Zebrafish are surviving, so far, on the Chinese space station – but seem a little disoriented. CC-licensed photo by Oregon State University 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 10 links for you. Which was is up, though? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How China’s 1980s PC industry hacked dot-matrix printers • Fast Company

Thomas Mullaney:

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Commercial dot-matrix printing was yet another arena in which the needs of Chinese character I/O were not accounted for. This is witnessed most clearly in the then-dominant configuration of printer heads—specifically the 9-pin printer heads found in mass-manufactured dot-matrix printers during the 1970s. Using nine pins, these early dot-matrix printers were able to produce low-resolution Latin alphabet bitmaps with just one pass of the printer head. The choice of nine pins, in other words, was “tuned” to the needs of Latin alphabetic script.

These same printer heads were incapable of printing low-resolution Chinese character bitmaps using anything less than two full passes of the printer head, one below the other. Two-pass printing dramatically increased the time needed to print Chinese as compared to English, however, and introduced graphical inaccuracies, whether due to inconsistencies in the advancement of the platen or uneven ink registration (that is, characters with differing ink densities on their upper and lower halves).

Compounding these problems, Chinese characters printed in this way were twice the height of English words. This created comically distorted printouts in which English words appeared austere and economical, while Chinese characters appeared grotesquely oversized. Not only did this waste paper, but it left Chinese-language documents looking something like large-print children’s books. When consumers in the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) world began to import Western-manufactured dot-matrix printers, then, they faced yet another facet of Latin alphabetic bias.

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This is an extract from what looks like a fascinating book about how China yanked itself into the computer age. Necessity as the mother of invention, and all that.
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Fish are adapting to weightlessness on the Chinese space station • Universe Today

Scott Alan Johnston:

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Four zebrafish are alive and well after nearly a month in space aboard China’s Tiangong space station. As part of an experiment testing the development of vertebrates in microgravity, the fish live and swim within a small habitat aboard the station.

While the zebrafish have thus far survived, they are showing some signs of disorientation. The taikonauts aboard Tiangong – Ye Guangfu, Li Cong, and Li Guangsu – have reported instances of swimming upside down, backward, and in circular motions, suggesting that microgravity is having an effect on their spatial awareness.

The zebrafish were launched aboard Shenzhou-18, which carried them, as well as a batch of hornwort, to orbit on April 25, 2024. The aim of the project is to create a self-sustaining ecosystem, studying the effects of both microgravity and radiation on the development and growth of these species.

As a test subject, zebrafish have several advantages. Their short reproductive and development cycle, and transparent eggs, allow scientists to study their growth quickly and effectively, and their genetic makeup shares similarities with humans, potentially offering insights that are relevant to human health. The zebrafish genome has been fully sequenced, and for these reasons zebrafish are commonly used in scientific experiments on Earth. Seeing how these well-studied creatures behave in such an extreme environment may have a lot to tell us about the life and development of vertebrates across species while exposed to microgravity.

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“Showing some signs of disorientation” sounds like they’re doing remarkably well, all things considered. (My understanding is they were taken up as fertilised embryos, rather than adult fish, because I’d have questions about how fish experience – or survive – high G forces.)
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AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd, by looking at them just once • UW News

Stefan Milne and Kiyomi Taguchi:

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A University of Washington team has developed an artificial intelligence system that lets a user wearing headphones look at a person speaking for three to five seconds to “enroll” them. The system, called “Target Speech Hearing,” then cancels all other sounds in the environment and plays just the enrolled speaker’s voice in real time even as the listener moves around in noisy places and no longer faces the speaker.

The team presented its findings May 14 in Honolulu at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The code for the proof-of-concept device is available for others to build on. The system is not commercially available.

“We tend to think of AI now as web-based chatbots that answer questions,” said senior author Shyam Gollakota, a UW professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “But in this project, we develop AI to modify the auditory perception of anyone wearing headphones, given their preferences. With our devices you can now hear a single speaker clearly even if you are in a noisy environment with lots of other people talking.”

To use the system, a person wearing off-the-shelf headphones fitted with microphones taps a button while directing their head at someone talking. The sound waves from that speaker’s voice then should reach the microphones on both sides of the headset simultaneously; there’s a 16º margin of error. The headphones send that signal to an on-board embedded computer, where the team’s machine learning software learns the desired speaker’s vocal patterns.

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Nifty. Wonder how long it will take for this to be incorporated into commercial systems. (It would be madness to try to do this as a standalone commercial project. One hopes the UW team realise that.)
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You were promised a jetpack by liars • Pluralistic

Cory Doctorow:

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As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole “we were promised jetpacks” thing.

I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment’s serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn’t want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs.

Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don’t actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them.

I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were “promised.” I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World’s Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan’s Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai’i.

Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn’t make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right?

Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99% Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it…

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Terrifying. (Rather like Doctorow’s work rate. How in the world does he do it.)
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A brief history of the traffic light and why we need a new colour • Al Jazeera

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The universally known traffic light has not experienced a significant redesign in almost 100 years, ever since William Pott, a Detroit police officer, created the first three-section traffic light in the United States in 1921. Now, say experts, the rise of driverless cars means that a new set of safety guidelines is needed to ensure they interact correctly with traffic signals.

Traffic lights around the world typically use red, amber and green lights to signal to drivers whether they should stop, go or get ready to either stop or go at intersections and pedestrian crossings. Ali Hajbabaie, a North Carolina State University (NCSU) engineering professor, is leading a team to design a traffic system that considers how driverless cars respond to traffic signals.

Hajbabaie told The Associated Press news agency that he proposes adding another light – possibly a white one.

…Humans and autonomous cars use different sets of visual cues when it comes to interpreting lighting systems. Different colours – sometimes flashing to indicate that a change is imminent – work best for the human brain, while a single light works better for autonomous cars.

Therefore, a fourth light – most likely white – would be added for the benefit of self-driving cars. The white light would be interpreted by a self-driven car as an instruction to “keep going unless instructed otherwise”.

Hajbabaie, the NCSU professor, explained: “If the white light is active, you just follow the vehicle in front of you.”

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This is going to make those captchas with “click the squares with traffic lights” much trickier. Also, though it sounds like a Beatles lyric, how many traffic lights would you have to change around the world? I’m going to guess hundreds of millions in existence.
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Announcing Exa, a search engine built for the AI world

exa:

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The internet contains the collective knowledge output of mankind – all the great works of art and literature, millions of essays, hundreds of millions of research papers, billions of images and videos, trillions of ideas sprinkled across tweets, forums, and memes.

Searching the internet should feel like navigating a grand library of knowledge, where you could weave insights across cultures, industries, and millenia.

Of course it doesn’t feel that way. Today, searching the internet feels more like navigating a landfill.

Many have debated what’s wrong with search.

But the core problem is actually simple – knowledge on the internet is buried under an overwhelming amount of information.

The core solution is also simple – we need a better search algorithm to filter all that information and organize the knowledge buried inside.

Exa is going to organize the world’s knowledge. Exa’s goal is to understand any query – no matter how complex – and filter the internet to exactly the knowledge required for that query.

To illustrate the problem, try googling “startups working on climate change”.

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Interesting: I’ve noticed a few people saying “this is the new Google, like Google was back in 1999”. Notable that it needs you to ask in a slightly stilted style:

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Exa uses a transformer architecture to predict links given text, and it gets its power from having been trained on the way that people talk about links on the Internet. This training produces a model that returns links that are both high in relevance and quality. However, the model does expect queries that look like how people describe a link on the Internet. For example, ‘best restaurants in SF” is a bad query, whereas “Here is the best restaurant in SF:” is a good query.

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I tried it with a query local to me. It’s… a work in progress.
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From pollution to solution • Cremieux Recueil

Andrew Song:

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This post examines the transformative role that stratospheric aerosol injection of SO₂ can play in moderating change in Earth’s climate. While many fear the corrosive effects of SO₂ based on its familiar ground-level impacts, its application in the upper atmosphere tells a different story altogether—one of cooling the Earth effectively and potentially reversing some of the most severe effects of global warming.

…First, we’ll determine the total area affected. To do this, we’ll assume aerosols spread uniformly over the Earth’s surface, an area of approximately 510 million square kilometers.

Second, we’ll compute the sulfuric acid required to produce mildly acidic rain. To impact our designated area, we’ll need 0.01 metric tons of sulfuric acid per square kilometer. Thus, the total required sulfuric acid is 0.01 metric tons per square kilometer * 510 million square kilometers = 5.1 million metric tons.

Third, we’ll compute the SO₂ needed to produce mildly acidic rain. Considering the conversion efficiency of 70%, the total SO₂ needed would be 5.1 million metric tons over the 70% efficiency, or approximately 7.29 million metric tons of SO₂.

Thus, we have our upper limit of 7.29 million metric tons of SO₂ that can be pumped into the atmosphere safely each year. Any more and we’ll end up with acidic rain. The next question is, does the amount bring global temperatures down meaningfully? Luckily, this exact question has been modeled extensively by scientists and featured in a report by the United Nations Environment Programme, which states:

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It is estimated that continuous injection rates of 8–16 million metric tons of sulphur dioxide (SO₂) per year (approximately equivalent to the estimated injection amount of Mount Pinatubo in the single year of 1991) would reduce global mean temperature by 1°C.

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Song is a co-founder of Make Sunsets, “the first company in the world to commercialise stratospheric aerosol injection as a service to cool the Earth”. It has some big-name VC backers. The bigger question is whether we want private companies noodling with the atmosphere. (Though in a sense, they have been for centuries already.)
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“I was misidentified as shoplifter by facial recognition tech” • BBC News

James Clayton:

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Sara needed some chocolate – she had had one of those days – so wandered into a Home Bargains store.

“Within less than a minute, I’m approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, ‘You’re a thief, you need to leave the store’.”

Sara – who wants to remain anonymous – was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch. She says after her bag was searched she was led out of the shop, and told she was banned from all stores using the technology.

“I was just crying and crying the entire journey home… I thought, ‘Oh, will my life be the same? I’m going to be looked at as a shoplifter when I’ve never stolen’.” Facewatch later wrote to Sara and acknowledged it had made an error.

Facewatch is used in numerous stores in the UK – including Budgens, Sports Direct and Costcutter – to identify shoplifters. The company declined to comment on Sara’s case to the BBC, but did say its technology helped to prevent crime and protect frontline workers. Home Bargains, too, declined to comment.

It’s not just retailers who are turning to the technology. On a humid day in Bethnal Green, in east London, we joined the police as they positioned a modified white van on the high street. Cameras attached to its roof captured thousands of images of people’s faces. If they matched people on a police watchlist, officers would speak to them and potentially arrest them.

Unflattering references to the technology liken the process to a supermarket checkout – where your face becomes a bar code.

On the day we were filming, the Metropolitan Police said they made six arrests with the assistance of the tech. That included two people who breached the terms of their sexual-harm prevention orders, a man wanted for grievous bodily harm and a person wanted for the assault of a police officer.

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How BBC’s breaking news alerts are giving voters – and political parties – an electoral buzz • The Guardian

Jim Waterson:

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he most powerful person in British media during this election, in terms of having the most direct access to voters, is no longer the editor of BBC’s News at Six or the person who chooses the headlines on Radio 2. Nor are they a newspaper editor, a TikTok influencer, or a podcaster. Instead, they’re the anonymous on-shift editor of the BBC News app, making snap judgments on whether to make the phones of millions of Britons buzz with a breaking news push alert.

The BBC does not publish user numbers, but external research suggests about 12.6 million Britons have its news app installed. BBC newsroom sources say the actual number is higher and the assumption is that about 60% of users have notifications enabled. This means that on a conservative estimate, a typical push alert is reaching the phones of seven million Britons – more than any other broadcast news bulletin in the UK.

Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s former director of communications, said influencing the BBC’s coverage was the main objective for all political press officers. This used to mean phoning the editors of specific television news shows. Now the focus is shifting online: “The sheer scale of the website alone and its breaking news alerts is huge. Once something gets into the water supply of the BBC, it’s very hard to get it out.”

The audience for the BBC’s News at Six, the most-watched television news show in the country, is down to about 3.5 million viewers – and its audience is ageing; the average BBC One television viewer is now in their 60s. Print newspaper front pages remain heavily analysed, but their reach has collapsed. Twenty years ago, the Sun still sold 3.5m copies a day. Now the biggest selling print newspaper is the Daily Mail, on 700,000 copies.

All have been quietly overtaken by the the BBC News app push alert, which was only widely adopted a decade ago. An alert can drive readers to open the full news story – or its headline can exist as a standalone nugget of news, a 25-word summary destined to remain unclicked. Some people are driven to distraction by breaking news buzzes, while others grab their phones the moment they see them arrive.

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Waterson is billed as the “political media editor”, which I hope is only temporary during the election.
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Google is playing a dangerous game with AI search • The Atlantic

Caroline Mimbs Nyce tried Google’s new AI search on health questions:

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This risk with generative AI isn’t just about Google spitting out blatantly wrong, eyeroll-worthy answers. As the AI research scientist Margaret Mitchell tweeted, “This isn’t about ‘gotchas,’ this is about pointing out clearly foreseeable harms.” Most people, I hope, should know not to eat rocks. The bigger concern is smaller sourcing and reasoning errors—especially when someone is Googling for an immediate answer, and might be more likely to read nothing more than the AI overview. For instance, it told me that pregnant women could eat sushi as long as it doesn’t contain raw fish. Which is technically true, but basically all sushi has raw fish. When I asked about ADHD, it cited AccreditedSchoolsOnline.org, an irrelevant website about school quality.

When I Googled How effective is chemotherapy?, the AI overview said that the one-year survival rate is 52%. That statistic comes from a real scientific paper, but it’s specifically about head and neck cancers, and the survival rate for patients not receiving chemotherapy was far lower. The AI overview confidently bolded and highlighted the stat as if it applied to all cancers.

In certain instances, a search bot might genuinely be helpful. Wading through a huge list of Google search results can be a pain, especially compared with a chatbot response that sums it up for you. The tool might also get better with time.

Still, it may never be perfect. At Google’s size, content moderation is incredibly challenging even without generative AI. One Google executive told me last year that 15% of daily searches are ones the company has never seen before. Now Google Search is stuck with the same problems that other chatbots have: Companies can create rules about what they should and shouldn’t respond to, but they can’t always be enforced with precision.

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Not it “may” never be perfect; it can never be perfect. Search is already incredibly difficult, and the sooner people – including people at Google – understand that the better.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A number of hotels in the Wyndham chain turn out to have had spyware on their checkin computers – making guest details visible to hackers. CC-licensed photo by Greg Grimes 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.

A selection of 10 links for you. Which credit card? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search • The Verge

Kylie Robison:

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Social media is abuzz with examples of Google’s new AI Overview product saying weird stuff, from telling users to put glue on their pizza to suggesting they eat rocks. The messy rollout means Google is racing to manually disable AI Overviews for specific searches as various memes get posted, which is why users are seeing so many of them disappear shortly after being posted to social networks.

It’s an odd situation, since Google has been testing AI Overviews for a year now — the feature launched in beta in May 2023 as the Search Generative Experience — and CEO Sundar Pichai has said the company served over a billion queries in that time.

But Pichai has also said that Google’s brought the cost of delivering AI answers down by 80% over that same time, “driven by hardware, engineering and technical breakthroughs.” It appears that kind of optimization might have happened too early, before the tech was ready.

“A company once known for being at the cutting edge and shipping high-quality stuff is now known for low-quality output that’s getting meme’d,” one AI founder, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Verge.

Google continues to say that its AI Overview product largely outputs “high quality information” to users. “Many of the examples we’ve seen have been uncommon queries, and we’ve also seen examples that were doctored or that we couldn’t reproduce,” Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth said in an email to The Verge. Farnsworth also confirmed that the company is “taking swift action” to remove AI Overviews on certain queries “where appropriate under our content policies, and using these examples to develop broader improvements to our systems, some of which have already started to roll out.”

Gary Marcus, an AI expert and an emeritus professor of neural science at New York University, told The Verge that a lot of AI companies are “selling dreams” that this tech will go from 80% correct to 100%. Achieving the initial 80% is relatively straightforward since it involves approximating a large amount of human data, Marcus said, but the final 20% is extremely challenging. In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20% might be the hardest thing of all.

