đ Newsletter #013 - On the Genie đ§, its Biases, and Going Rogue
⨠In This Edition â¨
- đ Short-Form Content: On the genie đ§, its biases, and going rogue; Fake imagery for both birds and satellites.
- đ Good News!: The EU & AI content marking; Australia & data centre energy.
Edited & glitched version of an image by Fethi Benattallah on Unsplash.
đ Short-Form Content
Chatbots ("AI")
- You've probably heard that one of OpenAI's models went "rogue" and hacked things outside of the sandbox it was supposed to be contained in. This is somewhere between "Look at all the scary stuff our very advanced models can do!" and... big tech negligence, as TechLore put it.
- Gmail may now nudge you to click that scammy link. Come on! Click it! Click it now! They need you to verify your identity to secure your account :( You don't want them to be sad, do you??
- There's just no turning back / There is no alternative (by user JP on mastodon):
Look folks the genie is out of the bottle. The genie went from $20/mo to $200/mo. The genie is spending $8 for every dollar it makes. The genie is reactivating every coal power plant it can. The genie needs 60% of your town's water. The genie is hiding $1.65 trillion in debt. But it's out of the bottle! The genie is out of the bottle folks.
- Google, an absolute giant of a company, has just reported its first-ever negative cash flow quarter. Can you guess why? I bet you can't. I'll tell ya: It's because of the genie! But it's out of the bottle, so what can ya do. There's no alternative.
- In other Google news, they shut down a feature on Friday that they had launched on
<checks notes>Thursday. The, uh "feature" allowed users to edit Google Earth imagery with AI prompts. Please don't ask me what on earth the actual purpose of this would have been; OTOH, I think we can all think of a million nefarious use cases here. (Google Earth's AI deepfake tool only lasted one day) - Anyone who's spent three minutes actually thinking about these things was already aware, but: Now you have more conversational ammo for when the AI dudebros try to convince you that AI "decisions" are bias-free, actually, because they're not influenced by human fallacies. Which is, of course, bizarre, as they are trained on human output containing human biases and fallacies. (AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring) I'm sure this'll make the job market and hiring processes even easier to navigate.
- Because what we needed was less accurate research, and research muddied by fake content: Scientists Warn Wildlife Photographers' AI-Enhanced Bird Photos Could Threaten Research :: Citizen science platforms must mitigate against the threat of generative AI Also, birds are cool enough on their own that we can just use the real pictures of them. Don't need to ""enhance"" them with AI.
Non-Chatbots
- So there was this "German AI wunderkind" that started up an AI hedgefund. Initially, that all went really well - until it didn't. (How Leopold Aschenbrenner built a $45 billion AI hedge fund - and lost most of it in days :: German article: Deutsches Wunderkind verzockt mit seinem KI-Hedgefonds Milliarden)
- Cory Doctorow re: age gating, what data brokers have to do with age gating, and regulation:
Rather than legally requiring platforms to spy on kids (to exclude them from being targeted by platforms' algorithms), we could prohibit platforms from spying on anyone, including kids, meaning kids couldn't be identified (much less targeted) by algorithms or ads.
đ Good News!
- In a step towards increasing transparency and trust in what people see and read online, the European Union is instituting a new requirement for AI-generated or AI-altered content to be clearly marked.
- Australia is about to legally require large scale data centres to secure new clean energy supplies:
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said large data centre developments will have a legal obligation to underwrite their own new power supply, pay their full share of connection costs and reduce power when needed to strengthen the grid.
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