, the whole Chinese car industry has the same conundrum. Thus, all of its domestic brands (and some foreign ones) have ingratiated themselves with Chinese tech companies, and the two have moved in lockstep to figure out just what that means.
«
It’s a long and detailed report, but Williams is uniformly impressed. Though there’s also this:
»
Beijing’s traffic was infinitely worse than Shanghai’s. Despite leaving the hotel at 8:30 a.m., it took us more than an hour and a half to drive just nine miles to the New China International Expo Center.
«
Next time take an e-bike? Meanwhile on Tuesday, Joe Biden announced 100% tariffs on imports to the US of Chinese EVs. What’s that going to do? Read the next link.
unique link to this extract
The Big Tariffs are here • Noahpinion
Noah Smith:
»
Tariffs are applied based on where final assembly for a good takes place. So if BYD or other Chinese carmakers put their factories in America — or in Mexico, or Canada, or any place other than China — they will still be able to sell EVs to the US without getting hit by Biden’s new tariff. This is already in progress…
Chinese-owned car factories in Mexico will be able to take advantage of Chinese supply chains (especially batteries), driving down their cost. They will make innovative Chinese designs, with those big screen interfaces that Kevin Williams loves so much. And they will incorporate whatever assembly-line innovations Chinese factories have discovered, driving costs down even further.
So Americans will still be able to get “Chinese” EVs, just not from Chinese factories. That’s fine. Mexico needs the jobs and income, American consumers could use some cheap futuristic cars, and American car companies could use the competition.
An open question is to what degree China’s government will decide to subsidize Chinese-owned factories in Mexico. Theoretically, China could deploy all the same policy tools that it uses to subsidize domestic production — tax credits, cheap loans, direct payments, etc. — to help Chinese companies pump out cheap cars from Mexican factories. Whether it’ll actually do that is another question entirely — China’s government may want to keep manufacturing jobs in the country, and thus be leery of subsidizing FDI [foreign direct investment]. So we’ll see.
But even without subsidies, Chinese companies do indeed make cheap good EVs, and Americans will still be able to get their hands on them under the new tariff regime.
This gets a lot harder, of course, if we also put tariffs on EVs made in Mexico, and other third countries. In fact, Trump is already threatening this…
«
Biden also put 50% tariffs on solar panels, medical products, semiconductors, steel and aluminium, and port cranes. Same principle probably applies, though it seems contrary to have legislation promoting measures to prevent climate change and then ban stuff that does that.
unique link to this extract
AirPods have way more features than you think [Video] • 9to5Mac
Fernando Silva:
»
I recently posted a video and article talking about some of my favorite Airpods Pro accessories. Readers seemed to enjoy some of the more unique accessories. However, one of the main comments was asking about hidden Airpod features that most users are unaware of. So that is exactly what we decided to do! Here are some of my favorite, lesser-known Airpods features!
«
I didn’t know about these. It’s not the simple ones like volume or alternative actions on different ears, but stuff like Custom EQ, “Live Listen” (free baby monitor!), and more.
unique link to this extract
Flood of fake science forces multiple journal closures • WSJ
Nidhi Subbaraman:
»
Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.
In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.
Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.
The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. “That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business,” said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. “This is a real threat.”
The sources of the fake science are “paper mills”—businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.
World-over, scientists are under pressure to publish in peer-reviewed journals—sometimes to win grants, other times as conditions for promotions. Researchers say this motivates people to cheat the system. Many journals charge a fee [$50 up to $8,500, depending] to authors to publish in them.
…For Wiley, which publishes more than 2,000 journals, the problem came to light two years ago, shortly after it paid nearly $300m for Hindawi, a company founded in Egypt in 1997 that included about 250 journals. In 2022, a little more than a year after the purchase, scientists online noticed peculiarities in dozens of studies from journals in the Hindawi family.
«
On Twitter, Nick Wise follows a lot of this stuff. In essence, Wiley poured $300m down the drain: Hindawi looks like a terrible purchase. Quite the failure of due diligence.
unique link to this extract
Amazon’s “Swag Store” sells neck fans to prevent workers from overheating • 404 Media
Jules Roscoe:
»
Amazon workers at some fulfillment centres can now purchase neck fans at an in-warehouse store using “swag bucks” earned for good behaviour to prevent them from overheating on the job.
