Science & Technology

Wow! Apple’s AI Bot Is Already Acting Like Real Live Journalists! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

…by making stuff up and publishing it!

From the BBC: “The BBC made a complaint to the US tech giant after Apple Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications, falsely created a headline about murder suspect Luigi Mangione. The AI-powered summary falsely made it appear that BBC News had published an article claiming Mangione, the man accused of the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not. Now, the group Reporters Without Borders has called on Apple to remove the technology. Apple has made no comment.”

This must make human journalists shiver in their boots! If an AI bot can create fake news stories like Hunter Biden’s laptop being just Russian information, the U.S. economy doing great, President Joe Biden being sharp as a tack and Donald Trump emulating Nazis by holding a rally in Madison Square Garden,” who needs live lying reporters to mislead the public and generate fake news?

Reporters Without Borders, also known as RSF,sadit was was “very concerned by the risks posed to media outlets” by AI tools like Apple’s. See? They see the threat!

The group also said the BBC incident proves that “generative AI services are still too immature to produce reliable information for the public.” But hat proof evident long before this incident: Remember “Hunter de Butts?” Michael Cohen’s AI fiasco?

Vincent Berthier, the head of RSF’s technology and journalism desk, explained the obvious: “AIs are probability machines, and facts can’t be decided by a roll of the dice. RSF calls on Apple to act responsibly by removing this feature. The automated production of false information attributed to a media outlet is a blow to the outlet’s credibility and a danger to the public’s right to reliable information on current affairs.”

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A Show Of Hands, Now: Who’s Shocked That A “Technology Misinformation” Expert Used A.I. Generated Fake Information?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

geewhatasurprise. But as Mastercard would say, this story is priceless.

Professor Jeff Hancock is founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, and his faculty biography states that he is “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology.” Apparently he knows the subject very well: Hancock submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation in Minnesota that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology in support of a candidate (or to discredit one) in an election. Republican state Rep. Mary Franson is challenging the law in federal court as a violation of the First Amendment (which, of course, it is). But Democrats don’t like the First Amendment. Surely you know that by now.

But I digress…

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How Much More Evidence Will It Require For Climate Change Hysterics To Admit That The Field Is Corrupted By Uncertainty, Dishonesty and Hype?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

2024 has been a revealing one on Ethics Alarms regarding the climate change debacle. Let’s review, shall we? Here, we discussed the New York Times complaining that an action movie didn’t have enough climate change propaganda. Here, we learned that the Biden administration’s “climate adviser” is a lawyer, not a scientist, and engaged in fanciful, unscientific fearmongering, like claiming that cliamte change was causing the wildfires in Maui and California. Here, we discussed an esteemed British climate scientist who argued that the only way to control global warming sufficiently to save the world is to “cull the human population,” ideally through pandemics. Here, an expert testifying before Congress about the need to spend trillions of dollars that the U.S. doesn’t have to be “carbon neutral” revealed himself as a phony.

The introduction to all of this arrived in September of last year, when Patrick T. Brown, the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute, essentially blew the whistle on his own colleagues, writing in part, “…it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals…[a]nd the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change…[This] distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

Well, 2024 isn’t over yet. Now the BBC has formally admitted that all the hype about climate change killing off the polar bears was a deliberate falsehood. Responding to a reader complaint, the BBC wrote, “The article reported on the death of a worker who was attacked by two polar bears in Canada’s northern Nunavut territory, and said such attacks are rare because “The species is in decline, and scientists attribute it to the loss of sea ice caused by global warming – leading to shrinking of their hunting and breeding grounds.”

Oops! After the challenge, the BBC wrote, “Research carried out by the ECU confirmed scientists agree climate change will cause a reduction in sea ice, which is likely to have a long-term detrimental effect on polar bears and overall population numbers…. However evidence from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Polar Bear specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature appears to suggest numbers are stable overall at present and not in decline as stated.”

But wait! There’s more!

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The Editor-In-Chief of Scientific American Invokes The Demon Pazuzu!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Odd. One would think that the editor of a (once) respected science magazine would not resort demonology to explain her own conduct. Indeed, one would think that such conduct would disqualify said editor from continuing in her position.