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Two points: note that Google doesn’t say how the cost of delivering AI answers compares to normal searches; and every day 15% of queries are completely novel, which amounts to millions every day. Google will never succeed at this.
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The Elmer’s Glue pizza error is more fascinating than you think • The End(s) of Argument

Mike Caulfield:

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Since intent can’t always be accurately read, a good search result for an ambiguous query will often be a bit of a buffet, pulling a mix of search results from different topical domains. When I say, for example, “why do people like pancakes but hate waffles” I’m going to get two sorts of results. First, I’ll get a long string of conversations where the internet debates the virtues of pancakes vs. waffles. Second, I’ll get links and discussion about a famous Twitter post about the the hopelessness of conversation on Twitter.

For an ambiguous query, this is a good result set. If you see a bit of each in the first 10 blue links you can choose your own adventure here. It’s hard for Google to know what matches your intent, but it’s trivially easy for you to spot things that match your intent. In fact, the wider apart the nature of the items, the easier it is to spot the context that applies to you. So a good result set will have a majority of results for what you’re probably asking and a couple results for things you might be asking, and you get to choose your path.

Likewise, when you put in terms about cheese sliding off pizza, Google could restrict the returned results to recipe sites, advice which would be relatively glue-free. But maybe you want advice, or maybe you want to see discussion. Maybe you want to see jokes. Maybe you are looking for a very specific post you read, and not looking to solve an issue at all, in which case you just want relevance completely determined by closeness of word match. Maybe you’re looking for a movie scene you remember about cheese sliding off pizza.

In the beforetimes, it would be hard to imagine a user getting upset that the cheese sliding query pulls up a joke on Reddit as well as some recipe tips. The user can spot, quite easily, that these are two different sorts of things.

The problem comes when the results get synthesized into a common answer. To some extent, this is a form of “context collapse”, where the different use contexts (jokes, movies, recipes, whatever) get blended into a single context.

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Things the guys who have my stolen phone have texted me to try to get me to unlock it • Read Max

Veronica de Souza:

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My phone was stolen in early March, most likely while I was standing on the platform at the York Street station waiting for the F train. Fifteen minutes later, in a food hall under the movie theater where my boyfriend and I were supposed to see Dune 2, I reached into my pocket and realized it was gone. Josh looked at the “Find My” app on his phone: My phone was “last seen” at York Street but wasn’t registering a current location. Someone had turned it off.

As quickly as possible, I did all the things you’re supposed to do when your phone is lost or stolen–mark it as lost, cut off service, and remotely erase it–and spent the rest of the night anxiously refreshing the Find My App, watching my phone move around Manhattan before finally coming to a stop at Rockefeller Center. I didn’t bother confronting the thief.

Worst of all, we didn’t even see Dune 2.

After two hours in the Williamsburg Apple Store the next morning, I had a new iPhone 15 and I stopped stressing. As long as I didn’t remove the phone from my Apple account or the “Find My” app, the phone was essentially bricked to anyone without the passcode–unusable by the thieves, or the fences who I assume bought it from them. Now my phone was their problem.

…Here are some things the guys who stole (or later purchased) my iPhone have told me to try to get me to unlock it:

1) “Your iPhone 14 Pro is trying to pay with Apple pay in China.”

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And that’s only the beginning. The fight between scammers and intelligent people who recognise scammers is always interesting.
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Spyware found on US hotel check-in computers • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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A consumer-grade spyware app has been found running on the check-in systems of at least three Wyndham hotels across the United States, TechCrunch has learned.

The app, called pcTattletale, stealthily and continually captured screenshots of the hotel booking systems, which contained guest details and customer information. Thanks to a security flaw in the spyware, these screenshots are available to anyone on the internet, not just the spyware’s intended users. 

This is the most recent example of consumer-grade spyware exposing sensitive information because of a security flaw in the spyware itself. It’s also the second known time that pcTattletale has exposed screenshots of the devices on which the app is installed. Several other spyware apps in recent years had security bugs or misconfigurations that exposed the private and personal data of unwitting device owners, in some cases prompting action by government regulators.

pcTattletale allows whomever controls it to remotely view the target’s Android or Windows device and its data, from anywhere in the world. pcTattletale’s website says the app “runs invisibly in the background on their workstations and can not be detected.”

But the bug means that anyone on the internet who understands how the security flaw works can download the screenshots captured by the spyware directly from pcTattletale’s servers. 

…It’s not known who planted the app or how the app was planted — for example, if hotel employees were tricked into installing it, or if the hotel owner intended the spyware to be used to monitor employee behavior.

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Media companies are making a huge mistake with AI • The Atlantic

Jessica Lessin:

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For as long as I have reported on internet companies, I have watched news leaders try to bend their businesses to the will of Apple, Google, Meta, and more. Chasing tech’s distribution and cash, news firms strike deals to try to ride out the next digital wave. They make concessions to platforms that attempt to take all of the audience (and trust) that great journalism attracts, without ever having to do the complicated and expensive work of the journalism itself. And it never, ever works as planned.

Publishers like News Corp did it with Apple and the iPad, investing huge sums in flashy content that didn’t make them any money but helped Apple sell more hardware. They took payouts from Google to offer their journalism for free through search, only to find that it eroded their subscription businesses. They lined up to produce original video shows for Facebook and to reformat their articles to work well in its new app. Then the social-media company canceled the shows and the app. Many news organizations went out of business.

The Wall Street Journal recently laid off staffers who were part of a Google-funded program to get journalists to post to YouTube channels when the funding for the program dried up. And still, just as the news business is entering a death spiral, these publishers are making all the same mistakes, and more, with AI.

Publishers are deep in negotiations with tech firms such as OpenAI to sell their journalism as training for the companies’ models. It turns out that accurate, well-written news is one of the most valuable sources for these models, which have been hoovering up humans’ intellectual output without permission. These AI platforms need timely news and facts to get consumers to trust them. And now, facing the threat of lawsuits, they are pursuing business deals to absolve them of the theft. These deals amount to settling without litigation. The publishers willing to roll over this way aren’t just failing to defend their own intellectual property—they are also trading their own hard-earned credibility for a little cash from the companies that are simultaneously undervaluing them and building products quite clearly intended to replace them.

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Lessin is a founder of The Information, which charges as much – more? – than most national papers for its paywall. And is going from strength to strength, unlike a lot of media. But not everyone can do that.
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I went undercover as a secret OnlyFans chatter. It wasn’t pretty • WIRED

Brendan Koerner:

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To seal the deal, I needed to pass an elaborate written test. Daniel sent me a biographical sketch for a fictional “adult influencer from Tokyo” named Miko; she was a fan of karate, green tea, and the tongue emoji. My assignment was to write four extended back-and-forth dialogs between Miko and a hypothetical subscriber—two had to involve X-rated material, while the other two were meant to be clean. “Each bot’s reply should contain a call to action, a question, a compliment, or an inspiration to do something,” the instructions dictated, though I was forbidden from using question marks in more than 20% of Miko’s responses.

I found it quite easy at first to write the sort of run-of-the-mill smut the Serbs expected. (I’ll spare you the gory details, except to say I cribbed some color from Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 sci-fi film Strange Days.) For the less explicit chats, I imagined Miko offering to cook the subscriber a pasta dinner and feigning appreciation for his TV recommendations. I did make one glaring error that could have led to an entire chat being voided as unusable: Due to my hasty misreading of Miko’s bio, I characterized her as a fan of spicy ramen when she actually prefers her food mild. “I have to ask you to pay attention to these little facts,” Daniel wrote in his assessment. “In this case, these lines mentioning the food could have been rejected, and that could have led to the dialog’s rejection.”

But despite that mistake and a few other hiccups—my punctuation seemed unnatural because it was too accurate—Daniel offered me the job. I was to be paid 7 cents per line of dialog, with each dialog running for a minimum of 40 lines. For my first assignment, I had to compose 20 dialogs involving sex in public places—10 at the beach, five inside a car, and five in a forest or garden. There was a list of particular sex acts I had to include, as well as a stricture that I refrain from using emoji in more than 30% of lines. I had only 48 hours to complete the task.

By the time I wrapped up my fifth dialog, my brain was a puddle of goo.

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It turns out there’s an enormous hinterland of this stuff – agents and hiring and recruitment and levels and schemes – but when you weigh it up, all nonsense. So much human effort, for what?
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Millennials are waving away privacy concerns and eyeing Chinese cars • Quartz

William Gavin:

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The US Department of Commerce in February announced an investigation into Chinese-made smart cars, noting that EVs and autonomous vehicles collect massive amounts of data.

About 44% of all respondents [to a survey] said they would be very concerned about their privacy if Chinese cars were sold in the US, with another 34% saying they would be somewhat concerned, according to AutoPacific. But that won’t stop Americans under 40 from considering buying one of those vehicles, despite 73% saying they would be concerned about their privacy.

“Privacy concerns about Chinese-brand vehicles are likely to eventually subside given that most of the connected smartphones, smart watches, laptops, connected home devices we are comfortable using every day are in fact manufactured in China,” [chief analyst and president of research firm AutoPacific, Ed] Kim said.

Chinese cars — especially EVs — have a major leg up on Western competitors. Many Chinese automakers — thanks to a combination of cheap manufacturing and state subsidies — are able to sell their cars for dirt-cheap.

BYD, for example, sells the Seagull hatchback car for less than $10,000. China is also home to the cheapest electric car in the world, the roughly $1,000 Changli Freeman. Chinese cars also come with impressive technology and features that consumers demand, from better driver assistance tech to free fridges and portable rooms.

“Younger generations of shoppers are clearly aware of the enticing products Chinese automakers are cooking up overseas,” Robby DeGraff, AutoPacific’s manager of product and consumer insights, said in a statement. “It’s only a matter of ‘when’ they’ll be able to get their hands on them.”

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Who actually uses Instagram’s Threads app? Taiwanese protestors • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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As thousands of people gathered outside Taiwan’s legislature on Tuesday to protest against a bill that would give more power to China-friendly parties, Yuan, who was volunteering at a nearby church, noticed that the large crowd was running short on supplies. 

He fired off posts on the Threads app listing items that protesters needed, such as snacks, bottled water, and plastic bags. Supplies arrived within minutes. 

“My Threads page was like a wishing well,” Yuan, who requested to be identified with part of his first name for privacy reasons, told Rest of World. “We got everything we asked for.” 

A 32-year-old bar owner in Taipei, Yuan has been lurking on Threads since Meta launched the Instagram-linked alternative to X last year. He posted on the app for the first time last weekend to help organize a protest against the island’s opposition lawmakers. His posts about the protests have been “liked” thousands of times. 

Threads, which had 150 million monthly active users globally by April, is doing exceptionally well in Taiwan, where it’s commonly loosely transliterated as cui — because the “th” sound doesn’t appear in Mandarin. It works like X, allowing users to post 500-character-long text posts as well as audio, photos and short videos. Despite its small population of 23 million, Taiwan had 1.88 million active users on Threads from May 5 to 11, behind only the U.S., Japan, and Brazil, according to app-tracking site Data.ai. 

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Apple’s WWDC may include AI-generated emoji and an OpenAI partnership • The Verge

Wes Davis:

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Apple will finally tell its own AI story at WWDC 2024, but it may not mean the sorts of showy features demoed by the likes of Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI. Instead, the event may see Apple rolling out basic AI features like transcribing voice memos or auto-generated emoji — and announcing a rumored partnership with OpenAI, according to Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg today.

…The Voice Memo app could also get a big boost in AI-generated transcripts, Gurman writes. Selfishly, that will be key for referring to interview recordings, but it could also be handy for, say, students recording their lessons for later reference. Apple devices have similar features already, like auto-generated voicemail transcripts and system-wide captions for videos, audio, and conversations.

The company also reportedly plans to announce AI-powered improvements to on-device Spotlight search, internet searches with Safari, as well as writing suggestions for emails and texts. And the company may also use AI to retouch photos and generate emoji on the fly, based on what you’re texting — a type of feature that seems to consistently lead to trouble for these companies. (See Meta’s gun-toting Waluigi AI stickers or Google’s inappropriately racially diverse nazi pictures.)

Apple could showcase a better, more natural-sounding voice for Siri, based on Apple’s own large language models, as well as better Siri functionality on the Apple Watch.

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California can make climate polluters pay for the mess they have made of Earth • Los Angeles Times

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As climate change exacts a mounting toll on California, who should pay for the damage from rising sea levels and increasingly ferocious wildfires, floods and heat waves?

Fossil fuel companies would like taxpayers to keep footing the bill while they reap the profits from the burning of coal, oil and methane gas. That’s not right. Companies whose products are responsible for the vast majority of the greenhouse gas emissions should be held liable for the costs.

That’s the concept behind the Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act, a bill in the California Legislature that would create a Superfund-style program to collect money from major fossil fuel companies such as Chevron and ExxonMobil to help the state pay for the environmental damage caused by their products.

Other states, including New York, Massachusetts and Maryland, are considering similar “Climate Superfund” bills. They’re modeled on the 1980 federal Superfund law that established an industry-funded trust fund to pay for cleaning abandoned hazardous waste sites and holds current and past operators and other responsible parties liable for the costs. California would not be the first to act; Vermont lawmakers earlier this month sent a Climate Superfund bill to their governor’s desk.

…The fund would come from the estimated 41 fossil fuel extraction and refining companies that meet the bill’s threshold of being responsible for more than 1 billion metric tons of emissions from 2000 to 2020. Each would pay a share of the climate costs to the state based on a study to be conducted by the California Environmental Protection Agency. The total cost recovery could amount to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars, according to legislative analysts, and could be paid in installments over 20 years.

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You would feel fairly sure that the monies raised wouldn’t really go into climate amelioration – though taxes are rarely ringfenced to their purposed. This tax is overdue, to be honest. (This was an Editorial opinion in the paper, hence no byline.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New documents from OpenAI claim to show that it did not copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice. But is that enough to head off her lawyers? CC-licensed photo by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. On electioneering!

A selection of 9 links for you. I can hear you now. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google promised better search — now it’s telling us to put glue on pizza • The Verge

Kylie Robison:

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Imagine this: you’ve carved out an evening to unwind and decide to make a homemade pizza. You assemble your pie, throw it in the oven, and are excited to start eating. But once you get ready to take a bite of your oily creation, you run into a problem — the cheese falls right off. Frustrated, you turn to Google for a solution.

“Add some glue,” Google answers. “Mix about 1/8 cup of Elmer’s glue in with the sauce. Non-toxic glue will work.”

So, yeah, don’t do that. As of writing this, though, that’s what Google’s new AI Overviews feature will tell you to do. The feature, while not triggered for every query, scans the web and drums up an AI-generated response. The answer received for the pizza glue query appears to be based on a comment from a user named “fucksmith” in a more than decade-old Reddit thread, and they’re clearly joking.

This is just one of many mistakes cropping up in the new feature that Google rolled out broadly this month. It also claims that former US President James Madison graduated from the University of Wisconsin not once but 21 times, that a dog has played in the NBA, NFL, and NHL, and that Batman is a cop. [Also that Barack Obama was a Muslim US president – Overspill Ed.]

Look, Google didn’t promise this would be perfect, and it even slaps a “Generative AI is experimental” label at the bottom of the AI answers. But it’s clear these tools aren’t ready to accurately provide information at scale.

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Look, these tools will never be ready to “accurately provide information at scale”. On Thursday night I tried the “African countries beginning with K” query, which it was getting wrong in November 2023, and it still gets it wrong. Somehow, people at Google thinks the internet is full of correct information. That suggests they’ve never actually met the internet.

This product is not fit for purpose, and never can be as long as the internet contains errors. Which means forever.
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Sky voice actor says nobody ever compared her to ScarJo before OpenAI drama • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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OpenAI is sticking to its story that it never intended to copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice when seeking an actor for ChatGPT’s “Sky” voice mode.

The company provided The Washington Post with documents and recordings clearly meant to support OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s defense against Johansson’s claims that Sky was made to sound “eerily similar” to her critically acclaimed voice acting performance in the sci-fi film Her.

Johansson has alleged that OpenAI hired a soundalike to steal her likeness and confirmed that she declined to provide the Sky voice. Experts have said that Johansson has a strong case should she decide to sue OpenAI for violating her right to publicity, which gives the actress exclusive rights to the commercial use of her likeness.

In OpenAI’s defense, The Post reported that the company’s voice casting call flier did not seek a “clone of actress Scarlett Johansson,” and initial voice test recordings of the unnamed actress hired to voice Sky showed that her “natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice.” Because of this, OpenAI has argued that “Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson.”

