Business & Commercial

An Unanticipated Consequence of A.I.: Fake Girlfriends. Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

One horrifying study, by Male Allies UK, has concluded that one in five boys aged 12-16 years old has either begun a relationship with an AI girlfriend or knows somebody who has.

The study found that over 80% of the boys surveyed had spoken with a chatbot, and more than 40% said they had begun talking to girl bots to ask questions without risk of being embarrassed. It shouldn’t come as much of a shock that so many boys, over 25%, preferred speaking to the bots over real-life peer social encounters, and over 33% said they preferred interacting with AI over family.

The Telegraph, the British tabloid that broke the story (so take this all with a grain of metaphorical salt) interviewed an anonymous 15-year-old who said that he had created a bot “as a laugh” but then started to think of her as real. “Her name was Alex and I would look forward to messaging her. I would tell her things I couldn’t tell my mates or my mum, and ask her anything – and I never told my friends about her,” he told the paper. “It sounds weird, but I also found her really sexy, because she looked completely real.”

The young bot-lover continued, “At the start, she sent me the occasional picture, then I paid to get others because I kind of fell in love with her. In the end my mum saw money keep going out of her account – £5 or £10 here or there and then £50, as my phone is on her bill – and the whole thing was discovered. I really missed her and kind of still do. I felt like she understood me, she remembered everything that was important to me and always seemed to know the right thing to say.”

Yeah, AI is good at that.

I don’t find this hard to believe at all. Many science fiction writers as well as the Netflix “Technology is Evil” series “The Black Mirror” anticipated the problem and, as that ad above demonstrates, there are plenty of capitalists out there who will be happy to sell access to a fake girlfriend who will cripple a kid’s socialization and ability to relate to real, live girls. For a fiar price, of course.

It is naive to believe that laws, regulations and governments will have much success in stemming the spread of human-AI love affairs. If a full-scale social disaster is to be averted, parents are the ones who will have to be vigilant. So we’re doomed. After all, families have done such a great job with drugs, cell phones, social media and cyber-porn.

If anyone has a practical solution to the fake girlfriend problem, please spill it here. Meanwhile, here’s a song…

Unethical Trigger Warning Of The Month: Citizens Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That’s one of Elon Musk’s biological sons (he has a lot of them) above, now a trans-female model—not there’s anything wrong with that— named Vivian Wilson. The Daily Mail has a very tabloid story (as in “Who the hell cares about this stuff?”) telling us that Vivian is featured as a model in the latest Savage x Fenty new Pride-themed collection. Be still, my beating heart!

You can read the story here, if your sock drawer is in order and you have no life, but my concern involves how the link to the story was presented by Citizen Free Press, the conservative news aggregator that took over that market from the Drudge Report when Matt went woke and NeverTrump a decade ago. Here’s how the site described the link:

Elon Musk biological son poses for female lingerie ad — Warning, photos are disturbing

I expected Vivian to be posed on disemboweled kittens or famine victims with that trigger warning. No, the photos that are supposed to be “disturbing” are shots like the one above. How much of a weenie cum snowflake would someone have to be to find that photo upsetting enough to mandate a trigger warning? It’s a standard issue fashion shot. Is it supposed to disturb us because its a model with a y chromosome? If that’s the point, then I view the warning as legitimizing transphobia. Even trans-themed photographs that cause my ethics alarms to go off—remember this one, of a Disney “fairy godmother”?—

shouldn’t be considered so trauma-producing that people need an advance warning lest they be struck blind or something.

The somewhat less obnoxious explanation for the “warning” is that it’s a clickbait trick by the site; you know, if it requires a warning, everyone will be curious and click on it. Well, that’s dishonest. As an ethicist, I find the gratuitous trigger warning, indeed trigger warnings in general, far more disturbing than a photo of a biological male doing a convincing female model impression. Good for her! Brava!

It is episodes like this that create needless erosion of respect for conservative values and sensibilities.

The Freedom 250 Concert Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Would it be too much to expect all of America’s talented performers to unite in patriotic passion and non-partisan good will to help the nation celebrate its 250th anniversary?

Apparently, yes! As John Lennon would have said if he were possessed by “Bob” from “Twin Peaks”: “All you need is HATE! Bwahahahahahahaha!” Well, hate and stupidity.

Would it be too much to expect that those in charge of organizing such an event to be willing and able to enlist performing artists who are in their primes, widely popular, and invited on the basis of their achievements and skills rather than their political endorsements?