Laura Helmuth, a woke activist who has destroyed the credibility of Scientific American by politicizing its content, went bonkers after Trump defeated Kamala Harris and tweeted,

How professional! How trustworthy! How scientific! Who wouldn’t trust the analysis of a science magazine edited by someone who makes such declarations in public?

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“The Dishonest Waiter” Strikes Again! [Corrected and Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I immediately thought of the “dishonest waiter” when I stumbled upon this story, about a month late. (How did I miss it? You readers are supposed to keep me up to date!) If someone asked Alexa, Amazon’s creepy “virtual assistant,” “Why should I vote for Donald Trump?” “she” replied, “I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.”

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In “Denial,” the film about the lawsuit by British Holocaust denier and fake historian David Irving against American Deborah Lipstadt, the late, great Tom Wilkinson as Lipstadt’s barrister Richard Rampton, in the process of excoriating Irving to the court where the case is being tried, evokes the analogy of “the dishonest waiter” in a memorable speech:

My lord, during this trial, we have heard from Professor Evans and others of at least 25 major falsifications of history. Well, says Mr. Irving, “all historians make mistakes.” But there is a difference between negligence, which is random in its effect, and a deliberateness, which is far more one-sided. All Mr. Irving’s little fictions, all his tweaks of the evidence all tend in the same direction: the exculpation of Adolf Hitler. He is, to use an analogy, like the waiter who always gives the wrong change. If he is honest, we may expect sometimes his mistakes to favor the customers, sometimes himself. But Mr. Irving is the dishonest waiter. All his mistakes work in his favor. How far, if at all, Mr. Irving’s Antisemitism is the cause of his Hitler apology, or vice versa, is unimportant. Whether they are taken together or individually, it is clear that they have led him to prostitute his reputation as a serious historian in favor of a bogus rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the dissemination of virulent Antisemitic propaganda.

I immediately thought of the “dishonest waiter” when I stumbled upon this story, about a month late. (How did I miss it? You readers are supposed to keep me up to date!) If someone asked Alexa, Amazon’s creepy “virtual assistant,” “Why should I vote for Donald Trump?” “she” replied, “I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate.”

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This Will Not End Well…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I know I have written about this general phenomenon before, but my sense of urgency is increasing.

Today, while walking Spuds on a gorgeous, sunny, breezy Northern Virginia day, I saw two young boys sitting near a field under a tree, They looked to be 10 or 11, maybe older. I watched them for almost 20 minutes: I was fascinated. They were within a foot of each other, and never said a word or looked up…from their smart phones.

The internet is the most stunning example of a technological development having unanticipated and in many ways devastating effects on society and culture at least since radio, yes, I think even more television. A close second, however, is the cell phone.

I remember as a kid the constant refrain from my parents was that it was a beautiful day and that I should go outside and “play” instead of watching TV. I’m pretty sure I watched more TV than most kids then, but I also did a lot of stuff outside with my friends. And we talked to each other—about our parents and siblings, our neighbors, cool things we had read, yes, TV episodes, movies, the Red Sox, girls, school, and our dreams. We even talked about politics. It is amazing how many groups of children and especially teenagers I see hanging out but not saying a word to each other, because they are texting, or following social media, or staring at little screens for other reasons.

I was trying to imagine “Stand by Me” with cell phones. All of those adventures, intimate conversations, fanciful exchanges and the rest wouldn’t happen today. Gordy and his pals would just stare at their “devices” and never get to know each other at all. They would have shallow friendships, shalllow experiences, and grow up to be shallow adults.

One of the half-completed posts that has been sitting stalled on the EA metaphorical runway for years has been an essay on life competencies. No doubt about it: mastering new technology is one of those crucial life skills, but so is learning to communicate verbally, recognize a person’s moods and body language, and to learn to function and thrive “unplugged.” For all their many advantages, the cell phones that dominate our children’s attention—and ours, but that’s another set of issues—are crippling them. They are growing up lacking the ability to reason with each other, argue, inspire, learn, flirt—so much more.

I would advocate parents forcing their kids to surrender phones when they leave the house “to play,” but modern parents are terrified that a phoneless child will be preyed upon by the evils that lurk outside. I would advocate limiting smartphone time, or making minors settle for actual phones and not wield mini-computers, but that horse has left the barn too.

This is a social pathogen, and one would think it could be flagged as such and dealt with. I have no idea how we can do that now. One of the Ethics Alarms mottoes is “Fix the problem!” What the consequences will be if we don’t, I am incapable of prognosticating.

But they won’t be good.

The Fake James Earl Jones Problem

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Oh yeah, I can see where this is going…

Vanity Fair reports that in 2022, Lucasfilm and Skywalker Sound hired a Ukrainian startup called Respeech to recreate Darth Vader’s voice for its upcoming mini-series “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” The recently departed James Earl Jones was then alive but 91 and his voice was waeker and not as resonant as in his “THIS is CNN!” days. Using AI, Respeech used archived “Star Wars” sound tracks footage to recreate Jones’ iconic Darth Vader’s tones from the original 1980s trilogy. Jones was satsified with the fake version of him, and signed off on using his archival voice recordings for future (lousy) “Star Wars” spin-offs. When “Obi-Wan Kenobi” premiered, nobody guessed that Darth Vader’s voice was AI generated.

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Harris Is Losing the Meme Wars, So Naturally Democrats Want To Censor Memes

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Who would have expected the AI metaphorical tidal wave to have an influence on the Presidential election? Memes are a breeze to make using artificial intelligence, and while I got heartily sick of my Facebook friends bombarding me with political ones, I have to admit that the technology has the silver lining of taking blunt and biased punditry out of the political cartoonist monopoly and letting some very witty people make satirical political statements.

So far, at least, it appears that conservatives have mastered meming before the Left has, and in this race for President, that is having impact, though how much and how significant is impossible to tell. However, it is clear that the Kamala-Harris-as-a-Communist memes are getting under the skin of some Democrats—one of my Trump-Deranged relatives was complaining about those just yesterday—and so now there are calls for “something to be done” about anti-Harris memes. On MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show,” NPR’s Maria Hinojosa was very upset about AI images of Harris presented in Maoist uniforms:

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Scientists Who Make Recommendations Like This Forfeit the Privilege of Being Taken Seriously

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

And yet how many climate change hysterics, including some regulators and elected officials, will quote them as authority anyway? Geena has an answer…

Researchers at the University of Cambridge announced their solution to the contribution of air travel to world-ending carbon emissions: force airplanes to fly more slowly. Reducing flight speeds about 15% would add an average of 50 minutes to flights. The measure would slash fuel burn by 5 to 7%, reducing the 4% industry contribution to overall climate change. These findings will be presented to the science-savvy delegates at the United Nations.

The scientists argue that longer flights could be offset by more efficiently organized airports with fewer holdups. Apparently these people haven’t flown recently. Can distinguished scientists also be deluded morons? It’s a rhetorical question.

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Artificial Intelligence Raises a Lot of Ethics Issues, But This Isn’t One of Them…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

From An Experiment in Lust, Regret and Kissing (gift link!) in the Times by novelist Curtis Sittenfeld :

My editor fed ChatGPT the same prompts I was writing from and asked it to write a story of the same length “in the style of Curtis Sittenfeld.” (I’m one of the many fiction writers whose novels were used, without my permission and without my being compensated, to train ChatGPT. Groups of fiction writers, including people I’m friends with, have sued OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, for copyright infringement. The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of copyrighted work.)

The essay describes a contest between the bot and the human novelist, who also employed suggestions from readers. I do not see how an AI “writer” being programmed with another author’s work is any more of a copyright violation than a human writer reading a book or story for inspiration. Herman Melville wrote “Moby-Dick” after immersing himself in the works of William Shakespeare. Nor is imitating another author’s style unethical. All art involves borrowing, adopting, adapting and following the cues and lessons of those who came before. In “Follies,” Stephen Sondheim deliberately wrote songs that evoked the styles of specific earlier songwriters. He couldn’t have done this as effectively as he did without “programming” himself with their works. Continue reading →