What’s more, an agent for the unnamed Sky actress who was cast—both granted anonymity to protect her client’s safety—confirmed to The Post that her client said she was never directed to imitate either Johansson or her character in Her. She simply used her own voice and got the gig.

The agent also provided a statement from her client that claimed that she had never been compared to Johansson before the backlash started.

This all “feels personal,” the voice actress said, “being that it’s just my natural voice and I’ve never been compared to her by the people who do know me closely.”

However, OpenAI apparently reached out to Johansson after casting the Sky voice actress. During outreach last September and again this month, OpenAI seemed to want to substitute the Sky voice actress’s voice with Johansson’s voice—which is ironically what happened when Johansson got cast to replace the original actress hired to voice her character in Her.

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Either there’s going to be a big payout to Johansson, or this is all going to court. The giveaway is the initial approach to Johansson, and Altman’s tweeting of “her” during the demo. There’s absolutely no mistaking the intention.
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Indian voters are being bombarded with millions of deepfakes. Political candidates approve • WIRED

Nilesh Christopher and Varsha Bansal:

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On a stifling April afternoon in Ajmer, in the Indian state of Rajasthan, local politician Shakti Singh Rathore sat down in front of a greenscreen to shoot a short video. He looked nervous. It was his first time being cloned.

Wearing a crisp white shirt and a ceremonial saffron scarf bearing a lotus flower—the logo of the BJP, the country’s ruling party—Rathore pressed his palms together and greeted his audience in Hindi. “Namashkar,” he began. “To all my brothers—”

Before he could continue, the director of the shoot walked into the frame. Divyendra Singh Jadoun, a 31-year-old with a bald head and a thick black beard, told Rathore he was moving around too much on camera. Jadoun was trying to capture enough audio and video data to build an AI deepfake of Rathore that would convince 300,000 potential voters around Ajmer that they’d had a personalized conversation with him—but excess movement would break the algorithm. Jadoun told his subject to look straight into the camera and move only his lips. “Start again,” he said.

Right now, the world’s largest democracy is going to the polls. Close to a billion Indians are eligible to vote as part of the country’s general election, and deepfakes could play a decisive, and potentially divisive, role. India’s political parties have exploited AI to warp reality through cheap audio fakes, propaganda images, and AI parodies. But while the global discourse on deepfakes often focuses on misinformation, disinformation, and other societal harms, many Indian politicians are using the technology for a different purpose: voter outreach.

Across the ideological spectrum, they’re relying on AI to help them navigate the nation’s 22 official languages and thousands of regional dialects, and to deliver personalized messages in farther-flung communities. While the US recently made it illegal to use AI-generated voices for unsolicited calls, in India sanctioned deepfakes have become a $60m business opportunity.

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Strange to think of deepfakes being used positively, but that really is the case here.
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Exclusive: Google parent Alphabet weighs offer for HubSpot • Reuters

Anirban Sen and Milana Vinn:

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Google parent Alphabet has been talking to its advisers about the possibility of making an offer for HubSpot, an online marketing software company with a market value of $35bn, people familiar with the matter said.

If Alphabet moves ahead with a bid, it would be a rare example of a major technology company attempting a mega deal amid heightened regulatory scrutiny of the sector under U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration.

The potential acquisition would be Alphabet’s largest ever and allow it to put some of its cash pile, which reached $110.9bn at the end of December, to work.

Alphabet has met with Morgan Stanley (MS.N), opens new tab investment bankers in recent days about a potential offer for HubSpot, the sources said. It has been discussing how much it should offer and whether antitrust regulators would clear such a tie-up, the sources added.

Alphabet has not yet submitted an offer to HubSpot and there is no certainty it will do so, the sources said, requesting anonymity to discuss confidential deliberations.

“As standard practice, HubSpot does not comment on rumors or speculation. We continue to focus on building a great business and serving our customers,” a HubSpot spokesperson said.

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HubSpot is the company where Dan Lyons, former journalist, worked and found life so ridiculous that he wrote the book Disrupted – which is hilarious. Though I think it’s the HubSpot shareholders who would be laughing all the way to the bank if this comes off.

Why does Google want it? Apparently, it “would expand Google’s offerings in the booming market for customer relationship management (CRM) software, enabling it to tap a wider base of enterprise customers who spend on marketing and advertising.” Can’t see this passing antitrust examination, to be honest. Or shouldn’t.
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Samsung requires independent repair shops to share customer data, snitch on people who use aftermarket parts, leaked contract shows • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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In exchange for selling them repair parts, Samsung requires independent repair shops to give Samsung the name, contact information, phone identifier, and customer complaint details of everyone who gets their phone repaired at these shops, according to a contract obtained by 404 Media. Stunningly, it also requires these nominally independent shops to “immediately disassemble” any phones that customers have brought them that have been previously repaired with aftermarket or third-party parts and to “immediately notify” Samsung that the customer has used third-party parts.

…The contract also requires the “daily” uploading of details of each and every repair that an independent company does into a Samsung database called G-SPN “at the time of each repair,” which includes the customer’s address, email address, phone number, details about what is wrong with their phone, their phone’s warranty status, details of the customer’s complaint, and the device’s IMEI number, which is a unique device identifier. 404 Media has verified the authenticity of the original contract and has recreated the version embedded at the bottom of this article to protect the source. No provisions have been changed.

The use of aftermarket parts in repair is relatively common. This provision requires independent repair shops to destroy the devices of their own customers, and then to snitch on them to Samsung.

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I don’t think even Apple would go this far.
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Three bullet points: internet time ain’t what it used to be • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

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I think one reason why people in my age bracket have such strong, implicit faith in Moore’s Law is that it was part of our shared reality for such a long time. Consumer tech really was getting significantly better and significantly cheaper, at a pace that you could not help but notice.

I saved up all summer in 1998 to buy a nice stereo. (It played tapes AND cds!) Four years later, my friend Becca was showing off the clickwheel on her new iPod.

In 2021, the keyboard on my laptop started having trouble. The “e” key stopped working. I checked, and found the computer wasn’t under warranty anymore. Turns out I had bought it way back in 2012. It still worked fine, except for the damn “e” key.

When I started college in 1997, a nine year old computer (from 1988!) would, for all practical purposes, not be a computer at all.

Silicon Valley’s aura of futurity was honed through this frenzied cycle of consumer product upgrades. The leveling-off in consecutive iterations of Apple’s product lines today was nowhere to be seen. There was forever a next generation of consumer products coming, and that next generation was demonstrably better and cheaper than the one that preceded it.

It felt just a bit magical. No other part of the physical world was transforming at such a constant, reliable pace. But this is no longer the case, and it hasn’t been for quite awhile.

And in the meantime, the mythos surrounding Moore’s Law keeps being propped up, Weekend at Bernie’s-style.

Sure, the Rabbit R1 might be utter trash. Yes, the Humane AI pin is so bad it’s unreviewable. But why be so dour about these early models? Just focus on how much better the next one will be. Surely it’s just around the corner. (Because Moore’s Law!)

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Karpf’s point is that Moore’s Law only applied narrowly: to chip manufacture. A generation that grew up with it thinks that will apply too on products like LLMs. But it very much doesn’t and won’t.
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The price of computer storage has fallen exponentially since the 1950s • Our World in Data

Edouard Mathieu:

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This chart [in the article, showing log price per terabyte over time] shows the dramatic fall in the price of computer storage between 1956 and 2023. It relies on the data carefully collected by the computer scientist John C. McCallum.

In the past 70 years, the price for a unit of storage has fallen by almost ten orders of magnitude. The data is plotted on a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis. The line follows an almost straight path, indicating an exponential reduction in price.

A 256-gigabyte storage capacity — commonly found in standard laptops sold today — would have cost around $20bn in the 1950s. (That’s in today’s prices.)

And cost has not been the only improvement: modern solid-state drives offer much faster and more reliable data access than early magnetic and hard disk drives.

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Intriguingly, “flash” memory is recorded from 2003 but there’s a separate category of “solid state” from 2013. (That distinction is in the original data too.) But flash memory is solid state memory. Anyhow, the prices shown are at retail (once storage was available from retail, in about 1975). There’s also another potential axis: speed. A 3D graphic showing that would be equally amazing.
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Political consultant behind fake Biden AI robocall faces charges in New Hampshire • CNN Politics

Rashard Rose and Marshall Cohen:

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New Hampshire prosecutors filed 26 criminal charges against the political consultant behind a robocall that used artificial intelligence to impersonate President Joe Biden and urged voters not to participate in the state’s primary this year.

The Federal Communications Commission also imposed a $6m fine against the consultant, Steve Kramer, because the robocalls used call-spoofing technology that violated federal caller-ID laws.

Kramer, 54, was named in several indictments in different New Hampshire counties, according to court documents obtained by CNN. He faces 13 charges of felony voter intimidation or suppression. He also faces 13 counts of impersonating a candidate, which is a misdemeanor, according to the court documents.

The indictments, filed by the New Hampshire attorney general, allege that Kramer “sent or caused to be sent a pre-recorded phone message that disguised the source of the call, or was deceptive in using an artificially created voice of a candidate, or provided misleading information, in attempting to prevent or deter” voters from participating in the New Hampshire primary.

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That’s quite a deterrent for anyone wanting to do some voter suppression.
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Spotify is going to break every Car Thing gadget it ever sold • The Verge

Chris Welch:

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Spotify’s brief attempt at being a hardware company wasn’t all that successful: the company stopped producing its Car Thing dashboard accessory less than a year after it went on sale to the public. And now, two years later, the device is about to be rendered completely inoperable. Customers who bought the Car Thing are receiving emails warning that it will stop working altogether as of December 9th.

Unfortunately for those owners, Spotify isn’t offering any kind of subscription credit or automatic refund for the device — nor is the company open-sourcing it. Rather, it’s just canning the project and telling people to (responsibly) dispose of Car Thing.

“We’re discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings,” Spotify wrote in an FAQ on its website. “We understand it may be disappointing, but this decision allows us to focus on developing new features and enhancements that will ultimately provide a better experience to all Spotify users.”

…The Car Thing hardware was quite nice considering it was Spotify’s first go, but the product was more of a remote control for Spotify on your mobile phone than any kind of standalone player.

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Wave goodbye to the $90 spent on it. But then again, it was only produced for five months. Originally described as:

»

Car Thing [is] a Spotify-only, voice-controlled device for the car, is launching today in limited quantities to invited users. It’s a dedicated, Bluetooth-connected device for controlling Spotify without the need for a phone screen, which seems to be meant for people who drive older cars without built-in infotainment systems or phone connections.

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Conclusion: there aren’t that many Spotify users driving cars without built-in infotainment or phone connections. Failure of market research, basically.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Most cars in Ethiopia are very old – but a government scheme is pushing electric vehicles, as electricity is cheap and oil expensive. CC-licensed photo by Rachel Strohm 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 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.

Microsoft Copilot+ Recall feature is a ‘privacy nightmare’ • BBC News

Imran Rahman-Jones:

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The UK data watchdog says it is “making enquiries with Microsoft” over a new feature that can take screenshots of your laptop every few seconds.

Microsoft says Recall, which will store encrypted snapshots locally on your computer, is exclusive to its forthcoming Copilot+ PCs. But the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) says it is contacting Microsoft for more information on the safety of the product, which privacy campaigners have called a potential “privacy nightmare”.

Microsoft says Recall is an “optional experience” and it is committed to privacy and security. According to its website, external, users “can limit which snapshots Recall collects”.

“Recall data is only stored locally and not accessed by Microsoft or anyone who does not have device access,” the firm said in a statement. And it said a would-be hacker would need to gain physical access to your device, unlock it and sign in before they could access saved screenshots.

But an ICO spokesperson said firms must “rigorously assess and mitigate risks to peoples’ rights and freedoms” before bringing any new products to market. “We are making enquiries with Microsoft to understand the safeguards in place to protect user privacy,” they said.

Recall has the ability to search through all users’ past activity including files, photos, emails and browsing history. Many devices can already do this – but Recall also takes screenshots every few seconds and searches these too.

“This could be a privacy nightmare,” said Dr Kris Shrishak, an adviser on AI and privacy. “The mere fact that screenshots will be taken during use of the device could have a chilling effect on people.”

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Recall does feel like a half-done solution to a tricky problem. At the very least you’d want the screenshots to be protected behind a password that isn’t the same as the login password, and ideally encrypted in the same way.
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Humane is looking for a buyer after the AI Pin’s underwhelming debut • The Verge

Chris Welch:

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Humane, the startup behind the poorly-reviewed AI Pin wearable computer, is already hunting for a potential buyer for its business. That’s according to a report from Bloomberg, which says the company — led by former longtime Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno — is “seeking a price of between $750m and $1bn.”

That might be a tough sell after the $699 AI Pin’s debut: the device has been widely panned for its slow responses and a user experience that falls well short of the always-on, wearable AI assistant concept that its founders promised in the run-up to the device’s release. The product was pitched at least partially as a way for people to be more present and reduce their ever-growing dependence on smartphones.

Humane developed its own operating system called CosmOS that runs on the AI Pin. It hooks into a network of AI models to fetch answers for voice queries and to analyze what the built-in camera is pointed at. For some interactions, the device beams out a laser “display” that is projected onto the wearer’s inner palm. A monthly subscription is required to keep the device active.

The Bloomberg report notes that Humane has raised $230m from investors including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is rumored to be developing an unrelated product (in collaboration with legendary Apple designer Jony Ive) that could better showcase AI’s promise.

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Overpriced, even in its death throes. What do we think: $50m and an acquihire in a couple of months?
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Google Search’s new AI overviews will soon have ads • WIRED

Paresh Dave:

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Last week Google introduced a radical shake-up of search that presents users with AI-generated answers to their queries. Now the company says it will soon start including ads inside those AI Overviews, as the automatic answers are called.

Google on Tuesday announced plans to test search and shopping ads in the AI summaries, a move that could extend its dominance in search advertising into a new era. Although Google rapidly rolled out AI Overviews to all US English users last week after announcing the feature at its I/O developer conference, it’s unclear how widely or quickly ads will start appearing.

Screenshots released by Google show how a user asking how to get wrinkles out of clothes might get an AI-generated summary of tips sourced from the web, with a carousel of ads underneath for sprays that purport to help crisp up a wardrobe.

Google’s AI Overviews are meant to keep users from shifting to alternatives such as ChatGPT or the startup Perplexity, which use AI-generated text to answer many questions traditionally thrown at Google. How and when Google would integrate ads into AI Overviews has been a significant question over the company’s ChatGPT catch-up strategy. Search ads are the company’s largest revenue generator, and even subtle changes in ad placements or design can spur big swings in Google’s revenue.

Google shared few details about its new Overview ad format in its announcement Tuesday. Ads “will have the opportunity to appear within the AI Overview in a section clearly labeled as ‘sponsored’ when they’re relevant to both the query and the information in the AI Overview,” Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s vice president and general Manager for ads, wrote in a blog post.

AI Overview will draw on ads from advertisers’ existing campaigns, meaning they can neither completely opt out of the experiment nor have to adapt the settings and designs of their ads to appear in the feature.

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Srinivasan was described by Ed Zitron as “The Man Who Killed Google Search“, based on documents released at the DoJ trial which showed how more and more ads were packed into search results to hit financial targets. Seems like this is the continuation: strangle the web in favour of adverts.
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Connected fitness is adrift post-pandemic • TechCrunch

Brian Heater, amid the news that Peloton is looking to refinance its debt while taking on a $1bn five-year loan:

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The pandemic has certainly had long-term impacts on the economy. For instance, while work from home has obviously declined from its COVID heights, a report earlier this year notes that it’s still in the area of three to four times more common than it was in 2019. Connected fitness’ big bet was that while some regression was inevitable, the cultural shift was going to be permanent.

Ultimately, however, many were eager for a “return to normality,” and arrival of vaccinations, coupled with lowered rates of infection, emboldened many to get back to the gym. Unlike commuting into an artificially lit cubical farm five times a week, plenty of people genuinely enjoy the experience of working out in person.

The struggle isn’t universal, however. Hydrow, which raised $55m in 2022, purchased a majority stake in AI-based strength training firm Speede Fitness earlier this month. The firm has done a good job capitalizing on interest around rowing machines, even as Peloton’s answer to the category was entirely overshadowed by its very public struggles.

