There are signs that Mark Zuckerberg’s excitement about the metaverse is waning in favour of AI. Well, who can blame him? It’s what people want. CC-licensed photo by Steve Jurvetson 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.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Quite the odyssey. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Google IO to feature AI updates, showing off PaLM 2 LLM • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

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Artificial intelligence is going to be a central theme at Google’s annual developer conference on Wednesday, as the company is planning to announce a number of generative AI updates, including launching a general-use large language model (LLM), CNBC has learned.

According to internal documents about Google I/O viewed by CNBC, the company will unveil PaLM 2, its most recent and advanced LLM. PaLM 2 includes more than 100 languages and has been operating under the internal codename “Unified Language Model.” It’s also performed a broad range of coding and math tests as well as creative writing tests and analysis.

At the event, Google will make announcements on the theme of how AI is “helping people reach their full potential,” including “generative experiences” to Bard and Search, the documents show. Pichai will be speaking to a live crowd of developers as he pitches his company’s AI advancements.

The updates come as competition ramps up in the AI arm’s race, with Google and Microsoft racing to incorporate chat AI technology into their products. Microsoft is using its investment in ChatGPT creator OpenAI to bolster its Bing search engine, while Google has quickly mobilized to try and incorporate its Bard technology and its own LLM across various teams.

Google first announced the PaLM language model in April of 2022. In March of this year, the company launched an API for PaLM alongside a number of AI enterprise tools it says will help businesses “generate text, images, code, videos, audio, and more from simple natural language prompts.” 

Last month, Google said its medical LLM called “Med-PaLM 2” can answer medical exam questions at an “expert doctor level” and is accurate 85% of the time.

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Remember that sorta-AI doodad which was going to phone your hairdresser and make an appointment for you? Whatever happened to that? Google has a bad habit of announcing things at I/O which don’t appear. Maybe these will be different?
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May 2001: Scientists warn of more CJD cases • BBC On This Day

May 2001:

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Leading experts on new variant CJD, the human form of BSE or “mad cow” disease, have warned the current outbreak could get much worse.

So far, 99 people have had the disease and nearly all of them have died.

New evidence gathered from experiments on mice suggests this first batch of cases could be followed in a few years’ time by a much larger “second wave”.

Professor John Collinge is one of the government’s top advisors on vCJD and director of the Medical Research Council Prion Unit in London.

He has found that a small number of the mice he observed got vCJD fairly quickly while the rest had a longer incubation period before contracting the disease.

“I don’t want to be alarmist about this,” he said “but it’s entirely possible and we have to consider that what we are looking at, at the moment is, thankfully, a very small incidence of the disease amongst a small sub-section of the population. It may be five or ten years before the rest of the population of those at risk develop the disease.”

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The government had admitted the existence of vCJD back in 1996, but there was still uncertainty about how many people might develop the disease – an awful descent into helplessness as holes developed in the brain. I discovered a study, which wasn’t published, by the official vCJD unit, which estimated the final death toll would be in the hundreds, perhaps peaking in 2003.

The most recent figures show 178 deaths since the first ones were recorded in 1995, with none from 2017. The peak, of 28 deaths, was in 2000.
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The Metaverse, Zuckerberg’s tech obession, is officially dead. ChatGPT killed it • Business Insider

Ed Zitron:

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The Metaverse fell seriously ill as the economy slowed and the hype around generative AI grew. Microsoft shuttered its virtual-workspace platform AltSpaceVR in January 2023, laid off the 100 members of its “industrial metaverse team,” and made a series of cuts to its HoloLens team. Disney shuttered its Metaverse division in March, and Walmart followed suit by ending its Roblox-based Metaverse projects. The billions of dollars invested and the breathless hype around a half-baked concept led to thousands — if not tens of thousands — of people losing their jobs.

But the Metaverse was officially pulled off life support when it became clear that Zuckerberg and the company that launched the craze had moved on to greener financial pastures. Zuckerberg declared in a March update that Meta’s “single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products.” Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, told CNBC in April that he, along with Mark Zuckerberg and the company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, were now spending most of their time on AI. The company has even stopped pitching the Metaverse to advertisers, despite spending more than $100 billion in research and development on its mission to be “Metaverse first.” While Zuckerberg may suggest that developing games for the Quest headsets is some sort of investment, the writing is on the wall: Meta is done with the Metaverse.

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Zitron is (when he’s not being a PR guy) a polemicist, rather than a journalist. However it’s hard to disagree: everyone’s talking about ChatGPT, nobody’s talking about the metaverse. Got to feel Apple’s going to be facing some serious headwinds if it does release a VR headset. (I’m still sceptical.)
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I know the motive behind every mass shooting • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Kimberly Harrington:

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“The shooting came barely a week after a man fatally shot five people in Cleveland, Texas, after a neighbor asked him to stop firing his weapon while a baby slept. It also follows other rampages in recent days, including the fatal shootings of six victims in a home in Oklahoma City on Monday, and gunfire that killed one and injured four in a medical facility in Atlanta on Wednesday.” — NBC News

CLEVELAND, TEXAS: The shooter’s motive was to kill people using a gun.

OKLAHOMA CITY: The shooter’s motive was to kill people using a gun.

ATLANTA: The shooter’s motive was to kill people using a gun.

I’m not a cop, a star witness, an FBI agent, or a forensic psychologist. I’m not a clairvoyant, I’m bad at math, and I lie to my doctor about doing regular breast exams. But even I—an ordinary American citizen with soft morals and the ability to take in basic information and discern simple patterns—know what the motive was behind every mass shooting. Every single one.

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Put like this, it is pretty obvious. All the chin-scratching around whether the latest mass shooting was by someone who was an extreme right-winger or just a bit right-wing or what tends to overlook this simple, basic fact: such people exist in other countries too, including the UK. And yet: the mass shootings are a thing you only find in the US. Because…

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Florida tosses climate lifeline to swamped ‘Keybillies’ • E&E News

Daniel Cusick:

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A steady outflow of low- and middle-income residents — beginning after Hurricane Wilma in 2005 and again after 2017’s Hurricane Irma — has demographically reshaped Big Pine Key. Longtime residents who work the service and labour jobs undergirding the Keys’ multibillion-dollar tourism economy are being squeezed out. New people with deeper pockets and greater mobility are moving in, often with cash in hand.

In the years after Wilma, Big Pine Key lost a fourth of its population, bottoming out at 3,777 people in 2012, according to Census Bureau data. It rebounded over the next decade — a relatively quiet period for Florida hurricanes — peaking at 5,339 in 2017. Then came Irma, the Keys’ second-strongest storm in a century. It whittled Big Pine Key’s population back down to 4,521 in three years, a 15% drop.

After each hurricane, Big Pine Key’s low-income residents had little to return to, and those who did found themselves packed into substandard houses or mobile home parks. Some sprawling trailer communities with reputations for colorful tenants and rough-and-ready living shuttered after Irma, drawing complaints of no-notice evictions and money-grubbing landlords.

What a difference five years makes. Big Pine Key is rebuilding again, and real estate values have nearly doubled since Irma, from $390,000 in 2018 to $777,000 in 2022, according to the real estate site Redfin. Cleared lots are going for six figures, and even unbuildable lots bound by state-imposed growth restrictions can fetch $80,000 or more. Those prices are putting added pressure on long-term Keys residents.

[Saima] Kawzinsky and her fiancé of 10 years currently pay $1,650 per month in rent for a 2-bedroom elevated home built by an affordable housing land trust created by a local philanthropist.

“We want to buy a house, but it’s getting harder and harder,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s either going to be me and my family living an underwater lifestyle or leaving and getting our heads just above water.”

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“Her fiancé of 10 years” is a phrase that tells its own story. Of course climate change is affecting the low-paid in America first; that’s how it’s going to go everywhere.
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TikTok spied on me. Why? • FT via Ars Technica

Cirstina Criddle:

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One evening in late December last year, I received a cryptic phone call from a PR director at TikTok, the popular social media app. I’d written extensively about the company for the Financial Times, so we’d spoken before. But it was puzzling to hear from her just before the holidays, especially since I wasn’t working on anything related to the company at the time.

The call lasted less than a minute. She wanted me to know, “as a courtesy,” that The New York Times had just published a story I ought to read. Confused by this unusual bespoke news alert, I asked why. But all she said was that it concerned an inquiry at ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, and that I should call her back once I’d read it.

The story claimed ByteDance employees accessed two reporters’ data through their TikTok accounts. Personal information, including their physical locations, had been used as part of an attempt to find the writers’ sources, after a series of damaging stories about ByteDance. According to the report, two employees in China and two in the US left the company following an internal investigation. In a staff memo, ByteDance’s chief executive lamented the incident as the “misconduct of a few individuals.”

When I phoned the PR director back, she confirmed I was one of the journalists who had been surveilled. I put down my phone and wondered what it meant that a company I reported on had gone to such lengths to restrict my ability to do so. Over the following months, the episode became just one in a long series of scandals and crises that call into question what TikTok really is, and whether the company has the world-dominating future that once seemed inevitable.

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Even the FT’s security team couldn’t stop TikTok trying to invade her privacy.
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The new Microsoft Bing AI wants to be the future of everything • Fast Company

Ryan Broderick:

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The new version of Bing runs on OpenAI’s newest language model, GPT-4. It integrates it further into the Bing search engine and the Edge web browser and centralizes all of its various processes into one interface—including the ability to generate images right in the same window, using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 image tool. But Bing AI doesn’t just pull all of this into one window, it offers some significant upgrades on how these services work.

The big addition to Bing is chat history. If you’ve never used OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the AI creates a thread for every query you ask. If you come back to that thread, the AI just picks up where you left off. Bing now has that feature, as well, but it also allows you to name your chat threads, organize them, and export them to a PDF or Microsoft Word document.

Bing also has real-time access to Bing search results, a feature that, in its early stages, led to critics describing it as “psychotic.” The chatbot seems a lot more mild-mannered these days, and as a guard against fake results (aka hallucinations), when it returns summaries, it does so with citations pulled in from Bing search. Even more impressive, when running Bing’s AI inside the Edge browser, it can summarize long articles and will include in-page citations, allowing you to find the exact text it’s referencing.

I asked Bing for advice about where to go while I’m on a trip in Milan next week, and it spit out five decent-enough suggestions. It also allowed me to click on the links it was summarizing and then, via an AI chatbot sidebar in the Edge browser, it was able to answer specific questions about the web page I was viewing.

Sarah Mody, Microsoft’s director of global search and AI product marketing, tells Fast Company that they’re hoping to inspire “magic moments,” where the AI suddenly surprises you with what it’s capable of. For her, it was a realization that Bing AI could not only generate a recipe, but also organize the ingredients based on where they would likely be found in the supermarket (an admittedly impressive feat).

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OK, it’s impressive – for about ten seconds. But you have to go around the supermarket. Sure, vegetables will be by the entrance and drinks nearer the exit, but don’t you know, Bing, that this stuff gets shuffled around all the time?

Anyhow, the tsunami continues.
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Your Twitter feed sucks now. These free add-ons can help • WIRED

Justin Pot:

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I’m not here to judge anyone who pays for Twitter Blue. However, I’m not a fan of pay-to-win mechanics. At this point, Twitter is a game where players compete for the most attention; Twitter Blue is overpowered DLC [downloadable content]. If you buy a subscription, your tweets are shown at the top of comment threads and prioritized in other contexts, including the “For You” page. This makes Blue the social media equivalent of paying for unlimited ammo or improved body armour, regardless of who you are or whether what you have to say is worth promoting.

It also makes Twitter really annoying to use. No one wants to play with the people who are paying to win. That’s why there’s so much mockery of, and desire to avoid, Twitter Blue users.

Granted, there are plenty of reasons why longtime Twitter power users—in particular, public figures or people who historically have trouble with impersonators—might pay for Twitter Blue. No one wants to lose an audience they worked hard to build, and Twitter has the right to monetize itself however it likes. You also have the right to consume (or not consume) the social media you choose.

All the same, it can’t be denied that a lot of really annoying posts from Twitter Blue users with low follower counts show up in all kinds of contexts. If you don’t want to see those posts, I don’t blame you, and here’s how you can filter them all out.

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Basically, use a Chrome extension. Or just look at the people you’re Following. (Though I suspect that some of the people who you follow are shifted to the For You tab, meaning you miss them. Can’t prove it, though.)
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Marissa Mayer on AI, tech fears, and Yahoo regrets • Morning Brew

Patrick Kulp speaks to the ex-CEO of Yahoo, ex-veep of Google, who is now running an AI startup that wants to organise your contacts list:

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PK: If there is one thing that you could have done differently in your time at Yahoo, what would it be?

MM: My perspective on Yahoo is there are probably three things I would have done differently. One is obvious—I hired the wrong COO; I would have hired a different COO. I would have hired [current Integral Ad Science CEO] Lisa Utzschneider, who became my chief revenue officer. And that would have been great.

We looked at a transformative acquisition, and we bought Tumblr [for $1.1bn]. At the same time, we were also considering whether it was possible to buy Hulu or, ironically, Netflix. And I think Netflix was $4bn and Hulu was at $1.3bn at the time. And either of those, with hindsight being 20/20, would have been a better acquisition.

And probably the biggest one—if you made me name just one—is that we should have done the tax-free Alibaba spinoff to separate the assets of the company. Because one, if we had done that, it would have saved $10bn for our shareholders or made them that money, whichever way you look at it, in taxes that were paid. And two, it would have allowed Yahoo to continue as an independent company, and it would have potentially had more success. Now it is an independent company and privately held by private equity. But I’m not sure that the foray through Verizon was as helpful to some of the technologies and what they had to offer as it could have been.

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Of course you’re wondering who the “wrong COO” was. It was Henrique de Castro, who she hired over from Google but binned after a year (to January 2014)

Wonder if Netflix would have been for sale. It would have been a brutal takeover fight, and probably would have flamed out over the huge cashflow problem: Mayer would have wanted to data it to death, but Netflix is a content company, not a data company. So, bullet dodged.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Millennium Bridge opened in London in 2000 – and almost immediately closed because pedestrians made it sway. And sway. CC-licensed photo by pablocanenpablocanen 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 was another post on Friday at the Social Warming Substack – about the challenge of moderating Twitter. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Still going. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

AI is tearing Wikipedia apart • Vice

Claire Woodcock:

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It didn’t take long for researchers to figure out that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a terrible fabricator, which is what tends to doom students who rely solely on the chatbot to write their essays. Sometimes it will invent articles and their authors. Other times it will name-splice lesser known scholars with more prolific ones, but will do so with the utmost confidence. OpenAI has even said that the model “hallucinates” when it makes up facts—a term that has been criticized by some AI experts as a way for AI companies to avoid accountability for their tools spreading misinformation. 

“The risk for Wikipedia is people could be lowering the quality by throwing in stuff that they haven’t checked,” Bruckman added. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using it as a first draft, but every point has to be verified.” 

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the website, is looking into building tools to make it easier for volunteers to identify bot-generated content. Meanwhile, Wikipedia is working to draft a policy that lays out the limits to how volunteers can use large language models to create content.

The current draft policy notes that anyone unfamiliar with the risks of large language models should avoid using them to create Wikipedia content, because it can open the Wikimedia Foundation up to libel suits and copyright violations—both of which the nonprofit gets protections from but the Wikipedia volunteers do not.

…The community is also divided on whether large language models should be allowed to train on Wikipedia content. While open access is a cornerstone of Wikipedia’s design principles, some worry the unrestricted scraping of internet data allows AI companies like OpenAI to exploit the open web to create closed commercial datasets for their models. This is especially a problem if the Wikipedia content itself is AI-generated, creating a feedback loop of potentially biased information, if left unchecked.

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June 2000: Swaying Millennium Bridge closed • BBC On This Day

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Huge crowds of people have been blamed for forcing the temporary closure of London’s new bridge on the day of its opening.

The city’s first new river crossing for decades began swaying violently in the wind under the weight of hundreds of pedestrians on Saturday morning.

Police became concerned and the bridge was closed briefly while engineers made safety checks to the structure.

A limit was subsequently imposed on the number of pedestrians allowed to cross the bridge, which spans the Thames from St Paul’s Cathedral to the Tate Modern gallery on the South Bank.

A spokesman for architects Foster and Partners who designed the bridge with engineers Ove Arup and Partners said: “Because there was such a huge number walking all at once across the bridge, which is very unusual, there was a certain amount of swaying.

“The bridge is intended to have some movement. It’s a suspension bridge – if there isn’t movement there can be a problem.”

Pedestrians had to wait for half an hour before they were able to continue crossing the bridge.

The project cost more than £18m and was designed by architect Sir Norman Foster and the British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro.

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This was a fascinating story: the problem was that people walking really did cause it to sway unpleasantly. Arup were properly surprised. It required £5m worth of 91 dampers to stop the movement. I wrote about it for The Independent; it was a sort of British Tacoma Narrows, except stopping well short of the self-destruction.
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Which jobs will be most impacted by ChatGPT? • Visual Capitalist

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On November 30, 2022, OpenAI heralded a new era of artificial intelligence (AI) by introducing ChatGPT to the world.

The AI chatbot stunned users with its human-like and thorough responses. ChatGPT could comprehend and answer a variety of different questions, make suggestions, research and write essays and briefs, and even tell jokes (amongst other tasks).

Many of these skills are used by workers in their jobs across the world, which begs the question: which jobs will be transformed, or even replaced, by generative AI in the coming future?

This infographic from Harrison Schell visualizes the March 2023 findings of OpenAI on the potential labor market impact of large language models (LLMs) and various applications of generative AI, including ChatGPT.