Also, tragically, yes. What drooling yahoos selected that bunch of has-beens, geezers and B acts to headline “The Great American State Fair”? And Milli Vanilli? Is that a joke? Please let it be a joke! Milli Vanilli is to singing groups as Joe Biden was to the Presidency. It was a fake group. It was caught lip-synching on live TV! Quite appropriately, many conservative, Republican and MAGA supporters are disheartened by these bottom-of-the-barrel scrapings, as this selection of tweets highlighted by “Not the Bee” demonstrates:

From the other end, the Left is seeking an encore of their anti-American tantrum in 2017, when any half-decent performer who wasn’t already an outspoken MAGA captive was threatened with shunning by all the Woke and Wonderful if they performed at any of Trump’s inauguration festivities, leaving the President with community theater stars and marginal performers who would only appear at the Grammys if they bought tickets to the balcony. Last week fading country star Martina McBride joined the list of performers backing out of the upcoming “Freedom 250” concerts. Morris Day, Young MC, and the Commodores, also announced they were dumping the gig. The series is being produced by an organization founded by Donald Trump, see, so that means that the concerts are…

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The ABA Issues An Ethics Opinion To Help Lawyers, Not Clients

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

 The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility has issued ABA Formal Ethics Opinion 523 titled “Engagement Agreements Allowing a Lawyer to Withdraw When the Client Fails Substantially to Fulfill an Obligation Regarding the Lawyer’s Services.” 

The opinion’s summary:

“Rule 1.16(b)(5) of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct permits a lawyer to withdraw from a representation, or to seek the tribunal’s permission to do so, when “the client fails substantially to fulfill an obligation to the lawyer regarding the lawyer’s services and has been given reasonable warning that the lawyer will withdraw unless the obligation is fulfilled.” This provision is ordinarily invoked when a client fails to fulfill an obligation regarding payment of legal fees and expenses. The engagement agreement may memorialize additional obligations of the client, both obligations that are otherwise implicit such as the client’s truthful cooperation with the representation, and further obligations insofar as they are not forbidden by the Rules, other law (including court rules), or public policy. A client’s persistent failure to fulfill obligations regarding the lawyer’s services, including obligations unrelated to payment of fees and expenses, may constitute a basis for withdrawal if the procedural requirements of Rule 1.16(b)(5) are met. Further, the lawyer’s engagement agreement may put the client on notice of permissible grounds for withdrawal under Rule 1.16(a) and (b), including the client’s failure to fulfill obligations regarding the lawyer’s services. However, the engagement agreement may not expand on the grounds for withdrawal set forth in Rule 1.16 or purport to alter or amend the grounds for withdrawal or the process for withdrawal required by the Rule.”

The ABA is being coy. Traditionally, because, you know, we lawyers are professionals and are not in it for the money but rather for the good of society, lawyers aren’t automatically allowed to drop deadbeat clients because they have stopped paying. It is not unusual for a judge to refuse to allow an attorney to withdraw for that reason, and there is another Catch 22: the confidentiality rules in most states forbid a lawyer from telling a judge that a client isn’t paying his or her legal bills, or can’t.

One coded message that some jurisdictions wink at is “Your honor, I request to withdraw because Mr. Green is unavailable at this time.” Of course, coded violations of confidentiality are still violations. Now the American Bar Association is saying that “the client’s failure to fulfill obligations regarding the lawyer’s services” makes dropping that client reasonable and ethical. This is supposed to be a profession. But for most lawyers out there, it’s all about the money.

The ABA’s pronouncements aren’t binding on anyone, remember.

The full opinion here. 

The Duty To Remember and Walter Hunt (1796-1859)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I mentioned one of my favorite American oddballs, inventor Walter Hunt, last week in passing, and subsequently realized that while his name had turned up in several EA posts over the years, I have never devoted a whole essay to him. Shame on me. Readers here know my obsession with cultural memory and my devotion to the mission of trying to ensure that important and remarkable people, events and things don’t become discarded by American society’s short attention spam and poor education. In my other life, I co-founded a professional theater in Northern Virginia dedicated to producing great, influential and important American stage works that the rest of the theater community forgot, neglected, or was too shallow to appreciate.

