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Category: Technology

The far right is using AI to sell Hitler to a new generation

The far right is using AI to sell Hitler to a new generation

The Washington Post reports: Extremists are using artificial intelligence to reanimate Adolf Hitler online for a new generation, recasting the Nazi German leader who orchestrated the Holocaust as a “misunderstood” figure whose antisemitic and anti-immigrant messages are freshly resonant in politics today. In audio and video clips that have reached millions of viewers over the past month on TikTok, X, Instagram and YouTube, the führer’s AI-cloned voice quavers and crescendos as he delivers English-language versions of some of his most…

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How Musk threatens America’s national security, and what must be done

How Musk threatens America’s national security, and what must be done

Robert Reich writes: Shortly after the apparent second assassination attempt against Trump, Elon Musk responded in a now deleted post: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔 ????” Musk later said his post was intended as a joke. But it could be interpreted as a call to murder Biden and Harris — at least by one of the 198 million followers of Musk who initially received it. Presumably this is why the Secret Service is investigating it. Under 18…

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Bigger AI chatbots more inclined to spew nonsense — and people don’t always realize

Bigger AI chatbots more inclined to spew nonsense — and people don’t always realize

Nature reports: A study of newer, bigger versions of three major artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots shows that they are more inclined to generate wrong answers than to admit ignorance. The assessment also found that people aren’t great at spotting the bad answers. Plenty of attention has been given to the fact that the large language models (LLMs) used to power chatbots sometimes get things wrong or ‘hallucinate’ strange responses to queries. José Hernández-Orallo at the Valencian Research Institute for Artificial…

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Why energy-hungry civilizations on this planet and elsewhere are destined to self-destruct

Why energy-hungry civilizations on this planet and elsewhere are destined to self-destruct

Universe Today reports: Earth’s average global temperatures have been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), Earth has been heating up at a rate of 0.06 °C (0.11 °F) per decade since 1850 – or about 1.11 °C (2 °F) in total. Since 1982, the average annual increase has been 0.20 °C (0.36 °F) per decade, more than three times as fast. What’s more, this trend is projected to increase by between 1.5 and 2 °C…

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Project analyzing human language usage shuts down because ‘generative AI has polluted the data’

Project analyzing human language usage shuts down because ‘generative AI has polluted the data’

Robyn Speer, the creator of wordfreq, writes: The wordfreq data is a snapshot of language that could be found in various online sources up through 2021. There are several reasons why it will not be updated anymore. Generative AI has polluted the data I don’t think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans. The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq’s data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language…

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Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple vastly higher than reported

Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple vastly higher than reported

The Guardian reports: Big tech has made some big claims about greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. But as the rise of artificial intelligence creates ever bigger energy demands, it’s getting hard for the industry to hide the true costs of the data centers powering the tech revolution. According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported. Amazon is the largest emitter…

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Gov. Gavin Newsom has the chance to make AI history

Gov. Gavin Newsom has the chance to make AI history

Vox reports: Advocates say it is a modest law setting “clear, predictable, common-sense safety standards” for artificial intelligence. Opponents say it is a dangerous and arrogant step that will “stifle innovation.” In any event, SB 1047 — California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s proposal to regulate advanced AI models offered by companies doing business in the state — has now passed the California State Assembly by a margin of 48 to 16. Back in May, it passed the Senate by 32 to 1. Once the…

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Don’t downplay the risks for democracy posed by AI

Don’t downplay the risks for democracy posed by AI

Suzanne Nossel writes: Midway through a year in which more than 2 billion voters in at least 64 counties are going to the polls, pioneers of artificial intelligence are breathing a sigh of relief and arguing that the worst fears over the potentially corrosive influence of AI on democracies seem to have been overblown. While platforms have removed scores of AI-distorted videos of politicians lying or making fools of themselves, the impact on voters and tallies has seemed minimal. But…

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When is ‘recyclable’ not really recyclable? When the plastics industry gets to define what the word means

When is ‘recyclable’ not really recyclable? When the plastics industry gets to define what the word means

By Lisa Song This story was originally published by ProPublica Is there anything more pathetic than a used plastic bag? They rip and tear. They float away in the slightest breeze. Left in the wild, their mangled remains entangle birds and choke sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish. It takes 1,000 years for the bags to disintegrate, shedding hormone-disrupting chemicals as they do. And that outcome is all but inevitable, because no system exists to routinely recycle them….

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U.S. said to consider a breakup of Google to address search monopoly

U.S. said to consider a breakup of Google to address search monopoly

The New York Times reports: Google was found last week to have violated antitrust law by illegally maintaining a monopoly in internet search. Now discussions over how to fix those violations have begun. Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off…

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We’re entering an AI price-fixing dystopia

We’re entering an AI price-fixing dystopia

Rogé Karma writes: If you rent your home, there’s a good chance your landlord uses RealPage to set your monthly payment. The company describes itself as merely helping landlords set the most profitable price. But a series of lawsuits says it’s something else: an AI-enabled price-fixing conspiracy. The classic image of price-fixing involves the executives of rival companies gathering behind closed doors and secretly agreeing to charge the same inflated price for whatever they’re selling. This type of collusion is…

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The Google antitrust ruling is huge, but we don’t know what it really means yet

The Google antitrust ruling is huge, but we don’t know what it really means yet

Fortune reports: Yesterday’s Google antitrust ruling was historic. It may be kind of obvious to most people that a company handling 90% or more of search queries in the U.S. is a monopolist, but it’s nonetheless a big deal for a judge to rule as such—and to confirm that Google was therefore breaking antitrust rules when it shored up that outsized position by paying billions to Apple, Samsung and other players to make Google Search the default on their devices….

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The antidemocratic politics of the broligarchs

The antidemocratic politics of the broligarchs

Brooke Harrington writes: Eight years ago, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel was an outlier in liberal Silicon Valley for publicly supporting Donald Trump. But now a number of prominent male tech plutocrats who previously opposed the former president have done an about-face: These broligarchs are publicly endorsing and donating to the Republican candidate—and revealing a lot about their own priorities. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who according to his biographer once waited in line for six hours…

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How a Washington tax break for data centers snowballed into one of the state’s biggest corporate giveaways

How a Washington tax break for data centers snowballed into one of the state’s biggest corporate giveaways

By Lulu Ramadan and Sydney Brownstone, The Seattle Times, photography by Karen Ducey, The Seattle Times This story was originally published by ProPublica In 2010, as the country still reeled from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, tech companies, real estate developers and rural lobbyists went to the state Capitol in Olympia, Washington, to press for a tax break for data centers. Turning it down, supporters argued, would mean rejecting high-paying, long-term and environmentally friendly jobs in distressed…

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How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths

How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths

BBC News reports: Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India. The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs. But more than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows. By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal…

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AI models fed AI-generated data quickly spew nonsense

AI models fed AI-generated data quickly spew nonsense

Nature reports: Training artificial intelligence (AI) models on AI-generated text quickly leads to the models churning out nonsense, a study has found. This cannibalistic phenomenon, termed model collapse, could halt the improvement of large language models (LLMs) as they run out of human-derived training data and as increasing amounts of AI-generated text pervade the Internet. “The message is, we have to be very careful about what ends up in our training data,” says co-author Zakhar Shumaylov, an AI researcher at…

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