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“High exposure” to the change, apparently, will be jobs which fit in these categories: interpreters + translators; survey researchers; writers and authors; public relations specialists; tax preparers; mathematicians; blockchain engineers; proofreaders and copy markers; accountants and auditors.

“Low exposure”: athletes, automotive repairers, cement masons, cooks, piledriver operators, stonemasons, tire repairers and changers, dishwashers, carpenter helpers.

To which I have a few queries: “blockchain engineers”?? And what’s the difference between a “tax preparer” and an accountant/auditor? Doesn’t one subsume the other? Also, presumably crane operators are there with piledriver operators. Though “athlete” sounds more fun. (Not listed on either side: “Wikipedia contributor”.)
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Ex-Googlers blast Geoffrey Hinton’s past silence on fired AI experts • Fast Company

Wilfred Chan:

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women who for years have been speaking out about AI’s problems—even at the expense of their jobs—say Hinton’s alarmism isn’t just opportunistic but also overshadows specific warnings about AI’s actual impacts on marginalized people.

“It’s disappointing to see this autumn-years redemption tour from someone who didn’t really show up” for other Google dissenters, says Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation and an AI researcher who says she was pushed out of Google in 2019 in part over her activism against the company’s contract to build machine vision technology for U.S. military drones. (Google has maintained that Whittaker chose to resign.)

“I didn’t see any solidarity or any action when there were people really trying to organize and do something about the harms that are happening now,” she says.

Another prominent ex-Googler, Margaret Mitchell, who co-led the company’s ethical AI team, criticized Hinton for not denouncing Google’s 2020 firing of her coleader Timnit Gebru, a leading researcher who had spoken up about AI’s risks for women and people of color. 

“This would’ve been a moment for Dr. Hinton to denormalize the firing of [Gebru],” Mitchell tweeted on Monday. “He did not. This is how systemic discrimination works.”

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Do colonoscopies really save lives? • The Science Writer

John Horgan:

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NordICC, for Nordic-European Initiative on Colorectal Cancer, is the first large-scale, randomized trial of colonoscopy. The study focused on 84,585 men and women 55-64 years old in Sweden, Norway, Poland and the Netherlands. The researchers randomly divided subjects into two groups: one invited to get a colonoscopy, the other not. 

NordICC measured rates of death from colon cancer and from any cause in these two groups after 10 years. Some researchers favor “all-cause” mortality, because tests and treatments for a specific cancer can result in deaths unattributed to that cancer.

Colonoscopy can cause perforation of the colon, bleeding and infection; patients may also have adverse reactions to purging of the bowels and sedation. A 2016 study of 331,880 people who underwent colonoscopies found that 1.6% had complications serious enough to require “unplanned hospital visits” within one week. 

NordICC found that the risk of death from colon cancer after 10 years was 0.28% in the invited group and 0.31% in the control group. The difference in risk of death from any cause was even smaller: 11.03% in the invited group and 11.04% in the uninvited group. These are not statistically significant differences.

Defenders of colonoscopy seize on the fact that only 42% of the NordICC subjects invited to get a colonoscopy actually got it; this group’s mortality rate from colon cancer was 0.15, significantly less than the control rate of 0.31. The Colon Cancer Coalition says this finding confirms that “colonoscopy saves lives.” But this lower mortality rate might reflect self-selection bias, precisely what NordICC was designed to overcome.

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Horgan also suggests following the money (which, in the US, would certainly make sense), which takes you to companies which benefit a lot from carrying out colonoscopies.
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IPCC’s conservative nature masks true scale of action needed to avert catastrophic climate change • The Conversation

Kevin Anderson is professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester:

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If we step outside the rarefied realm of IAM [climate modelling] scenarios that leading climate scientist Johan Rockström describes as “academic gymnastics that have nothing to do with reality”, it’s clear that not exceeding 1.5°C or 2°C [of excess warming] will require fundamental changes to most facets of modern life.

Starting now, to not exceed 1.5°C of warming requires 11% year-on-year cuts in emissions, falling to nearer 5% for 2°C. However, these global average rates ignore the core concept of equity, central to all UN climate negotiations, which gives “developing country parties” a little longer to decarbonise.

Include equity and most “developed” nations need to reach zero CO₂ emissions between 2030 and 2035, with developing nations following suit up to a decade later. Any delay will shrink these timelines still further.

Most IAM models ignore and often even exacerbate the obscene inequality in energy use and emissions, both within nations and between individuals. As the International Energy Agency recently reported, the top 10% of emitters accounted for nearly half of global CO₂ emissions from energy use in 2021, compared with 0.2% for the bottom 10%. More disturbingly, the greenhouse gas emissions of the top 1% are 1.5 times those of the bottom half of the world’s population.

So where does this leave us? In wealthier nations, any hope of arresting global heating at 1.5ºC or 2°C demands a technical revolution on the scale of the post-war Marshall Plan. Rather than relying on technologies such as direct air capture of CO₂ to mature in the near future, countries like the UK must rapidly deploy tried-and-tested technologies.

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I don’t like what I believe the narrator’s voice is going to say in a couple of decades’ time.
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The coronation was an act of magic for a country scared the spell might break • POLITICO

Tanya Gold on cracking form:

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That lack of confidence in the magic spell was obvious at breakfast time. As the congregation spooled into Westminster Abbey, with actors at the front — kings tend to like actors, as they have the same job — the head of the anti-monarchist pressure group Republic, Graham Smith, was arrested near Trafalgar Square with five other republican leaders. The peaceful protest, he told me last week, was organized with the approval of the Metropolitan Police. They arrested him anyway, confiscated the placards, and blamed the string which tied the placards together for breaking the rules. (Apparently they might have used it to “lock” onto buildings.) A few hours later the king swore to serve us, which means serving our democracy. So he has already failed.

The protest went on in Trafalgar Square, but the BBC cut away as the cavalcade passed. Screens were erected in front of the protest, as if our eyes — and the king’s — were too delicate to be allowed to see it. We were told the police operation passed off without incident. The Duke of York was booed as he left Buckingham Palace, but that too was not reported on. The BBC was in the hagiography business at this coronation, and it was fervent and vapid. This is possibly tactical — they fear what an unpopular nativist government will do to their funding model — but it also indicates a nation afraid of itself. A deputy chairman of the Conservative Party suggested all republicans emigrate. They were all afraid the spell might break.

Then came the pomp: the fantastical costumes, the militarism, the uneasy horses, one of which panicked and backed into the crowd. Another marched sideways. It was lovely to look at, but it is the fumes of Empire, which of course is why the Mall was full.

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Editors quit top neuroscience journal to protest against open-access charges • Nature

Katharine Sanderson:

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More than 40 editors have resigned from two leading neuroscience journals in protest against what the editors say are excessively high article-processing charges (APCs) set by the publisher. They say that the fees, which publishers use to cover publishing services and in some cases make money, are unethical. The publisher, Dutch company Elsevier, says that its fees provide researchers with publishing services that are above average quality for below average price. The editors plan to start a new journal hosted by the non-profit publisher MIT Press.

The decision to resign came about after many discussions among the editors, says Stephen Smith, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and editor-in-chief of one of the journals, NeuroImage. “Everyone agreed that the APC was unethical and unsustainable,” says Smith, who will lead the editorial team of the new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, when it launches.

The 42 academics who made up the editorial teams at NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports announced their resignations on 17 April. The journals are open access and require authors to pay a fee for publishing services. The APC for NeuroImage is US$3,450; NeuroImage: Reports charges $900, which will double to $1,800 from 31 May.

Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, says that the APCs cover the costs associated with publishing an article in an open-access journal, including editorial and peer-review services, copyediting, typesetting, archiving, indexing, marketing and administrative costs

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This is the challenge that the open access model faces. The alternative to getting lots of institutions to pay a regular subscription to get paywalled access to scientific research is: get smaller numbers of individuals (or institutions) to pay occasional large amounts to make their scientific research available for free. The former is the usual Nature/Science/etc model, the latter is “open access”. But what’s the right price for the latter?

Or does it need a third, alternative model?
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A $15.8m mistake: why San Francisco can’t pay its teachers on time • SF Chronicle

Bilal Mahmood:

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In 2019, the [San Francisco] school district approved a $9.5m contract with the consulting company Infosys to replace the payroll system that had been used for 17 years. The new system was originally set to go live in 2021 but wasn’t rolled out until 2022, delays that raised costs by about $7m.

When the EMPowerSF system finally did go live, problems immediately emerged. Hundreds of teachers didn’t get their paychecks.

Months went by with no resolution. By the end of the summer of 2022, the district finally hired a consulting firm named Alvarez & Marsel to diagnose and audit the issue. Over the course of the year, the firm’s initial contract of $2.8m was extended so it could stabilize the problem, costing the district another $8m. In 2023, an additional $5m was spent to finally fix the problem.

What Alvarez & Marsel’s audit found was shocking: 64 software bugs had gone undetected in the EMPowerSF system for nearly a year, with 18 of the bugs affecting pay rules management, 12 bugs affecting the user interface, 7 affecting leave management, 7 affecting time management, 5 affecting benefits management and 15 bugs affecting other system protocols.

These bugs resulted in employees being paid even after they were terminated, incorrect daily rates being set for paid leave during pregnancy disability and annual salary fields for certificated bi-weekly employees being incorrectly pro-rated.

To add insult to injury, the same software underlying the EMPowerSF system had been used once before in a California school district. In 2007, Los Angeles Unified School District also launched a payroll system powered by the same software, and it also failed to pay teachers on time.

Compounding matters, the San Francisco school district lacked personnel with the technical experience to support the implementation of the new system. To successfully implement a payroll transition, you need experienced financial operators, technical administrators and, perhaps most important, software engineers to transfer hundreds of thousands of records between systems.

«

“Turnkey” systems never are. And I’ve never seen a company merger get its payroll to run smoothly. Unsurprising if a school district can’t either.
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Over half of Twitter Blue’s earliest subscribers are no longer subscribed • Mashable

Matt Binder:

»

Twitter Blue’s struggles since its launch nearly six months ago are more severe than previously revealed, new data suggests.

Since Musk’s version of the subscription service launched last November, Twitter has only been able to convert around 640,000 Twitter users into paying Twitter Blue subscribers as of the end of April, as Mashable reported earlier this week.

While those numbers are lacklustre, an even more telling detail about Twitter Blue is just how many of its earliest subscribers have canceled their subscriptions.

Out of about 150,000 early subscribers to Twitter Blue, just around 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription as of April 30. Subscriptions are $8 per month – $11 on mobile.

The total early subscriber numbers are linked directly to internal leaks published by the Washington Post last year showing that a total of 150,000 users originally signed up for Twitter Blue within just a few days of its launch in November. Twitter temporarily disabled new signups for about a month shortly after those users subscribed as a result of accounts signing up for Blue with the intent to impersonate major brands on the platform.

That means around 81,843 users, or 54.5%, of Twitter users who subscribed to Twitter Blue when it first launched in November are no longer subscribed to the service. That’s an abnormally high churn rate for an online subscription service. Churn rate is the percentage of users that unsubscribe from a service.

«

Perhaps all those original ones were troll accounts that got shut down? That would be the optimistic reading. Otherwise it means that they didn’t think Twitter Blue was worth it. Say it ain’t so, Elon!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Remarkably, Apple and Google are working together to prevent AirTags being used for stalking. But what about for tracking your car? CC-licensed photo by Tatsuo Yamashita on Flickr.

There’s another post at the Social Warming Substack, due about 0845. It’s about the puzzle of correcting things on social networks.

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. Nearly around again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

EU warns Apple about limiting speeds of uncertified USB-C cables for iPhones • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

It was rumoured in February that Apple may be planning to limit charging speeds and other functionality of USB-C cables that are not certified under its “Made for iPhone” (MFi) program. Like the Lightning port on existing iPhones, a small chip inside the USB-C port on iPhone 15 models would confirm the authenticity of the USB-C cable connected.

“I believe Apple will optimize the fast charging performance of MFi-certified chargers for the iPhone 15,” Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in March.

In response to this rumour, European Commissioner Thierry Breton has sent Apple a letter warning the company that limiting the functionality of USB-C cables would not be permitted and would prevent iPhones from being sold in the EU when the law goes into effect, according to German newspaper Die Zeit. The letter was obtained by German press agency DPA, and the report says the EU also warned Apple during a meeting in mid-March.

Given that it has until the end of 2024 to adhere to the law, Apple could still move forward with including an authentication chip in the USB-C port on iPhone 15 models later this year. And with iPhone 16 models expected to launch in September 2024, even those devices would be on the market before the law goes into effect.

The report says the EU intends to publish a guide to ensure a “uniform interpretation” of the legislation by the third quarter of this year.

«

Does Apple have to “limit” the functionality of the cables? It could just put up a warning when you plug in an uncertified one, saying “this is not a certified Apple cable, speeds cannot be guaranteed” (but more briefly). Because USB-C cables really are a lottery. You might find the speeds of charging or data is variable anyway without Apple lifting a finger, or a chip.
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October 1999: Super-cyclone wreaks havoc in India • BBC On This Day

October 1999:

»

A massive cyclone has swept through the state of Orissa in eastern India, killing an unknown number of people and leaving thousands more homeless.

The extent of the damage is difficult to determine. The area is almost impossible to reach, as the cyclone has torn down bridges and made roads and railways impassable. All communications have been cut, and the rescue effort is being hampered by the continuing bad weather.

Officials in the state capital, Bhubaneshwar, say nine deaths have been confirmed, but that number is expected to rise rapidly. Many towns and villages have not been able to report casualty figures or damage assessments because telephone lines have been brought down.

The winds are believed to have reached over 160 mph (250 km/h) – some of the highest ever recorded in the region.

A devastating tidal wave has also driven in across the low-lying plains along the coast, wiping out entire villages.

«

Perhaps the first of the serious, climate-change driven, extreme weather events. Though of course picking out one or the other and saying that’s the one is impossible.
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Vice Media reportedly headed for bankruptcy • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

»

Vice, the global news publisher and TV company that was once valued at nearly $6bn (£5bn), is reportedly close to filing for bankruptcy.

The company, whose assets include Vice News, Motherboard, Refinery29 and Vice TV, has been involved in sale talks with at least five companies in an attempt to avoid filing for bankruptcy, according to the New York Times.

Vice, which hit a valuation of $5.7bn in 2017 as media giants including Rupert Murdoch, WPP and Disney clamoured for a slice of its youth appeal, has been seeking a sale at a price tag of about $1.5bn.

Last week, the company – which has been evaluating its future since plans to float using a special purpose acquisition vehicle (Spac) collapsed two years ago – announced it was cancelling its popular Vice News Tonight as part of a restructuring that could result in more than 100 staff being made redundant.

In February, Fortress Investment Group, the company’s debt holder, extended a $30m funding line to enable Vice to pay overdue bills to vendors. The same month, Nancy Dubuc, who took over as chief executive from controversial co-founder Shane Smith in 2018, announced her surprise departure.

If a sale cannot be agreed – suitors are said to be seeking a sub-$1bn deal – a bankruptcy process would result in Vice continuing to operate normally while an auction process is run.

«

This would be a pity: the Motherboard part of Vice, which writes about the technology world, has consistently been a terrific outlet. It’s hard to think it would continue quite so brightly under a different owner.
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Google internal memo: “we have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” • Semi Analysis

Dylan Patel, quoting a note that apparently was posted internally by a researcher at Google:

»

the uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.

I’m talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today. Just to name a few:

• LLMs on a phone: People are running foundation models on a Pixel 6 at 5 tokens / sec
• Scalable Personal AI: You can finetune a personalized AI on your laptop in an evening
• Responsible Release: This one isn’t “solved” so much as “obviated”. There are entire websites full of art models with no restrictions whatsoever, and text is not far behind
• Multimodality: The current multimodal ScienceQA SOTA was trained in an hour.

While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13bn params that we struggle with at $10m and 540bn. And they are doing so in weeks, not months. This has profound implications for us:

We have no secret sauce. Our best hope is to learn from and collaborate with what others are doing outside Google. We should prioritize enabling 3P integrations.

People will not pay for a restricted model when free, unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality. We should consider where our value add really is.

Giant models are slowing us down. In the long run, the best models are the ones which can be iterated upon quickly. We should make small variants more than an afterthought, now that we know what is possible in the <20bn parameter regime.

«

Google’s moat (the business element that protects its profits) always used to be its search index and the data gathered from it. But in AI, that doesn’t count for much.
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Google shared AI knowledge with the world – until ChatGPT caught up • The Washington Post

Nitasha Tiku and Gerrit De Vynck:

»

In February, Jeff Dean, Google’s longtime head of artificial intelligence, announced a stunning policy shift to his staff: they had to hold off sharing their work with the outside world.

For years Dean had run his department like a university, encouraging researchers to publish academic papers prolifically; they pushed out nearly 500 studies since 2019, according to Google Research’s website.

But the launch of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT three months earlier had changed things. The San Francisco start-up kept up with Google by reading the team’s scientific papers, Dean said at the quarterly meeting for the company’s research division. Indeed, transformers — a foundational part of the latest AI tech and the T in ChatGPT — originated in a Google study.
Things had to change. Google would take advantage of its own AI discoveries, sharing papers only after the lab work had been turned into products, Dean said, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private information.

The policy change is part of a larger shift inside Google. Long considered the leader in AI, the tech giant has lurched into defensive mode — first to fend off a fleet of nimble AI competitors, and now to protect its core search business, stock price, and, potentially, its future, which executives have said is intertwined with AI.