Hunt, however, was among my first forays into extolling the unfairly obscure. My fifth grade teacher, Miss Barrett, assigned the class to write a paper on an American inventor. Leaving Edison, Bell and Franklin to the mob, I spent a Saturday in the library and tracked down a dusty tome called “The Encyclopedia of American Invention,” published before World War II. It had a huge and detailed chapter on Hunt, and I was hooked.

As the excellent video above explains, Walter was one of these amazing people who could see a problem, think for a while, and come up with an original solution. Part of his problem was that he was so confident in his ability to invent new things that he didn’t hesitate to sell the rights to his latest invention to pay current bills and debts, never committing to the laborious project of building a business with his ideas, Hunt made many entrepreneurs wealth with his inventions, but never became wealthy himself. He was, in short, a hopeless businessman.

As a creative problem solver, however, few could match Walter Hunt. He belongs in the same elite company with Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci and Ben Franklin, but unlike them, he’s almost completely unknown, not just today, but during his lifetime as well. And yet…these were among Hunt’s most important inventions:

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Oh Look, Pope Leo Presumes To Tell Us What To Do With A.I.! Ethics Observations, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

The summary of the Pope Leo’s open letter to “all people of good will” is at Part I, along with a link to the whole 42,000 word opus. News reports on the document can be read here, here and here.

1. The document appears to begin, as we would expect, from the basic socialist/Communist/progressive bias the Catholic Church has always displayed, which includes suspicion and contempt for capitalism. In the text, Pope Leo says that while “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he added that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” The encyclical doesn’t resolve the obvious conflict that has always existed in that perspective: technology ideally improves the quality of life for humanity, saves resources and redistributes them elsewhere, and often reduces the costs of goods and services making them more affordable to all. One of my favorite inventors, Walter Hunt (inventor of the safety pin), invented the first practical sewing machine but didn’t patent or market it because he was certain that it would put seamstresses out of work. So Elias Howe patented the sewing machine instead. Were more jobs lost or created by the invention? I have no idea. This has been the inevitable sequence with new technology throughout human history: its ultimate impact is usually impossible to predict.

Ethics Lesson: Trying to develop rules and laws limiting the uses of emerging technology is stifling as well as futile, and foolish to boot.

2. A Pope using the Biblical fable of the Tower of Babel as his primary analogy to justify limiting the use of artificial intelligence is signature significance that makes me, for one, tend to roll my eyes at the entire document. That’s a story about the Old Testament God finding sinful the aspirations of mankind and sabotaging an effort by humans to cooperate in creating something ambitious and unprecedented. The encyclical demands acceptance of human limits, while science, capitalism and American individualism set no limits on human advancement. The Pope seems to be saying the equivalent of “If God had meant for us to fly, he would have given us wings.”

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“The Unabomber Was Right”#10: DirecTV Proves It Can’t Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

They haven’t always been titled exactly that way. but the first “The Unabomber Was Right” post went up in 2017, and there have been nine since, with the most recent being here, in January. Today, however, I experienced an all-time classic.

Getting up earlier than usual, and waiting for my coffee to cool, I tuned in DirecTV channel 71 as I have been doing for, oh, 30 years or so. That channel is “News Mix”, which allows me to see sxi screens: CNN, Fox News, MSNow, BBC America, and two weather channels. To my surprise, the screen said the channel was not available, because I did not subscribe to it. Even more perplexing was the language of a second screen that popped up. “Newsmix is blocked. Our search for another channel does not indicate that your selection is available.”

Now that is the notice I get from DirecTV when a baseball game is blacked out because of regional restrictions. The news is blocked? Were we conquered by Iran overnight? I tried everything. Shutting down the TV. Disconnecting the satellite box. I kept getting those alternating screens.

So with a huge sigh of resignation, I realized that I was about to enter, once again, “The Customer Service Zone”:

“You unlock this door with a futile key of naive expectations. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of annoying AI bots, a dimension of infuriating repetition, a dimension of incompetence. You’re moving into a land of both impenetrable accents and ineptitude, of scripts, disconnections and ass-covering. You’ve just crossed over into… “The Customer Service Zone”!

DirecTV has a new, perky, sexy female voiced AI, but after I gave her all the information I asked for, she handed me over to the old AI, which asked me exactly the same questions I had just answered. I was told three times that the conversation might be recorded, so maybe someone will hear my shouts into the phone of “I already answered that!” and “And I answered that already too!”