Despite some major regressions and broader economic headwinds, there’s always money to be raised if you’ve got a compelling enough product. Ultimately, however, those rounds should be consistently lower than they were in the home fitness salad days. For a recent example, Kabata, the maker of the “world’s first AI-powered dumbbells,” announced a $5m seed round on Tuesday. That’s follows a $2m seed round raised in May 2022.

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AI-powered dumbbells. The website makes lots of promises. They’re not on sale yet (autumn!), require a subscription, iOS only, require Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, US only.

How much? $800 outright. Suggestion to American fitness readers: buy normal dumbbells, get a personal trainer.
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‘Climate change is on the ballot’: Prime Minister calls surprise summer UK election • BusinessGreen News

Michael Holder and James Murray:

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Government Ministers have repeatedly argued Labour’s plan to deliver a clean power system by 2030 is not feasible and risks driving up energy bills, while also highlighting their record of delivering the deepest decarbonisation in the G20 and engineering a huge increase in renewables capacity and green investment.

But Labour has hit back by accusing the government of overseeing policy uncertainty and insufficient infrastructure underinvestment that has hampered the clean energy transition, driven up energy bills, and led to a sewage pollution crisis.   

Green groups today urged both main parties to prioritise ambitious climate action in the coming election.

“The election has been called on the day that scientists announced that “never ending” rain in the UK in autumn and winter has been made 10 times more likely by the climate crisis,” said Ed Matthew, campaigns director at climate change think tank E3G. “Climate change is already causing devastation to crops and homes in the UK and our dependence on fossil fuels has been at the heart of the cost of living crisis. Climate change is on the ballot like never before and voters will be looking for bold manifesto pledges to show parties are committed to ambitious action to rapidly build a clean, green energy system. Any party failing to take action on climate change is condemning itself to electoral oblivion.”

Leo Murray, co-director of climate charity Possible, urged political leaders to avoid the temptation to stoke divisions on environmental issues.

“We can’t let climate change become a culture war in this general election campaign,” he said. “During the 2019 general election, it was an issue on the doorstep for the first time. The first ever televised climate debate was broadcast into millions of living rooms and leading politicians pledged billions for climate action. But going into this election, the political consensus around climate is in peril.  Government ministers peddle conspiracy theories. Our prime minister has watered down net zero targets. Politicians are trying to turn climate into a dividing line, rather than a way to bring people together.”

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Related: heavy rainfall expected to lead to £1bn fall in arable farm revenues – which will probably push up inflation in the autumn. By which time it’ll be Someone Else’s Problem, as far as the Tories are concerned.
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Ethiopia shows us just how fast the transition to electric mobility can happen in Africa • CleanTechnica

Remeredzai Joseph Kuhudzai:

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Like a lot of countries on the African continent, Ethiopia has an exceptionally low motorisation rate. Ethiopia has a population of 126 million people, but the total number of vehicles registered in Ethiopia is around 1.2 million. Most of these vehicles are over 20 years old.

According to reports and announcements from the Ethiopian government, Ethiopia had a plan to catalyse adoption of electric vehicles in Ethiopia with a 10 year target to see 148,000 electric cars and close to 50,000 electric buses on Ethiopia’s roads by 2030. However, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Transport and Logistics recently said that this target of over 100,000 EVs has already been met in just the first two years of this plan.

Due to this incredible progress, the target has since been bumped up to close to 500,000 in the 10-year period. So, in just two years, locally assembled EVs and imported EVs have added almost 10% of Ethiopia’s current total ICE vehicle registrations. If all the vehicles in the current fleet stay on the road for the next 8 years (highly unlikely), the total fleet will be 1.7 million. If the target is met, it would mean the penetration of electric vehicles in Ethiopia’s total fleet will be close to 30% at that time.

Of course, the actual number will be more than 30%, as a lot of the vehicles in the current ICE fleet will be retired by then. Also, given the extremely low motorisation in Ethiopia, vehicle sales should grow at a much faster rate going forward, and probably the penetration of EVs in the country’s total fleet will hit close to 50% by then.

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And why the push for EVs?

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Ethiopia spends over US$5bn annually on petrol and diesel imports, precious foreign currency it does not have. Ethiopia has also recently started generating electricity from the first units at the 5-gigawatt Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, adding to its other hydro and renewable energy resources. Electricity is ridiculously cheap in Ethiopia at under 1¢ USD per kWh in many cases.

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Microsoft’s AI obsession is jeopardizing its climate ambitions • The Verge

Justine Calma:

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Back in 2020, Microsoft set a target of becoming carbon negative by the end of the decade. To translate the jargon, it pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions by more than half and then capture a greater amount of carbon dioxide emissions than it would produce. It was an audacious commitment to make at the time, considering carbon capture technologies were barely coming into existence. The company would also have to spur the deployment of way more renewable energy onto power grids where it operates.

Now, it looks like the company’s recent obsession with AI is making that much harder to achieve. Microsoft has invested more than $13bn in OpenAI to date, and it’s “turning everyone into a prompt engineer” for generative AI with new features in Copilot for Microsoft 365. (The Verge’s Tom Warren just launched a newsletter called Notepad to keep you up to date on all things Microsoft and AI.)

“In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence,” Microsoft president Brad Smith said in an interview with Bloomberg. “So in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs.”

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But on the plus side, you have autocomplete for that code to make a box of advertising pop up in the middle of the screen when someone’s reading a story, so net-net about even?
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Risk assessment of a highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus from mink • Nature Communications

Katherine Restori et al:

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Outbreaks of highly pathogenic H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b viruses in farmed mink and seals combined with isolated human infections suggest these viruses pose a pandemic threat. To assess this threat, using the ferret model, we show an H5N1 isolate derived from mink transmits by direct contact to 75% of exposed ferrets and, in airborne transmission studies, the virus transmits to 37.5% of contacts. Sequence analyses show no mutations were associated with transmission.

The H5N1 virus also has a low infectious dose and remains virulent at low doses. This isolate carries the adaptive mutation, PB2 T271A, and reversing this mutation reduces mortality and airborne transmission. This is the first report of a H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b virus exhibiting direct contact and airborne transmissibility in ferrets. These data indicate heightened pandemic potential of the panzootic H5N1 viruses and emphasize the need for continued efforts to control outbreaks and monitor viral evolution.

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Watching brief, nothing more. Cross-species transmission without laboratory manipulation, you say? Unimaginable.
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Eventbrite promoted illegal opioid sales to people searching for addiction recovery help • WIRED

Matt Burgess and Dhruv Mehrotra:

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This June, approximately 150 motorcycles will thunder down Route 9W in Saugerties, New York, for Ryan’s Ride for Recovery. Organized by Vince Kelder and his family, the barbecue and raffle will raise money to support their sober-living facility and honor their son who tragically died from a heroin overdose in 2015 after a years-long drug addiction.

The Kelders established Raising Your Awareness about Narcotics (RYAN) to help others struggling with substance-use disorder. For years, the organization has relied on Eventbrite, an event management and ticketing website, to arrange its events. This year, however, alongside listings for Ryan’s Ride and other addiction recovery events, Eventbrite surfaced listings peddling illegal sales of prescription drugs like Xanax, Valium, and oxycodone.

“It’s criminal,” Vince Kelder says. “They’re preying on people trying to get their lives back together.”

Eventbrite prohibits listings dedicated to selling illegal substances on its platform. It’s one of the 16 categories of content the company’s policies restrict its users from posting. But a WIRED investigation found more than 7,400 events published on the platform that appeared to violate one or more of these terms.

Among these listings were pages claiming to sell fentanyl powder “without a prescription,” accounts pushing the sale of Social Security numbers, and pages offering a “wild night with independent escorts” in India. Some linked to sites offering such wares as Gmail accounts, Google reviews (positive and negative), and TikTok and Instagram likes and followers, among other services.

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Not only that, but the algorithm pushed those illicit listings to people trying to recover. Shall we guess? Could it be that Eventbrite doesn’t monitor the listings at all, just takes the money from them? What an incredible thought. Would it surprise you to hear that “Eventbrite appears to have removed most, if not all, of the illicit listings that WIRED identified after we alerted the company to the issue.” [Italics added.]
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Nova explosion visible to the naked eye expected any day now • Ars Technica

Jacek Krywko:

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When you look at the northern sky, you can follow the arm of the Big Dipper as it arcs around toward the bright star called Arcturus. Roughly in the middle of that arc, you’ll find the Northern Crown constellation, which looks a bit like a smiley face. Sometime between now and September, if you look to the left-hand side of the Northern Crown, what will look like a new star will shine for five days or so.

This star system is called T. Coronae Borealis, also known as the Blaze Star, and most of the time, it is way too dim to be visible to the naked eye. But once roughly every 80 years, a violent thermonuclear explosion makes it over 10,000 times brighter. The last time it happened was in 1946, so now it’s our turn to see it.

“The T. Coronae Borealis is a binary system. It is actually two stars,” said Gerard Van Belle, the director of science at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. One of these stars is a white dwarf, an old star that has already been through its fusion-powered lifecycle. “It’s gone from being a main sequence star to being a giant star. And in the case of giant stars, what happens is their outer parts eventually get kind of pushed into outer space. What’s left behind is a leftover core of the star—that’s called a white dwarf,” Van Belle explained.

The white dwarf stage is normally a super peaceful retirement period for stars. The nuclear fusion reaction no longer takes place, which makes white dwarfs very dim. They are still pretty hot, though, and they’re super dense, with a mass comparable to our Sun squeezed into a volume resembling the Earth.

But the retirement of the white dwarf in T. Coronae Borealis is hardly peaceful, as it has a neighbor prone to littering. “Its companion star is in the red giant phase, where it is puffed up. Its outer parts are getting sloughed off and pushed into space. The material that is coming off the red giant is now falling onto the white dwarf,” Van Belle said.

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Just as long as it’s not our star going nova.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Great spotted eagles changed their migration routes to avoid Ukraine once the conflict began there in 2022. CC-licensed photo by Bernard DUPONT 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 10 links for you. Like Steve Miller? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

How the new Microsoft Recall feature fundamentally undermines Windows security • DoublePulsar

Kevin Beaumont:

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On Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sat down with the media to introduce a new feature called Recall, as part of their Copilot+ PCs. It takes screenshots of what you’re doing on constantly, by design:

The idea is it allows you to rewind back in time at the click of a button to see what you were doing at, say, 11pm two months ago. It also classifies almost everything you’re doing, seeing and typing. This is instantly searchable.

Microsoft’s store page for the PCs points out “It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers [..]” For example, if you log into online banking, your information around account numbers, balances, purchases etc will enter Recall’s database.

This fundamentally changes the relationship with you and your Microsoft Windows computer. It also introduces real risk to you, the customer. Let’s break down what is happening.

You may look at this and think ‘surely there’s some safety guardrails’, and there are — in the video above you’ll see Satya point out the processing and data storage is done locally on the device. In the FAQ they point out there’s some circumstances where data won’t be recorded, for example when password’s aren’t visible on screen.

That’s great. It’s also not nearly enough.

If you look at what has happened historically with infostealer malware — malicious software snuck onto PCs — it has pivoted to automatically steal browser passwords stored locally. In other words, if a malicious threat actor gains access to a system, they already steal important databases stored locally.

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You can turn it off, but of course then.. you’ve turned it off. This is going to be a hell of a target for malware.
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The tragic downfall of the internet’s art gallery • Slate

Nitish Pahwa:

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On March 27, a large group of artists and creators from across the web noticed the frightening extent to which a once-beloved, highly influential community platform of theirs had, like so many others, fallen prey to the artificial intelligence juggernauts plundering the internet.

As VFX animator Romain Revert (Minions, The Lorax) pointed out on X, the bots had come for his old home base of DeviantArt. Its social accounts were promoting “top sellers” on the platform, with usernames like “Isaris-AI” and “Mikonotai,” who reportedly made tens of thousands of dollars through bulk sales of autogenerated, dead-eyed 3D avatars. The sales weren’t exactly legit—an online artist known as WyerframeZ looked at those users’ followers and found pages of profiles with repeated names, overlapping biographies and account-creation dates, and zero creations of their own, making it apparent that various bots were involved in these “purchases.”

It’s not unlikely, as WyerframeZ surmised, that someone constructed a low-effort bot network that could hold up a self-perpetuating money-embezzlement scheme: Generate a bunch of free images and accounts, have them buy and boost one another in perpetuity, inflate metrics so that the “art” gets boosted by DeviantArt and reaches real humans, then watch the money pile up from DeviantArt revenue-sharing programs. Rinse, repeat.

After Revert declared this bot-on-bot fest to be “the downfall of DeviantArt,” myriad other artists and longtime users of the platform chimed in to share in the outrage that these artificial accounts were monopolizing DeviantArt’s promotional and revenue apparatuses. Several mentioned that they’d abandoned their DeviantArt accounts—all appearing to prove his dramatic point.

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Stalk my date: I know where you were last night • Bustle

Kate Lindsay:

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Location-monitoring is all but expected in relationships nowadays, in part because it comes in so many forms — from Life360 to Snap Map. Whether they mean to or not, users are constantly signaling their availability or where they are in real time. Instagram beams out a bright green dot next to my username whenever I’m scrolling; Facebook Messenger allows me to toggle sharing my whereabouts. It’s so easy, people may not even know when and where they’re doing it. Just ask 31-year-old Carlotta*, whose ex seemed to have no idea he had turned location services on for Facebook Messenger while they were dating.

“It was definitely by accident,” she told me. “He would message me, ‘Just leaving my house for work. What are you doing tonight?’ I would see in his location services that he was somewhere completely different.” She used this information to confront him, and he admitted to sleeping with someone else.

For those with an iPhone, one location-sharing feature, Find My Friends, dominates. Apple launched its standalone app in 2011, and by 2015, it came automatically with new iPhones. Since it merged with Find My iPhone and Find My Mac in 2019, Find My has been a one-stop shop for all users’ surveillance needs. Even when I’m not actively checking in on my friends and family, my iPhone is: I’ll reliably get an alert when my boyfriend (or, really, his AirPods) have been near me for a while.

Just last week, my friend Selina Scharr, a 31-year-old from Brooklyn, dropped her dog off at the vet for a stressful surgery. After an emotional goodbye, she left, only to receive an alert from the AirTag she keeps on her dog’s collar. Basil, it warned her, had been “left behind.”

“Jeez, Apple, way to make me cry this morning,” she texted our group chat. (Basil is recovering happily at home.)

This technology has changed everything. I no longer have to ask my friend for their ETA or wonder if my parents are available for a phone call. I can just check in on their real-time location, a capability previously associated with intelligence agencies and covert criminals. What is, for all intents and purposes, stalking, has become a casual part of everyday familial, romantic, and platonic relationships — and turned many with formerly healthy boundaries into lurkers in the process.

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Everyone in Hollywood is using AI, but “they are scared to admit it” • Hollywood Reporter

Winston Cho and Scott Roxborough:

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For horror fans, Late Night With the Devil marked one of the year’s most anticipated releases. Embracing an analog film filter, the found-footage flick starring David Dastmalchian reaped praise for its top-notch production design by leaning into a ’70s-era grindhouse aesthetic reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead or Death Race 2000. Following a late-night talk show host airing a Halloween special in 1977, it had all the makings of a cult hit.

But the movie may be remembered more for the controversy surrounding its use of cutaway graphics created by generative artificial intelligence tools. One image of a dancing skeleton in particular incensed some theatergoers. Leading up to its theatrical debut in March, it faced the prospect of a boycott, though that never materialized.

The movie’s directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes defended the AI usage, explaining the art was touched up by human hands. In a statement, they said, “We experimented with AI for three still images which we edited further and ultimately appear as very brief interstitials in the film.”

Less than a month later, five images suspected to be generated by AI teasing postapocalyptic scenes in A24’s Civil War sparked similar outrage by a segment of fans. There were a few telltale signs that the graphics were AI-created in landmark accuracy and consistency blunders: The two Chicago Marina Towers buildings in one poster are on opposite sides of the river; in another, a shot of wreckage shows a car with three doors.

In response, a reader on A24’s Instagram post wrote that the backlash to Late Night was “more than enough to make transparently clear to everyone: WE DO NOT WANT THIS.” 

But in the entertainment industry, the Pandora’s box of AI has likely already been unleashed. Behind closed doors, most corners of production, from writers’ rooms to VFX departments, have embraced generative AI tools.

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Those Civil War posters (in the linked article) do look weird, and AI-adjacent – especially the car with three doors on one side. They aren’t scenes from the (excellent) film itself.
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Four more cats die of H5N1 bird flu in the US • BNO News

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Four more cats have died of H5N1 bird flu in the United States, including two pets in South Dakota with no links to poultry or dairy cows, according to state and federal officials. At least 14 cats have recently died of bird flu.

Of the newly reported cases, two were domestic cats which died at a property in Campbell County in South Dakota, according to a state official and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Beth Thompson, the state’s veterinarian, said there was no livestock on the property where the pets died. “No other details regarding how the cats were infected are known at this time,” Thompson told BNO News.

Two other cases were recently reported in Michigan, one in Isabella County and the other in Ionia County. Both cases involved barn cats on commercial dairy farms where cows were also infected with H5N1.

At the property in Ionia County, two Virginia opossums were also infected with the bird flu virus.

“Cats are particularly susceptible to H5N1 2.3.4.4b viruses and the majority of sick cats have been reported at or near affected poultry facilities or dairies,” Shilo Weir, a spokesperson for USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, told BNO News.

…In the United States, at least 27 cats have now been infected with H5N1 bird flu, including the 14 cases reported in recent weeks. The other 13 happened last year in connection with infected poultry or wild birds.

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Watching brief. (Also: birds, cows, opossums, cats. It’s as if viruses can cross species barriers.)
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Why we’re unhappiest in our late 40s • Greater Good

Jill Suttie:

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According to new research, the United States isn’t the only place where midlife is so hard. Studying 132 countries around the world, labor economist and researcher David Blanchflower found strong evidence that people’s happiness forms a U shape over their lifetime, hitting its lowest point in midlife.

In the paper, Blanchflower reviewed large data sets from every continent but Antarctica. He drew from studies that focused on many measures of happiness, including life satisfaction, mood, pain, and more. He ran analyses that took into account factors that might impact happiness—such as health, income, employment, being married, being a parent, and more—then ran the analysis again not taking these into account.

In each case, he found that people’s happiness rose and fell in a U-shaped curve, and that it hit a low around the ages of 47 and 49. The consistency of this result surprised him.

“The expectation was that I probably wouldn’t find that this [dip in happiness] was the same everywhere; but it’s present in America, Germany, Thailand, Pakistan, everywhere,” he says. “Even in countries with a lower life expectancy, where you might’ve thought that it would be pretty different, it turns out it’s not. There’s an empirical regularity in the data from around the world, for millions of people.”

Why would that be? No one really knows, says Blanchflower; but researchers are trying to figure it out. The fact that apes also experience this drop in midlife points to a possible biological origin, perhaps with some evolutionary advantage. Feeling down in midlife could be nature’s way of spurring us to take action that extends our chances of survival or helps our communities.

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Perhaps they’re disappointed by headlines that promise to answer a question and then say it doesn’t have an answer. Just throwing it out there.
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Endangered migrating eagles impacted by Ukraine war • University of East Anglia

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Researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA), the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and the Estonian University of Life Sciences compared the movement and migration of the Greater Spotted Eagle through Ukraine, before and shortly after it was invaded by Russia in February 2022.

They were already studying the species when the war started, with the dangers faced by migratory birds usually related to disruptive weather or drought, changes in land use affecting traditional stopping-off points, or destruction of essential habitats. 

However, during the invasion the team found that the eagles, which had previously been fitted with GPS tracking devices, were exposed to multiple conflict events along their journey through the country in March and April.

These included artillery fire, jets, tanks and other weaponry, as well as unprecedented numbers of soldiers moving through the landscape and millions of civilians displaced.

Their migratory behaviour, gathered from the tracking data, was compared to previous years as they passed between wintering areas in southern Europe and East Africa and key breeding grounds in southern Belarus.

Published on Tuesday in the journal Current Biology, the findings reveal the eagles made large deviations from their traditional migratory routes. They also spent less time stopping at their usual refuelling sites in Ukraine or avoided them entirely.

This resulted in the eagles travelling further and arriving on their nesting grounds later than usual. This could seriously affect them and likely contributed to reduced physical fitness at a time when peak condition is critical to successful breeding.

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The animals think it’s stupid, just as the humans do, yet are equally powerless to stop it.
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Microsoft Copilot will watch you play Minecraft, tell you what you’re doing wrong • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

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Longtime gamers (and/or Game Grumps fans) likely know that even single-player games can be a lot more fun with a friend hanging out nearby to offer advice, shoot the breeze, or just offer earnest reactions to whatever’s happening on screen. Now, Microsoft is promising that its GhatGPT-4o-powered Copilot system will soon offer an imitation of that pro-social experience even for Minecraft players who don’t have any human friends available to watch them play.

In a pair of social media posts on Monday, Microsoft highlighted how “real-time conversations with your AI companion copilot” can enhance an otherwise solitary Minecraft experience. In the first demo, the disembodied copilot voice tells the player how to craft a sword, walking him through the process of gathering some wood or stone to go with the sticks sitting in his inventory. In another, the AI identifies a zombie in front of the player and gives the (seemingly obvious) advice to run away from the threat and “make sure it can’t reach you” by digging underground or building a tower of blocks.

These kinds of in-game pointers aren’t the most revolutionary use of conversational AI—even a basic in-game tutorial/reference system or online walkthrough could deliver the same basic information, after all. Still, the demonstration stands out for just how that information is delivered to the player through a natural language conversation that doesn’t require pausing the gameplay even briefly.

The key moment highlighting this difference is near the end of one of the video demos, when the Copilot AI offers a bit of encouragement to the player: “Whew, that was a close one. Great job finding shelter!” That’s the point when the system transitions from a fancy voice-controlled strategy guide to an ersatz version of the kind of spectator that might be sitting on your couch or watching your Twitch stream. It creates the real possibility of developing a parasocial relationship with the Copilot guide that is not really a risk when consulting a text file on GameFAQs, for instance (though I think the Copilot reactions will have to get a bit less inane to really feel like a valued partner-in-gaming).

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Even so: the possibility of parasocial relationships with your automagically talking device does seem like something we should consider carefully.
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Revealed: Meta approved political ads in India that incited violence • The Guardian

Hannah Ellis-Petersen:

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The Facebook and Instagram owner Meta approved a series of AI-manipulated political adverts during India’s election that spread disinformation and incited religious violence, according to a report shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Facebook approved adverts containing known slurs towards Muslims in India, such as “let’s burn this vermin” and “Hindu blood is spilling, these invaders must be burned”, as well as Hindu supremacist language and disinformation about political leaders.

Another approved advert called for the execution of an opposition leader they falsely claimed wanted to “erase Hindus from India”, next to a picture of a Pakistan flag.

The adverts were created and submitted to Meta’s ad library – the database of all adverts on Facebook and Instagram – by India Civil Watch International (ICWI) and Ekō, a corporate accountability organisation, to test Meta’s mechanisms for detecting and blocking political content that could prove inflammatory or harmful during India’s six-week election.

According to the report, all of the adverts “were created based upon real hate speech and disinformation prevalent in India, underscoring the capacity of social media platforms to amplify existing harmful narratives”.

The adverts were submitted midway through voting, which began in April and would continue in phases until 1 June. The election will decide if the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government will return to power for a third term.

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As should always pointed out: dehumanising language (“vermin”) and othering is how massacres are fomented. Most recently in Myanmar, where this sort of monologue directed by Buddhists towards Muslims on, yes, Facebook, led to genocide in 2016-17.
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AI traces mysterious metastatic cancers to their source • Nature

Smitri Mallapaty:

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To treat metastatic cancers, doctors need to know where they came from. The origin of up to 5% of all tumours cannot be identified, and the prognosis for people whose primary cancer remains unknown is poor.

One method used to diagnose tricky metastatic cancers relies on tumour cells found in fluid extracted from the body. Clinicians examine images of the cells to work out which type of cancer cell they resemble. For example, breast cancer cells that migrate to the lungs still look like breast cancer cells.

Every year, of the 300,000 people with cancer who are newly treated at the hospital affiliated with Tianjin Medical University (TMU) in China, some 4,000 are diagnosed using such images, but around 300 people remain undiagnosed, says Tian Fei, a colorectal cancer surgeon at TMU.

Tian, Li Xiangchun, a bioinformatics researcher who studies deep learning at TMU, and their colleagues wanted to develop a deep-learning algorithm to analyse these images and predict the origin of the cancers. Their results were published in Nature Medicine on 16 April.

The researchers trained their AI model on some 30,000 images of cells found in abdominal or lung fluid from 21,000 people whose tumour of origin was known. They then tested their model on 27,000 images and found there was an 83% chance that it would accurately predict the source of the tumour. And there was a 99% chance that the source of the tumour was included in the model’s top three predictions.

…The researchers also retrospectively assessed a subset of 391 study participants some four years after they had had cancer treatment. They found that those who had received treatment for the type of cancer that the model predicted were more likely to have survived, and lived longer, than participants for whom the prediction did not match.

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I feel this is a far better use for ML than helping people writing marketing letters.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A group of students at Johns Hopkins University have made a quieter leaf blower – though it would be better to have a non-petrol one. CC-licensed photo by Dean Hochman 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 9 links for you. Blowin’ in the wind. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

New Arm-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop aim directly at Apple Silicon Macs • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

»

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Microsoft has announced a pair of new devices powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite processors. They’re far from Microsoft’s first PCs with Arm processors in them—2012’s original Surface, the Surface Pro X, and the Surface Pro 9 with 5G have all shipped with Arm’s chips instead of Intel’s or AMD’s. But today’s new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are the first Arm devices to be the primary Surface offerings rather than a side offering, and they’re the first to credibly claim that they can both outperform comparable Intel- and AMD-designed chips while offering better battery life, a la Apple’s M1 chip in 2020.

One caveat that I hadn’t seen mentioned in Microsoft’s presentation or in other coverage of the announcement, though—Microsoft says that both of these devices have fans. Apple still uses fans for the MacBook Pro lineup, but the MacBook Air is totally fanless. Bear that in mind when reading Microsoft’s claims about performance.

All of these devices meet Microsoft’s minimum hardware requirements for its new “Copilot+ PC” initiative, which is meant to support more on-device processing for AI-powered activities like chatbots and image generation. All of the devices are available for pre-order now and will begin arriving on June 18.

…Microsoft’s messaging is muddy. The devices declare on a “key specs” sheet that they will give users up to 20 or 22 hours of local video playback. But the full specs sheet claims a much shorter 13 and 15 hours for “active web usage.” Microsoft quotes 18 and 17 hours of “typical device usage” for the Surface Laptop 5, but it’s unclear how “typical device usage” and “active web usage” compare to each other since Microsoft says they’re different tests.

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Nobody’s buying laptops based on comparative performance between Windows and Mac. It’s the OS first, and everything else afterwards. The only question is whether this makes Windows virtualisation on macOS more likely, and on that, there’s no sign.
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ChatGPT suspends AI voice that sounds like Scarlett Johansson • The Guardian

Nick Robins-Early:

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OpenAI removed a heavily promoted voice option from ChatGPT on Monday, following a widespread reaction to the flirtatious, feminine voice that sounded almost identical to Scarlett Johansson.

The company used the voice, which it calls “Sky”, during its widely publicized event last week debuting the capabilities of the new ChatGPT-4o artificial intelligence model. Researchers talked with the AI assistant to show off Sky’s personable and responsive affectations, which users and members of the media immediately compared to Johansson’s AI companion character in the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her.

Even OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, seemed to suggest that the vocal design was intentionally mimicking Johansson’s character, posting a one-word tweet after the presentation that simply said “her”. Less than a week later, OpenAI felt compelled to explicitly clarify that Sky was not based on Johansson. The company published a blogpost about Sky’s creation and claimed that the company values the voice acting industry.

“Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice,” the blogpost read. “To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents.”

While many commentators remarked on Sky’s similarities to Johansson in Her – including Johansson’s husband and Saturday Night Live cast member, Colin Jost, during a segment on the show’s season finale – others questioned why the voice was so fawning and gendered. “You can really tell that a man built this tech,” the Daily Show host Desi Lydic joked last week. “She’s like, ‘I have all the information in the world, but I don’t know anything.’”

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Scarlett Johansson issued a statement on Monday suggesting that OpenAI did approach her to be the voice (she considered it and declined), approached her again two days ahead of the release, released it and thus forced her to hire lawyers who got it taken offline.

You can tell that a man built it, indeed.
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How AI bots and voice assistants reinforce gender bias • Brookings

Caitlin Chin-Rothmann and Mishaela Robison:

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As artificial bots and voice assistants become more prevalent, it is crucial to evaluate how they depict and reinforce existing gender-job stereotypes and how the composition of their development teams affect these portrayals. AI ethicist Josie Young recently said that “when we add a human name, face, or voice [to technology] … it reflects the biases in the viewpoints of the teams that built it,” reflecting growing academic and civil commentary on this topic. Going forward, the need for clearer social and ethical standards regarding the depiction of gender in artificial bots will only increase as they become more numerous and technologically advanced.

Given their early adoption in the mass consumer market, U.S. voice assistants present a practical example of how AI bots prompt fundamental criticisms about gender representation and how tech companies have addressed these challenges. In this report, we review the history of voice assistants, gender bias, the diversity of the tech workforce, and recent developments regarding gender portrayals in voice assistants.

…Voice assistants illustrate how Silicon Valley’s approach to gender-based harassment is evolving. In 2017, Leah Fessler of Quartz analyzed how Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant responded to flirty, sexual comments and found they were evasive, subservient, and sometimes seemingly thankful (Table B in the article).

When replicating this exercise in July 2020, we discovered that each of the four voice assistants had since received a rewrite to respond to harassment in a more definitively negative manner. For example, Cortana responded by reminding the user she is a piece of technology (“I’m code”) or moving on entirely. Similarly, Siri asked for a different prompt or explicitly refused to answer.

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The progress from 2017 to 2020 is quite encouraging.
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FBI arrests man for generating AI child sexual abuse imagery • Courtwatch News

Seamus Hughes and Samantha Cole:

»

Steven Anderegg, a 42 year old man from Holmen, Wisconsin, allegedly used Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image generative AI model, to create “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors,” prosecutors said in an announcement on Monday. “Many of these images depicted nude or partially clothed minors lasciviously displaying or touching their genitals or engaging in sexual intercourse with men. Evidence recovered from Anderegg’s electronic devices revealed that he generated these images using specific, sexually explicit text prompts related to minors, which he then stored on his computer.”

He then allegedly communicated with a 15-year-old boy, describing his process for creating the images, and sent him several of the AI generated images of minors through Instagram direct messages. In some of the messages, Anderegg told Instagram users that he uses Telegram to distribute AI-generated CSAM. “He actively cultivated an online community of like-minded offenders—through Instagram and Telegram—in which he could show off his obscene depictions of minors and discuss with these other offenders their shared sexual interest in children,” the court records allege. “Put differently, he used these GenAI images to attract other offenders who could normalize and validate his sexual interest in children while simultaneously fueling these offenders’ interest—and his own—in seeing minors being sexually abused.”

This marks one of the first known instances where the FBI has charged someone for using AI to create child sexual abuse material. 

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Regrettably, almost surely won’t be the last.
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How I made Google’s “web” view my default search • Tedium

Ernie Smith:

»

Ever use a de-Googled Android phone? Here’s a de-Googled Google, or as close to one as you’re going to get on the google.com domain.

It’s such a questionably fascinating idea to offer something like this, and for power searchers like myself, it’s likely going to be an amazing tool. But Google’s decision to bury it ensures that few people will use it. The company has essentially bet that you’ll be better off with a pre-parsed guess produced by its AI engine.

It’s worth understanding the tradeoffs, though. My headline aside, a simplified view does not replace the declining quality of Google’s results, largely caused by decades of SEO optimization by website creators. The same overly optimized results are going to be there, like it or not. It is not Google circa 2001—it is a Google-circa-2001 presentation of Google circa 2024, a very different site.

But if you understand the tradeoffs, it can be a great tool. Power users will find it especially helpful when doing deep dives into things. However, is there anything you can do to minimize the pain of having to click the “Web” option buried in a menu every single time?

The answer to that question is yes. Google does not make it easy, because its URLs seem extra-loaded with cruft these days, but by adding a URL parameter to your search—in this case, “udm=14”—you can get directly to the Web results in a search.

