Deadly or delicious (or both)? Facebook put an AI chatbot offering potentially lethal advice into a mushroom Group. CC-licensed photo by Aleksey Gnilenkov on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Uncapped. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
AI chatbot added to mushroom foraging Facebook Group immediately gives tips for cooking dangerous mushroom • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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An AI chatbot called “FungiFriend” was added to a popular mushroom identification Facebook group last week. It then told users there how to “sauté in butter” a potentially dangerous mushroom, signaling again the high level of risk that AI chatbots and tools pose to people who forage for mushrooms.
404 Media has previously reported on the prevalence and risk of AI tools intersecting with the mushroom foraging hobby. We reported on AI-generated mushroom foraging books on Amazon and the fact that Google image search has shown AI-generated images of mushrooms as top search results. On Tuesday, the FungiFriend AI chatbot to the Northeast Mushroom Identification & Discussion Facebook group, which has 13,500 members and is a place where beginner mushroom foragers often ask others for help identifying the mushrooms they have found in the wild. A moderator for the group said that the bot was automatically added by Meta and that “we are most certainly removing it from here.” Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The bot is personified as a bearded, psychedelic wizard. Meta recently began adding AI chatbots into specific groups, and has also created different character AIs.
Rick Claypool, research director for consumer safety group Public Citizen’s president’s office, told 404 Media about FungiFriend. Claypool has done important work about corporate capture of local and state governments, but is also an avid mushroom forager and has been documenting the risks of AI tools in mushroom foraging over the last few months.
Over the summer, he wrote a lengthy article in Fungi Magazine that noted “emerging AI technologies are being deployed to help beginner foragers identify edible wild mushrooms. Distinguishing edible mushrooms from toxic mushrooms in the wild is a high-risk activity that requires real-world skills that current AI systems cannot reliably emulate.”
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This is all a bit Darwinian. Are we sure that they haven’t achieved intelligence and are trying to wipe us out, quietly?
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Netflix served the Tyson vs. Paul fight to 60 million households • The Verge
Wes Davis:
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Netflix peaked at “65 million concurrent streams” during the boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul last night, according to Most Valuable Promotions, the promoter for the fight. Those streams went out to 60 million households globally, the group said in a press release shared with The Verge via email. That’s more than twice the traffic Netflix could see for its Christmas Day NFL stream this year, if everyone who watched last year streamed it.
The crush of people trying to watch Tyson vs. Paul seemed to be more than Netflix’s servers could easily handle, as the social web was awash with complaints about the quality of the stream, which many found to be muddy, or plagued with buffering and dropped connections. Downdetector recorded more than 100,000 complaints of Netflix streaming issues during the event, according to Bloomberg.
That’s also just a massive number of people streaming a single live event at the same time. Disney served 59 million concurrent streams of a World Cup cricket match through its Disney Plus Hotstar service last year. It hit similar numbers a few days earlier, and again in June this year.
Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone told employees that the company dealt with this “unprecedented scale” by prioritizing keeping the stream stable “for the majority of viewers,” according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
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When the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, 60 years ago, 73 million people watched. Now, the quality might not have been tip-top, but it was as good as they could offer at the time, and modern broadcast could reach that number in HD.
A roundabout way of saying that we seem to do two steps forward, two steps back. (Or vice-versa.) We now do live sports! To lots of people! Which we did before. (I remember pay-per-view Tyson fights years ago. Everything old is new again.)
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London bus crashes are the result of an unsafe model • FT
Camilla Cavendish, who met Tom Kearney, an American businessman who was hit by a London bus’s wing mirror and put into a coma (from which he recovered):
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The most recent data show that 86 people died or were badly injured in bus collisions in London between 10 December 2023 and 31 March 2024. Kearney’s analysis of TfL data suggests that around three people a day are hospitalised after bus safety incidents. That doesn’t feel good, even though it’s tiny in comparison to the 1.8bn annual passenger journeys. Compared with other world cities like New York and Paris the capital’s buses rank in the top quartile for financial efficiency but the bottom quartile for collisions per kilometre. And the number of collisions in London has increased in the past couple of years, despite buses travelling fewer miles.
Could this have anything to do with the way that bus contracts prioritise speed? Last week, hundreds of bus drivers marched to TfL headquarters to demand better working conditions and the right to report safety concerns “without fear of retribution from TfL or employers”. Drivers described the pressure of long shifts, few breaks and having to drive in sometimes blistering heat, all while being shouted at over a monitor by controllers who want them to make up the time to the next stop, and keep the right amount of distance between their bus and next. It’s not surprising that a third of bus drivers, before the pandemic, reported having had a “close call” from fatigue.
With the government about to export the London franchise model to other parts of the country, someone in Whitehall needs to take a look. Michael Liebreich, a former McKinsey consultant who sat on the TfL board for six years, believes that TfL’s contracting out model is “institutionally unsafe”. Bus drivers are under such pressure, he thinks, that some may break the speed limit and overtake cyclists dangerously.
I still wasn’t sure about this, until I met the families of more victims. Katrina Finnegan’s aunt Kathleen died earlier this year, after being hit by a bus at Victoria bus station. Trish Burr’s daughter Melissa also died in Victoria a few years earlier, after a driver accidentally hit the accelerator.
What shocked me was how badly the families were treated.
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Dreaming of snow this winter? Look up the forecast • Washington Post
Harry Stevens and Ben Noll:
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For Joseph Gordon, 83, a snowless season will further confirm his sense that the winters of his memory have been irretrievably lost. Four decades ago, Gordon moved to McLean, Virginia, where he raised his family. He remembers snowy days when he would pile his kids into a 10-foot toboggan or cross-country ski through acres of farmland where rows of houses now stand.
Gordon has not consulted a meteorological database, but his experience tells him McLean gets less snow than it used to. According to our analysis of 60 years of snowfall data, he’s right. “It’s so gradual,” Gordon said of the change in snowfall. “We’re like frogs in a pot of boiling water, and we don’t jump out until it’s too late.”
With the exception of part of the Northeast and a few patches elsewhere, the snowfall trend across the country has matched Northern Virginia’s, with less snow in the most recent three decades than in the three decades before that.
Over the past 60 years, as humans have added more than 2.3 trillion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the average global temperature has increased by about 2.1ºF (1.2ºC). The warming has contributed to less snow in the United States and elsewhere.
“The laws of thermodynamics are tough to beat,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist who has studied long-term snowfall trends. “As you warm temperatures up, you’re just going to get less snow. There’s just no way around that.”
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The accompanying map shows that barely anywhere in the US is going to see “more” snow; almost everywhere will get less. Unsurprising.
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Lucy Manning on how a sexually obscene phone call led to a two-year ordeal getting police to act • BBC News
Lucy Manning is a BBC journalist who received an obscene call – which she taped – and took it to the police:
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I was concerned about my personal safety: if this man knew my first name and number, did he know me? Had I met him? Was it someone I’d interviewed? Did he know where I lived?
He had an accent I didn’t recognise, maybe Midlands. I assumed it was in some way connected to the fact I was an on-air BBC journalist but I wasn’t sure. I dialled 999 to report the crime.
The following day I went to my local police station to give a statement and was asked to upload the taped recording onto the Metropolitan Police’s system.
I was naively hopeful they could use it to quickly trace the caller and arrest the man.
I’ve worked on too many stories of violence against women – including the disappearance and subsequent rape and murder of Sarah Everard.Police had failed to investigate Wayne Couzens for at least three indecent exposure offences before he murdered Sarah Everard. Experts say those offences may have been a “red flag” that someone could go onto more serious offending.
So I had two concerns: my own safety and making sure this man couldn’t go on to commit more serious sexual offences.
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The incredibly screwed-up way that things which should have happened did not happen ought to shame the police. But you know that instead of remaking the way in which cases are handled, they’ll just shrug.
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The X exodus: could Bluesky spike spark end of Elon Musk’s social media platform? • Sky News
Mickey Carroll:
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Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, The Guardian newspaper, and even the Clifton Suspension Bridge have joined swathes of people deserting Elon Musk’s social media site X.
Millions have instead joined Bluesky, which has a stronger focus on moderation, set up by former Twitter founder Jack Dorsey – who is now no longer affiliated with the social media platform – in 2019.
According to the official Bluesky account, a million people joined the platform in just one day this week, after Musk was given a position in Donald Trump’s government.
“The alignment of Mr Musk with president-elect Trump and his use of the platform to promote the interests of president-elect Trump is obviously driving out a lot of people,” says Adam Tinworth, a social media expert and digital journalism lecturer at City St George’s University.
…Jason Barnard, the chief executive of Kalicube, spent nine years gathering three billion different data points that Google uses to decide what is factual information.
He told Sky News that although X has a long-standing agreement with Google to allow the search engine to use X posts to help it understand the world, Google’s trust appears to be waning.
“Bluesky is 20 times smaller in terms of the number of people on the platform,” he says. “If you search for people [on Google], you will find Bluesky 10 times less often than you will find X.