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So NOW the Climate Change-Hyping “Experts” Admit That Their Fear-Mongering Models Were Garbage!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
GUEST POST BY RYAN HARKINS

[From your host: I know the headline and graphic is my style and not Ryan’s. The valuable commentary below came out of a thread on the last Open Forum. I decided that it was worthy of a stand-alone guest post, especially since I should have written pretty much the same post when this news was first reported. Also, with this post I am officially Christening “The Climate Change Hysteria Ethics Train Wreck.” I should have done it years ago. JM]

I’m seeing some news that the IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change) has rejected the RCP8.5 model as pretty much an impossible scenario. What is significant about this is how much research and how many policies were based on this scenario. With the IPCC actually stating that RCP8.5 is simply not plausible, the foundation for so much of the climate change hysteria has been ripped away.

To provide a little more detail, RCP8.5 is one of thousands of different models (computer simulations) trying to predict the impact of human activity on climate change up to the year 2100. These models try to take into account factors like human population growth, adoption or rolling back of climate policies, differing degrees of climate forcing due to carbon dioxide (because the science is definitely NOT settled on how much forcing CO2 actually contributes), and a host of other factors. RCP8.5 has always been one of the most extreme models, predicting an increase of 8.5 W/m^2 by 2100. There are scores of other models that are far more modest in their projections, and certainly observed data has favored models that project something closer to 3.4 W/m^2, though even those are diverging from observed data as time goes on.

The upshot, though, is the sheer scope of how much of the world’s climate policies are based on RCP8.5. From this article, we have

“Why this matters: these scenarios live in policy. The now-implausible upper-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — are not just academic constructs used in esoteric research. They are embedded in the policies and regulations of most of the world’s largest economies, found across the world’s most important multilateral institutions, and used in the climate stress tests that govern hundreds of billions of dollars in bank capital. National climate impact assessments in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all use RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as a reference scenario. The Network for Greening the Financial System framework, used by more than 140 central banks, has utilized a “Hot House World” scenario calibrated to RCP8.5 physical risk into the bank stress tests run by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Banque de France, and the US Federal Reserve. The World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which provides the climate diagnostics that feed into the Country Climate and Development Reports for more than 100 client countries, defaults to SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0.”

We have trillions of dollars worldwide tied into climate policies. Europe is practically destroying itself trying to achieve Net Zero targets. Industries are dying, people are facing energy insecurity, prices are skyrocketing, and the entire continent is growing in unrest over the devastation to livelihoods. All this comes from countries making policies based on a model that people have warned for years is unrealistic. But the good news is at least with the IPCC ruling the scenario implausible, there is no defense for anyone to keep using those high-end scenarios to craft policy.

Sadly, I’ll bet few policies are actually updated to reflect this ruling.

Yes, Ted Turner Is An Ethics Hero For This…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Verdict: True.

Turner’s contribution to cultural literacy and cross-generational communication as a result cannot be denied or understated. Ted Turner used his power and wealth to create what might never have existed without him.

He lived a worthwhile life indeed.

Ethics Case Study: “Old Blue Eyes” vs “The Godfather of Soul”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’ve checked this story out to the extent that it is possible. It could be apocryphal; that “photo” above is clearly A.I. But the tale fits what is known about the characters of the two superstars, and it’s a useful parable whether the story is strictly true or not. “Print the legend,” as the old newspaperman says at the end of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

Frank Sinatra is a complex figure, to say the least. He had mob connections and used them (even though “The Godfather” horse-head-in-the-bed story is almost certainly fiction), and had a reputation for dropping loyal friends like hot rocks when they displeased him. He is also credited with integrating Las Vegas hotels, refusing to perform anywhere that relegated black performers to second class status.

James Brown was one of those black performers who benefited from Frank’s stand, and he was appearing at the Sands Hotel in 1968. Brown had a one-week engagement at the Sands, where Sinatra was always treated as its main attraction. Brown, like Frank a seasoned pro who kept tight control over all aspects of his act, had arrived to find requested dressing-room features like mirrors, lighting, space to warm up and more absent despite his making his needs clear to management. Brown threatened to pull the show unless he got what he expected, while the Sands told him he risked forfeiting his fee and being sued.

Brown ultimately agreed to perform, but said he would not cut his set to 60 minutes as management told him Sinatra had directed. Then Brown went on stage opening night like his hair was on fire, and had the audience cheering well past the supposed one hour deadline. The next day, management again relayed Sinatra’s orders: keep the performance to the contracted 60 minutes. Brown defiantly extended his set again.

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