«

Best time to build a moat: right about now.
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How eating ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) can affect your mental health • The New York Times

Sally Wadyka:

»

Recent research has demonstrated a link between highly processed foods and low mood. In one 2022 study of over 10,000 adults in the United States, the more UPFs participants ate, the more likely they were to report mild depression or feelings of anxiety. “There was a significant increase in mentally unhealthy days for those eating 60% or more of their calories from UPFs,” Dr. Hecht, the study’s author, said. “This is not proof of causation, but we can say that there seems to be an association.”

New research has also found a connection between high UPF consumption and cognitive decline. A 2022 study that followed nearly 11,000 Brazilian adults over a decade found a correlation between eating ultraprocessed foods and worse cognitive function (the ability to learn, remember, reason and solve problems). “While we have a natural decline in these abilities with age, we saw that this decline accelerated by 28% in people who consume more than 20% of their calories from UPFs,” said Natalia Gomes Goncalves, a professor at the University of São Paulo Medical School and the lead author of the study.

It’s possible that eating a healthy diet may offset the detrimental effects of eating ultraprocessed foods. The Brazilian researchers found that following a healthy eating regimen, like the MIND diet — which is rich in whole grains, green leafy vegetables, legumes, nuts, berries, fish, chicken and olive oil — greatly reduced the dementia risk associated with consuming ultraprocessed foods. Those who followed the MIND diet but still ate UPFs “had no association between UPF consumption and cognitive decline,” Dr. Goncalves said, adding that researchers still don’t know what a safe quantity of UPFs is.

«

The 2022 study does adjust for poverty level – that’s the most obvious thing you’d expect to predict both consumption of UPFs and depression/anxiety. So America, and the rest of us, are eating ourselves into gloom?
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Traders grow wary of ‘unloved’ bitcoin rally • Financial Times

Scott Chipolina:

»

The degree to which a market can absorb large orders without major changes to the price of bitcoin has declined since the start of the year, according to data provider CCData.

In January it would have required the purchase of more than 1,400 bitcoins, roughly equivalent to $23m at the time, to move the price of the token by more than 1% of its prevailing market value, CCData said.

Towards the end of last month it would have taken only 462 bitcoins, worth about $13m, to move market prices by 1%, the lowest point of market depth for the bitcoin-tether trading pair since May 2022, when the industry plunged into crisis.

“Prices are recovering, but liquidity has yet to return. No exchange or market maker has yet to fill the space that FTX and [its sister trading arm] Alameda once encompassed,” said Michael Safai, managing partner at crypto trading firm Dexterity Capital.

Investors who have bought into bitcoin in recent months are now holding on to their investments.

Glassnode, a crypto data provider, said “there has been remarkably little expenditure” by investors who bought bitcoin when it hit a two-year low after FTX’s failure last November.

“The ‘FOMO’ that drove a lot of first time institutional and retail investors last year is obviously not happening now, despite the fact the crypto markets have rallied significantly this year,” said one crypto fund manager based in Dubai, referring to a fear of missing out.

Moreover, there have been outflows of $72mn over the last two weeks in digital asset investments, ending a six-week run of consecutive inflows, according to CoinShares.

«

Wonder when we declare it all a zombie that no longer merits our attention.
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Apple and Google join forces to combat AirTag stalking • Bitdefender

Graham Cluley:

»

Apple and Google have announced that they are teaming up in order to combat the safety risks associated with AirTags and other tracking devices.

In a joint press release, the tech giants revealed that they had teamed up in an effort to thwart the growing problem of Bluetooth tracking devices being used to stalk individuals without their knowledge.

Although such gadgets were invented to help people locate their lost luggage or mislaid car keys, they have also been used to secretly track individuals’ location.

Although the phenomenon is often labelled “Airtag stalking” after the popular device Apple released in 2021, the problem of unwanted location-tracking can also be present with other gadgets, such as those from manufacturers such as Tile, Chipolo, and Pebblebee.

“Bluetooth trackers have created tremendous user benefits, but they also bring the potential of unwanted tracking, which requires industrywide action to solve,” said Dave Burke, who heads up Android engineering at Google.

Burke isn’t wrong. There are countless media reports of AirTags and their like being used by jealous partners and stalkers to monitor the movements of individuals without their knowledge.  It has even been alleged that one Indiana woman used an AirTag to track her boyfriend, and then – after an argument – murder him.

No major tech company wants to be associated with a technology that is making it easier to stalk people.

So it’s not a huge surprise that in a draft specification lodged with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Google and Apple describe how they aim to protect the privacy of individuals who do not want to either themselves or their belongings unwittingly tracked, by people misusing location-tracking accessories.

«

Not sure how this squares with the NYPD encouraging people to stick AirTags in their Hondas so they can track them when they’re nicked. A skim through the specification suggests that if you’re not the owner and the AirTag is “in range” (10 metres for Bluetooth LE?) then you should get an alert that it’s travelling with you.

Side note: think the last time I saw a joint Apple-Google press release was for Covid tracking.
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The Reverse-Scooby-Doo Theory of Tech Innovation • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

»

There’s a standard trope that tech evangelists deploy when they talk about the latest fad. It goes something like this:

(1) Technology XYZ is arriving. It will be incredible for everyone. It is basically inevitable.

(2) The only thing that can stop it is regulators and/or incumbent industries. If they are so foolish as to stand in its way, then we won’t be rewarded with the glorious future that I am promising.

We can think of this as a “reverse-Scooby-Doo.” It’s as though Silicon Valley has assumed the role of a Scooby Doo villain, but decided in this case that he’s actually the hero. (“We would’ve gotten away with it, if not for those meddling regulators!”)

…My main hope from the years of “techlash” tech coverage is that we collectively might start to take the power of these tech companies seriously and stop treating them like a bunch of scrappy inventors, toiling away at their visions of the future they might one day build. Silicon Valley in the ‘90s was not the power center that it is today. The largest, most profitable, most powerful companies in the world ought to be judged based on how they are impacting the present, not based on their pitch decks for what the future might someday look like.

What I like about the study of digital futures’ past is the sense of perspective it provides. There’s something almost endearing in the old claims that “the technological future is inevitable, so long as those meddling regulators don’t get in the way!”, applied to technologies that had so very many fundamental flaws. Those were simpler times, offering object lessons that we might learn from today.

It’s much less endearing from the present-day tech billionaire class. Balaji Srinivasan either doesn’t understand the existing limits of AI or doesn’t care about the existing limits of AI. He’s rehashing an old set of rhetorical tropes that place Silicon Valley’s inventors, engineers, and investors as the motive force of history, and regards all existing social, economic, and political institutions as interfering villains or obstacles to be overcome.

«

This is a fabulous piece, from February, but newly relevant. Srinivasan is the guy who “bet” $1m that the US would go into hyperinflation within 90 days, then said “kidding!” after 45 days. Karpf has views on that too. I’m very much enjoying his Substack.
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Andreessen Horowitz saw the future — but did the future leave it behind? • The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto:

»

One of the ways that [VC firm] Andreessen Horowitz marketed itself as distinct from its competitors was its founder-centric approach, which, during the go-go era of the 2010s, was in high style. It’s probably part of the reason that [co-founder Marc] Andreessen in 2015 defended [Theranos founder and subsequently convicted criminal Elizabeth] Holmes — he wanted to make it clear to founders that he was on their side no matter what. “We tend to be pro-megalomania,” Andreessen said in 2009.

More aggressive reporting on tech jeopardized the model of hyping a business and then selling after an inflated valuation. It’s no surprise, then, that Andreessen turned on the media. It probably didn’t help that The Wall Street Journal suggested in 2016 that a16z was all hat and no cattle — not really an elite firm if you looked at its returns, which had merely doubled its investment capital. The article contrasted a16z’s performance with that of Bill Gurley’s Benchmark, which “has multiplied investors’ money 11 times net of fees in its 2011 fund, according to a person familiar with its performance.”

Still, a 2014 Andreessen article about the news media is perceptive. Unlike most techies, Andreessen’s aware that the “view from nowhere” is a recent artifact, born from media consolidation. He knew how important distribution was. His list of possible business models was among those many publications experimented with. Andreessen and a16z even made a few media investments. They largely failed.

…The other vibe shift that would seriously affect a16z’s strategy, of course, was the Fed.

When a16z was founded in 2009, the Fed’s interest rate was near zero, where it mostly remained until 2022. A series of rate hikes beginning last year means that borrowing money is now more expensive than it has been at any point in the history of Andreessen Horowitz.

«

Wonderful piece, which shows that the questioning about tech has now moved on to the questioning about tech funding.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The proliferating buttons on the car dashboards of a decade or so ago went away.. and now they’re coming back. CC-licensed photo by Elizabeth 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.

When it’s Friday, there’ll be another post at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 10 links for you. Not even looking! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

The glorious return of a humble car feature • Slate

David Zipper:

»

As I explained in a 2021 Slate article, the trend toward car touch screens has been a dangerous one for road safety. Those who drove in the 1990s will remember using buttons and knobs to change the radio or adjust the air conditioning without looking down from the steering wheel. Despite their name, touch screens rely on a driver’s eyes as much as her fingers to navigate—and every second that she is looking at a screen is a second that she isn’t looking at the road ahead. Navigating through various levels of menus to reach a desired control can be particularly dangerous; one study by the AAA Foundation concluded that infotainment touch screens can distract a driver for up to 40 seconds, long enough to cover half a mile at 50 mph.

“The irony is that everyone basically accepts that it’s dangerous to use your phone while driving,” said Farah. “Yet no one complains about what we’re doing instead, which is fundamentally using an iPad while driving. If you’re paying between $40,000 and $300,000 for a car, you’re getting an iPad built onto the dashboard.”

Seeking to address these risks, NHTSA published voluntary guidance in 2013 recommending that a driver be able to complete any infotainment task with glances of under two seconds, totaling a maximum of 12 seconds. But NHTSA’s guidance had no enforcement mechanism, and carmakers have violated it with impunity.

In the last two years further evidence has suggested that touch screens represent a step backward for auto design. Drexel researchers found that infotainment systems posed a statistically significant crash risk even in the early 2010s, before carmakers added many of today’s bells and whistles. A widely publicized Swedish study found that completing tasks with screens takes longer than with physical buttons.

Meanwhile, a revolt has been brewing. A recent J.D. Power consumer survey on vehicle dependability concluded that “infotainment remains a significant issue for new vehicles.” It wasn’t hard to understand why. In a 2022 New York Times opinion piece titled “Touch Screens in Cars Solve a Problem We Didn’t Have,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote, “I can think of no better way of describing the frustration of the modern consumer than buying a car with a feature that makes you less safe, doesn’t improve your driving experience in any meaningful way, saves the manufacturer money and gets sold to you as some necessary advance in connectivity.”

«

Wonder if the NHTSA will mandate something to do with touchscreens, and how the carmakers – addicted to cheap screens – will cope with it.
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Why are TV writers so miserable? • The New Yorker

Michael Schulman:

»

For people outside the industry, the woes of TV writers can elicit a boo-hoo response: it is, after all, a more lucrative form of writing than most, right? But the economics of streaming have chipped away at what was previously a route to a middle-class life, as the cost of living in Los Angeles has crept upward. “It feels like the studios have gone through our contracts and figured out how to Frankenstein every loophole into every deal, which means that, at the very best, you can keep your head above water,” [Laura] Jacqmin said. “You can maybe maintain the amount of money you made the year before, but more than likely you will be asked to cut your quote. It just feels really grim.” She added, “I’m on Twitter every other day, and I’m seeing writers who are, like, ‘Please Venmo me some grocery money. I am desperate, and I have not worked in three months. Help!’ ”

Aly Monroe, a 30-year-old writer who’d worked up from production assistant to story editor on Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” told me that she makes about $10,000 a year in residuals, “and that’s certainly not reflective of what the studio is making.” In the long breaks between seasons, she relies on her wife’s more regular income while stretching out the money from “Handmaid.” Some of her friends are getting copywriting jobs or moving back in with their parents. “Before the strike demands came out, a lot of my friends were feeling really hopeless and essentially ready to give up, because it had just been such a hard road,” she said. “And they think that what the W.G.A. is asking for makes us all feel really good and like we’re working toward something that can make it back into a livable career for all of us. That’s certainly how I feel.”

At the same time that the money has tightened, original ideas have become harder to sell. The prestige-cable days of “Mad Men” and “Nurse Jackie” became the prestige-streaming era of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Stranger Things,” which has given way to the algorithm-and-I.P.-fuelled hellscape of superheroes, mergers, and HBO Max becoming plain old Max.

«

They’re also extremely worried about AI being used to generate ideas or content or to “punch up” content they’ve written. And given how studios will use absolutely any excuse to screw over those who work for them, it’s a legitimate concern.
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Web3’s fake version of Web history • The Future, Now and Then

Dave Karpf:

»

Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most influential Venture Capital firms in the world. He is Web3’s single biggest investor, and its most prominent evangelist.

And he is just atrocious at explaining the history of the Web.

Dixon made his money in the internet of the ‘00s and ‘10s. He works with Marc Andreessen, the iconic “golden geek” of the ‘90s internet. The guy has been around long enough to know better. When he gets the history of the Web completely wrong, he is doing so with intent. And he has been prominently, boldly getting this wrong for YEARS. No one seems to call him on it. I don’t understand why.

(Yes I do. It’s because he’s rich and well-connected. Picking fights with him over something like “the history of the web” has little upside. It’s one of those things that only a tenured professor who isn’t looking for much research funding would bother with.)

…Broad historical narratives are a bit like statistical models — “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” Of course history is more messy and complicated than that. But if the general outline makes sense, and if it helps us make sense of the present, then the effort is justifiable.

But let me offer a corollary: “all models are wrong, but some are wronger than others.” And the problem with Dixon’s model is that it extremely, ceaselessly, aggressively wrong. It’s the type of wrong that might be useful for hawking unregistered Web3 security products (err, sorry, I mean, play-to-earn games), but is not at all useful for actually understanding the development of the internet.

«

Karpf offers a neat history of the internet – and it is correct, especially about the Web2 phase.
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Report describes Apple’s “organizational dysfunction” and “lack of ambition” in AI • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

»

The Information’s sources [in an article about Apple’s struggles or otherwise with AI] offer up numerous examples of senior Apple leadership putting the brakes on (or at least reining in) aggressive efforts within the company’s AI group for fear of seeing products like Siri present the same kinds of embarrassing factual errors or unhinged behavior that ChatGPT and its ilk have done. In other words, Apple isn’t keen on tolerating what many working in AI research and product development call “hallucinations.”

For example, Siri’s responses are not generative—they’re human-written and human-curated. Apple leadership has been hesitant to allow Siri developers to push the voice assistant toward detailed back-and-forth conversations like you see in the latest LLM-driven chatbots. Those are seen as more attention-grabbing than usefulness, and Apple is worried about being responsible for bad answers.

Some engineers within the company have argued that Apple should be more tolerant of bizarre edge cases and factual errors, saying that a certain scale and comfort for wonkiness is needed to truly improve them. Notably, several senior people within the company have abandoned ship for Google or startups out of frustrations with Apple’s conservative mindset.

Further, Apple has increasingly focused on running AI and machine learning features on users’ local devices—both because that enabled faster response times and because of the company’s public commitment to user privacy. For some features, that is an advantage (as Giannandrea explained to Ars Technica in 2020). But to date, LLMs typically run in the cloud, and some have questioned whether they’ll ultimately work as well on local devices.

«

Counting down to LLMs on-device.. what do we think, a year?
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The long demise of the stretch limousine • The New York Times

Jesus Jiménez:

»

Over a few days in early March, carmakers and limousine company operators gathered at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for an annual convention, where they went to panels and parties and admired shiny new party buses, vans and black sport utility vehicles.

But something was missing.

“There wasn’t one stretch limousine on the show floor,” said Robert Alexander, president of the National Limousine Association, a trade group. “Not one.”

Decades ago, stretch limos were a symbol of affluence, used almost exclusively by the rich and famous. Over time, they became more of a common luxury, booked for children’s birthday parties or by teenagers heading to the prom.

These days, it seems as if hardly anyone is riding in a stretch limo. While the limousine name has stuck, the limo industry has shifted to chauffeur services in almost anything but actual stretch limos, which have largely been supplanted by black S.U.V.s, buses and vans.
“The limo business isn’t your father’s limo business anymore,” Mr. Alexander said.

Today, the stretch limo represents less than 1% of services offered by limo companies, down from about 10% a decade ago, according to the association.

“The stretch limo is — what’s the expression? — gone like the dodo bird,” Mr. Alexander said. “Extinct.”

«

What happened? Mostly, Uber and Lyft. The Great Recession. Also not looking like a jerk.
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Netflix Spain lost 1 million users last quarter, Kantar says • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Clara Hernanz Lizarraga and Thomas Seal:

»

In early February, Netflix introduced a €5.99 ($6.57) monthly fee for users in Spain who shared their log-in details with another household and technical measures to detect such sharing. The move was linked to a fall in users of more than a million, two thirds of whom were using someone else’s password, according to Kantar’s research, which is based on surveys of household streaming habits.

“It’s clear this steep drop is due to the crackdown,” said Dominic Sunnebo, global insight director at Kantar’s Worldpanel Division, adding that the loss of a million users, even if most weren’t paid subscribers, would be a blow to Netflix in terms of word of mouth recommendation for its shows and service.

Subscription cancellations in the first quarter tripled compared to the previous period, according to Kantar’s research. Of all remaining Netflix subscribers in Spain, one-tenth said they planned to unsubscribe in the second quarter.

A similar fee was introduced in Portugal, Canada and New Zealand after a roll-out in several Latin American countries.

“We see a cancel reaction in each market when we announce the news,” Netflix said in its first quarter earnings release on April 18, expecting the dip to be momentary before users that didn’t pay start signing up for their own accounts.