The fans are stocked in Amazon’s in-warehouse “Swag Store.” Employees can earn Swag Bucks “for a variety of reasons to include strong safety performance, good teamwork, and more,” an Amazon spokesperson said. Employees who earn enough swag bucks can exchange their “money” for goods at the store. The swag bucks themselves can either be distributed electronically, on the app Amazon workers use to track their shifts, or physically as blue-green strips of paper with the Amazon logo, money bag emojis, and the Amazon mascot Peccy peeking out from behind the words “swag bucks.” The prizes at the Swag Store can range from Amazon backpacks and beanies to Keurig coffee machines and wireless earbuds.
But one recent post on the Amazon fulfilment centre subreddit shared a photo of an announcement about the new availability of neck fans, with an image of a neck fan resting on a pile of ice. “Neck fans are now available in the SWAG Store,” the poster reads. “Please note: These are NOT to be charged by plugging them into any computer and/or equipment. We are currently in the process of getting charging stations in the 1st and 3rd floor main break rooms.”
«
Fabulously dystopian to not allow the people who you think are at risk of conking out from overheating to charge the same devices. Compared to the colossal energy demands of those warehouses, it’s the tiniest drop in the biggest bucket. Unless the concern is that they’re cheap and might catch fire, in which case.. don’t sell them?
unique link to this extract
Illness took away an Rhode Island patient’s voice. AI created a replica • WBUR News
Matt O’Brien:
»
The voice Alexis “Lexi” Bogan had before last summer was exuberant.
She loved to belt out Taylor Swift and Zach Bryan ballads in the car. She laughed all the time — even while corralling misbehaving preschoolers or debating politics with friends over a backyard fire pit. In high school, she was a soprano in the chorus.
Then that voice was gone.
Doctors in August removed a life-threatening tumor lodged near the back of her brain. When the breathing tube came out a month later, Bogan had trouble swallowing and strained to say “hi” to her parents. Months of rehabilitation aided her recovery, but her speech is still impaired. Friends, strangers and her own family members struggle to understand what she is trying to tell them.
In April, the 21-year-old got her old voice back. Not the real one, but a voice clone generated by artificial intelligence that she can summon from a phone app. Trained on a 15-second time capsule of her teenage voice — sourced from a cooking demonstration video she recorded for a high school project — her synthetic but remarkably real-sounding AI voice can now say almost anything she wants.
…Bogan is one of the first people — the only one with her condition — who have been able to recreate a lost voice with OpenAI’s new Voice Engine. Some other AI providers, such as the startup ElevenLabs, have tested similar technology for people with speech impediments and loss — including a lawyer who now uses her voice clone in the courtroom.
«
This, at last (and at least?), is a positive use for this sort of fakery: faking yourself because you need to. What if our fake voice becomes like a driving licence that we need to use to prove we are who we say we are?
unique link to this extract
UK police could get Ghostbusters-style backpack devices to halt ebike getaways • The Guardian
Vikram Dodd:
»
Police officers in Britain could be armed with Ghostbusters-style devices that fire electromagnetic rays to shut down the engines of ebikes being used in a crime.
Gavin Stephens, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), said the weapon was in development and could be months away from being available, though it is expected to be longer than that.
He said it would be housed in a backpack, reminiscent of the equipment used in the Ghostbusters series of movies. It could tackle crime linked to newer vehicles such as electric bikes and electric scooters.
The device is being developed with the Defence Science and Technology Lab, which is overseen by the Ministry of Defence, alongside other technological innovations that British police are hoping to use. It would fire an electromagnetic pulse at a vehicle that an officer wants to stop because the rider is suspected of involvement in a crime.
The electromagnetic weapon works by tricking the engine into thinking it is overheating, which shuts down the engine and brings the vehicle to a stop. It requires a line of sight to work, Stephens said.
Stephens told a media briefing: “Basically, it interferes with the electric motor, to trick the electric motor into thinking it is overheating. It sends a signal to confuse the electric motor. All these electric motors apparently have an inbuilt safety system that if it thinks it’s overheating, it shuts down. At the minute, it’s like a ginormous backpack.”
The equipment was demonstrated to police leaders at the Farnborough technology show earlier this year. Stephens said: “They were also telling me it has the potential to be useful with normal combustion engine vehicles.”
«
Having checked the date, no, this isn’t an April Fool. They’re talking about a targeted EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapon. It sounds absolutely bonkers.. but some US Army researchers got a patent in 2019 for a muzzle attachment for M-14 rifles. So perhaps not impossible?
unique link to this extract
| • 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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 