“But,” he says, “it’s 10 times more important to Google today for factual information.”
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I think people like Bluesky perhaps a little more because they can create blocklists, and there will probably be APIs sooner. (It certainly needs better native Mac apps.) And shouldn’t it be called the Xodus?
That Google data point though is dramatic.
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Why do we put fluoride in water? • The Atlantic
Charles C. Mann, writing in 2020:
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Nonfluoridated nations such as Belgium, Luxembourg, and Denmark actually have better dental health by this measure than the United States, one of the world’s fluoridation champions. Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland tried fluoridation, abandoned it years later—and saw no rise in tooth decay. What’s going on?
One of the lesser-known advantages of government-run health-care systems, such as Britain’s National Health Service, is the fact that because taxpayers are funding everything, the government occasionally tries to determine whether the money is being spent usefully. In 1999, the government asked the NHS to “carry out an up-to-date expert scientific review of fluoride and health.” A research team based at the University of York evaluated every study of fluoridation it could find—about 3,200 of them. The team’s conclusion was, it said, “surprising.” Despite the long fight over fluoridation, few of the thousands of studies counted as “high-quality research.” The implication was that Britain had been tinkering with its water supply with little empirical support. Trevor Sheldon, the head of the York review’s advisory board, was blunt: “There’s really hardly any evidence” that fluoridation works, he told Newsweek. “And if anything there may be some evidence the other way.” These findings were respectfully ignored.
In 2015, the Cochrane organization waded into the debate. Founded in 1993, Cochrane is a London-based global network of about 30,000 medical researchers in multiple countries that provides systematic analyses of medical issues. The goal is to produce painstaking, rigorous assessments of what research has—and hasn’t—established about a given subject. Cochrane has a fiercely guarded reputation for impartiality and thoroughness. Its verdicts have global impact. Which may be why the pushback on its fluoridation work was so strong.
…The Cochrane group reported its work carefully. The evidence, it said, is poor and sparse, but what little there is “indicates” that the fluoridation of water reduces cavities in children. But, the group said, “these results are based predominantly on old studies”—from before 1975—“and may not be applicable today.” For adults, there is “insufficient evidence,” old or new, to determine whether fluoridation is effective. The report did not support or attack fluoridation; it only asked for more research.
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Well, now RFK Jr is going to remove it. Let the research begin!
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TikTok takes down 400k videos in Kenya over sexual content • Semafor
Martin Siele:
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TikTok is deleting more videos in Kenya for violating community guidelines, as the company looks to avoid government scrutiny over content moderation for sexually explicit content.
TikTok pulled down 360,000 videos in Kenya in the three months to June, according to its newly published Q2 enforcement report. It took down 296,000 videos in all of 2023 in Kenya. The videos removed in the three-month period accounted for 0.3% of videos uploaded in Kenya in that quarter.
The platform was compelled by Kenya’s government in April to share quarterly compliance reports because it faced a petition that threatened to see it banned in the country.
The proliferation of sexual content in particular on TikTok in Kenya fueled the push for stricter moderation from regulators concerned about Only Fans-style content. Videos featuring ethnic incitement and violence are also often pulled down for violating guidelines.
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A reminder that it’s not just the US where people get worked up over social media content.
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The Onion CEO explains Infowars purchase amid Alex Jones’s claims about auction • Politico via MSN
Ashleigh Fields:
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The Onion CEO Ben Collins confirmed that the publication purchased Alex Jones’s Infowars outlet in a Saturday series of posts on the social media platform Bluesky amid Jones’s claims of wrongdoing and illegal activity.
“I just wanted to give a quick update on The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars, which we can’t wait to relaunch as the dumbest website on the internet,” Collins wrote.
“The long and short of it: We won the auction and — you’re not going to believe this — the previous InfoWars folks aren’t taking it well.”
He shared that The Onion, a satirical news website, won the bid for Infowars on Thursday at Jones’s bankruptcy auction, along with the Connecticut Sandy Hook families of victims. Jones previously said the massacre was a “hoax.”
Jones was held liable for nearly $1.5bn in damages due to his false claims about the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. The families moved to liquidate his business and take over his social media accounts, which was granted by a judge in September.
Throughout their efforts to acquire Jones’s platforms, he has spread conspiracies about legal missteps in the process. He recently claimed that the auction for his Infowars site was changed from a “regular auction” to a “secret” auction two days before it occurred. He also said that higher bidders were prevented from submitting offers so that a lower bid could be accepted.
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For clarification of Friday’s link and its update. Alex Jones telling fibs? Perish the thought.
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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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