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Netflix says that Canada, where it tried this first, dipped and then came back above the previous point. Keep those fingers crossed!
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Who Can I Vote For?

»

Find out about candidates in your area.

WhoCanIVoteFor is a simple tool which allows UK voters to see lists of candidates in upcoming elections using only their postcode.

All the candidate data ued in this site is collected by volunteers from council websites and other sources. If you wish to contribute, please visit Democracy Club Candidates.

«

OK, so this is a little late (today is the day for local elections in many, though not all, parts of the UK) but it’s a good site to bookmark – and also available in Welsh. Hats tipped to Sym Roe, Joe Mitchell, Tim Green, Andy Lulham and David Miller, with a little help from mySociety – the latter being one of those Web2 ideas that keeps on giving.
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Amnesty International criticised for using AI-generated images • The Guardian

Luke Taylor:

»

While the systemic brutality used by Colombian police to quell national protests in 2021 was real and is well documented, photos recently used by Amnesty International to highlight the issue were not.

The international human rights advocacy group has come under fire for posting images generated by artificial intelligence in order to promote their reports on social media – and has since removed them.

The images, including one of a woman being dragged away by police officers, depict the scenes during protests that swept across Colombia in 2021.

But any more than a momentary glance at the images reveals that something is off.

The faces of the protesters and police are smoothed-off and warped, giving the image a dystopian aura.

The tricolour carried by the protester has the right colours – red, yellow and blue – but in the wrong order, and the police uniform is outdated.

…Amnesty International said it had used photographs in previous reports but chose to use the AI-generated images to protect protesters from possible state retribution.

To avoid misleading the public, the images included text stating that they were produced by AI.

“We have removed the images from social media posts, as we don’t want the criticism for the use of AI-generated images to distract from the core message in support of the victims and their calls for justice in Colombia,” Erika Guevara Rosas, director for Americas at Amnesty, said.

“But we do take the criticism seriously and want to continue the engagement to ensure we understand better the implications and our role to address the ethical dilemmas posed by the use of such technology.”

«

As Ryan Broderick pointed out in his Garbage Day email/Substack, Amnesty could completely have used real photos, and just blurred the faces of the people. But they thought to themselves it would be cool and edgy to use AI.
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August 7 1998: US embassies in Africa bombed • BBC On This Day

»

At least 200 people have been killed and more than 1,000 injured following explosions at United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The bombings took place within minutes of each other at around 1030 local time.

The first blast happened in the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam and the second, just five minutes later, in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city.

The Nairobi explosion demolished a five-story office block sending it crashing onto the embassy next door.

The US Ambassador Prudence Bushnell was meeting Kenyan Trade Minister Joseph Kamotho at the nearby Ufundi Cooperative Bank at the time but was only slightly injured.

The blast could be heard 10 miles (16km) away and caused total chaos in the city centre.

No-one has claimed responsibility but US officials suspect the attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist.

«

A cloud the size of a man’s fist on the horizon. Earlier in the year, India and then Pakistan had carried out a series of underground nuclear tests, which “provoked worldwide condemnation and fears of a nuclear conflict in one of the world’s most volatile regions.”

Which just goes to show how wrongly placed fears can be.
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Former Coinbase official Balaji Srinivasan closes out $1m bitcoin bet early • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Olga Kharif:

»

Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase Global Inc., said he closed out what appeared to be a losing bet that Bitcoin would rise to $1m within 90 days.

Srinivasan said he gave $1m to two organizations, including the Bitcoin Core development team at researcher Chaincode Labs, as well as paying $500,000 to someone who goes by James Medlock on Twitter, and who won the wager.

The goal of the bet, Srinivasan reiterated in a Twitter post and a short video Tuesday, was to show that fiat currencies such as the dollar are in trouble, and that those troubles will push Bitcoin’s price up. At $28,710, Bitcoin is about 10% up from when Srinivasan accepted the bet on March 17.

The terms of the wager weren’t immediately clear. Medlock and Srinivasan didn’t return requests for comment.

“The reason that I did that is I wanted to tell you in a provable way that there’s something wrong in the economy and the state isn’t telling you about it,” Srinivasan said in the video, recounting troubles with US banks, sovereign debt and other potential issues. “That is what I am doing at my own expense, I am raising public alarm.”

Back on March 16, Medlock posted a tweet, “I’ll bet anyone $1m dollars that the US does not enter hyperinflation.”

On March 17, Srinivasan responded with, “I will take that bet.”

«

Honestly, how did someone with so little comprehension of the world get so rich that he can afford to throw a million dollars away?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You can now tour every Star Trek bridge via a web portal – you won’t even need to wear the clothes to fit in. But shouldn’t it be VR instead? CC-licensed photo by WarvanWarvan 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation • The Economist

Yuval Noah Harari:

»

What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about ChatGPT and other new AI tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using AI to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of AI tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults.

In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around anonymous online messages, known as “q drops”. Followers collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first cults in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality.

On a more prosaic level, we might soon find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions about abortion, climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine with entities that we think are humans—but are actually AI. The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend time trying to change the declared opinions of an AI bot, while the AI could hone its messages so precisely that it stands a good chance of influencing us.

«

There’s also a (released in a rush) interview with Geoffrey Hinton, ex-Google, at MIT Tech Review:

»

“These things are totally different from us,” he says. “Sometimes I think it’s as if aliens had landed and people haven’t realized because they speak very good English.”

«

(YNH piece via John Naughton.)
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Scientists use GPT AI to passively read people’s thoughts in breakthrough • Vice

Becky Ferreira:

»

The breakthrough marks the first time that continuous language has been non-invasively reconstructed from human brain activities, which are read through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. 

The decoder was able to interpret the gist of stories that human subjects watched or listened to—or even simply imagined—using fMRI brain patterns, an achievement that essentially allows it to read peoples’ minds with unprecedented efficacy. While this technology is still in its early stages, scientists hope it might one day help people with neurological conditions that affect speech to clearly communicate with the outside world.

However, the team that made the decoder also warned that brain-reading platforms could eventually have nefarious applications, including as a means of surveillance for governments and employers. Though the researchers emphasized that their decoder requires the cooperation of human subjects to work, they argued that “brain–computer interfaces should respect mental privacy,” according to a study published on Monday in Nature Neuroscience.

“Currently, language-decoding is done using implanted devices that require neurosurgery, and our study is the first to decode continuous language, meaning more than full words or sentences, from non-invasive brain recordings, which we collect using functional MRI,” said Jerry Tang, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Texas at Austin who led the study, in a press briefing held last Thursday.

“The goal of language-decoding is to take recordings of a user’s brain activity and predict the words that the user was hearing or saying or imagining,” he noted. “Eventually, we hope that this technology can help people who have lost the ability to speak due to injuries like strokes, or diseases like ALS.”

«

It’s very dramatic, though fMRI is one of those Tinkerbell technologies – the more you believe in it, the better it works. But if you don’t…
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May 2 1997: Labour routs Tories in historic election • BBC On This Day

May 1997:

»

The Labour Party has won the general election in a landslide victory, leaving the Conservatives in tatters after 18 years in power, with Scotland and Wales left devoid of Tory representation.

Labour now has a formidable 419 seats (including the speaker) – the largest the party has ever taken. The Conservatives took just 165, their worst performance since 1906.

Tony Blair – at 43 the youngest British prime minister this century – promised he would deliver “unity and purpose for the future”.

John Major has resigned as Conservative leader, saying “When the curtain falls it’s time to get off the stage and that is what I propose to do.”

«

Major went to spend the May afternoon watching a cricket match, and stayed mostly quiet for more than a decade until the Brexit vote hove into view.

The next election is due some time before the end of 2024. Let’s see how that goes.
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Surviving (just about) the digital media carnage • The Fence

An anonymous insider (who I think worked at Buzzfeed) on the highs and lows:

»

Even when I arrived, there was a sense that the glory days were over. Staff complained loudly that there was no free swag bag at the Christmas party. (A few years back, everyone had been gifted wraps of coke.) Our company had recently secured mega-bucks investment from corporate investors, and over the coming years the pressure to make good on that investment became increasingly strained.

Redundancies crashed over the editorial team in waves. First our news division was laid off. Then the parts of the site that were trafficking badly were excised, then a wider round of lay-offs that seemed to cherry-pick people at random. One time, they forgot to lay off a colleague for the simple reason that they forgot he existed. Someone eventually remembered him, and got in touch to let him know his services would no longer be required – after he’d enjoyed the sweet relief of thinking he’d escaped.

So many talented people were laid off, and so many mediocre employees survived. There was no way the lay-offs could be performance-related. Executives crashed through strategies. We were pivoting to video, pivoting away from video, pivoting to a digital-first strategy, pivoting to a multi-platform strategy, consolidating our brands under one brand, unconsolidating them again.
I came to understand the vagaries of my employer in the same way that a child learns to study the rhythms and temper of an abusive parent. Typically, there would be an eight to twelve-month period of calm, before the sudden, stuttering shock of a round of Friday afternoon lay-offs. Colleagues were mourned on Twitter. We would mutter about unionising.

…But even the best managers would have been powerless to face down the Facebook and Google duopoly. It was like a suicide attempt, where the person realises too late that they don’t actually want to die and scrambles for a foothold – their toe hooked on an overturned chair – before succumbing to a slow, asphyxiating death.

«

To be honest, sounds like working on The Independent from 1995-2000, which was a constant round of layoffs and dwindling numbers. Except we were already unionised. Still, had an upside: met my future wife at one of the leaving dos.

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NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

The New York Police Department (NYPD) and New York City’s self-proclaimed computer geek of a mayor are urging resident car owners to equip their vehicles with an Apple AirTag. During a press conference on Sunday, Mayor Eric Adams announced the distribution of 500 free AirTags to New Yorkers, saying the technology would aid in reducing the city’s surging car theft numbers.

Adams held the press conference at the 43rd precinct in the Bronx, where he said there had been 200 instances of grand larceny of autos. An NYPD official said that in New York City, 966 Hyundais and Kias have been stolen this year thus far, already surpassing 2022’s 819 total. The NYPD’s public crime statistics tracker says there have been 4,492 vehicle thefts this year, a 13.3% increase compared to the same period last year and the largest increase among NYC’s seven major crime categories.

Adams, as the city did when announcing litigation against Kia and Hyundai on April 7, largely blamed the rise in car thefts on Kia and Hyundai, which he said are “leading the way” in stolen car brands.

Hyundais and Kias were the subjects of the Kia Challenge TikTok trend that encouraged people to jack said vehicles with a mere USB-A cable. The topic has graduated way beyond a social media fad and into a serious concern. Adams, for example, pointed to stolen cars as a gateway to other crimes, like hit-and-runs. It can also be dangerous; four teenagers in upstate New York died during a joyride with a stolen Kia last year. And some insurance companies even stopped taking new insurance policies for some Hyundais and Kias. In February, Kia and Hyundai issued updates to make the cars harder to lift.

Adams was adamant grand larceny auto numbers were dragging the city’s overall crime numbers up and urged New Yorkers to “participate” in the fight against car theft by using an AirTag.

«

I thought the UK had cut down on car theft through immobilisers, but London in 2022 had more than 26,000 thefts – though it seems a large proportion of the targeted cars are high-end, keyless models stolen by complex methods (as we’ve discussed here recently). Those have trackers built in. Still get nicked.
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Brazil pushes back on big tech firms’ campaign against ‘fake news law’ • Reuters

Anthony Boadle:

»

Brazil’s government and judiciary objected on Tuesday to big tech firms campaigning against an internet regulation bill aimed at cracking down on fake news, alleging undue interference in the debate in Congress.

Bill 2630, also known as the Fake News Law, puts the onus on the internet companies, search engines and social messaging services to find and report illegal material, instead of leaving it to the courts, charging hefty fines for failures to do so.

Tech firms have been campaigning against the bill, including Google which had added a link on its search engine in Brazil connecting to blogs against the bill and asking users to lobby their representatives.

Justice Minister Flavio Dino ordered Google to change the link on Tuesday, saying the company had two hours after notification or would face fines of one million reais ($198,000) per hour if it did not.

“What is this? An editorial? This is not a media or an advertising company,” the minister told a news conference, calling Google’s link disguised and misleading advertising for the company’s stance against the law.

The US company promptly pulled the link, though Google defended its right to communicate its concerns through “marketing campaigns” on its platforms and denied altering search results to favor material contrary to the bill.

“We support discussions on measures to combat the phenomenon of misinformation. All Brazilians have the right to be part of this conversation, and as such, we are committed to communicating our concerns about Bill 2630 publicly and transparently,” it said in a statement.

«

On its face, this law is like the XKCD cartoon “Someone is wrong on the internet”, except Google and other tech firms have to correct it all the time. What does that mean for YouTube – do all the flat earth videos vanish in Brazil? Or all of the videos?
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‘Star Trek’ fans can now virtually tour every Starship Enterprise bridge • Smithsonian Magazine

Sarah Kuta:

»

For decades, many “Star Trek” fans have imagined what it would be like to work from the bridge of the starship Enterprise, the long-running franchise’s high-tech space-exploring vessel. Through various iterations and seasons of the series, created by Gene Roddenberry in the ’60s, the bridge has remained a constant, serving as the backdrop for many important moments in the show’s 800-plus episodes.

Now, die-hard Trekkies and casual watchers alike can virtually roam around the Enterprise’s bridge to their heart’s content, thanks to a sophisticated and highly detailed new web portal that brings the space to life.

The site features 360-degree, 3D models of the various versions of the Enterprise, as well as a timeline of the ship’s evolution throughout the franchise’s history. Fans of the show can also read detailed information about each version of the ship’s design, its significance to the “Star Trek” storyline and its production backstory.

«

This seems like it would be the ideal thing for virtual reality. Though, OK, you might need some sort of thing where you’re not walking, but floating around. So VR with no legs so you’re not tempted to walk?
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About us • Fakespot

»

Fakespot’s mission is to bring trust and transparency to the Internet by eliminating misinformation and fraud, starting with eCommerce. Fakespot protects consumers while saving them both time and money by using AI to detect fraudulent product reviews and third-party sellers in real-time. Our proprietary technology analyzes billions of consumer reviews to quickly identify suspicious activity and then recommend better alternatives to consumers. We got tired of getting ripped off online, so we made it our mission to never let it happen to anyone else.

«

Mozilla has just bought this company:

»

In Mozilla, we have found a partner that shares a similar mission as to what the future of the internet should look like, where the convergence of trust, privacy and security play an imperative part of our digital experiences.

In a time where it’s simpler than ever before to generate fake content, the browser is the first entry point to consuming that content. As such, browsers have the most potential for true innovations where actions, like shopping, become better than ever before.

«

Mozilla, clinging to life through Google’s generous sponsorship of its search box (renews this year!), and still looking for that new USP.
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Intel: Just You Wait. Again.• Monday Note

Jean-Louis Gassée looks at how Intel has promised – or threatened – to catch up with the ARM-based world ever since Apple stuck a Qualcomm chip in the first iPhone:

»

the company’s revenue for its new IFS foundry business decreased by 24% to an insignificant $118m, with a $140m operating loss gingerly explained as “increased spending to support strategic growth”. Other Intel businesses such as Networking (NEX) products and Mobileye — yet another Autonomous Driving Technology — add nothing promising to the company’s picture.

This doesn’t prevent Gelsinger from once again intoning the Just You Wait refrain. This time, the promise is to “regain transistor performance and power performance leadership by 2025”.

Is it credible?

We all agree that the US tech industry would be better served by Intel providing a better alternative to TSMC’s and Samsung’s advanced foundries. Indeed, We The Taxpayers are funding efforts to stimulate our country’s semiconductor sector at the tune of $52B. I won’t comment other than to reminisce about a difficult late 80s conversation with an industry CEO when, as an Apple exec, I naively opposed an attempt to combat the loss of semiconductor memory business to foreign competitors by subsidizing something tentatively called US Memories. But, in this really complicated 2023 world, what choices do we actually have?

For years I’ve watched Intel’s repeated mistakes, the misplaced self-regard, the ineffective leadership changes for this Silicon Valley icon, for the inventor of the first commercial microprocessor, only to be disappointed time and again as the company failed to shake the Wintel yoke — while Microsoft successfully diversified.

I fervently hope Pat Gelsinger succeeds.

«

Chances aren’t looking that good that he will, though. Maybe Intel will become an also-ran in the category it invented.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if – just imagine – queries to doctors were answered by ChatGPT? It turns out people like that. CC-licensed photo by Camilo Rueda Lõpez 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

‘The godfather of AI’ quits Google and warns of danger ahead • The New York Times

Cade Metz interviewed Dr Geoffrey Hinton, the British scientist who first built a neural network, and in 2012 built a neural net that could identify common objects in photos:

»

Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than a decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of AI. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.

…As companies improve their AI systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of AI technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”

Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.

His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

He is also worried that AI technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow AI systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

«

This interview implies lots of questions. He was worried while inside Google? He’s worried now he’s outside, but Google is saying everything’s peachy? They’re all rushing too quickly towards putting this stuff out, even while denying that’s the case? It’s not encouraging.
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ChatGPT will see you now: doctors using AI to answer patient questions • WSJ

Nidhi Subbaraman:

»

In California and Wisconsin, OpenAI’s “GPT” generative artificial intelligence is reading patient messages and drafting responses from their doctors. The operation is part of a pilot program in which three health systems test if the AI will cut the time that medical staff spend replying to patients’ online inquiries.

UC San Diego Health and UW Health began testing the tool in April. Stanford Health Care aims to join the rollout early next week. Altogether, about two dozen healthcare staff are piloting this tool. 

Marlene Millen, a primary care physician at UC San Diego Health who is helping lead the AI test, has been testing GPT in her inbox for about a week. Early AI-generated responses needed heavy editing, she said, and her team has been working to improve the replies. They are also adding a kind of bedside manner: If a patient mentioned returning from a trip, the draft could include a line that asked if their travels went well. “It gives the human touch that we would,” Dr. Millen said.

There is preliminary data that suggests AI could add value. ChatGPT scored better than real doctors at responding to patient queries posted online, according to a study published Friday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, in which a panel of doctors did blind evaluations of posts.

As many industries test ChatGPT as a business tool, hospital administrators and doctors are hopeful that the AI-assist will ease burnout among their staff, a problem that skyrocketed during the pandemic. The crush of messages and health-records management is a contributor, among administrative tasks, according to the American Medical Association. 

«

I guess it’s sort of equal: the patients are using search engines (usually Dr Google), and now the doctors are entering the arms race (a little late). The advantage is that ChatGPT is polite and you can narrow (or train) its expertise.
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Missing Links: A comparison of search censorship in China • The Citizen Lab

Jeffrey Knockel, Ken Kato, and Emile Dirks:

»

Key findings:
• Across eight China-accessible search platforms analyzed — Baidu, Baidu Zhidao, Bilibili, Microsoft Bing, Douyin, Jingdong, Sogou, and Weibo — we discovered over 60,000 unique censorship rules used to partially or totally censor search results returned on these platforms.

• We investigated different levels of censorship affecting each platform, which might either totally block all results or selectively allow some through, and we applied novel methods to unambiguously and exactly determine the rules triggering each of these types of censorship across all platforms.

• Among web search engines Microsoft Bing and Baidu, Bing’s chief competitor in China, we found that, although Baidu has more censorship rules than Bing, Bing’s political censorship rules were broader and affected more search results than Baidu. Bing on average also restricted displaying search results from a greater number of website domains.

• These findings call into question the ability of non-Chinese technology companies to better resist censorship demands than their Chinese counterparts and serve as a dismal forecast concerning the ability of other non-Chinese technology companies to introduce search products or other services in China without integrating at least as many restrictions on political and religious expression as their Chinese competitors.

«

One has to wonder if the people of China are aware of this, and there’s a sort of silent consensus that it’s OK, or if there’s some growing unhappiness with it.
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How China’s Huawei spooked Germany into launching a probe • POLITICO

Louis Westendarp:

»

While much of the fear around Huawei in the West has focused on espionage and the risk of data leaking to Beijing, Germany’s latest investigation — and the intelligence that triggered it — point to another risk: the potential of sabotage through critical components that could collapse telecoms networks.

In March, the interior ministry announced it was checking all components with security implications from two Chinese telecoms suppliers, Huawei and ZTE. The review was launched to identify technology “that could enable a state to exercise political power,” a high-ranking official from the interior ministry said at the time.

German lawmakers were briefed on the probe by security authorities in a classified parliamentary hearing at the German Bundestag’s digital committee in early April. The session was held by the German interior ministry and the federal intelligence service, the two lawmakers said. Germany’s cybersecurity agency was also present, one lawmaker added.

In the briefing, security officials told lawmakers that one tech component in particular triggered the ministry’s investigation, namely an energy management component from Huawei, two lawmakers present at the briefing who spoke under the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the information told POLITICO.

The revelations suggest security officials feared such a component could be used to disrupt telecoms operations or — in a worst case scenario — be exploited to bring down a network.

…In its review, the German interior ministry is asking network operators to submit a list of all Chinese “security-relevant” components. The checks are expected to conclude in the coming months.

The review could lead to operators having to “rip and replace” components provided by Chinese suppliers in past years if they’re deemed too risky.

«

The paranoid style of politics is returning.

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April 19 1995: Many feared dead in Oklahoma bombing • BBC On This Day

April 1995:

»

A huge car bomb has exploded at a government building in Oklahoma City killing at least 80 people including 17 children at a nursery.

At least 100 people have been injured and the number of dead is expected to rise.

In an emotional speech, President Bill Clinton vowed “swift, certain and severe” punishment for those behind the atrocity.

“The United States will not tolerate and I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated by evil cowards,” he told a White House news conference this evening.

The blast happened just after 0900 local time when most workers were in their offices. It destroyed the facade of the ten-storey Alfred Murrah Building.

One survivor said he thought there was an earthquake: “I never heard anything that loud. It was a horrible noise…the roar of the whole building crumbling,”

There were scenes of chaos as paramedics treated the wounded on the pavement and rescue workers battled to dig out those still trapped in the rubble.

«

The work of Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran, as retaliation – he said – for the government siege of Waco, Texas in which 82 of the Branch Davidian sect died. McVeigh’s actions led an entire right-wing conspiracist militia to surface over the next 30 years.

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15 June 1996: Huge explosion rocks central Manchester • BBC On This Day

June 1996:

»

A massive bomb has devastated a busy shopping area in central Manchester.

Two hundred people were injured in the attack, mostly by flying glass, and seven are said to be in a serious condition. Police believe the IRA planted the device.

The bomb exploded at about 1120 BST on Corporation Street outside the Arndale shopping centre.

It is the seventh attack by the Irish Republican group since it broke its ceasefire in February and is the second largest on the British mainland.

A local television station received a telephone warning at 1000 BST – just as the city centre was filling up with Saturday shoppers.

The caller used a recognised IRA codeword.

One hour and 20 minutes after the warning, police were still clearing hundreds of people from a huge area of central Manchester.

Army bomb disposal experts were using a remote-controlled device to examine a suspect van parked outside Marks & Spencer when it blew up in an uncontrolled explosion.

«

Less than two years later, the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, signed the Good Friday Agreement which ended the terrorism campaign, and brought peace to Northern Ireland. It’s the only successful political negotiation to end a conflict in the past 25 years.
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Jack Dorsey says Elon Musk shouldn’t have bought Twitter after all • The Washington Post

Faiz Siddiqui and Will Oremus:

»

[Former Twitter CEO Jack] Dorsey said he thought Musk, the Tesla CEO who serves in the same role at Twitter today, should have paid $1bn to back out of the deal to acquire the social media platform. The comments are a stark reversal from Dorsey’s strong endorsement of Musk’s takeover, when he wrote a year ago that if Twitter had to be a company at all, “Elon is the singular solution I trust.”

“I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness,” Dorsey tweeted at the time.

In his remarks on Bluesky on Friday, Dorsey struck a far different tone. Dorsey said he didn’t think Musk “acted right” after pursuing the site and realizing his potential mistake, adding that he did not believe the company’s board should have forced the sale.

“It all went south,” Dorsey added.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment on Dorsey’s remarks. Musk appeared on Friday night’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” on HBO, and spoke on topics including his time in charge of the company, a recent meeting with U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), and his concerns about rhetoric coming from the political left.

“It was on a fast track to bankruptcy,” Musk said of Twitter. “So I had to take drastic action. There wasn’t any choice.”

«

Pity Musk didn’t come to the same realisation a lot earlier. Possibly he did and thought that actually, he could make it all happen.
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Scientists in India protest move to drop Darwinian evolution from textbooks • Science

Athar Parvaiz:

»

Scientists in India are protesting a decision to remove discussion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from textbooks used by millions of students in ninth and 10th grades. More than 4000 researchers and others have so far signed an open letter asking officials to restore the material.

The removal makes “a travesty of the notion of a well-rounded secondary education,” says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Other researchers fear it signals a growing embrace of pseudoscience by Indian officials.

The Breakthrough Science Society, a nonprofit group, launched the open letter on 20 April after learning that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous government organization that sets curricula and publishes textbooks for India’s 256 million primary and secondary students, had made the move as part of a “content rationalization” process. NCERT first removed discussion of Darwinian evolution from the textbooks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes, the society says. (Last year, NCERT issued a document that said it wanted to avoid content that was “irrelevant” in the “present context.”)

…One major concern, Joshi says, is that most Indian students will get no exposure to the concept of evolution if it is dropped from the ninth and 10th grade curriculum, because they do not go on to study biology in later grades. “Evolution is perhaps the most important part of biology that all educated citizens should be aware of,” Joshi says. “It speaks directly to who we are, as humans, and our position within the living world.”

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No word on whether they’re replacing it with something else, or just hoping children absorb the idea by osmosis.
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Rise of the Newsbots: AI-generated news websites are proliferating • NewsGuard

McKenzie Sadeghi and Lorenzo Arvanitis:

»

In April 2023, NewsGuard identified 49 websites spanning seven languages — Chinese, Czech, English, French, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Thai — that appear to be entirely or mostly generated by artificial intelligence language models designed to mimic human communication — here in the form of what appear to be typical news websites. 

The websites, which often fail to disclose ownership or control, produce a high volume of content related to a variety of topics, including politics, health, entertainment, finance, and technology. Some publish hundreds of articles a day. Some of the content advances false narratives. Nearly all of the content features bland language and repetitive phrases, hallmarks of artificial intelligence.

Many of the sites are saturated with advertisements, indicating that they were likely designed to generate revenue from programmatic ads — ads that are placed algorithmically across the web and that finance much of the world’s media — just as the internet’s first generation of content farms, operated by humans, were built to do.

In short, as numerous and more powerful AI tools have been unveiled and made available to the public in recent months, concerns that they could be used to conjure up entire news organizations  — once the subject of speculation by media scholars — have now become a reality.

In April 2023, NewsGuard sent emails to the 29 sites in the analysis that listed contact information, and two confirmed that they have used AI. Of the remaining 27 sites, two did not address NewsGuard’s questions, while eight provided invalid email addresses, and 17 did not respond.

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Used to be you’d just feed a normal site through a thesaurus to produce a junk news site, but now we have machines to generate it from scratch. Hurrah?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Buzzfeed offices in New York were a microcosm of the company – but the tech industry only wanted to chew it up and spit it out, a former staffer says. CC-licensed photo by Anthony Quintano 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 11 links for you. Got a spare ribbon? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Unions representing Hollywood writers and actors seek limits on AI and chatbots • The New York Times

Noam Scheiber and John Koblin:

»

When the union representing Hollywood writers laid out its list of objectives for contract negotiations with studios this spring, it included familiar language on compensation, which the writers say has either stagnated or dropped amid an explosion of new shows.

But far down, the document added a distinctly 2023 twist. Under a section titled “Professional Standards and Protection in the Employment of Writers,” the union wrote that it aimed to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies.”

To the mix of computer programmers, marketing copywriters, travel advisers, lawyers and comic illustrators suddenly alarmed by the rising prowess of generative AI, one can now add screenwriters.

“It is not out of the realm of possibility that before 2026, which is the next time we will negotiate with these companies, they might just go, ‘you know what, we’re good,’” said Mike Schur, the creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation.”

“We don’t need you,” he imagines hearing from the other side. “We have a bunch of A.I.s that are creating a bunch of entertainment that people are kind of OK with.”

In their attempts to push back, the writers have what a lot of other white-collar workers don’t: a labour union.

Mr. Schur, who serves on the bargaining committee of the Writers Guild of America as it seeks to avert a strike before its contract expires on Monday, said the union hopes to “draw a line in the sand right now and say, ‘Writers are human beings.’”

«

The point about the WGA (as it’s known) being an unusual beast, by being a union for white-collar workers, is very salient. Being pessimistic – or optimistic – about the potential for AI to evolve and develop is a sensible defensive position. Of course it isn’t close now. And it probably won’t be close to being able to write a scene for years. But you wouldn’t want your forebears to have sold your future for a mess of pottage, would you.

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We interviewed the engineer Google fired for saying its AI had come to life • Futurism

Maggie Harrison spoke to Blake Lemoine, who Told You It Was Bad:

»

BL: In mid-2021 — before ChatGPT was an app — during that safety effort I mentioned, Bard was already in the works. It wasn’t called Bard then, but they were working on it, and they were trying to figure out whether or not it was safe to release it. They were on the verge of releasing something in the fall of 2022. So it would have come out right around the same time as ChatGPT, or right before it. Then, in part because of some of the safety concerns I raised, they deleted it.

So I don’t think they’re being pushed around by OpenAI. I think that’s just a media narrative. I think Google is going about doing things in what they believe is a safe and responsible manner, and OpenAI just happened to release something.

MH: So, as you say, Google could have released something a bit sooner, but you very specifically said maybe we should slow down, and they — 

BL: They still have far more advanced technology that they haven’t made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They’ve had that technology for over two years. What they’ve spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it — making sure that it doesn’t make things up too often, making sure that it doesn’t have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That’s what they spent those two years doing. But the basic existence of that technology is years old, at this point.

And in those two years, it wasn’t like they weren’t inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google’s AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal — not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it.

That’s the one that I was like, “you know this thing, this thing’s awake.” And they haven’t let the public play with that one yet. But Bard is kind of a simplified version of that, so it still has a lot of the kind of liveliness of that model.

«

I still don’t believe Lemoine’s correct about the consciousness part, but the inside info about Google is fascinating.
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Black holes resolve paradoxes by destroying quantum states • Science News

Lisa Grossman:

»

Don’t try to do a quantum experiment near a black hole — its mere presence ruins all quantum states in its vicinity, researchers say.

The finding comes from a thought experiment that pits the rules of quantum mechanics and black holes against each other, physicists reported April 17 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. Any quantum experiment done near a black hole could set up a paradox, the researchers find, in which the black hole reveals information about its interior — something physics says is forbidden. The way around the paradox, the team reports, is if the black hole simply destroys any quantum states that come close.

That destruction could have implications for future theories of quantum gravity. These sought-after theories aim to unite quantum mechanics, the set of rules governing subatomic particles, and general relativity, which describes how mass moves on cosmic scales.

“The idea is to use properties of the [theories] that you understand, which [are] quantum mechanics and gravity, to probe aspects of the fundamental theory,” which is quantum gravity, says theoretical physicist Gautam Satishchandran of Princeton University.

Here’s how Satishchandran, along with theoretical physicists Daine Danielson and Robert Wald, both of the University of Chicago, did just that.

«

This is a really quite puzzling – as in non-obvious, but logical – outcome, but it seems to ascribe a bizarre power to black holes that’s hard to square with something that’s just a big mass. The next, obvious, question is, well, how close exactly can you be to the black hole before it starts messing around with your quantum experiments? (And, presumably, your quantum computers on your gleaming new starship?)
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How Buzzfeed News went bust • NY Mag

John Herrman:

»

Even back when I worked at Buzzfeed, it was clear enough that one of two things was likely to happen. Scenario one, which [Buzzfeed founder] Jonah [Peretti] embraced and preached, was a world where “social news” made sense, and running alongside the tech giants was the profitable and righteous way of the future. Publishers’ adjacency to social media wasn’t a temporary and inherently doomed state of affairs — it was bankable, and major investments in pre-profit digital media were rational. Scenario two was less appealing to contemplate. In this world, all ad-supported news — not just BuzzFeed — really was as fucked as it otherwise seemed to be when Google showed up, even before Facebook made its brazen bid to capture and monetize the online commons. From the vantage point of 2023, the history described in [Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith’s forthcoming book] Traffic sounds less like a story of entrepreneurial experimentation than an account of a recurring industry delusion. But it’s a delusion worth studying today as it threatens to manifest again. The tech industry will not ever save the media. It will sooner eat it alive.

There are many more books’ worth of material to write about the last ten years in online journalism, but I’d like to take a moment to emphasize the straightforwardness of the overall story. Just over a decade ago, a small group of social-media services became very large. Facebook, which had started as a place to keep up with friends, evolved into a tool for consuming media. This created a massive and sudden demand for fresh content, including, at the margins, news. Publishers old and new rushed to address the need, epitomized by BuzzFeed, which raised huge sums of VC money on the promise it could do so profitably, with maximally sharable and engaging content, some of which was sponsored. The newsroom portion of the proposition was straightforward, if incomplete. The platforms were hungry for stories, and what is a newsroom if not a machine for producing fresh and authoritative links, ready to share, comment on, or get mad about? And so this era, whatever it was, began.

What came next wasn’t much more complicated. Social media kept growing, ingesting and digesting the web around it, and sending some of its users back as readers in exchange. Its business model was an improvement, in nearly every way, on that of the news sites that were now supplying them with free content: bigger audiences, better targeting, and endless user-generated media. In the early days — let’s say 2011 to 2012 — there was a lot of windfall traffic for media companies. Random stories from years ago would suddenly have hundreds of thousands of readers, having been stripped of their original context and reshared by Facebook users. These new readers arrived in large numbers but didn’t really stick around. Their arrival was interpreted as an invitation. In hindsight, it was a warning.

«

So true. The tech industry doesn’t want to share. It wants to take. Everything.
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UK readers may lose access to Wikipedia amid online safety bill requirements • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia site, has said it will not carry out age checks on users, which it fears will be required by the [online safety bill when it becomes an] act.

[Wikimedia UK chief executive Lucy] Crompton-Reid said some content on the site could trigger age verification measures under the terms of the bill.

“For example, educational text and images about sexuality could be misinterpreted as pornography,” she said.

She added: “The increased bureaucracy imposed by this bill will have the effect that only the really big players with significant compliance budgets will be able to operate in the UK market. This could have dire consequences on the information ecosystem here and is, in my view, quite the opposite of what the legislation originally set out to achieve.”

Rebecca MacKinnon, vice-president of global advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation, has said carrying out age verification would “violate our commitment to collect minimal data about readers and contributors”.

The online safety bill requires commercial pornography sites to carry out age checks. It will also require sites such as Wikipedia to proactively prevent children from encountering pornographic material, with the bill in its current form referring to age verification as one of the possible tools for this. However, there is also a question mark over whether any of Wikipedia’s content would meet the definition of pornographic material in the bill.

