The rise of the AI obituary raises the question of whether another element of human effort is going to vanish in the face of chatbot. CC-licensed photo by K P on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Nice round number. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Russia is quietly churning out fake content posing as US news • POLITICO
Dana Nickel:
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A pro-Russian propaganda group is taking advantage of high-profile news events to spread disinformation, and it’s spoofing reputable organizations — including news outlets, nonprofits and government agencies — to do so.
According to misinformation tracker NewsGuard, the campaign — which has been tracked by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center as Storm-1679 since at least 2022 — takes advantage of high-profile events to pump out fabricated content from various publications, including ABC News, BBC and most recently POLITICO.
This year, the group has focused on flooding the internet with fake content surrounding the German SNAP elections and the upcoming Moldovan parliamentary vote. The campaign also sought to plant false narratives around the war in Ukraine ahead of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday.
McKenzie Sadeghi, AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, said in an interview that since early 2024, the group has been publishing “pro-Kremlin content en masse in the form of videos” mimicking these organizations.
“If even just one or a few of their fake videos go viral per year, that makes all of the other videos worth it,” she said.
While online Russian influence operations have existed for many years, security experts say artificial intelligence is making it harder for people to discern what’s real.«
AI is all over the place and people absolutely can’t tell the difference. Can’t tell the difference in writing, can’t distinguish it in photos, and soon video and audio will follow. Is this how a culture or a civilisation loses its mind?
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YouTube secretly used AI to edit people’s videos. The results could bend reality • BBC Future
Thomas Germain:
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Rick Beato’s face just didn’t look right. “I was like ‘man, my hair looks strange’, he says. “And the closer I looked it almost seemed like I was wearing makeup.” Beato runs a YouTube channel with over five million subscribers, where he’s made nearly 2,000 videos exploring the world of music. Something seemed off in one of his recent posts, but he could barely tell the difference. “I thought, ‘am just I imagining things?'”
It turns out, he wasn’t. In recent months, YouTube has secretly used artificial intelligence (AI) to tweak people’s videos without letting them know or asking permission. Wrinkles in shirts seem more defined. Skin is sharper in some places and smoother in others. Pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp. These changes are small, barely visible without a side-by-side comparison. Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling.
There’s a larger trend at play. A growing share of reality is pre-processed by AI before it reaches us. Eventually, the question won’t be whether you can tell the difference, but whether it’s eroding our ties to the world around us.
“The more I looked at it, the more upset I got,” says Rhett Shull, another popular music YouTuber. Shull, a friend of Beato’s, started looking into his own posts and spotted the same strange artefacts. He posted a video on the subject that’s racked up over 500,000 views.
“If I wanted this terrible over-sharpening I would have done it myself. But the bigger thing is it looks AI-generated. I think that deeply misrepresents me and what I do and my voice on the internet. It could potentially erode the trust I have with my audience in a small way. It just bothers me.”
…Now, after months of rumors in comment sections, the company has finally confirmed it is altering a limited number of videos on YouTube Shorts, the app’s short-form video feature.
“We’re running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses traditional machine learning technology to unblur, denoise and improve clarity in videos during processing (similar to what a modern smartphone does when you record a video),” said Rene Ritchie, YouTube’s head of editorial and creator liaison, in a post on X.
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The trajectory is that unless it’s calamitous and people watch fewer of them (the only metric Google would care about – complaints won’t get a hearing), then this will become standard and, after a few months of it, people will shrug and accept it. Because where else are they going to go?
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Meta to unveil Hypernova smart glasses with display, wristband at Connect • CNBC
Salvador Rodriguez,Lora Kolodny and Jonathan Vanian:
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Meta is planning to use its annual Connect conference next month to announce a deeper push into smart glasses, including the launch of the company’s first consumer-ready glasses with a display, CNBC has learned.
That’s one of the two new devices Meta is planning to unveil at the event, according to people familiar with the matter. The company will also launch its first wristband that will allow users to control the glasses with hand gestures, the people said.
Connect is a two-day conference for developers focused on virtual reality, AR and the metaverse. It was originally called Oculus Connect and obtained its current moniker after Facebook changed its parent company name to Meta in 2021.
The glasses are internally codenamed Hypernova and will include a small digital display in the right lens of the device, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.
The device is expected to cost about $800 and will be sold in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the people said.
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This is surely going to be the next big category, and within a year or so analysts will be looking for signs that Apple is developing something in this space, and marking it down if it isn’t.
If you don’t believe me that smart glasses have a huge potential market, count the number of people you see tomorrow walking along a pavement staring into their phones. Every one would buy smart glasses.
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Hackers who exposed North Korean government hacker explain why they did it • TechCrunch
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:
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Earlier this year, two hackers broke into a computer and soon realized the significance of what this machine was. As it turned out, they had landed on the computer of a hacker who allegedly works for the North Korean government.
The two hackers decided to keep digging and found evidence that they say linked the hacker to cyberespionage operations carried out by North Korea, exploits and hacking tools, and infrastructure used in those operations.
Saber, one of the hackers involved, told TechCrunch that they had access to the North Korean government worker’s computer for around four months, but as soon as they understood what data they got access to, they realized they eventually had to leak it and expose what they had discovered.“These nation-state hackers are hacking for all the wrong reasons. I hope more of them will get exposed; they deserve to be,” said Saber, who spoke to TechCrunch after he and cyb0rg published an article in the legendary hacking e-zine Phrack, disclosing details of their findings.
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The article has lots of deep hacker stuff – shall we shade past the part where these guys broke into someone’s computer, and then realised it was a state-sponsored hacker’s? – including this:
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Kimsuky [the North Korean hacking group], you are not a hacker. You are driven by financial greed, to enrich your leaders, and to fulfill their political agenda. You steal from others and favour your own. You value yourself above the others: You are morally perverted.
I am a Hacker and I am the opposite to all that you are. In my realm, we are all alike. We exist without skin color, without nationality, and without political agenda. We are slaves to nobody.
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Nice to believe, but not sure about the lack of political agenda.
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The rise of AI tools that write about you when you die • The Washington Post
Drew Harwell:
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Funeral directors are increasingly asking the relatives of the deceased whether they would prefer for AI to write the obituary, rather than take on the task themselves. Josh McQueen, the vice president of marketing and product for the funeral-home management software Passare, said its AI tool has written tens of thousands of obituaries nationwide in the past few years.
Tech start-ups are also working to build obituary generators that are available to everyone in their time of grief, for a small fee. Sonali George, the founder of one such tool called CelebrateAlly, said the AI functions as an “enabler for human connection” because it can help people skip past an overwhelming task and still end up with something that can bring their family together.
“Imagine for the person who just died, [wouldn’t] that person want their best friend to say a heartfelt tribute that makes everybody laugh, brings out the best, with AI?” she said. “If you had the tool to do ‘25 reasons why I love you, mom,’” she added, “wouldn’t it still mean something, even if it was written by a machine?”
…To McQueen, the funeral software executive, the technology’s value is obvious. For a human, the task of elegantly summing up a loved one’s life — while also navigating the sadness and logistics of their death — can be stressful and emotionally draining. For a large language model, it’s all just text.
“You’re given this assignment to write 500 words, and you want to be loving and profound, but you’re dealing with this grief, so you sit at your computer and you’re paralyzed,” he said. “If this can help get some of your thoughts and ideas down on paper … that to me is a win.”
Thousands of funeral homes now use the company’s software, he said, and many of them let families access the AI tool through their online funeral portals. Beyond clearing writer’s block, he said, the AI is unmatched in being able to quickly adjust an obituary’s length or tone.
“Do you want it to be more celebratory? Traditional? Poetic? Humorous?” McQueen said. “It provides just a new flavor on it, if you will.”
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I’m absolutely certain that the next story coming up in this sequence is preachers getting chatbots to write sermons.
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Our response to Mississippi’s Age Assurance Law • Bluesky
“The Bluesky team”:
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Mississippi’s HB1126 requires platforms to implement age verification for all users before they can access services like Bluesky. That means, under the law, we would need to verify every user’s age and obtain parental consent for anyone under 18. The potential penalties for non-compliance are substantial — up to $10,000 per user. Building the required verification systems, parental consent workflows, and compliance infrastructure would require significant resources that our small team is currently unable to spare as we invest in developing safety tools and features for our global community, particularly given the law’s broad scope and privacy implications.
While we share the goal of protecting young people online, we have concerns about this law’s implementation:
• Broad scope: The law requires age verification for all users, not just those accessing age-restricted content, which affects the ability of everyone in Mississippi to use Bluesky
• Barriers to innovation: The compliance requirements disadvantage newer and smaller platforms like Bluesky, which do not have the luxury of big teams to build the necessary tooling. The law makes it harder for people to engage in free expression and chills the opportunity to communicate in new ways
• Privacy implications: The law requires collecting and storing sensitive personal information from all users, including detailed tracking of minors.Starting [from last Friday], if you access Bluesky from a Mississippi IP address, you’ll see a message explaining why the app isn’t available. This block will remain in place while the courts decide whether the law will stand.
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Lucky Mississippi! Meanwhile if you want to read about the various verification methods in use, there’s this WSJ article. (Thanks Gregory B for the WSJ one.)
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Samsung reportedly looking to partner with Intel in the chip industry to leverage President Trump’s ‘personal support’ for Team Blue • WCCftech
Muhammad Zuhair:
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according to Taiwan Economic Daily, citing Korean sources, it is reported that Samsung is looking for a ‘strategic partnership’ with US chipmakers such as Intel, in a bid to secure a better trade deal with the Trump administration.
It is claimed that Samsung is exploring partnerships with American companies to ‘please’ the Trump administration and ensure that its regional operations aren’t affected by hefty tariffs. It is speculated that if Samsung manages to strike a deal with Intel, it would allow the Korean giant to see an elevated status in the eyes of President Trump, mainly since Intel has become an important factor for the current US administration. While details around how the partnership could pan out are uncertain, we might know how it could turn out.
In a previous report, we discussed how Intel is abandoning its pursuit of glass substrates, and in the midst of it, several engineers from the firm are moving to Samsung’s Electro-Mechanics division in the US, since the Korean giant sees glass substrates as an essential part of its prospects. More importantly, since Intel is looking to license its glass substrate technology, Samsung could also play a role in this by producing end solutions for Team Blue, ultimately allowing both firms to leverage the packaging technology.
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Nobody could accuse Samsung of not spotting an opportunity. Chapeaux.
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The US takes a 10% stake in Intel as part of Trump’s big tech push • CNN Business
Clare Duffy and Lisa Eadicicco:
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The United States government is making an $8.9bn investment in Intel common stock, giving the Trump administration a roughly 10% stake in the struggling chipmaker, Intel and the president announced on Friday.
“It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday.
The announcement came after Trump said earlier in the Oval Office on Friday that the CEO of Intel had agreed to such a deal, adding that he hopes to strike similar deals with other companies in the future.
“I said, I think you should pay us 10% of your company,” Trump said of his conversations with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. “And they said yes.”
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Intel says there won’t be government representation on the board – let’s see how long that lasts! – but the obvious reason for this, which Trump probably didn’t know about two weeks ago, is that if things get sticky with China, you need to be able to make some chips outside Taiwan.
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University of Chicago lost money on crypto, then froze research when federal funding was cut • Stanford Review
Teddy Ganea:
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UChicago’s financial position is clear: Unlike near-peer institutions, its endowment is not large enough to sustain its spending and debt. The university carries nearly $6bn in debt while running annual budget deficits exceeding $200m, all on an endowment three times smaller than Stanford’s.
To compensate, the university has focused on expanding lucrative certification programs, increasing donations, raising tuitions, and cutting costs, though many faculty and students viscerally disagree with the administration on which costs to cut.
Yet these debates neglect the most important factor: the UChicago endowment’s weak returns, driven by poor investment decisions.
Possibly the most notorious example is the university’s foray into cryptocurrency. Four sources, as well as widespread campus rumors, allege that the university lost tens of millions investing in crypto around 2021. Given UChicago’s extraordinary 37.6% endowment gain that year, far beyond what conventional investments would have yielded, it’s likely they took significant risks. But if those gambles paid off in the short term, they quickly unraveled.
UChicago’s endowment remains lower today than in 2021.
…Had UChicago simply matched the market, its endowment would be $6.45bn larger today—more than enough to repay its entire debt. Obviously, universities cannot just track the market, as they must hedge for downturns to maintain financial stability. But even if UChicago had only matched its Ivy League near-peers, its endowment would still be $3.69bn larger.
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Those who bought bitcoin and stuck with it, though, must be laughing: that part of the crypto bubble has not, so far, burst.
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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 