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A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode

cross-posted from: lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1287625

Comments

Without evidence, the idea that there’s a hidden camera in the exam room is just paranoid speculation. By contrast, this was an actual visible camera in the exam room, and a camera that was obviously the doctor’s own personal device. It makes sense to worry more about the camera you know is real.

Here’s a link with more details of that attack:

thehackernews.com/…/claude-ai-just-cracked-post-q…

I have been enjoying Qobuz, since quitting Spotify a couple of years ago. Everything’s better quality, they have proper credits and PDF CD booklets, the classical music metadata is much better, it encourages you to listen more deliberately to music you choose, and I don’t feel dirty for funding scumbags.

Scientists Sound Alarm on AI-Generated Biological Viruses Amid Unregulated Industry

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/70021

It is better at producing relevant information, but it may never be great, or even as good, at producing reliable information.

OK, but the point still stands if you allow that: It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are often not, in fact, helpful.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if all the corporate leaders believe it will change everything and, in a fit of FOMO, force it into every corner of our lives, then everything will be changed. But not so much because of what AI can do, as because of a mass delusion among the LinkedIn types.

Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

Karp is a nut; Thiel is a nut. Is Palantir elvish for “bag o’ nuts” or something?

In ISBNdb’s now-removed marketing materials, it admitted that getting caught destroying printed books during the scanning process would not be a good look. “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site said. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

So their solution was to do the evil thing secretly?

Sends like we have that anyway. Let’s replace them with AI then switch the AI off.

There’s no legitimate purpose for destroying these books.

There are non-invasive ways scan books. But the destruction is an added bonus. These companies make a copy of these public domain books and then pulp the remains. They’re rare, so that means they’re hard to find (that’s what rare means, after all).

Then, they can turn around and sell their dataset to AI companies.

The destruction is the point.

Capitalism always creates perverse incentives. The most profitable thing you can do is seize something readily available and make it impossible to get without paying you.

But which companies are doing this? It sounds like these are companies that supply training data to AI companies. I think we need names.

LLMs are bullshit machines. I dont see how there’s any question.

The USA is close, with a two-week concept of a plan.

Do they? I know they process the images, blending in takes from the different cameras, doing white balance and enhancing colours, etc., but the “AI Enhance” is a button you have to press. Unless they have changed that.

LG TVs sound like a nightmare. They spy on what you’re watching, listen to what you’re saying and doing, open a doorway into your home network for malware, and put you on the hook for whatever some pedo decides to download through your IP address via one of these proxy-infested apps. Plus their monitors have been silently installing highly privileged adware that is also probably spyware on people’s PCs, and popping up big unwanted ads for McAfee etc. that users can’t turn off.

Outright hoaxes remain rare and are often easy to spot, said Lees – nobody is falling for a toucan sighting in Siberia – but he says birders often use AI to edit and improve an image, and the algorithm can then introduce parts from different bird species to create the new image.

My phone offers an “AI enhance” option after you take a photo. Mostly it tweaks the framing and colours, but it can also do some surprising things and produce a quite different image from the original. I played with it a bit when I first got the phone, and I saw it change people’s eye colour, turn their head to face a different way, and add extra strings to musical instruments. So I don’t use it, but it sounds like the problem is mostly people using AI image enhancers like that carelessly.

It runs on theft and planet-scale destruction.

You could argue that this is the very nature of capitalism: theft because it always means owners extracting value from other people’s work, and ultimately planet-scale destruction because it depends on infinite growth while externalizing (not paying for) the true costs of its activity.

In that sense, AI companies are just a faster-growing strain of the global cancer that is capitalism.