«

This was presented on social media as OMG GUVMINT IS SHUTTING DOWN WIKIPEDIA. Except as the story here notes, there’s a questionmark – rather a big one, I’d suggest – over how you’d describe Wikipedia as pornography. It’s self-evidently an education and information site. The government’s description is that “all sites that publish pornography” will have to put in checks. You’d need to add a lot of pornography to Wikipedia to really make it fit that description, which would be a perverse way to prove that you don’t like that requirement of the OSB.
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Language experience predicts music processing in a half-million speakers of 54 languages • Current Biology

Jingxuan Liu et al:

»

we used web-based citizen science to assess music perception skill on a global scale in 34,034 native speakers of 19 tonal languages (e.g., Mandarin, Yoruba). We compared their performance to 459,066 native speakers of other languages, including 6 pitch-accented (e.g., Japanese) and 29 non-tonal languages (e.g., Hungarian).

Whether or not participants had taken music lessons, native speakers of all 19 tonal languages had an improved ability to discriminate musical melodies on average, relative to speakers of non-tonal languages. But this improvement came with a trade-off: tonal language speakers were also worse at processing the musical beat.

The results, which held across native speakers of many diverse languages and were robust to geographic and demographic variation, demonstrate that linguistic experience shapes music perception, with implications for relations between music, language, and culture in the human mind.

«

They got people to respond at The Music Lab. The implication seems to be that tonal language speakers are less good at keeping rhythm. Don’t ask them to judge that scene in Whiplash, then. Rushing! Dragging! WHICH IS IT!

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Prompt engineering techniques with Azure OpenAI • Microsoft Learn

»

This guide will walk you through some advanced techniques in prompt design and prompt engineering. If you’re new to prompt engineering, we recommend starting with our introduction to prompt engineering guide.

While the principles of prompt engineering can be generalized across many different model types, certain models expect a specialized prompt structure. For Azure OpenAI GPT models, there are currently two distinct APIs where prompt engineering comes into play:
•Chat Completion API
•Completion API.

Each API requires input data to be formatted differently, which in turn impacts overall prompt design. The Chat Completion API supports the ChatGPT (preview) and GPT-4 (preview) models. These models are designed to take input formatted in a specific chat-like transcript stored inside an array of dictionaries.

«

If you need an introduction – and let’s face it, this is probably going to be in the sixth forum curriculum in a few years (or should be) – then this is as good a place as any to start.
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Web3 funding continues to crater — drops 82% year to year • Crunchbase

Chris Metinko:

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In the first quarter of the year, funding to VC-backed Web3 startups hit its lowest point since the very early days of the space as deal flow continues to slow.

Venture funding plummeted 82% year to year, dropping from $9.1bn in Q1 of 2022 to only $1.7bn, per Crunchbase data.

The funding number is also a 30% decline from the final quarter of last year, and the lowest total since the fourth quarter of 2020 — which saw only $1.1bn — when many people had never heard of Web3. [Many people still haven’t – Overspill Ed.]

Deal flow also continued its pronounced drop, as only 333 deals were completed in the first quarter — down from 369 in the previous quarter and a sharp drop from the  more than 500 announced in Q1 2022. The total number of deals is the lowest since Q4 2020.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the differences between the first quarter of last year and the first quarter of the current one in terms of funding to Web3 startups more than the dramatic fall of big rounds.

In Q1 2022, VC-backed startups raised 29 rounds of more than $100m. That included massive raises of $400m or more by ConsenSys and Polygon Technology, as well as — of course —  FTX and its US affiliate FTX US.

«

FTX? Gosh I wonder what happened to them. Bet all the VCs took a lot of guidance from them.
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Elizabeth Holmes delays start of prison sentence with last-minute appeal • CNN Business

Jennifer Korn and Catherine Thorbecke:

»

Elizabeth Holmes won’t be starting her 11-year prison sentence just yet.

The disgraced Theranos founder was previously expected to report to prison on Thursday, but she will remain free a little longer while the court considers a last-minute appeal, according to a filing Tuesday night.

Holmes was sentenced last November after she was convicted months earlier on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the now-defunct blood testing startup. Earlier this month, her request to remain free while she appeals her conviction was denied by a judge, setting her up to report to prison on April 27.

On Tuesday, however, Holmes’ legal team filed an appeal of the judge’s decision. As a result, Holmes can remain free on bail while the latest appeal is considered by the court, as per the court’s rules.

«

Gnnnnnngggh. However:

»

Holmes’ ex-boyfriend and former COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was indicted alongside Holmes and convicted of fraud in a separate trial. Like Holmes, Balwani’s legal team delayed the start of his prison sentence by roughly a month with an appeal.

Balwani reported to prison last week to serve out his nearly 13-year sentence.

«

Oh well, the wheels of justice grind slow, but they do at least grind.
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AI journalism is getting harder to tell from the old-fashioned, human-generated kind • The Guardian

Ian Tucker:

»

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted a call-out for freelance journalists to pitch me feature ideas for the science and technology section of the Observer’s New Review. Unsurprisingly, given headlines, fears and interest in LLM (large language model) chatbots such as ChatGPT, many of the suggestions that flooded in focused on artificial intelligence – including a pitch about how it is being employed to predict deforestation in the Amazon.

One submission however, from an engineering student who had posted a couple of articles on Medium, seemed to be riding the artificial intelligence wave with more chutzpah. He offered three feature ideas – pitches on innovative agriculture, data storage and the therapeutic potential of VR. While coherent, the pitches had a bland authority about them, repetitive paragraph structure, and featured upbeat endings, which if you’ve been toying with ChatGPT or reading about Google chatbot Bard’s latest mishaps, are hints of chatbot-generated content.

I showed them to a colleague. “They feel synthetic,” he said. Another described them as having the tone of a “life insurance policy document”. Were our suspicions correct? I decided to ask ChatGPT. The bot wasn’t so sure: “The texts could have been written by a human, as they demonstrate a high level of domain knowledge and expertise, and do not contain any obvious errors or inconsistencies,” it responded.

…If the chatbot were a bit more intelligent it might have suggested that I put the suspect content through OpenAI’s text classifier. When I did, two of the pitches were rated “possibly” AI generated. Of the two Medium blog posts with the student’s name on, one was rated “possibly” and the other “likely”.

I decided to email him and ask him if his pitches were written by a chatbot. His response was honest: “I must confess that you are correct in your assumption that my writing was indeed generated with the assistance of AI technology.”

But he was unashamed: “My goal is to leverage the power of AI to produce high-quality content that meets the needs of my clients and readers. I believe that by combining the best of both worlds – human creativity and AI technology – we can achieve great things.” Even this email, according to OpenAI’s detector, was “likely” AI generated.

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Requiem for the newsroom • The New York Times

Maureen Dowd:

»

“What would a newspaper movie look like today?” wondered my New York Times colleague Jim Rutenberg. “A bunch of individuals at their apartments, surrounded by sad houseplants, using Slack?”

Mike Isikoff, an investigative reporter at Yahoo who worked with me at The Washington Star back in the ’70s, agreed: “Newsrooms were a crackling gaggle of gossip, jokes, anxiety and oddball hilarious characters. Now we sit at home alone staring at our computers. What a drag.”

As my friend Mark Leibovich, a writer at The Atlantic, noted: “I can’t think of a profession that relies more on osmosis, and just being around other people, than journalism. There’s a reason they made all those newspaper movies, ‘All the President’s Men,’ ‘Spotlight,’ ‘The Paper.’
“There’s a reason people get tours of newsrooms. You don’t want a tour of your local H&R Block office.”

Now, Leibovich said, he does most meetings from home. “At the end of a Zoom call, nobody says, ‘Hey, do you want to get a drink?’ There’s just a click at the end of the meetings. Nothing dribbles out afterward, and you can really learn things from the little meetings after the meetings.”

When Leibovich got his first newspaper job answering phones and sorting mail at The Boston Phoenix, he soon learned that “the best journalism school is overhearing journalists doing their jobs.”

Isikoff still recalls how excited he was when he heard his seatmate at The Star, Robert Pear, the late, great reporter who later worked at The Times, track down the fugitive financier Robert Vesco in Cuba. “Hello, Mr. Vesco,” Pear said in his whispery voice. “This is Robert Pear of The Washington Star.”

With journalists swarming around Washington for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner and cascade of parties, it seems like a good time to write the final obituary for the American newspaper newsroom.

«

I haven’t been inside a newsroom for a long time, but they did seem to be getting quieter. The biggest trend was away from boozy lunches and towards sandwiches at a desk.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Apologies: I forgot to include a link to a news story from 1995. Tomorrow we’ll have two years to cover!

Remember WeWork? Its value has collapsed since the halcyon days, and it’s still losing money. Has anyone learnt any lessons from it? CC-licensed photo by Ajay Suresh 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. It’s about the E.coli of the internet.

A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Intel reports largest quarterly loss in company history • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

»

Intel reported first-quarter results on Wednesday that showed a staggering 133% annual reduction in earnings per share. Revenue dropped nearly 36% year-over-year to $11.7bn.

Still, the loss per share and sales were slightly better than soft Wall Street expectations. The stock fluctuated in extended trading after initially rising on the report.

Here’s how Intel did versus Refinitiv consensus expectations:
• Loss per share: Loss of 4c per share, adjusted, versus a loss of 15c per share expected
• Revenue: $11.7bn, adjusted, versus $11.04bn expected.

Intel’s guidance for the current quarter of about $12bn in revenue and a 4c loss per share came up short versus analyst expectations of 1c in earnings per share on $11.75bn in sales.

Intel recorded a net loss of $2.8bn, compared with a profit of $8.1bn last year. GAAP revenue decreased to $11.7bn from $18.4bn. It’s the fifth consecutive quarter of falling sales for the semiconductor giant and the second consecutive quarter of losses.

It’s also the largest quarterly Intel loss of all time, beating out the fourth quarter of 2017, where Intel reported a loss of $687m.

…Intel hopes that by 2026 that it can manufacture chips as advanced as those made by TSMC in Taiwan, and it can compete for custom work like Apple’s A-series chips in iPhones. Intel said on Thursday it was still on track to hit that goal.

«

PC chip sales down 38%, server chip sales down 39%, Network and Edge down 30%. CEO Pat Gelsinger really needs to pull the plane out of the dive.
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April 1994: Killing spreads in Rwanda • BBC On This Day

April 1994:

»

The ethnic violence in the Rwandan capital Kigali is now spreading throughout the country, aid officials have said.

Tens of thousands of people are believed to have died since Rwanda’s president died in a suspicious plane crash on 6 April.

The killing has mainly been carried out by Hutu gangs, who blame Tutsi rebels for downing President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane in a rocket attack. The President of Burundi was also killed.

Witnesses in Kigali say Hutu soldiers have been hacking Tutsi civilians to death with machetes in the street.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jean-Luc Thevoz, said hundreds of thousands of Rwandans had also been forced to leave their homes by the violence.

“The situation is catastrophic, not just in Kigali, but in the rest of Rwanda,” he said.

About 3,600 rebels from the mainly Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) have infiltrated the capital. The group has said it will continue to fight until the Hutu-dominated government stops the massacres.

The RPF is currently moving to take the city and has blown up a radio station that it said was broadcasting propaganda inciting Hutus to slaughter Tutsis.

«

Incitement to genocide via radio: this was the awful precedent.
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Raccoon dogs in Wuhan ‘did not spread Covid to humans’ • Daily Telegraph

Sarah Knapton:

»

Raccoon dogs blamed for the Covid pandemic were not responsible, new analysis suggests, after samples at a Wuhan market were found to contain virtually no virus.

Last month a controversial study suggested that raccoon dog DNA found at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in January 2020 was mixed with Covid-19, providing “strong evidence” that coronavirus jumped to humans from the animals.

The paper was based on swabs taken by Chinese researchers in the market at the start of the pandemic which were recently uploaded to an international database. The authors said it pointed to a zoonotic origin for the pandemic rather than a laboratory leak.

But a new in-depth genetic analysis of the samples by respected computational virologist Dr Jesse Bloom, of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle in the US, showed there is barely any Covid-19 intermixed with raccoon dog DNA.

Of the 14 raccoon dog samples studied, 13 had no Covid-19 at all, while one had just one fragment of virus per 200 million fragments of animal DNA.

In contrast, the virus was found in greater quantities mixed with human DNA, as well as species such as largemouth bass, catfish, cow, carp, and snakehead fish, none of which could pass the virus to humans.

The team concluded there was actually a “negative correlation” between Covid-19 and raccoon dog DNA.

Dr Bloom also warned that the samples were taken several weeks after the first Covid cases emerged in Wuhan at a time when Covid-19 had already been spread widely across the market by humans.

“What can we conclude about Covid-19 origins from all this? Probably not much,” he said.

“We should analyse everything, but these data don’t tell us how the pandemic began.

«

Bloom is reliable; this essentially wipes the slate clean again and puts us back on the starting blocks. As Bloom says, this doesn’t answer the question. We still need more data. Anyhow, raccoon dogs can walk tall again (while avoiding people looking to trap them and sell them in wet markets).
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Dropbox is laying off 500 people and pivoting to AI • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Dropbox is laying off around 500 employees, making up about 16% of the company’s entire workforce. In a memo to employees, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston attributes the layoffs to a rocky economy — but also says that the cuts will allow the company to build out its AI division.

“In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible,” Houston writes. “However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we’ll need even more.”

As part of the change, Houston says Dropbox will consolidate its core and document workflow businesses, and that it’s also making adjustments to its product development teams. Houston adds that Dropbox is still “profitable” despite rough economic times and that the job cuts are part of the “natural maturation” of the Dropbox business.

“The changes we’re announcing today, while painful, are necessary for our future,” Houston notes. “I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era, just as we were at the forefront of the shift to mobile and the cloud. We’ll need all hands on deck as machine intelligence gives us the tools to reimagine our existing businesses and invent new ones.”

«

Just as well they were making the cuts now. If it had been six months ago, they’d have been building out their metaverse division. But now it’s AI, which everyone loves (not like that metaverse garbage – ugh), and definitely needs to be incorporated somehow (details TBD) into their file-sharing product.
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Employers reveal why Gen Z is the hardest generation to work with • NY Post

Rikki Schlott:

»

Despite many of them having only just entered the workforce, Generation Z — born from 1997 onwards — is already getting a bad rap at the office.

According to a recent survey of 1,300 managers, three out of four agree that Gen Z is harder to work with than other generations — so much so that 65% of employers said they have to fire them more often.

One in eight have let go of a Gen Zer less than one week after their start date, the study found.

The results ring true with managers across the US and in various industries, who report that young hires have been difficult to deal with, particularly when it comes to language.

“I feel kind of hamstrung on what I can and can’t say,” Peter, a New Jersey-based manager in the hospitality industry, told The Post.

“I don’t want to offend anyone or trigger someone. I always have it in the back of my mind that I’m going to get angry one day, and I’m going to get freaking cancelled.”

For Alexis McDonnell, a content creator who managed Gen Z employees at a tech company in Dallas, “The biggest difference I noticed was just a difference in professionalism.

“I do think the pandemic had a big role to play in that because for all of them, this was their first job out of college and their last years were spent remote,” McDonnell, 28, told The Post.

Starting their careers during a pandemic may have stunted Gen Z’s office etiquette. In fact, 36% of survey respondents reported poor communication skills among their young hires.

“They all exhibited the same weird office behavior,” said Peter, who asked to withhold his last name for privacy reasons. “They didn’t know how to conduct themselves in a business setting. I was taught how an office operates, whether it’s dealing with a hierarchy or just something as simple as when someone’s in front of you, you look them in the eye.”

Another major complaint was distractibility, with 36% of managers agreeing that Gen Z has a hard time concentrating.

«

This reads like something out of The Onion, but no, it’s a real story in the (tabloid) Post. The complaints are quite strange: they’re on their phone, they don’t know what to do in meetings. I think back to my first days in work, and I’m grateful nobody was judging me like this. Or probably they were, but didn’t have the NY Post to complain to?
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Founders’ email to Clubhouse employees • Clubhouse

Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, founders of audio chat app Clubhouse:

»

As we’ve talked about in team meetings, Clubhouse was designed to be a place where you could come together with friends, meet their friends and talk. It works really well when your friends are on the product and you have the time to meet up. Millions of people in our core community know this. But as the world has opened up post-Covid, it’s become harder for many people to find their friends on Clubhouse and to fit long conversations into their daily lives. To find its role in the world, the product needs to evolve. This requires a period of change.

Rohan and I have tried to make this work with our current team size, but we haven’t been able to do it effectively. It’s difficult for us to communicate the strategy to cross-functional teams when it’s evolving by 1% each day, or to make quick changes when each surface is owned by a different product squad. Being remote has made this especially challenging for us. The end result is that it’s hard for teams to coordinate, people feel blocked by us, and brilliant, creative people are left underutilized.

In order to fix this we need to reset the company, eliminate roles and take it down to a smaller, product-focused team.

«

In brief: halving the number of staff. The severance terms look pretty generous – multiple months of pay and health insurance, plus you can keep the company laptop. That VC money is trickling down in some places at least.
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Taiwan braces for drought in key chip hubs again • Nikkei Asia

Lauly Li:

»

Taiwan, home to Asia’s biggest semiconductor industry, is once again bracing for water shortages less than two years after overcoming its worst drought in a century.

Chipmaking is a thirsty business. Take Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, for example. Its chip facilities in the Southern Taiwan Science Park alone consume 99,000 tonnes of water per day, according to the company’s latest figures. And as chip production techniques become more advanced, their water needs grow. 