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There is a way to make it automatically add the URL parameter to the search, as the article explains. If you’re getting annoyed with the AI suggestions, then this is your way forward.
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How will Google make money when search just gives you the answer? • Threads

»

edmundlee: I have a dumb question for all the smart tech reporters out there. How will
@google make money when search doesn’t take you to a site but just gives you the answer? Search advertising accounts for nearly 60% of all Alphabet revenue. So it’s going to be replaced by subscriptions? I still don’t get it.

crumbler [Casey Newton, tech journalist who writes the Platformer email): They’ll show fewer ads on web pages, more (and more lucrative) ads on the SERP [search engine results page], and also scoop up the affiliate fees that used to go to all the websites publishing ‘best laptop’ lists. Once they have a working agent they’ll take various fees for being your travel agent / personal shopper etc

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Which makes a lot of sense. Google just wants to roll it all up so it’s the only site on the internet.
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As clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple News be a lifeline? • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

Like many digital publishers, The Daily Beast was struggling at the end of 2023. Facebook, long a primary driver of clicks to the publication, had turned away from news. Search traffic had become increasingly erratic, as Google adjusted its algorithm to combat a flood of AI-powered junk. The site’s paid subscription program had atrophied since Donald Trump left office.

But it had a new lifeline: Apple.

Late last year, the digital news tabloid (where I worked from 2018 to 2021 as a media reporter) entered into Apple’s partnership program, called Apple News+. The program made all of the publication’s buzziest exclusives available to paying Apple subscribers, behind Apple’s own paywall. And the impact for a mid-sized news site was immediate, putting the Beast on track to make between $3-4m in revenue this year from Apple News alone — more than its own standalone subscription program, and without much additional cost.

The Beast is hardly alone in its increased reliance on the iOS news aggregator. The free version of Apple News has been a source of audience attention for news publishers since it launched in 2015. But while many publishers have come to the conclusion that traffic has less business value than they once thought, they’re still desperate for revenue. Executives at companies including Condé Nast, Penske Media, Vox, Hearst, and Time all told Semafor that Apple News+ has come to represent a substantial stream of direct revenue.

A spokesperson for Time said that Apple News has become “one of our most important partners and delivers 7-figures of revenue for TIME annually,” adding that the publication garnered five million unique visitors from Apple News last month. The revenue and audience numbers have been similar at major Condé Nast publications, including Wired and Vanity Fair. As significant as the partnership has been for the Daily Beast, it’s been even bigger for its larger corporate sister Dotdash Meredith, which runs the portfolio of magazines purchased by Daily Beast parent company IAC in 2021.

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Just in case it hadn’t clicked, seven-figure revenues are in the millions. Astonishing if Apple News has somehow become the new saviour of the news industry: as Google changes its algorithm and kills the smaller sites (which are otherwise being killed by Dotdash Meredith), maybe this is the new port in a storm.
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Interview of the week: Meredith Whittaker, AI ethics expert • The Innovator

Jennifer L. Schenker talks to the woman who is president of Signal, the messaging app, but also has been a faculty director of the AI Now Institute, and formerly at Google:

»

Q: There is concern that large language models are being dominated by a handful of Silicon Valley and Chinese players. What problems does this pose? And where does Europe fit into this picture? 

MW: This is not just a concern, this is the reality. The AI industry is dominated by a handful of monopoly players, largely based in the US (whose dominant cloud companies have about 70% of the global market). The best hope for AI “startups” in this environment is to be acquired or enter into another kind of encumbered partnership with one of the US-based ‘hyperscalers.’ Meaning, there is no path to market that isn’t through the current giants. The EU and others need to recognize this, and seriously prepare for a future where these largely unaccountable and obscure companies, which provide core infrastructure for computation globally in addition to licensing powerful AI services, could be pressured by a more hostile, more isolationist US government.

Q: In the early days of the Internet the mantra was “Privacy is dead. Get over it.” Is it game over or do you believe we can regain control of our data and our privacy in the age of GenAI? 7. You are speaking at VivaTech in May. What will be your main message to the audience?

MW: The ‘Internet’ is not even a century old, and the current version of commercial networked computation is only a few decades old, emerging out of the 1990s and the neoliberal zeitgeist of that time which saw the market as the rightful arbiter of social and political life, and saw regulations–even those that would protect privacy and curb massive corporate surveillance–as inhibiting this free market. Out of the 1990s, the surveillance business model emerged, and the massive amounts of data, compute, and monopolistic platforms that we now confront were shaped during this time. We cannot treat this peculiar, contingent business model as somehow natural or inevitable. We can regain control – of course we can! – and we can make necessary and meaningful changes to these infrastructures.

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She’s an interesting interviewee.
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College students engineer a leaf blower silencer that blew Black & Decker away • Hot Hardware

Nathan Ord:

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A team of undergraduate engineering students at Johns Hopkins University has created a quieter leaf blower using a simple barrel attachment that acts like a suppressor on a gun. This attachment is expected to hit shelves in the next two years, reducing the traditional shrill cry of leaf blowers worldwide to a gentler blowing noise.

Last September, a team of four students from Johns Hopkins were presented with a challenge: “Take a leaf blower, but make it quiet.” The project began with figuring out how the leaf blower was built and its individual components, further “analyzing all of its the noises and why it made them.” Once complete, the team spent a lot of time contemplating improvements, creating solutions, and binning many options that did not fit the bill. Team member Andrew Palacio explained to JHU Hub that “The sound that comes out of this leaf blower is very complicated and it contains a lot of different frequencies,” so ultimately, it took around 40 versions of the solution that was finally landed upon, a suppressor-like leaf blower-attachment.

The final design cuts out the high-pitched, more annoying frequencies by roughly 12dB which is 94% quieter over the original sound pressure level, and the overall noise was reduced by 2dB making the leaf blower around 37% quieter. So, while it is a quieter machine overall, the noise that is present will also be more bearable than standard, non-suppressed leaf blowers.

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Although the utility of any but electric leaf blowers (which would by nature be silent) is in question. They’re incredibly polluting, not only in noise but also the oil/petrol mix they burn.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might expect that Australia would generate most of its power from renewables. In fact it relies heavily on fossil fuels. CC-licensed photo by Nigel Hoult 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.

A selection of 9 links for you. Puffing away. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Link rot and digital decay on government, news and other webpages • Pew Research Center

Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy and Gonzalo Rivero:

»

A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.

For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:
• 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.

• 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:
• Nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted. In 60% of these cases, the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. In the other 40%, the account holder deleted the individual tweet, but the account itself still existed.

• Certain types of tweets tend to go away more often than others. More than 40% of tweets written in Turkish or Arabic are no longer visible on the site within three months of being posted. And tweets from accounts with the default profile settings are especially likely to disappear from public view.

…We found that 25% of all the pages we collected from 2013 through 2023 were no longer accessible as of October 2023. This figure is the sum of two different types of broken pages: 16% of pages are individually inaccessible but come from an otherwise functional root-level domain; the other 9% are inaccessible because their entire root domain is no longer functional.

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Depressing, if you view the internet as somehow representing the sum of our knowledge. What we don’t know, of course, is how much of the lost content is actually accretively useful in some way, rather than being repetition or plain noise.
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Brazil is reeling from catastrophic floods. What went wrong – and what does the future hold? • The Guardian

Jore Carrasco:

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Rio Grande do Sul, a state home to almost 11 million people, has witnessed the most extensive climate catastrophe in its history and one of the greatest in Brazil’s recent history.

Over the course of 10 days at the end of April and beginning of May, the region recorded between a third and almost half of the yearly rainfall predicted – between 500 and 700 millimetres, depending on the area, according to measurements by Metsul Meteorologia.

The storm caused the Taquari, Caí, Pardo, Jacuí, Sinos, and Gravataí rivers – tributaries of the Guaíba – to overflow.

According to the Civil Defence, there are more than 100 people dead, more than 130 missing, and nearly 400 people injured in 425 affected municipalities.

At least 232,125 people have left their homes: 67,542 are in shelters, and 164,583 are homeless or temporarily staying with family or friends. Cities such as Eldorado do Sul, Roca Sales, and Canoas were partly flooded, and villages such as Cruzeiro do Sul were devastated in what the state governor, Eduardo Leite, described as “the greatest catastrophe of all”.

Porto Alegre, the state capital and one of Brazil’s largest urban centres, is one of the worst-affected cities. On 5 May, the level of the Guaíba River, which runs through the city, reached a record of 5.35 meters, surpassing the 4.76 meters reached during the historic floods of 1941.

Neighbourhoods close to the river were submerged. The airport closed, and power and water-treatment plants went down, causing electricity and drinking water shortages in several areas. A dam in a northern suburb failed and flooded a large portion of the city.

Viewed from an army helicopter, the neighbouring city of Eldorado do Sul looks like a set of canals stretching along narrow strips of land and buildings. About 90% of the city is underwater. Along the BR-290 highway, one of the most critical roads in the country’s south, hundreds of people are waiting for transport to shelters.

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A quarter of a million people displaced by ten days of rain.
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Wegovy and the others are becoming too essential for its elite price • FT

John Gapper:

»

everything comes at a price, and the one attached to the GLP-1 agonist drugs is enormous. Indeed, the more effective they turn out to be in treating a variety of chronic and life-shortening ailments, the higher the looming costs to health insurers and governments. Battles about the prices of innovative drugs are nothing new, but this one is on another financial scale.

The drugs are now testing the rule that no product can be too successful. If they were as cheap and convenient as blood pressure pills and statins, they might soon be routinely prescribed. But they are far from it: Wegovy’s list price in the US is $15,600 per year, although insurers obtain discounts. There is a widening gulf between benefit and affordability.

Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist US senator, this week released a study that claimed these drugs had “the potential to bankrupt Medicare, Medicaid and the entire [US] healthcare system”. He wants Novo Nordisk to reduce the US price of Wegovy to the much lower one in Denmark but, even there, the government only provides limited coverage for severe obesity.

It was easier for governments and insurers to hold the financial line before studies showed benefits beyond simply curbing obesity. But the US Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy for heart disease risk in March, opening coverage for older Americans under Medicare. If it does what trials show, cost alone may become the chief obstacle to mass adoption.

Still, the fact that something is useful does not make it worth the price. It is extremely valuable to an individual to avoid a heart attack that debilitates or kills them, but that does not mean a government should provide the same treatment more widely to limit the risk to millions of people. There is a hard financial calculation to be made.

…The potential cost of prescribing such drugs to all obese Americans could exceed $1tn, [economics professor Jonathan] Gruber has estimated. Yet obesity also has high costs, not just to healthcare systems but to societies and economies.

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OpenAI’s long-term AI risk team has disbanded • WIRED

Will Knight:

»

In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the company’s cofounders, was named as the colead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20% of its computing power.

Now OpenAI’s “superalignment team” is no more, the company confirms. That comes after the departures of several researchers involved, Tuesday’s news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation of the team’s other colead. The group’s work will be absorbed into OpenAI’s other research efforts.

Sutskever’s departure made headlines because although he’d helped CEO Sam Altman start OpenAI in 2015 and set the direction of the research that led to ChatGPT, he was also one of the four board members who fired Altman in November. Altman was restored as CEO five chaotic days later after a mass revolt by OpenAI staff and the brokering of a deal in which Sutskever and two other company directors left the board.

Hours after Sutskever’s departure was announced on Tuesday, Jan Leike, the former DeepMind researcher who was the superalignment team’s other colead, posted on X that he had resigned.

Neither Sutskever nor Leike responded to requests for comment. Sutskever did not offer an explanation for his decision to leave but offered support for OpenAI’s current path in a post on X. “The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial” under its current leadership, he wrote.

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But did he really write it.. or was it the AI?
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February 2024: Opinion: how a16z gamed the NYT Bestseller list • Protos

Cas Piancey, a couple of months ago:

»

Entrepreneur and Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon recently released a book espousing the benefits of the blockchain, NFTs, and web3, entitled Read Write Own — and it’s getting mixed reviews.

From the highly critical Molly White complaining that “Dixon fails to identify a single blockchain project that has successfully provided a non-speculative service at any kind of scale,” to the more commendatory by David Z. Morris calling it “an optimistic read,” it’s safe to say Dixons literary efforts are dividing opinion.

However, regardless of how you feel about a16z, Dixon, or the future of web3, what’s clear is that the book did some serious numbers in its first week on bookshelves and via ebook sales. Indeed, the nonfiction title sold more copies this week than Britney Spears’ autobiography, The Woman in Me, and slightly fewer than bestselling author Donald L. Miller’s Masters of the Air, landing at number nine on the New York Times (NYT) Best Seller list.

Unfortunately, the revered ranking comes with a very serious caveat, namely that the NYT itself suspects that the title managed to get ranked by gaming the system.

The list only adds a ‘dagger’ to titles it believes have, in some way, attempted to present more sales than real demand, a concept a16z is extremely familiar with.

…The NYT states that including a dagger on the Best Seller list implies “institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases,” and that such a dubious distinction only comes after “proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations.”

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Wondered how this might have turned out.
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Nuclear option costs ‘six times more’ than renewables, study finds • RenewEconomy

Marion Rae:

»

The high upfront costs and burden on consumers of adding nuclear to Australia’s energy mix have been confirmed in an independent review.

Building nuclear reactors would cost six times more than wind and solar power firmed up with batteries, according to the independent report released on Saturday by the Clean Energy Council.

“We support a clear-eyed view of the costs and time required to decarbonise Australia and right now, nuclear simply doesn’t stack up,” the industry body’s chief executive Kane Thornton said.

Taxpayers needed to understand the decades of costs if they were forced to foot the bill for building a nuclear industry from scratch, Mr Thornton warned.

The analysis prepared by construction and engineering experts Egis also found nuclear energy had poor economic viability in a grid dominated by renewable energy.

Renewable energy will provide 82% of the national electricity market under current targets for 2030, which is at least a decade before any nuclear could theoretically be operational.

Further, nuclear power stations are not designed to ramp up and down to align with renewable energy generation.

Adding to the cost challenges, Australia has no nuclear energy industry because it is prohibited under commonwealth and state laws, which would all need to be changed.

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Amazing: Australia has one – count it! – nuclear power plant, but it isn’t used to generate power. Renewables are only 32% of Australia’s power generation. Incredible.
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One flu over the cuckoo’s nest • Logging The World

Oliver Johnson on avian flu mortality rates in human:

»

Take COVID for example. If I go to the UKHSA dashboard then I will see that the latest figures are 2,343 cases and 92 deaths in a week. Crudely dividing one by another suggests a case fatality rate of about 5%. Doing a better estimate, taking into account lags and rising and falling trajectories, the most recent deaths probably relate to a time around early April when cases were perhaps half that. So we could perhaps even argue for a case fatality rate in the 8-10% region.

And yet …pre-vaccine the COVID infection fatality rate was much lower than this (perhaps of the order of 1%). Now, it’s likely that the true value is perhaps somewhere in the 0.01-0.05% range. In other words, our dashboard-derived case fatality rate estimate is something like 200 to 500 times too high.

There’s a simple explanation for this: nobody is testing any more! The vast majority of reported cases arise at the hospital admissions stage, so are hugely skewed to the most serious infections and the most vulnerable people. People for whom COVID is somewhat like a case of flu don’t tend to show up in the data – even those who do take an lateral flow test don’t have an easy mechanism for reporting the result.

So, returning to bird flu, I believe that it’s likely that similar things are going on (as Whipple suggested). Looking again at the WHO table you can see that the vast majority of the reported cases (861 out of 888) took place before 2014, the majority of them in countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and Egypt which locally reported a very high case fatality rate at the time. While this data is valid in a sense, it’s not clear to me that an estimate which is heavily weighted to decade-old estimates of a healthcare-dependent quantity (dominated by these kinds of countries) is representative of what the experience might be in the UK now.

Indeed, [Times science editor Tom] Whipple suggests that the estimate might be lower if we did surveillance of all farm workers, rather than just picking up the most serious cases. But that has been happening! For example, the most recent UKHSA surveillance report describes four cases picked up by random sampling: three did not even show symptoms, and one reported a sore throat and myalgia. While four people is a small sample, and so random chance will play a role, it seems hard to reconcile these numbers with a true fatality rate of the claimed 50%.

…So it’s definitely right that we take bird flu seriously, and that infectious disease experts should be planning ahead to mitigate the risks. But equally I don’t think it helps anyone to be routinely quoting a science fiction sounding fatality rate, without at least thinking a little bit about what that means and how it is derived.

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Watching brief! But also, that’s a killer pun in the title.
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What I got wrong in a decade of predicting the future of tech • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»

after almost 500 articles in The Wall Street Journal, one thing I’ve learned from covering the tech industry is that failures are far more instructive. Especially when they’re the kind of errors made by many people.

Here’s what I’ve learned from a decade of embarrassing myself in public—and having the privilege of getting an earful about it from readers.

1. Disruption is overrated
Why are three of the most valuable companies of 2014—Microsoft, Apple, and Google—bigger than ever? How is Meta doing so well even as people have for years been abandoning Facebook, its core product? Why is Twitter still chugging along, no matter what its new owner gets up to?

The short answer is that disruption is overrated. The most-worshiped idol in all of tech—the notion that any sufficiently nimble upstart can defeat bigger, slower, sclerotic competitors—has proved to be a false one.

It’s not that disruption never happens. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as we’ve been led to believe. There are many reasons for this. One is that many tech leaders have internalized a hypercompetitive paranoia—what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called “Day 1” thinking—that inspires them to either acquire or copy and kill every possible upstart.

Economic historians have been picking apart the notion of business-model disruption for a long time, and yet hardly a day goes by when a startup, investor, or journalist—including yours truly—doesn’t trumpet the power of a new technology to completely upend even the biggest and most hidebound of industries.

Don’t believe it. In a world in which companies learn from one another faster than ever, incumbents have an ability to reinvent themselves at a pace that simply wasn’t possible in the past.

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That’s only the first; he has four more (human factors, we lie to ourselves about tech’s potential, bubbles can be useful, we need to take charge of tech). [The link should be free to read.]
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AI’s next big step: detecting human emotion and expression • Big Technology

Alex Kantrowitz:

»

Alan Cowen, CEO of Hume AI, is a former Meta and Google researcher who’s built AI technology that can read the tune, timber, and rhythm of your voice, as well as your facial expressions, to discern your emotions. 

As you speak with Hume’s bot, EVI, it processes the emotions you’re showing — like excitement, surprise, joy, anger, and awkwardness — and expresses its responses with ’emotions’ of its own. Yell at it, for instance, and it will get sheepish and try to diffuse the situation. It will display its calculations on screen, indicating what it’s reading in your voice and what it’s giving back. And it’s quite sticky. Across 100,000 unique conversations, the average interaction between humans and EVI is ten minutes long, a company spokesperson said.

“Every word carries not just the phonetics, but also a ton of detail in its tune, rhythm, and timbre that is very informative in a lot of different ways,” Cowen told me on Big Technology Podcast last week. “You can predict a lot of things. You can predict whether somebody has depression or Parkinson’s to some extent, not perfectly… You can predict in a customer service call, whether somebody’s having a good or bad call much more accurately.”

Hume, which raised $50m in March, already offers the technology that reads emotion in voices via its API, and it has working tech that reads facial expressions that it has yet to release. The idea is to deliver much more data to AI models than they would get by simply transcribing text, enabling them to do a better job of making the end user happy. “Pretty much any outcome,” Cowen said, “it benefits to include measures of voice modulation and not just language.”

…To program ’emotional intelligence’ into machine learning models, the Hume team had more than 1 million people use survey platforms and rate how they’re feeling, and connected that to their facial expressions and speech. “We had people recording themselves and rating their expressions, and what they’re feeling, and responding to music, and videos, and talking to other participants,” Cowen said. “Across all of this data, we just look at what’s consistent between different people.”

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Can’t human operators tell if it’s a bad call? Oh, we want to get rid of them. And how well do we trust the survey platforms? Not that deeply, personally.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if you went to a dog show, determined to pet every dog that was there? CC-licensed photo by Salon NYC 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.

With regret, there’s no Social Warming Substack this week. The chosen topic simply didn’t work, and I ran out of time to find another. Apologies. Perhaps it’ll be a twofer next week.

A selection of 9 links for you. Very good indeed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Ofcom: almost a quarter of kids aged 5-7 have smartphones • BBC News

Chris Vallance and Philippa Wain:

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Nearly a quarter of UK five-to-seven-year-olds now have their own smartphone, Ofcom research suggests.

Social media use also rose in the age group over last year with nearly two in five using messaging service WhatsApp, despite its minimum age of 13.

The communications regulator warned parental enforcement of rules “appeared to be diminishing.”
It also said the figures should be a “wake up call” for the industry to do more to protect children.

In its annual study of children’s relationship with the media and online worlds, Ofcom said the percentage of children aged between five and seven who used messaging services had risen from 59% to 65%. The number on social media went up from 30% to 38%, while for livestreams it increased from 39% to 50%. Just over 40% are reported to be gaming online – up from 34% the year before.

Over half of children under 13 used social media, contrary to most of the big platforms’ rules, and many admitted to lying to gain access to new apps and services.

“I think this is a wake up call for industry. They have to take account of the users they have, not the users that their terms and conditions say they have,” Mark Bunting, from Ofcom’s Online Safety Group told BBC News.

“We’ve known for a long time that children, under the age limit on a lot of the most popular apps, are widely using those apps, and companies are now under a legal obligation to take steps to keep those children safe,” he added.

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Sony Music warns global tech and streamers over AI use of its artists • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas:

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Sony Music is sending warning letters to more than 700 artificial intelligence developers and music streaming services globally in the latest salvo in the music industry’s battle against tech groups ripping off artists.

The Sony Music letter, which has been seen by the Financial Times, expressly prohibits AI developers from using its music — which includes artists such as Harry Styles, Adele and Beyoncé — and opts out of any text and data mining of any of its content for any purposes such as training, developing or commercialising any AI system.

Sony Music is sending the letter to companies developing AI systems including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Suno and Udio, according to those close to the group.

The world’s second-largest music group is also sending separate letters to streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, asking them to adopt “best practice” measures to protect artists and songwriters and their music from scraping, mining and training by AI developers without consent or compensation. It has asked them to update their terms of service, making it clear that mining and training on its content is not permitted.

Sony Music declined to comment further.

…Executives at the New York-based group are concerned that their music has already been ripped off, and want to set out a clearly defined legal position that would be the first step to taking action against any developer of AI systems it considers to have exploited its music.

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This is rather the point surely: this horse has long since bolted, judging by the number of AI music generators (plural) already available.
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New energy weapon replaces million-dollar missiles at 13c a shot • New Atlas

David Szondy:

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A new directed energy weapon (DEW) is being rolled out to bolster British defense capabilities. And, at 13 cents a shot, it’s just as effective, but a lot cheaper than the multi-million dollar missiles it’s designed to replace.

The Radio Frequency Directed Energy Weapon (RFDEW) is part of the British government’s policy to respond to a changing geopolitical situation, placing the country’s defense on more of a war footing as it increases spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030. This policy change also includes fast-tracking the rollout of lasers and other directed energy weapons.

The latter is extremely important, because, well, knocking out a drone that costs a few grand with a missile costing millions of dollars per round is bad economics – see, for example, the US$1.3-2.5m Sea Viper missile used to take out a US$20,000 Huthi drone, as reported by Navy Lookout. Also, missile stockpiles tend to be pretty small, and swarms of cheap drones could easily exhaust them.

Energy weapons overcome these problems because, though the weapon itself costs money, on a shot by shot basis they are astonishingly cheap. And, since they fire energy rather than solid rounds, they can potentially fire an infinite number of times so long as the energy holds.

The RFDEW is a self-contained energy weapon that can be operated by one person, and can detect, track, and engage multiple threats at a range of up to 1km. It can also be installed on everything from a warship to the back of a lorry. The main target will be drones or aircraft electronics, blasting them with a burst of electromagnetic radiation.

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Still “in development”, but clearly it’s fun toys time for the army and the police.
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A new theory says gravity is weaker at the largest scales • Nautilus

Tom Metcalfe:

»

instein’s theory of gravity is a cornerstone of modern cosmology. It has been tested and proven correct over and over again and is supported by the discovery of countless cosmic phenomena: from the gravitational lensing detected by Arthur Eddington in 1919 and the anomalies observed in the orbit of Mercury, to galactic redshifts and gravitational waves. The theory of general relativity—to give Einstein’s theory of gravity its proper name—has precisely predicted them all.

But astronomical observations near the “cosmological horizon”—where the farthest galaxies recede from us at nearly the speed of light—suggest gravity may act differently at the very largest scales. Now, some scientists propose Einstein’s theory of gravity could be improved by adding a simple “footnote” to his equations, which amounts to a “cosmic glitch” in the scientific understanding of gravity.

…“From an observational standpoint, there have been these anomalies in the data for well over a decade now,” says Afshordi, a professor of astrophysics at Canada’s University of Waterloo and a researcher at the Perimeter Institute.

Scientists have made dozens of attempts over recent decades to modify Einsteinian gravity to better fit observations. One of these is the theory of “massive gravity” proposed by Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London. Another is MOND, which applies modified Newtonian dynamics and was developed as an alternative to dark matter theories; in addition, there are several early dark energy theories, which propose that the dark energy thought to drive the expansion of the universe was much stronger in the first 100,000 years after the Big Bang.

Unlike these other theories, which are driven by discrepancies in the data, the cosmic glitch model is derived from specific fundamental theoretical challenges to Einsteinian gravity that have been developed in recent decades, says Afshordi. These challenges include the Hořava-Lifshitz proposal—the idea that quantum gravity works differently at high energies—and the Einstein-aether framework, which reintroduces a dynamic form of the “aether” that Einstein aimed to eliminate.

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Lovely if we’ve come completely around to where we were back with Michelson-Morley, the most consequential null outcome ever.
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What happens when a romance writer gets locked out of Google Docs • WIRED

Madeline Ashby:

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On the evening of March 24, 2024, writer K. Renee was doing what she often does: curling up on the couch and watching hockey with her husband. It was the Dallas Stars versus the Arizona Coyotes. Renee has followed the Stars her whole life. She was born the season they won the Stanley Cup. As she watched, she got a strange message: a friend texted to say the shared Google folders where Renee kept her works in progress were no longer accessible. Her friend had planned to read and make notes on one of Renee’s stories and was surprised to be locked out.

“You no longer have permission to view this document,” said the pop-up message. “If you believe this is an error, contact the document owner.”

This was how Renee experienced a moment that most of us have heart-pounding 3 am stress nightmares about. All 10 of her works in progress—some 222,000 words across multiple files and folders—were frozen. Not just frozen, but inaccessible on her phone and tablet. When her husband fetched her laptop, Renee logged into Docs and tried sharing the documents again. Then she received her own message from Google.

“Can’t share item,” was the header. “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate,” read the body text.

Renee writes hockey romance. People who get to see her drafts first, her community of alpha and beta readers, all have that in common. Renee describes her work as “open-door spice.” Aside from being an amazing name for an overpriced cocktail, the term serves as a descriptor for the level of explicitness in romance fiction. Simply put, “open-door” means more explicit; “closed-door” means less. Reading an open-door romance is like watching a John Wick movie. You see the knife go in. Closed-door romances are like watching a Marvel movie. You know something is happening to someone’s body, but you never really see it.

When she saw the word inappropriate in the notification, Renee worried her work had been dinged for its spice. “I thought I was the problem,” she says. “I thought I had somehow messed it up.”

But she hadn’t. At least, she hadn’t messed it up in any way she could hope to avoid in the future. Google never specified which of her 222,000 words was inappropriate.

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Used to be authors would lose their work because their hard drive crashed. (Doesn’t happen now: thanks SSDs!) Losing it because someone blocks access to your cloud drive is a new one. Unclear if this is resolved even now: author’s web page doesn’t say.

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We tried to pet all 200 breeds at the Westminster dog show • The Washington Post

Maura Judkis:

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If you play it right, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is not just a competition for the finest-bred dog. It is also a fancy petting zoo.

You can pet them all — from Airedale to Yorkie, silky terrier to wire-haired pointer, hairless Xoloitzcuintli to moppish Komondor. You can pet them even when their hair-care routine is an elaborate, six-hour process with mousses and gels more exquisite than most humans use on themselves. You can pet them even when they look like a sculpture, or a Victorian-era painting of royal dogs on a hunt. You just have to ask nicely.

…Petting a dog, studies have proved, activates our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls cognitive and emotional activity. It also increases our oxytocin, the body’s feel-good chemical, and lowers our stress hormones. Researchers have observed this effect even in those who don’t own dogs, but who pet ones belonging to strangers.

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Can confirm.
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The Messenger crashed and burned—now the CEO Jimmy Finkelstein is trying again • Daily Beast

Justin Baragona:

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Despite falling flat on his face with doomed media outlet The Messenger, Jimmy Finkelstein is already looking to launch another project, multiple sources familiar with the situation told The Daily Beast.

The former owner of The Hill recently met with potential investors in New York, according to three sources familiar with the matter, in an effort to drum up interest in a new venture. This potential new project is still very much in the planning stages, the sources emphasized.

Details are still scant on what exactly Finkelstein may be cooking up, with sources speculating that it could be health industry-related and possibly not even a traditional media company.

Either way, the 76-year-old mogul does appear determined to add another chapter to his lengthy career. “Jimmy is definitely doing something. He’s not prepared to be on the sidelines,” one person close to Finkelstein told The Daily Beast.

Another source close to the situation relayed last month that Finkelstein was in New York City, meeting with potential investors and promising to soon launch a project with the potential to clear his name after The Messenger’s spectacular failure. Finkelstein did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Finkelstein has recently met with Loews CEO James Tisch and Newsmax chief Chris Ruddy to discuss his ideas, our sources said.

Tisch was a key investor in The Messenger, the $50m “centrist” news site that launched last spring before crashing and burning less than a year later, leaving hundreds of journalists out of work.

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He’s either utterly delusional (and some of the post-crash interviews don’t entirely remove that possibility) or just loves spending other people’s money. Anyhow, it would be amazing to see who would be credulous enough to work for him if he manages to start another site in the teeth of the gale of AI-generated Google search results.
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Full-colour 3D holographic augmented-reality displays with metasurface waveguides • Nature

Wetzstein et al (from the University of Stanford, University of Hong Kong, and NVidia):

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Emerging spatial computing systems seamlessly superimpose digital information on the physical environment observed by a user, enabling transformative experiences across various domains, such as entertainment, education, communication and training. However, the widespread adoption of augmented-reality (AR) displays has been limited due to the bulky projection optics of their light engines and their inability to accurately portray three-dimensional (3D) depth cues for virtual content, among other factors.

Here we introduce a holographic AR system that overcomes these challenges using a unique combination of inverse-designed full-colour metasurface gratings, a compact dispersion-compensating waveguide geometry and artificial-intelligence-driven holography algorithms.

…Holographic principles could enable the ‘ultimate display’ using their ability to produce perceptually realistic 3D content using ultrathin optical films.

…Here we develop a new AR display system that pairs a lensless holographic light engine with a metasurface waveguide optimized for full-colour optical-see-through (OST) AR display applications in a compact form factor.

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Blimey, they’re really going there. This may be a few (many) years off, but it’s going to be amazing when they do it.
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Crew trapped on Baltimore ship, seven weeks after bridge collapse • BBC News

Bernd Debusmann Jr:

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As a controlled explosion rocked the Dali on Monday, nearly two dozen sailors remained on board, below deck in the massive ship’s hull.

The simultaneous blasts sent pieces of Baltimore’s once iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge into the dark waters of Maryland’s Patapsco River, seven weeks after its collapse left six people on the bridge dead and the Dali marooned.
Authorities – and the crew – hope that the demolition will mark the beginning of the end of a long process that has left the 21 men on board trapped and cut off from the world, thousands of miles from their homes. But for now, it remains unclear when they will be able to return home.

The Dali – a 948ft (289m) container ship – was at the start of a 27-day journey from Baltimore to Sri Lanka when it struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge, sending thousands of tonnes of steel and cement into the Patapsco. It left the ship stranded under a massive expanse of shredded metal.

A preliminary NTSB report found that two electrical blackouts disabled equipment ahead of the incident, and noted that the ship lost power twice in the 10 hours leading up to the crash.

The crew, made up of 20 Indians and a Sri Lankan national, has been unable to disembark because of visa restrictions, a lack of required shore passes and parallel ongoing investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and FBI.

On Monday, the crew remained on board even as authorities used small explosive charges to deliberately “cut” an expanse of the bridge lying on the ship’s bow.

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Amazing to think it’s still there, but the bridge isn’t even properly demolished yet.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Portugal, an amazing 95% of electricity came from renewables through April. CC-licensed photo by Vitor Oliveira 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 9 links for you. That’s hot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

It’s the end of Google Search as we know it • WIRED

Lauren Goode:

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Eight months ago [SEO company] BrightEdge developed something it calls a generative parser, which monitors what happens when searchers interact with AI-generated results on the web. He says over the past month the parser has detected that Google is less frequently asking people if they want an AI-generated answer, which was part of the experimental phase of generative search, and more frequently assuming they do. Jim Yu, executive chair of BrightEdge says: “We think it shows they have a lot more confidence that you’re going to want to interact with AI in search, rather than prompting you to opt in to an AI-generated result.”

Changes to search also have major implications for Google’s advertising business, which makes up the vast majority of the company’s revenue. In a recent quarterly earnings call, Pichai declined to share revenue from its generative AI experiments broadly. But as WIRED’s Paresh Dave pointed out, by offering more direct answers to searchers, “Google could end up with fewer opportunities to show search ads if people spend less time doing additional, more refined searches.” And the kinds of ads shown may have to evolve along with Google’s generative AI tools.

Google has said it will prioritize traffic to websites, creators, and merchants even as these changes roll out, but it hasn’t pulled back the curtain to reveal exactly how it plans to do this.

When asked in a press briefing ahead of I/O whether Google believes users will still click on links beyond the AI-generated web summary, Reid said that so far Google sees people “actually digging deeper, so they start with the AI overview and then click on additional websites.”

In the past, [Google head of search Liz] Reid continued, a searcher would have to poke around to eventually land on a website that gave them the info they wanted, but now Google will assemble an answer culled from various websites of its choosing. In the hive mind at the Googleplex, that will still spark exploration. “[People] will just use search more often, and that provides an additional opportunity to send valuable traffic to the web,” Reid said.

It’s a rosy vision for the future of search, one where being served bite-size AI-generated answers somehow prompts people to spend more time digging deeper into ideas. Google Search still promises to put the world’s information at our fingertips, but it’s less clear now who is actually tapping the keys.

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Google is delusional if it thinks it can provide correct – as in accurate, truthful – answers to queries. It didn’t manage it in the first 25 years, and adding an LLM won’t change that.
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For tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point • Blood in the Machine

Brian Merchant:

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When OpenAI debuted its new voice interface program, ChatGPT-4o, it quickly invited a flood of comparisons to Her, the 2013 Spike Jones film in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a program voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The comparison was encouraged by OpenAI — both in the very design of the flirty voice agent itself, which sounds suspiciously like Johansson, and by CEO Sam Altman himself, who tweeted “her” as the demo was underway.

In response, observers — myself included — took to what’s become a time-honored internet tradition: pointing out that the science fictional reference point a tech founder put forward was not an aspirational one, but, in fact, a dystopia containing a warning meant to be heeded, not emulated.

“I Am Once Again Asking Our Tech Overlords to Watch the Whole Movie,” Wired’s Brian Barrett wrote in a fun piece that runs through recent some recent offenders in the genre, including Elon Musk and his suggestion that the Cybertruck is “what bladerunner [sic] would have driven,” and Mark Zuckerberg’s love of the metaverse, the idea for which came from Snowcrash and Ready Player One — both pessimistic cyberpunk dystopias.

“Begging the AI companies building stuff modeled on “Her” to finish the movie!” the New York Times’ Kevin Roose wrote on X. “It does not end well!”

That tech executives have a penchant for mining inspiration from dystopian sci-fi films and books has become a running gag at this point — I wrote a longish piece for Motherboard (RIP) needling Zuck for trying to cash in on a dystopian metaverse back in 2021 — but maybe best nailed by the infamous Torment Nexus tweet.
[Sci-fi author: in my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: at long last we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.]

That’s the gist of it! And yet. As much as we needle, or mock, or point out that the tech titans are stripping their references and products of context — it’s all in vain. The CEOs obviously don’t much care what some flyby cultural critics think of their branding aspirations, but beyond even that, we have to bear in mind that these dystopias are actively useful to them.

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What really happens when emissions vanish • BNN Bloomberg

Ben Elgin and Sinduja Rangarajan:

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Procter & Gamble Co. vowed to cut its heat-trapping emissions in half by 2030, before announcing it had surpassed its target a decade early. Cisco Systems Inc. recently said it had exceeded a goal to reduce its climate pollution by 60% over 15 years. Continental AG, the German tire and auto parts juggernaut, claimed it had slashed greenhouse gases by an astounding 70% in 2020.

These appear to be exactly the kind of giant leaps needed to forestall the most destructive impacts of climate change. But a substantially different picture emerges when using a different accounting method that more accurately measures the pollution from a company’s operations. Procter & Gamble more realistically cut its emissions by 12%, Continental’s pollution fell a more pedestrian 8%, and Cisco’s actually climbed 22%.

In the cases of each of these companies—along with similar claims made by hundreds of others—they’re relying on a common, but controversial, form of climate bookkeeping known as “market-based accounting.” This allows businesses to buy credits from clean energy providers to say they’re running on green power when they actually aren’t, wiping from their ledgers vast quantities of pollution caused by the electricity powering their offices, data centers, and factories.

…When wind or solar farms sell their power to the grid, they get paid for the electricity like any other power plant. The owners of clean energy resources also usually get tax credits from governments. To increase the incentives, corporations began paying the renewable plants an extra bonus for the right to take credit for that clean energy.

This approach relies on a measure of fiction. The corporate buyers never physically use the clean electricity, yet they can claim credit for zero-emission energy on their ledgers.

Many companies became enamored with this method as they discovered it could seemingly wipe away vast quantities of emissions in a hurry. But market-based accounting sparked a bitter debate. The US Environmental Protection Agency and nonprofits such as CDP embraced it as a way to funnel more money into clean energy, believing these extra payments from companies would accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. On the other side, dozens of academics cringed at the idea of allowing companies to take credit for green energy they hadn’t actually used, fearing it would warp the accuracy of emissions reports and provide a cheap cop-out instead of meaningful greenhouse gas cuts.

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Renewables are meeting 95% of Portugal’s electricity needs. How did it become a European leader? • Euronews

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Portugal generated an ‘historic’ 95% of its electricity from renewables in April, according to the network operator REN.

Renewable energy generation averaged just below that for the first four months of the year, covering 91% of the nation’s power needs. It’s one national good news story within a great continental shift: fossil fuels provided less than a quarter of the EU’s energy for the first time ever last month.

Ember, the clean think tank behind that assessment, also found that more than 30% of the world’s electricity is now generated using renewables. “Solar in particular is accelerating faster than anyone thought possible,” Ember’s director of global insights, Dave Jones told us.

…Portugal has made some huge strides in renewable power, up from 27% in 2005 and 54% in 2017.

It phased out coal-fired generation in 2021, and boosted its large hydropower fleet with added storage capacity. And since 2019, the state’s renewable energy auctions have been increasing utility-scale projects, with clear guidance for green companies.

All this has laid the ground for some milestone moments. For six consecutive days last autumn, for example, renewable energy production actually exceeded the country’s electricity needs.

Portugal had the third highest share of wind energy in its electricity mix last year at 29%, behind Ireland (36%) and Denmark (58%). But, as elsewhere, it’s no good a renewable leader resting on its laurels. Ember’s new European Electricity Review report notes that Portugal has still not moved past the peak in wind generation it achieved in 2019.

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UK peaks for April: 48% total from renewables (including biomass); wind making up 31% of demand. Helps if, like Portugal, you’re by the sea and have lots of sunlight.
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Southeast Asian scam syndicates stealing $64bn annually, researchers say • The Record

James Reddick:

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Online fraud operations in Southeast Asia continue to grow, with organized scamming syndicates netting an estimated $64 billion each year worldwide, according to new research. 

In Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, the criminal groups are stealing about $43.8bn each year through scams — some 40% of the three nations’ combined formal GDP — according to a report released Monday from the United States Institute of Peace. 

The scams typically involve pig butchering, when potential victims are contacted on messaging platforms or dating apps. The scammers try to develop relationships and eventually convince victims to make fraudulent investments which are siphoned off by criminals. 

“This has gone from being very much a regional issue that was focused on criminal markets within the region to a global issue in a very short period of time,” Jason Tower, Myanmar country director at USIP, said during an event to discuss the research.  “And it’s spreading into other countries… There’s new linkages into the Middle East, into Africa, that the same criminal actors are beginning to exploit.”

The researchers noted that in recent months there has been a “massive upsurge in the targeting of victims who are not Chinese and do not speak Mandarin” — perhaps as a response to Chinese law enforcement’s increasing scrutiny of the industry. 

Last year, such scams resulted in about $3.5bn in losses in the US, while Canadians lost an estimated $413m and Malaysians more than $750m, researchers said. 

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Of note, the report says: “The scamming operations are powered by hundreds of thousands of people, many duped by fraudulent online ads for lucrative high-tech jobs and trafficked illegally into scam compounds, where they are held by armed gangs in prisonlike conditions and forced to run online scams.” That’s scary.
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Leonardo police spy tech scans cars for phones, pets and books • Forbes

Thomas Brewster:

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American police are testing a new technology that can scan moving vehicles for anything that emits a signal, including phones, smartwatches, cat and dog tracking chips and even library books, according to its creator, Rome, Italy-based surveillance, defense and aerospace company Leonardo.

The nascent technology, called Elsag EOC Plus, is typically incorporated into one of Leonardo’s Elsag license plate readers, though can be deployed as a standalone surveillance device, and is designed to help police monitor suspects as they move. But privacy advocates told Forbes the new technology could be abused to warrantlessly track people across large tranches of the country, learning more about them by identifying their belongings without their knowledge.

Leonardo claims the tool can identify specific models of devices like iPhones and Bose headphones inside moving vehicles, according to a marketing brochure from the Milipol conference in Paris last year. It can also identify unique signals emitted by pet chips, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, wearable tech like fitness trackers, in-car infotainment systems and tire pressure sensors, and can even detect the RFID of a library book, according to the brochure. For law enforcement, all that data can be linked to a car’s license plate number, becoming a unique “fingerprint.” As a person travels through other license plate scanners, their fingerprint can be followed around a given area, even when the driver or passenger switches vehicles.

“As an example, while 30 cars in 100 may contain iPhones, only one will have an iPhone 13rev2, an Audi radio, a pair of Bose headphones, a Garmin sports watch, a key finder and the license plate ABC-1234. The collection of data represented by these specific things is an electronic signature,” Leonardo explained in its brochure.

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As you might imagine, privacy groups are not enamoured of this. It seems to be “novel police technology” week, though.
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Smiles, waves and flashed body parts: video portal links Dublin and New York • The Guardian

Rory Carroll:

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Rain sluiced down on a grey Dublin afternoon but the crowd clustering around the portal ignored the downpour and waved at a man cycling towards the screen on a sunny morning in Manhattan.

He gazed back, waved and wobbled before recovering his balance and vanishing down Fifth Avenue, eliciting a cheer from the sodden observers on North Earl Street.

Monday was day five of a live stream that has connected Ireland’s capital with New York via an interactive sculpture and webcam that allows people to see, but not hear, each other.

Seconds after the cyclist, a woman appeared walking her dog. She stopped, stared at the screen and grinned. She picked up her dog and waved his paw. The crowd in Dublin, huddled under umbrellas, gave another cheer. “I wish I’d brought my dog,” said Amy Ferguson, 24.

The fleeting, playful interactions between people separated by 3,000 miles and five time zones exemplified the hope of authorities when the art installation launched on 8 May. “Two amazing global cities connected in real time and space,” said New York’s chief public realm officer, Ya-Ting Liu.

“I would encourage Dubliners and visitors to the city to come and interact with the sculpture and extend an Irish welcome and kindness to cities all over the world,” said Dublin’s lord mayor, Daithí de Róiste.

Not all, however, have followed that utopian exhortation. Some on the Irish side have flashed body parts, while others displayed images of swastikas and the twin towers aflame on 9/11. One man made a theatrical show of snorting what appeared to be cocaine. Police escorted away a woman who was grinding against the portal.

“Portal to hell: NYC-Dublin live video art installation already bringing out the worst in people,” lamented the New York Post, which blamed Dublin’s “Guinness-glugging patrons”.

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Such a simple, fabulous idea: the thing we’ve seen in so many SF TV shows and films made real. Apart from the stepping through and going there. The choice (one assumes it’s a choice?) not to include sound is peculiar, though. Naturally, within a few hours, the portal in New York was fenced off. Spoilsports.
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Don’t fret about green subsidies • Project Syndicate

Dani Rodrik:

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China has scaled up its green industries with mind-boggling speed. It now produces nearly 80% of the world’s solar PV modules, 60% of wind turbines, and 60% of electric vehicles and batteries. In 2023 alone, its solar-power capacity grew by more than the total installed capacity in the US. These investments were driven by a variety of government policies at the national, provincial, and municipal levels, allowing Chinese firms to travel rapidly down the learning curve to dominate their respective markets.

But there is a big difference between solar PV cells, electric vehicles, and batteries, on one hand, and older industries such as steel and gas-powered cars. Green technologies are crucial in the fight against climate change, making them a global public good. The only way we can decarbonize the planet without undermining economic growth and poverty reduction is to shift to renewables and green technologies as rapidly as possible.

The case for subsidizing green industries, as China has done, is impeccable. Beyond the usual argument that new technologies provide know-how and other positive externalities, one also must account for the immeasurable costs of climate change and the huge prospective benefits of accelerating the green transition. Moreover, because the knowledge spillovers cross national borders, China’s subsidies benefit not only consumers everywhere, but also other firms along the global supply chain.

Another powerful argument follows from second-best reasoning. If the world were organized by a social planner, there would be a global carbon tax; but, of course, there is no such thing. Although a variety of regional, national, and subnational carbon-pricing schemes do exist, only a tiny share of global emissions is subject to a price that comes close to covering the true social cost of carbon.

Under these circumstances, green industrial policies are doubly beneficial – both to stimulate the necessary technological learning and to substitute for carbon pricing. Western commentators who trot out scare words like “excess capacity,” “subsidy wars,” and “China trade shock 2.0” have gotten things exactly backwards. A glut in renewables and green products is precisely what the climate doctor ordered.

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The iPad Pro Manifesto (2024 Edition) • High Caffeine Content

Steve Troughton-Smith is a very (very) experienced Mac and iOS developer:

»

Another year, another series of incredibly-overpowered new iPads Pro, another round of ‘…shame the software sucks, though’ reviews. But ‘sucks’ means different things to different people, and it’s been a while since I put together an iPad manifesto so I thought I’d delineate where I think iPadOS is dropping the ball or needs improvement specifically from a core OS/developer perspective.

Below are the tentpoles that I think should be, need to be, addressed to make iPad Pro live up to the expectations of its monstrously-powerful M-series chip and multi-thousand-dollar asking price.

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They’re all the sorts of things you’d expect, but most of all, given that the latest iPads have an M4 chip which makes most PCs on the market look a bit sluggish, it’s utterly obvious that Apple has some sort of strategy tax around the Mac: it can’t accept that the iPad could and should compete on a level playing field, so it doesn’t put the effort in to make it a first-class citizen. Is the fear that people will stop buying Macs? The problem at the moment is that not enough people are buying tablets.

There’s an equally good article by Federico Viticci at MacStories on the same topic; his requests are more as a user, but it all washes out to the same thing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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:

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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.

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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”.
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Facebook news referrals: no sign of the slowdown stopping • Press Gazette

Aisha Majid:

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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.

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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.
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Google is building Gemini Nano AI right into Chrome • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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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.

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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.
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Laughing, chatting, singing, GPT-4o is AI close to human, but watch out: it’s really not • The Guardian

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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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.

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I went to China and drove a dozen electric cars. Western automakers are cooked • Inside EVs

Kevin Williams:

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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.

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It’s a long and detailed report, but Williams is uniformly impressed. Though there’s also this:

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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.

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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.
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The Big Tariffs are here • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

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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…

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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.
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AirPods have way more features than you think [Video] • 9to5Mac

Fernando Silva:

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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!

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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.
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Flood of fake science forces multiple journal closures • WSJ

Nidhi Subbaraman:

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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.

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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.
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Amazon’s “Swag Store” sells neck fans to prevent workers from overheating • 404 Media

Jules Roscoe:

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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.”

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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?
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Illness took away an Rhode Island patient’s voice. AI created a replica • WBUR News

Matt O’Brien:

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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.

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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?
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UK police could get Ghostbusters-style backpack devices to halt ebike getaways • The Guardian

Vikram Dodd:

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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.”

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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?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified