Pesticide runoff from golf courses into groundwater may be triggering Parkinson’s disease in people living nearby, research says. CC-licensed photo by Sherwood CC on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Off course. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Anthropic expert accused of using AI-fabricated source in copyright case • Reuters
Blake Brittain:
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A federal judge in San Jose, California, on Tuesday ordered artificial intelligence company Anthropic to respond to allegations that it submitted a court filing containing a “hallucination” created by AI as part of its defense against copyright claims by a group of music publishers.
A lawyer representing Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO in a lawsuit over Anthropic’s alleged misuse of their lyrics to train its chatbot Claude told U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen at a hearing that an Anthropic data scientist cited a nonexistent academic article to bolster the company’s argument in a dispute over evidence.
Van Keulen asked Anthropic to respond by Thursday to the accusation, which the company said appeared to be an inadvertent citation error. He rejected the music companies’ request to immediately question the expert but said the allegation presented “a very serious and grave issue,” and that there was “a world of difference between a missed citation and a hallucination generated by AI.”
Attorneys and spokespeople for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment following the hearing.
The music publishers’ lawsuit is one of several high-stakes disputes between copyright owners against tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work to train artificial-intelligence systems.
The expert’s filing cited an article from the journal American Statistician to argue for specific parameters for determining how often Claude reproduces copyrighted song lyrics, which Anthropic calls a “rare event.”
The music companies’ attorney, Matt Oppenheim of Oppenheim + Zebrak, said during the hearing that he confirmed with one of the supposed authors and the journal itself that the article did not exist. He called the citation a “complete fabrication.”
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Oopsie. There’s a lot of this going on: another nearly got past a judge in California.
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YouTube is finally doing something about all those fake movie trailers • Pocket Lint
Craig Donaldson:
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If you spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos , you’ve likely encountered a misleading trailer for a show or movie popping up in your recommendations , with AI-generated voiceovers and video clips.
Many of these trailers take clips from actual movie trailers and splice them together with AI-generated slop. As a result, sometimes viewers can be deceived into thinking the trailers are real, causing them to amass millions of views. A recent Deadline investigation revealed that a “handful of Hollywood studios” were asking YouTube to redirect some of the ad revenue from those trailers “in their direction.”
Deadline didn’t name any of the studios, but due to its reporting, YouTube suspended two prominent fake movie trailer channels, Screen Culture and KH Studio, from its partnership program, effectively cutting off any ad revenue they generate. Now, YouTube is taking further action against fake movie trailer channels in an effort to crackdown on the ad revenue these misleading, AI-generated trailers generate.
Following Deadline’s reporting, YouTube has acted against two additional fake movie trailer channels. It has now removed ad revenue from Screen Trailers and Royal Trailer, both of which are alternative accounts for Screen Culture and KH Studio.
One of the most recent AI-generated movie trailers from Screen Trailers is a misleading trailer for “Titanic 2.” Which is indeed, just as bonkers as it sounds. What are they going to do? Sink the ship again? You can watch the trailer above if you dare, but at least you can take solace in the fact that it’s no longer generating ad revenue for the creators.
The latest video from Royal Trailer is a fake AI-generated trailer for Toy Story 5, which might have the worst AI voiceover I have ever heard. However, in just three days since being uploaded, it has already amassed over 144,000 views, so many people have clicked on it.
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So they embedded the trailer in the story, and …actually, the trailer is pretty clever: it has a premise (the toys seek to overthrow gadgets) and the visual style is extremely Pixar Toy Story. On the infinite monkey principle, isn’t it worth just letting them keep at it?
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How can traditional British television survive the US streamers? • BBC News
Katie Razzall is the BBC’s culture and media editor:
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Just before Christmas, in a private dining room in the upmarket Charlotte Street Hotel in the heart of London’s Fitzrovia area, the BBC’s director general gathered some of the UK’s leading TV creatives and executives for lunch. As they ate, surrounded by kaleidoscopic-patterned wallpaper and giant artworks, they were also chewing over the future survival of their own industry.
As solutions were thrown around to what many see as an acute funding crisis in the age of global streaming, one of the invitees suggested, in passing, that BBC Studios (the corporation’s commercial content-producing arm) could merge with Channel 4 to create a bigger, more powerful force to compete with the likes of Disney Plus, Netflix and Amazon.
As another diner knocked down the idea, I’m told that Tim Davie, the BBC’s DG, asked why it was so ridiculous.…Sir Peter Bazalgette, the former Chairman of ITV, told me that what he termed the current “generous spread” of British broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) will need some consolidation or, at the very least, more cooperation in future.
“We’re in danger of having no public service broadcasting within a decade, certainly within 20 years,” he says. “We don’t have a strategy for their survival. It’s that serious. The regulators need to start thinking about it. Mergers may well be part of the answer. There should be fewer companies in the future.”
Lord Vaizey, who was Culture Minister under David Cameron, put it baldly. “ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 should merge. “The UK only has room for two domestic broadcasters.”
Others, however, argue that distinctiveness is good for viewers. Channel 5 President Sarah Rose told me she “couldn’t disagree with Ed Vaizey more” – calling it a “Doomsday prophecy”.
…the days of turning on your TV and finding an electronic programme guide listing channels – with BBC1 and BBC2 at the top, then ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 – are disappearing. The proposed date for the dawn of a new era is 2035; the end of traditional terrestrial TV as we know it.
When the increasingly expensive contracts to provide broadcast channels and digital terrestrial services like Freeview come to an end, the UK’s broadcasters are likely to pivot to offering digital-only video on demand. (However this won’t happen without a campaign to ensure older people are protected, as well as rural and low-income households who may not have high quality internet access.)
But if the aerials are turned off in 2035, is this the moment TV as we know it changes forever? If it becomes a battle between online-only British streamers and their better-funded US rivals, can the Brits survive? And, crucially, what will audiences be watching?
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Golf course proximity linked to higher Parkinson’s disease risk • Medical Xpress
Justin Jackson:
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Barrow Neurological Institute and Mayo Clinic-led researchers report an association between living near golf courses and increased Parkinson’s disease (PD) risk in a study published in JAMA Network Open.
Residents within three miles of a golf course demonstrated nearly triple the odds of having PD, with the greatest risk identified among those in water service areas with a golf course situated in regions susceptible to groundwater contamination.
Environmental risk factors, including pesticide exposure, have been identified as contributors to PD risk. Golf courses in the United States are treated with pesticides at levels up to 15 times higher than those in Europe, raising concerns about potential environmental contamination. Earlier reports have proposed that proximity to golf courses may increase PD risk through groundwater and drinking water contamination.
In the study, “Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease,” researchers conducted a population-based case-control study to assess the relationship between proximity to golf courses and PD risk.
The cohort included 419 incident PD cases and 5,113 matched controls identified through the Rochester Epidemiology Project, a comprehensive medical records system covering a 27-county region in southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin from 1991 to 2015.
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So it’s because of pesticide runoff into groundwater. Wonder how that’s going to affect real estate prices once word gets around. If I’m reading the paper correctly, five years is sufficient time to increase the risk.
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I quit Google search to use alternatives. It was surprisingly easy • The Washington Post
Shira Ovide:
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Last month, I challenged myself, and you, to try giving up Google search for two weeks.
This was inspired by academic researchers who bribed people to use Microsoft’s Bing for 14 days and found some of them wanted to keep using it.
The researchers concluded that because we rarely try alternatives to Google search, we have little experience to challenge our belief that Google search is superior. Giving another search option a shot could significantly dent, they said, the 90% of web searches we do with Google.
So that’s what I tried, minus the bribery. I switched the search engine on my work computer’s browser from Google to DuckDuckGo on April 22. (I included how-to instructionshow-to instructions.)
I’ve done more than 300 DuckDuckGo searches since then, including “beyonce ice bucket challenge” and “gestation period of a llama.” The first was for my job. The second one — I just got curious about llama pregnancy.
I didn’t do a fancy analysis into whether my search results were better with Google or DuckDuckGo, whose technology is partly powered by Bing. The researchers found our assessment of search quality is based on vibes. And the vibes with DuckDuckGo are perfectly fine.
Many dozens of readers told me about their own satisfaction with non-Google searches. “Most people, as you’ve pointed out, just mindlessly go to Google,” Claire Lea of Tipp City, Ohio, wrote in an email. “I’ll mindlessly stick with Bing.”
The ease of leaving Google search is oddly good news for the company as it fights claims that it cheated to dominate. “Your experiment confirms what we’ve said all along – it’s easy to find and use the search engine of your choice,” a Google spokeswoman said.
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Said while silently weeping, perhaps. Once the Washington Post is talking about this, everyone’s talking about it.
People who are frustrated by the AI junk and adverts splurged all over Google’s once-tidy search engine results page have the power to change it right there. And search results really don’t vary that much between search engines. Google might index some of the more arcane parts of web forums better and rank them higher, but for the most part, you won’t notice.
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Alphabet analyst says ‘complete breakup’ needed for gains • Bloomberg via Financial Post
Ryan Vlastelica:
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D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria is calling for a “complete breakup” of Alphabet Inc., saying such a move is the best way to unleash shareholder value.
“The only way forward for Alphabet is a complete breakup that would allow investors to own the business they actually want,” he wrote, adding that valuing the company on a sum-of-the-parts basis “only works if the company is willing to take action.” Luria holds a neutral rating on the stock but said it would be his top megacap pick if Alphabet pursued a breakup.
The stock was down 7.5% over the past year on Tuesday, compared with an gain of more than 15% for the Nasdaq 100 Index.
…Luria sees AI competition as a persistent headwind facing the company, limiting the market’s ability to fully value Alphabet’s other notable businesses, including YouTube, Waymo, and its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) chips. Alphabet’s myriad businesses include “the top competitors” to such varied Wall Street favourites as Netflix Inc. and advertising-technology company Trade Desk Inc., he wrote, along with both Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in cloud computing, and both Uber Technologies Inc. and Tesla Inc. in autonomous driving.
“By keeping the conglomerate structure, management is dooming all of its businesses to the 16x Search multiple,” he wrote. “Until management acts in the interest of shareholders, the entire business will trade at 16x earnings, which assigns zero value to Waymo and TPU, and severely undervalues YouTube, Cloud and Network.”
Luria previously estimated that a company comprised of Alphabet’s TPU business and its DeepMind AI research lab could be worth as much as $700bn if traded separately. Waymo, the self-driving unit, was valued at more than $45bn in October.
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OK but Alphabet is valued at $2 trillion right now. Then again, what would YouTube be worth alone? Even without the fake movie trailers?
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The Everything drugs • The Works in Progress Newsletter
Works in Progress:
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Most drugs get approved to do one thing. In rare cases, drugs get multiple indications, allowing their manufacturers to advertise them as treatments for a range of conditions. Sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, also called flozins, began as diabetes drugs.
Surprisingly, they turned out to also be very effective at improving heart health. Then they were discovered to slow the progression of chronic kidney disease, one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. Preliminary evidence indicates that they show promise in helping several other conditions, but no one knows exactly how they achieve this yet. Could SGLT2 inhibitors be a new medical Swiss Army knife?
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This is truly an amazing time in medical history. Perhaps not since the discovery of antibiotics have so many remarkable drugs been coming on to the market. These ones: cardiac, kidney, respiratory, dementia.. it’s astonishing.
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September 2014: Wada brings in ban on xenon and argon, but has no test • BBC News
Matt McGrath, in September 2014:
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Doping experts have yet to find an effective test for athletes using xenon and argon, despite introducing a ban on the gases’ use by sports stars.
The new ban has been ordered by the World Anti-Doping Agency, external (Wada), which runs drug testing across many sports. It follows concerns that athletes were breathing these so-called noble gases to encourage the growth of red blood cells that boost stamina.
But despite being piloted, a valid test is not yet ready, the agency says.
The idea of doping with gases more usually associated with arc welding, neon light bulbs and anaesthesia may seem bizarre, but Wada believes there is enough evidence of their enhancement potential to ban them.
Media reports earlier this year, external indicated that athletes in Russia have been using the gases for years as a means of boosting their stamina ahead of international competitions. Indeed the company that developed techniques to help athletes prepare using xenon, has a “badge of honour, external” on its website from the Russian Olympic Committee for “the organisation and conduct of inhalation remediation”.
Earlier this year Wada’s executive committee decided to ban these two named gases by adding them to the prohibited list from this month. “We had serious information that xenon was being used,” Wada’s science director Dr Olivier Rabin told BBC News. “We believe it has been used in the preparation for some major events.”
Now that xenon and argon are banned, the agency needs to have an effective test for the gases.
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Not to worry: Wada verified a test later that year. That means that the men looking to climb Everest (noted yesterday) and aiming to speed up their acclimatisation by huffing xenon wouldn’t pass a doping test.
But they’ll probably be satisfied with surviving. (Thanks Wendy G for the pointer.)
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Instagram’s algorithm recommended minors to putative paedophiles • Big Tech On Trial
Brendan Benedict is reporting on the FTC’s attempt to win an antitrust trial against Meta over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, which is turning up all sorts of old and embarrassing emails and slide decks:
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Why was there a pressing need for more staffing on Instagram, even years after the acquisition [by, then, Facebook] closed? We saw one reason raised by Instagram head Adam Mosseri:
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“Harmful behavior (e.g. grooming especially) . . . this really worries me given . . . IG’s younger audience. I bet we’ll find we have work to do there.”
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…Meta did have more work to do on “child grooming,” as we saw in a June 2019 deck titled, “Inappropriate Interactions with Children on Instagram.” An early page called out that “IG recommended a minor through top suggested to an account engaged in groomer-esque behavior.” Grooming refers generally to the tactics a child predator might use to gain trust with potential victims to sexually abuse them.
Subsequent pages gave some broader data: “27% of all follow recommendations to groomers were minors.” There’s a lot we don’t know about this statement: how did Meta track accounts that were “groomers” or “engaged in groomer-esque behavior”? And why were those accounts allowed at all? How did they generate that statistic? And it’s important to caveat as well that perhaps Meta didn’t know that any potential groomers were actual criminals. But by any measure, the headline is troubling.
There was more data than that: 33% of all Instagram comments reported to Meta as inappropriate were reported by minors, the deck said. Of the comments reported by minors, more than half were left by an adult. “Overall IG: 7% of all follow recommendations to adults were minors,” the deck concluded.
The presentation also noted that during a “3-month period”—presumably in 2019—2 million minors were recommended by Instagram’s algorithm for groomers to follow. 22% of those recommendations resulted in a follow request from a groomer to a minor.
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The “how did they know they were a groomer?” question obviously arises, but the numbers here are very scary.
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Slop farmer boasts about how he uses AI to flood social media with garbage to trick older women • Futurism
Maggie Harrison Dupré:
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[Jamie] Cunningham is one of many sloperators using AI to flood social media with AI content to make money.
The process goes like this. Cunningham publishes large numbers of AI-generated articles to websites helmed by made-up bloggers, with AI-generated headshots, purporting to be experts in topics ranging from houseplants and recipes to DIY holiday crafts and nature scenes. Then he posts AI-generated images linking back to those sites on social, with Cunningham claiming he’s able to rake in cash — not by actually putting time and energy into photographing any actual home gardening, or drafting and testing new recipes, but by using AI to quickly and cheaply imitate traditional content creators’ final product.
Evidence of such zombie tactics employed by Cunningham and others are evident on his preferred platforms, Pinterest and Facebook, where users are increasingly made to wade through swamps of parasitic AI slop.
As Futurism reported earlier this year, Pinterest is facing a pervasive influx of AI-generated content masquerading as the real thing. The torrent of AI slop on Facebook is well-documented as well — last year, an in-depth 404 Media investigation revealed that AI slop farmers around the world had figured out how to use AI to generate engagement-bait imagery designed to earn cash by exploiting Facebook’s since-shuttered Performance Bonus program.
We highlighted Cunningham in our previous reporting about Pinterest. He’s an avid YouTuber, and we were struck by his candor as he publicly shared the sordid details of his slop farming process, which frequently includes copying the work of his competitors — real bloggers and online creators who say the AI influx on Pinterest, Facebook, and other platforms has had a destructive impact on their businesses.
“Across the board, like across the board, this is something that is talked about in blogging groups all the time, because it is devastating all of our businesses,” Rachel Farnsworth, a veteran food blogger of the website The Stay at Home Chef, told Futurism of the impact that schemes like Cunningham’s have had on her industry.
“It’s put a ton of people out of business,” she added.
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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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