In addition, the island relies heavily on seasonal rainfall to fill its reservoirs — and climate change has made this a less reliable option.

This year, cities have already started preparing for constraints.

Kaohsiung, an emerging chip hub, and Tainan, where TSMC and United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) both have chipmaking facilities, introduced water-saving measures this month, including reducing the pressure in public water supplies at night. The Southern Taiwan Science Park has asked suppliers to cut their water use by 10% and Kaohsiung will follow suit at its industrial zone from March 30.

Such moves are aimed at avoiding a repeat of 2021, when drought was so severe that it disrupted manufacturing and agricultural activities across the island. Manufacturers like TSMC resorted to rented water tanks and newly drilled wells to keep factories running at a time when the world was counting on Taiwan to ease an unprecedented chip shortage.

Keeping the supply of chips flowing is not just an economic imperative for Taiwan. Being a vital source of semiconductors makes the island politically important for allies such as the U.S. in the face of Chinese aggression. If Taiwan’s chip output is dented, its “silicon shield” could also weaken.

«

This is from March, but of course climate change doesn’t bother about calendars. It just happens. The idea that emissions may make Taiwan more vulnerable because it has to concede its position as “the place that makes chips” might not seem obvious at first, but in geopolitics, everything matters.
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Global smartphone market declined by 13% in Q1 2023 • Canalys Newsroom

»

Canalys’ latest research shows that global smartphone shipments fell by 13% to 269.8m units in Q1 2023. The demand decline has started to flatten, although the contrast between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023 is still stark.

Samsung reclaimed its pole position [from Apple] and shipped 60.3m units, driven by a refreshed product portfolio. Apple came in second with 58.0m shipments. It was the only top five vendor to grow year-on-year, which gave it a strong 21% market share. Xiaomi defended its number three position with 30.5m shipments while OPPO and vivo completed the top five, shipping 26.6m and 20.9m units, respectively, securing 10% and 8% market share. 

“Samsung’s performance shows early signs of recovery after a tough end to 2022,” said Runar Bjørhovde, Canalys Analyst. “The rebound is particularly connected to product launches, which drove an increase in sell-in volume.

“Still, Samsung will have to navigate through a difficult landscape going forward, particularly as entry-level device inventory remains high. Declining profits from its semiconductor memory business will also trigger a more conservative marketing spend overall. Meanwhile, Apple had robust performance in Q1, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. Here, Apple’s sustained investments into offline channels enabled it to attract a burgeoning middle-class, which places high value on the in-store purchasing experience.” 

«

I’m intrigued by that last bit, which seems to be saying “people like to buy a phone in a shop, particularly an Apple Store”. Meanwhile overall smartphone sales have been in negative year-on-year growth for 10 of the past 13 quarters. The boom times really are over.
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WeWork has crashed in value by $46.7bn and VCs have learned nothing • Business Insider

Julie Bort:

»

Last week, WeWork was forced to issue an embarrassing press release warning that it was in danger of being delisted from the NYSE because the stock has traded below $1 for so long.

In 2019, prior to a disastrous attempt to go public that resulted in the exodus of its flamboyant, controversial founder, Adam Neumann, WeWork was valued at $47bn. As of Monday, with shares trading at $0.47 and a market cap of $345.7m, the company has lost some $46.7bn in value over four years — vanishing like a sand sculpture left in the wind.

In 2021, the company briefly looked like its fortunes could turn around. It was acquired by BowX, a blank-check special-purpose-acquisition company from Vivek Ranadivé, the founder of the software company Tibco who is perhaps better known as a former owner of the Golden State Warriors and, more recently, the Sacramento Kings. WeWork’s valuation at that time was $9bn, CNBC reported.

But WeWork crawled into 2023 so loaded with debt that it has yet to find its footing or future. Last month, it struck deals to restructure debt, cutting obligations by about $1.5bn, and extending the due dates of other notes in an attempt to preserve cash, Reuters reported. This after it closed 40 locations in late 2022.

When a $47bn startup shrivels so drastically, who gets hurt? The investors. In this case, Softbank has suffered the most by far.

«

But hey, WeWork revenue increased by 18% yoy! To $848m!

Come on, that’s pretty respectable revenue. And the profits, let’s see – ah. It made a loss of $527m including non-cash expenses of $348m. In its outlook, it expects this quarter to see revenues at the same level, and perhaps break even, or just lose $25m.

One detail missing from Bort’s story: how much funding WeWork received. Don’t worry, it’s available: $22.2bn over 23 – yes, 23 – rounds of financing. A classic ZIRP story.
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It’s time to protect yourself from AI voice scams • The Atlantic

Caroline Mimbs Nyce:

»

This month, a local TV-news station in Arizona ran an unsettling report: A mother named Jennifer DeStefano says that she picked up the phone to the sound of her 15-year-old crying out for her, and was asked to pay a $1 million ransom for her daughter’s return. In reality, the teen had not been kidnapped, and was safe; DeStefano believes someone used AI to create a replica of her daughter’s voice to deploy against her family. “It was completely her voice,” she said in one interview. “It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried.” DeStefano’s story has since been picked up by other outlets, while similar stories of AI voice scams have surfaced on TikTok and been reported by The Washington Post. In late March, the Federal Trade Commission warned consumers that bad actors are using the technology to supercharge “family-emergency schemes,” scams that fake an emergency to fool a concerned loved one into forking over cash or private information.

Such applications have existed for some time—my colleague Charlie Warzel fooled his mom with a rudimentary AI voice-cloning program in 2018—but they’ve gotten better, cheaper, and more accessible in the past several months alongside a generative-AI boom. Now anyone with a dollar, a few minutes, and an internet connection can synthesize a stranger’s voice. What’s at stake is our ability as regular people to trust that the voices of those we interact with from afar are legitimate.

«

And bear in mind that a thousand parents and relatives lost £1.3m to the “WhatsApp Mum and Dad” scam in 2022 and you can see that times are good for the scammers.
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The rapid rise of generative AI threatens to upend US patent system • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

»

When members of the US supreme court refused this week to hear a groundbreaking case that sought to have an artificial intelligence system named as the inventor on a patent, it appeared to lay to rest a controversial idea that could have transformed the intellectual property field.

The justices’ decision, in the case of Thaler vs Vidal, leaves in place two lower court rulings that only “natural persons” can be awarded patents. The decision dealt a blow to claims that intelligent machines are already matching human creativity in important areas of the economy and deserve similar protections for their ideas.

But while the court’s decision blocked a potentially radical extension of patent rights, it has done nothing to calm growing worries that AI is threatening to upend other aspects of intellectual property law.

The US Patent and Trademark Office opened hearings on the issue this week, drawing warnings that AI-fuelled inventions might stretch existing understandings of how the patent system works and lead to a barrage of litigation.

The flurry of concern has been prompted by the rapid rise of generative AI. Though known mainly from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the same technology is already being used to design semiconductors and suggest ideas for new molecules that might form the basis of useful drugs.

…legal experts warned that systems such as ChatGPT could be used to churn out large numbers of new patent applications, flooding the patent office with claims in the hopes of scoring a big win.

«

Seems pretty much inevitable, to be honest, though I don’t know if the current generation would really be up to the task of generating the intricacies of a patent.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Life in the Bronze Age was stable, and above all never at risk of changing from year to year. Just like our own? CC-licensed photo by Karsten Wentink 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Why yes, it’s a sword. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition blocked by UK regulators • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft’s $68.7bn deal to acquire Activision Blizzard has been blocked by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). After months of analysing three million Microsoft and Activision documents, and more than 2,100 emails from the public, the CMA has concluded that the deal could “alter the future of the fast-growing cloud gaming market, leading to reduced innovation and less choice for UK gamers over the years to come.”

The final decision is a blow to Microsoft’s hopes of acquiring Activision Blizzard. “Microsoft has a strong position in cloud gaming services and the evidence available to the CMA showed that Microsoft would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision’s games exclusive to its own cloud gaming service,” says the CMA.

The CMA estimates that Microsoft controls around 60% to 70% of global cloud gaming services and that adding control over Call of Duty, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft would give Microsoft a significant advantage in the cloud gaming market.

Microsoft had attempted to address concerns around cloud gaming in the lead up to this decision. The software giant signed cloud gaming deals with Boosteroid, Ubitus, and Nvidia to allow Xbox PC games to run on these rival cloud gaming services — after striking a similar deal with Nintendo in December. These 10-year deals also include access to Call of Duty and other Activision Blizzard games, if the deal is approved by regulators.

The CMA says it has examined these deals, but that they contain “a number of significant shortcomings” in cloud gaming services.

«

Analysing that volume of documents and emails is a hell of a task; writing a 415-page report which goes into detail for all the possible remedies is quite the feat.

Activision Blizzard is very annoyed about this, saying the UK is “clearly closed for business”. Time will tell, but to me preventing market concentration is always a good thing for a regulator to do.
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AI spam is already flooding the internet and it has an obvious tell • Vice

Matthew Gault:

»

ChatGPT and GPT-4 are already flooding the internet with AI-generated content in places famous for hastily written inauthentic content: Amazon user reviews and Twitter. 

When you ask ChatGPT to do something it’s not supposed to do, it returns several common phrases. When I asked ChatGPT to tell me a dark joke, it apologized: “As an AI language model, I cannot generate inappropriate or offensive content,” it said. Those two phrases, “as an AI language model” and “I cannot generate inappropriate content,” recur so frequently in ChatGPT generated content that they’ve become memes.

These terms can reasonably be used to identify lazily executed ChatGPT spam by searching for them across the internet.

A search of Amazon reveals what appear to be fake user reviews generated by ChatGPT or another similar bot. Many user reviews feature the phrase “as an AI language model.” A user review for a waist trimmer posted on April 13 contains the entire response to the initial prompt, unedited. “Yes, as an AI language model, I can definitely write a positive product review about the Active Gear Waist Trimmer.”

Another user posted a negative review for precision rings, a foam band marketed as a trainer for people playing first person shooters on a controller. “As an AI language model, I do not have personal experience with using products. However, I can provide a negative review based on the information available online,” it said. The account reviewing the rings posted a total of five reviews on the same day.

«

Fake reviews? There should be a law against it! Perhaps the UK government…?
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New rules ban subscription traps and fake reviews • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

»

Buying, selling or hosting fake reviews will become illegal as part of changes planned in new laws.

The UK government’s new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill aims to help consumers and increase competition between big tech firms.

The bill is being introduced on Tuesday and bans people receiving money or free goods for writing glowing reviews. Firms will also have to remind people when free subscription trials end.

The bill, which has been in the making since 2021, also seeks to end the tech giants’ current market dominance. Its creators have said they want to manage the way in which a handful of huge tech companies dominate the market – although none is specifically named yet, and will be selected after a period of investigation of up to nine months.

It does not matter in which country they are based, and firms headquartered in China will also be included if they are found to be in scope.

The newly formed Digital Markets Unit, which will be part of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), will then be given certain powers to open up a specific market depending on the situation.

«

Great idea, though it’s pretty hard to believe that this is going to get through Parliament in the 18 months or so before the general election due before the end of 2024. (April and October 2024 are the favoured dates.)
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AI used photographer’s photos for training, then slapped him with an invoice • DIY Photography

Dunja Djudjic:

»

Earlier this year, German stock photographer Robert Kneschke used Have I Been Trained?, a website that tells you if your photos were used to train AI image generators. He discovered many of his images in the dataset of LAION, a non-profit that makes large-scale machine learning models, datasets, and code. As Profi Foto reports, Knescke asked ​​Laion to remove his work from the training data. But he got a response he didn’t expect: a letter from a law firm Heidrich Rechtsanwälte on behalf of LAION. What’s more, the company allegedly reached out to other photographers with the letter in almost the same form.

In the letter, LAION’s attorney claims that the non-profit is “doing voluntary research with the aim of further developing self-learning algorithms in the sense of artificial intelligence and making them available to the general public,” and that they “do not violate copyright or data protection law.”

LAION “only maintains a database containing links to image files that are publicly available on the Internet, the letter alleges, “but not the image data itself,” Because of this, the company’s attorney claims that the photographer has no right to request image deletion. “There are simply no pictures of our client that could be deleted,” says Heidrich Rechtsanwälte.

“We also point out that our client can assert claims for damages in accordance with Section 97a (4) UrhG if they are unjustified in terms of copyright,” the law firm reportedly told the photographer. And this is exactly what happened. LAION lawyers are now reportedly demanding almost €900 (~$1000 USD) from Kneschke while LAION continues to use his pictures.

«

What I think this story happens not to mention – except at the end, in a quote from Kneschke – is that he must have included a legal threat, and possibly mention of payment for breach of copyright, in the letter sent to LAION. That’s why its lawyers fired back. Of course if it goes to court it will be up to Kneschke to prove any breach, which might be tricky. It’s essentially the same thing as Getty’s case against Stable Diffusion: is the data actually trapped inside there?
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Boy groomed on Twitter and abducted after Musk takeover • NBC News

Ben Goggin:

»

The 13-year-old Utah boy hung out in the typical online spaces for someone his age: The chat app Discord. The gaming platform Roblox. And, of course, Twitter. 

But for more than two months last year, on those very platforms, the boy was being sexually groomed by an adult who was 13 years older and hundreds of miles away. It started in private messages then moved into public view on Twitter.

It ended in a horror story. The boy’s father went to check on him one night and found him missing, his window open, the bedroom freezing. The boy was allegedly abducted by the man accused of grooming him, driven across state lines, and, prosecutors said, repeatedly sexually assaulted.

Heather and Ken McConney, the boy’s parents, told NBC News that they believe the kidnapping was preventable. It came after a series of missed opportunities over the span of nearly a month, where, they said, Twitter and law enforcement failed to effectively intervene despite an abundance of information posted online. They’re demanding answers.

“I need to move forward and figure out what the hell happened,” Heather said. “Where did the ball get dropped?”

…The case illustrates how easily online predators can avoid detection online, even on the internet’s most recognized platforms. In a mountain of content, tech platforms sometimes struggle to detect and respond to real threats to children.

It also highlights the sometimes bold and grandiose security statements made by tech platform executives and managers, despite the problems those companies face every day. As the boy was being groomed, and over a month before his abduction, Elon Musk said that addressing child exploitation on Twitter was “Priority #1,” alleging he’d inherited a platform on which child exploitation was previously allowed to run rampant.

Ella Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, provided an accounting of the company’s interactions with law enforcement in the case, but declined to address specific questions about the days leading up to the abduction. 

«

One element I’ve cut for length there is that the police dropped the ball: they misspelt the username on a search warrant sent to Twitter 25 days before the abduction, and took “several weeks” to notice and correct it. (Two? Three?) That doesn’t mean Musk was wrong, since this clearly predated his takeover; nor that Twitter was lazy afterward.
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Congress gets 40 ChatGPT Plus licenses to start experimenting with generative AI • FedScoop

John Hewitt Jones:

»

Congressional offices have begun using OpenAI’s popular and controversial generative AI tool ChatGPT to experiment with the technology internally, a senior official within the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer’s House Digital Services said Friday.

The House recently created a new AI working group for staff to test and share new AI tools in the congressional office environment and now the House of Representatives‘ digital service has obtained 40 licenses for ChatGPT Plus, which were distributed earlier this month.

The purchase of the licenses comes amid widespread debate over how artificial intelligence technology should be used and regulated across the private sector and within government. This represents one of the earliest examples of ChatGPT being used as part of the policymaking process.

The 40 licenses were assigned on a first-come first-served basis, and House Digital Services will pay the $20/month per office subscription plan for an indefinite period of time, according to the official. Details of which Congressional offices have received the ChatGPT Plus licenses will remain anonymous for now. 

…“Oftentimes members are experimenting with things, new tools, in their own ways and we just want to be in the loop on that. We want to help facilitate that experimentation,” the official said.

They added: “There are so many different use cases for ChatGPT but what we’ve heard is at the top of the list for Congressional offices is creating and summarising content.”

«

“Creating and summarising content”, eh? Wonder how many speeches will be helped along by this. (One politician has already done this back in January, after all.)
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It’s 1178 BCE and the Bronze Age has never looked stronger. No, I won’t lift my eyes to the horizon right now • The Chatner

Daniel Lavery:

»

It’s 1178 BCE and the sun never sets on the Ugaritic Empire/Kassite Federation/Old Babylonion Empire/Ugaritic trade network! And it’s all thanks to bronze, the hardest and most durable metal to ever come down the pike. Yes, whether you’re looking to smelt or cast, whether you need an ingot or a rhyton, a double-headed Cretan axe, some grave goods for your strongest grandmother, or a brazier-fitted statue of Kronos to give just the right finishing touch to your tophet, you simply can’t do better than bronze. And demand isn’t likely to die down anytime soon!  

Linear A will simply never be replaced, alphabetically speaking. Absolutely undefeated script. For practicality and ease of communication, you can’t do much better than a stylus cutting lines into soft clay, the final and best innovation over a stylus pressing wedges into soft clay.

«

This builds and builds, as you realise how many assumptions folk in 1178 BCE (or so) were making about how everything’s going to be just the same next year as this. Which of course leads you to look around at the assumptions you were making a year or two years ago or in 2019 about how next year would look.

Which, in turn, raises the question of what assumptions about right now you’re making that are flat-out wrong.
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April 26 1993: Recession over – it’s official • BBC On This Day

»

April 1993: The government has reacted with relief to news that Britain’s economy grew by 0.2% in the first three months of this year, and declared the longest recession since the 1930s officially over.

The figures, from the Central Statistical Office, show a 0.2% rise in gross domestic product (GDP), and a 0.6% increase in activity in the onshore economy, excluding oil and gas production.

It’s the first sign of growth in the economy for over two years. The recession has been longer, but less severe, than the last one in the 1980s. Output has fallen by 3.9%, compared with a 5.5% fall last time.

Prime Minister John Major called on industry to make the most of the “unparalleled opportunities” offered by the combination of low inflation and interest rates, and a competitive exchange rate.

The Chancellor, Norman Lamont, was also upbeat, saying the figures were “the best evidence so far that the economy is recovering across a broad front.”

«

Grandpa-Munsters lookalike Lamont had been derided for having earlier said that he was sure he could see “the green shoots of recovery” in 1991, ahead of the coming 1992 election, when things were very bleak. But with an election won the year before, and the country heading towards growth while Labour’s new leader John Smith struggled to assert himself on his party, surely for the Tories everything was coming up Milhouse?
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Election greeters mean voter ID impact may not be known, Labour says • The Guardian

Peter Walker:

»

Labour has said it may prove impossible to know how many people are turned away at next week’s local elections for not having identity documents, after it emerged that officials outside polling stations will not be making a count of those unable to vote.

While clerks inside polling stations will take a formal register of those who cannot vote because they lack the correct photo ID, some venues will place other staff outside as so-called greeters, who will remind people about the need for ID before they go in.

These greeters will not take a note of the number of people who leave when told about the requirements, the Electoral Commission has confirmed, meaning the total number of potentially disfranchised voters may never be known.

Ten days before the first mass use of voter ID in a UK election outside Northern Ireland, there is also concern about the very low take-up of a free, government-issued document intended to help people excluded because they lack a passport, driving licence or other permitted type of ID.

While government estimates suggest that more than 2 million people around the UK lack up-to-date photo ID, just 55,316 people had applied online for a so-called voter authority certificate as of Sunday, 48 hours before applications close.

The numbers applying from older and younger demographics – those seen as particularly likely to be without the necessary ID – are especially low. Just 2,025 people aged 75-plus applied, and 3,334 aged under 25.

An Electoral Commission spokesperson said the number of applications so far was “lower than we might have expected”.

«

At the close of applications on Wednesday 5pm, a total of 63,279 had applied for ID; that’s about 3% of the two million people who lack the necessary photo ID. You can see people – or perhaps bots? – still trying to apply. That page shows breakdowns by date, age and nation. Notably, it’s the 45-54 and 55-64 age who made up more than half of applications in the past week; those under 25, just 6.6%.
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Everything you don’t actually need to know about the economics of Succession • Financial Times

Louis Ashworth:

»

Succession is a show about a business. For three-and-a-bit seasons, the saga of Waystar Royco — a storied but creaking media giant led by ageing mogul Logan Roy and his squabbling spawn — has entranced audiences with familial betrayal, corporate intrigue, withering put-downs and Cousin Greg.

Despite the sound, fury and personal drama, in a strictly business sense . . . not much has actually happened. Still, it has got a bit confusing, and even seasoned financial analysts or FT columnists could be forgiven for losing track of things. So FT Alphaville sat down for a fevered quasi-binge of the show and tried to make sense of Succession’s financial plotline(s).

We’re gonna try to answer some key questions:

— What is Waystar worth and how is it run?
— Who owns Waystar shares?
— What is Waystar’s share price and why does it matter?
— How rich are the Roy kids?

«

If you’re interested in Succession, you might enjoy this attempt to see if the numbers that get thrown around actually tie together. There are very major spoilers for the latest (final) season, up to episode 4, but not beyond (because things get even tastier, money-wise, in episode 5 which aired earlier this week).

Of course, given how careful Succession is about all the details – they even consulted on how you’d tell if someone who came to a rich peoples’ party just didn’t fit in, and having a capacious bag was one – then of course the fine points hold together. Well, mostly. A pity the FT couldn’t get a Quad Squad onto this one, but ehh.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In US schools, cheap Chromebooks have recently been very popular – but their short lifespan means their real cost is much higher, a new report says. CC-licensed photo by Virginia Department of Education 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 about 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Still going. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Tidal power’s fickle future • Hakai Magazine

Doug Johnson:

»

For tidal power generation, location is everything. To produce energy, tidal generators need fast currents or a sizable swing in sea level between high tide and low tide. The Bay of Fundy in Atlantic Canada, for instance, is an ideal candidate. Rising and falling by 12 meters, the bay has one of the largest tidal ranges in the world.

But a site’s currents and tidal range, and its potential for tidal power generation, is a complex consequence of myriad factors, including the basin’s width, length, and shape, the inflow from rivers, and the height of the sea. It’s this last variable—sea level—that threatens to throw a wrench in the world’s tidal power plans.

In a recent paper, scientists including Danial Khojasteh, a hydrodynamics expert at the University of New South Wales in Australia, show how sea level rise could upend the viability of tidal energy in sites around the world, turning presently prime spots into duds.

Khojasteh and his colleagues came to this conclusion after modeling 978 different hypothetical estuaries with varying shapes, tidal ranges, and rates of sea level rise, among other factors. While none of the estuaries were based on real locations, they could “reasonably represent the geometries of many, many estuaries worldwide,” says Khojasteh.

Of their 978 theoretical estuaries, a total of 54 had currents fast enough to drive tidal turbines. This number dropped to 47 in simulations with one meter of sea level rise. With two meters of sea level rise, it fell to 40. Even in estuaries that did keep their tidal power potential, Khojasteh says that in some the actual spot within the estuary where the water was moving at the necessary speed moved around.

Sea level rise is “going to displace, eliminate, or create new optimal sites across the system,” Khojasteh says.

For those looking to install tidal power generating infrastructure—equipment designed to last for decades—this could be a problem.

«

Understatement of the year there. However tidal power keeps showing up as too expensive, even though it doesn’t suffer from the irregularity of wind or solar.
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Twitter Blue Thread: Newsletter Edition • The Mosquite Chronicles

“Mosquito Capital”:

»

Super quick background: At Facebook, most product decisions were made only after careful A/B testing. This did stifle some creativity, but it also meant that catastrophic changes to the app were usually reverted before they ever made it past a few thousand users.

So. When you think about making changes to a massive system like Twitter or FB, you need to keep a few things in mind:

1) These are giant interconnected systems full of irrational, rational, adversarial, and opportunistic actors. The behavioral incentives are often very unintuitive and weird. Cascading unintended side effects are pretty much guaranteed any time you make a large change.

1.a) As a result of this, you have to be **very, very careful about the assumptions you make**. You can be the best and brightest, but at the end of the day there are just too many factors and feedback loops. What you expect to happen, and what will happen, are very different.

1.b) I cannot stress this enough. You can be the biggest brain genius, straight out of old Bell Labs or early Google or MIT or CERN or SpaceX or whatever, and you will *always* eventually be caught off guard by the behavior of these systems and the humans that use them.

«

There are another nine points, some also subdivided. It gets repetitive to say that Twitter is a super-complex system, and that Musk has no idea what he’s playing with, but — Twitter is a super-complex system, and Musk has no idea what he’s playing with. Just be grateful that failure there can’t actually do any active harm; it’s not as if it’s storing nuclear waste or running an intensive care unit.
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Apple declares victory after decision reached in Epic Games appeal • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

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Epic sued Apple after the game company introduced its own payment system into Fortnite, which broke Apple’s rules and ultimately got the company banned from the App Store. It culminated in a weekslong trial two years ago in California where Apple CEO Tim Cook and Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney testified.

Monday’s ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed the decision that primarily found Apple did not violate antitrust law by banning competing app marketplaces on iPhones.

Apple mostly won the initial court battle, with the judge finding that it did not monopolize any market.

However, the iPhone maker did lose one claim and had to allow developers to place links inside their apps so users could make purchases outside the App Store.

The appeals court did not overturn that decision, which was related to California law, and is the one claim that Apple says was not decided in its favor. Whether the company is forced to allow links to outside payments will be determined in possible future hearings.

Apple said in its statement that it was considering further action, which could include an appeal to the Supreme Court. Whether Epic Games will help pay Apple’s legal fees will also be decided at a lower court.

“Apple prevailed at the 9th Circuit Court,” Epic Games CEO Sweeney said in tweets sent after the decision. “Though the court upheld the ruling that Apple’s restraints have ‘a substantial anticompetitive effect that harms consumers’, they found we didn’t prove our Sherman Act case.”

“Fortunately, the court’s positive decision rejecting Apple’s anti-steering provisions frees iOS developers to send consumers to the web to do business with them directly there. We’re working on next steps,” Sweeney continued.

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That key loss – obliging Apple to allow links to purchasing outside the App Store – could be big or could be small; look at how long and tediously Apple fought against dating apps in the Netherlands where it was required to do the same, and gave a mile, one inch at a time.
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School Chromebooks are creating huge amounts of e-waste • The Verge

Monica Chin:

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Back in early 2020, as the covid pandemic drove classrooms online, school districts found themselves needing to bulk purchase affordable laptops that they could send home with their students. Quite a few turned to Chromebooks.

Three years later, the US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund concludes in a new report called Chromebook Churn that many of these batches are already beginning to break. That’s potentially costing districts money; PIRG estimates that “doubling the lifespan of Chromebooks could result in $1.8bn in savings for taxpayers.” It also creates quite a bit of e-waste.

One of the big problems is repairability. Chromebooks are harder to upgrade and repair, on average, than Windows laptops. That’s in part, the PIRG found, because the replacement parts are much harder to come by — especially for elements like screens, hinges, and keyboards that are particularly vulnerable to the drops, jolts, jostles, and spills that come from school use.

For example, researchers found that nearly half of the replacement keyboards listed for Acer Chromebooks were out of stock online and that over a third cost “$89.99 or more, which is nearly half the cost of a typical $200 Chromebook.” Some IT departments, PIRG reports, have resorted to buying extra batches of Chromebooks just for their components.

“These high costs may make schools reconsider Chromebooks as a cost-saving strategy,” the report reads.

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Will they, though? It’s not just Chromebooks cost less, it’s also that they’re more secure.
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April 13 1992: Labour’s Neil Kinnock resigns • BBC On This Day

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Neil Kinnock has resigned as Labour leader following the party’s defeat by the Conservatives in the general election three days ago. His deputy Roy Hattersley has also said he will step down.

Both men will continue in their positions until their successors are chosen in June.

In a sombre statement read out in the Shadow Cabinet room at Westminster, he pinned the blame on Labour’s demise firmly on newspapers sympathetic to the Conservatives.

He quoted former treasurer of the Conservative Party, Lord McAlpine, who said in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph: “The heroes of this campaign were Sir David English, Sir Nicholas Lloyd, Kelvin MacKenzie and the other editors of the grand Tory Press.”

Mr Kinnock gave this warning to the victorious Conservative Party – “This was how the election was won and if the politicians, elated in their hour of victory, are tempted to believe otherwise, they are in very real trouble next time.”

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It’s edition 1992 of this collection, so here’s something from April 1992. Thanks Gavin W for the idea.
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The collapse of FTX affected Africa, too • Rest of World

Damilare Dosunmu:

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Chiamaka, a former product manager at a Nigerian cryptocurrency startup, has sworn off digital currencies. The 22-year-old has weathered a layoff and lost savings worth 4,603,500 naira ($9,900) after the collapse of FTX in November 2022. She now works for a corporate finance company in Lagos, earning a salary that is 45% lower than her previous job.

“I used to be bullish on crypto because I believed it could liberate Africans financially,” Chiamaka, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym as she was concerned about breaching her contract with her current employer, told Rest of World. “Instead, it has managed to do the opposite so far … at least to me and a few of my friends.”

Chiamaka is among the tens of millions of Africans who bought into the cryptocurrency frenzy over the last few years. According to one estimate in mid-2022, around 53 million Africans owned crypto — 16.5% of the total global crypto users. Nigeria led with over 22 million users, ranking fourth globally. Blockchain startups and businesses on the continent raised $474 million in 2022, a 429% increase from the previous year, according to the African Blockchain Report. Young African creatives also became major proponents of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), taking inspiration from pop culture and the continent’s history. Several decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), touted as the next big thing, emerged across Africa.

Now, however, much of this buzz seems to be a thing of the past.

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Don’t say you’re surprised.
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The Kraken Wakes: when games start talking back • Financial Times

Chris Allnutt:

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In the poky, half-flooded offices of the English Broadcasting Company, a red telephone is ringing. You answer it. A woman’s voice asks anxiously, “Is anyone there?”

In any other game, you would expect her question to be followed by a series of dialogue lines for you to choose from, pre-written approximations of different approaches your character might take. “I’m here to help,” perhaps or, for the more abrasive, “What’s it to you?” But in The Kraken Wakes the text box is empty, waiting to be filled by you either through a headset or a keyboard.

An adventure game adapted from the 1953 John Wyndham novel of the same name, The Kraken Wakes is the latest beneficiary of Charisma’s revolutionary AI dialogue software. The British company has developed a platform capable of interpreting players’ custom contributions — however unpredictable or outlandish — and cleverly weaving them into the narrative in a way designed to feel natural.

And just as your input is entirely up to you, the responses you receive in return are dynamic too: some will pick up on keywords to deliver a range of scripted responses, but others harness OpenAI’s GPT-4 in order to fashion entirely original ones. It’s the first time the language model has been implemented in a game in this way, and it opens the medium up to a level of autonomy that was until now too time-consuming to tackle. ChatGPT may already be helping to secure undergraduate degrees around the world, but for game developers the technology’s full potential remains to be seen.

As a fledgling reporter for the EBC, you spend much of the game interviewing people (and I thought games were supposed to be escapist). When asked by an editor [in the game] what I liked to read, I replied: “Detective stories”. “Oh, mysterious. Perhaps you’re to become our in-house investigative reporter,” came the response. Several minutes later, I heard the editor reference my choice to another character.

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Security failures at TikTok’s Virginia data centers: unescorted visitors, mystery flash drives and illicit crypto mining • Forbes

Emily Baker-White:

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For years, TikTok has told lawmakers that the private data of its U.S. users is secured — and safe from potential influence or exfiltration — in a cluster of data centers located in Northern Virginia.

But interviews with seven current and former employees and more than 60 documents, photos and videos from the data centers reveal that the centers have faced security vulnerabilities ranging from unmarked flash drives plugged into servers to unescorted visitors to boxes of hard drives left unattended in hallways. Sources suggest that these challenges are the result of TikTok trying to grow its data storage capacity very quickly, and sometimes cutting corners along the way.

Documents, photos, and interviews also suggest that TikTok’s data center operations are still tightly enmeshed with ByteDance’s business in China. Among other suppliers, the data centers use servers produced by Inspur, a company that the Pentagon said in 2020 was controlled by the Chinese military and that the Commerce Department added to a sanctions list last month. Documents also show that as recently as last week, server work orders were sent to data center technicians by Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd., a ByteDance subsidiary partially owned by the Chinese government, which TikTok has repeatedly insisted has no control over its operations.

These revelations come at a critical moment for TikTok, which is facing a federal criminal investigation for surveilling journalists (including this reporter) and a threat from the Biden Administration that ByteDance must sell TikTok or face a full ban of the app in the US.

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Snapchat sees spike in 1-star reviews as users pan the ‘My AI’ feature, calling for its removal • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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The user reviews for Snapchat’s “My AI” feature are in — and they’re not good. Launched last week to global users after initially being a subscriber-only addition, Snapchat’s new AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology is now pinned to the top of the app’s Chat tab where users can ask it questions and get instant responses. But following the chatbot’s rollout to Snapchat’s wider community, Snapchat’s app has seen a spike in negative reviews amid a growing number of complaints shared on social media.

Over the past week, Snapchat’s average U.S. App Store review was 1.67, with 75% of reviews being one-star, according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. For comparison, across Q1 2023, the Snapchat average U.S. App Store review was 3.05, with only 35% of reviews being one-star.

The number of daily reviews has also increased by five times over the last week, the firm noted.

Another app data provider, Apptopia, reports a similar trend. Its analysis shows “AI” was the top keyword in Snapchat’s App Store reviews over the past seven days, where it was mentioned 2,973 times. The firm has given the term an “Impact Score” rating of -9.2. This Impact Score is a weighted index that measures the effect a term has on sentiment and ranges from -10 to +10.

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Seems sub-optimal. Perhaps we don’t want AIs to chat to all the time.
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There is no AI • The New Yorker

Jaron Lanier:

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Many of the uses of A.I. that I like rest on advantages we gain when computers get less rigid. Digital stuff as we have known it has a brittle quality that forces people to conform to it, rather than assess it. We’ve all endured the agony of watching some poor soul at a doctor’s office struggle to do the expected thing on a front-desk screen. The face contorts; humanity is undermined.

The need to conform to digital designs has created an ambient expectation of human subservience. A positive spin on A.I. is that it might spell the end of this torture, if we use it well. We can now imagine a Web site that reformulates itself on the fly for someone who is color-blind, say, or a site that tailors itself to someone’s particular cognitive abilities and styles. A humanist like me wants people to have more control, rather than be overly influenced or guided by technology. Flexibility may give us back some agency.

Still, despite these possible upsides, it’s more than reasonable to worry that the new technology will push us around in ways we don’t like or understand. Recently, some friends of mine circulated a petition asking for a pause on the most ambitious A.I. development. The idea was that we’d work on policy during the pause. The petition was signed by some in our community but not others. I found the notion too hazy—what level of progress would mean that the pause could end? Every week, I receive new but always vague mission statements from organizations seeking to initiate processes to set A.I. policy.

These efforts are well intentioned, but they seem hopeless to me.

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I feel like Lanier has never seen a technology that he’s delighted by, and I’ve been reading his opinions for at least 30 years.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified