….you ever just wonder why?

When wildfires swept across Maui last month with destructive fury, China’s increasingly resourceful information warriors pounced.

The disaster was not natural, they said in a flurry of false posts that spread across the internet, but was the result of a secret “weather weapon” being tested by the United States. To bolster the plausibility, the posts carried photographs that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence programs, making them among the first to use these new tools to bolster the aura of authenticity of a disinformation campaign.

…why would they do that? …say you really have a bond villain weather control device…why point it at hawaii? …makes not a lick of sense to me…so why they thought trying to snow folks into believing it was a worthwhile thing to do with an advantage to china is frankly beyond me this morning

Until now, China’s influence campaigns have been focused on amplifying propaganda defending its policies on Taiwan and other subjects. The most recent effort, revealed by researchers from Microsoft and a range of other organizations, suggests that Beijing is making more direct attempts to sow discord in the United States

…it’s not new in a lot of senses

China was not the only country to make political use of the Maui fires. Russia did as well, spreading posts that emphasized how much money the United States was spending on the war in Ukraine and that suggested the cash would be better spent at home for disaster relief.

…but all the same it’s up there with the jewish space laser for me

The researchers suggested that China was building a network of accounts that could be put to use in future information operations, including the next U.S. presidential election. That is the pattern that Russia set in the year or so leading up to the 2016 election.
[…]
There is no indication that Russia and China are working together on information operations, according to the researchers and administration officials, but they often echo each other’s messages, particularly when it comes to criticizing U.S. policies. Their combined efforts suggest a new phase of the disinformation wars is about to begin, one bolstered by the use of A.I. tools.

…&…aside from making me think about the zap gun…

“We don’t have direct evidence of coordination between China and Russia in these campaigns, but we’re certainly finding alignment and a sort of synchronization,” said William Marcellino, a researcher at RAND and an author of a new report warning that artificial intelligence will enable a “critical jump forward” in global influence operations.

…so…parts of it follow a certain sort of logic

Caroline Amy Orr Bueno, a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security, reported that a coordinated Russian campaign began on Twitter, the social media platform now known as X, on Aug. 9, a day after the fires started.

It spread the phrase, “Hawaii, not Ukraine,” from one obscure account with few followers through a series of conservative or right-wing accounts like Breitbart and ultimately Russian state media, reaching thousands of users with a message intended to undercut U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.

…but

Recorded Future first reported that the Chinese government mounted a covert campaign to blame a “weather weapon” for the fires, identifying numerous posts in mid-August falsely claiming that MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, had revealed “the amazing truth behind the wildfire.” Posts with the exact language appeared on social media sites across the internet, including Pinterest, Tumblr, Medium and Pixiv, a Japanese site used by artists.

Other inauthentic accounts spread similar content, often accompanied with mislabeled videos, including one from a popular TikTok account, The Paranormal Chic, that showed a transformer explosion in Chile. According to Recorded Future, the Chinese content often echoed — and amplified — posts by conspiracy theorists and extremists in the United States, including white supremacists.

…even if you assume they just aimed to push the envelope in directions crazy already pointed

The Chinese campaign operated across many of the major social media platforms — and in many languages, suggesting it was aimed at reaching a global audience. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center identified inauthentic posts in 31 languages, including French, German and Italian, but also in less prominent ones like Igbo, Odia and Guarani.

The artificially generated images of the Hawaii wildfires identified by Microsoft’s researchers appeared on multiple platforms, including a Reddit post in Dutch. “These specific A.I.-generated images appear to be exclusively used” by Chinese accounts used in this campaign, Microsoft said in a report. “They do not appear to be present elsewhere online.”

…it honestly sounds almost as though they picked something really outlandish so they could track the “markers” to see how far they got & how the misinformation flowed…I mean…what the hell do I know about how any of this shit works let alone how the people responsible think…but…proof of concept makes more sense to me than there being any real advantage to putting that bullshit out there?

“This would be Russia in 2015,” [Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center] said, referring to the bots and inauthentic accounts Russia created before its extensive online influence operation during the 2016 election. “If we look at how other actors have done this, they are building capacity. Now they’re building accounts that are covert.”
[…]
“We’ve always been able to come together in the wake of humanitarian disasters and provide relief in the wake of earthquakes or hurricanes or fires,” said Mr. Smith, who is presenting some of Microsoft’s findings to Congress on Tuesday. “And to see this kind of pursuit instead is both, I think deeply disturbing and something that the global community should draw a red line around and put off-limits.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/us/politics/china-disinformation-ai.html

…sounds nice…but…how exactly do we do that?

The company announced the new rules on its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) forum on Wednesday. It said in a statement: “Beginning today, when you publish a new title or make edits to and republish an existing title through KDP, you will be asked whether your content is AI-generated.” KDP allows authors to self-publish their books and put them up for sale on Amazon’s site.

…there was a thing the other day about auto-generated books about foraging telling people to go pick poisonous mushrooms…so the point of that is easier to follow…but how useful is a watermark that bad actors can just skip applying?

Amazon also added a new section to its content guidelines focused on AI, which now includes definitions of “AI-generated” and “AI-assisted” content and states that sellers are not required to disclose when content is AI-assisted.

…lines in the sand & all

The new rules come weeks after the site removed suspected AI-generated books that imitated the work of real authors. In August, the author Jane Friedman complained that several books, which she believed were created by AI tools, were falsely listed as being written by her. The books were subsequently removed by Amazon.

In Amazon’s forum announcement, the company wrote that it is “actively monitoring the rapid evolution of generative AI and the impact it is having on reading, writing, and publishing” and that it remains “committed to providing the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience for our authors and customers”.
[…]
The new guidelines state that sellers are responsible for reviewing and editing any AI output to “confirm an AI-based tool did not create content based on copyrighted works”.

Amazon did not say what it will do with the information about AI provided by sellers and whether it will disclose to buyers when Kindle books are AI-generated.
[…]
However, [Nicola Solomon, the chief executive of the UK’s leading industry body for writers, the Society of Authors] added: “While this will apply to new and updated KDP publications, we would like to see Amazon ask the same question of all books published on KDP.” She continued: “The past year alone has seen a huge influx of poor-quality, rapidly generated titles in the KDP store alongside human-created works. We also look forward to understanding how readers will be able to filter out AI-generated content from search results when they browse for books.”

The society is “seeking guarantees from Amazon that, when it acts as a publisher or as a supplier of services to authors – whether via KDP, Amazon Crossing, Thomas & Mercer, or any other venture – it will respect our recommended contractual wording on AI and, ‘not allow access to the work (by the publisher, or by any sublicensee) in any manner which could help the learning or training of artificial intelligence technologies. In addition, it will not without the author’s consent use or allow the use of AI in association with the production of this work, including but not limited to AI for translating, narrating, design of the cover or other artwork.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/11/self-publishers-must-declare-if-content-sold-on-amazons-site-is-ai-generated

…what is it they say about “you’re the product”? …because the product of those products being fed back to you…there’s a reason (apart from the obvious moral issues) why we don’t do that with livestock

Unless you turn it off, Google uses your Gmail to train an AI to finish other people’s sentences. It does that by analyzing how you respond to its suggestions. And when you opt in to using a new Gmail function called Help Me Write, Google uses what you type into it to improve its AI writing, too. You can’t say no.

Your email is just the start. Meta, the owner of Facebook, took a billion Instagram posts from public accounts to train an AI, and didn’t ask permission. Microsoft uses your chats with Bing to coach the AI bot to better answer questions, and you can’t stop it.
[…]
We don’t yet understand the risk that this behavior poses to your privacy, reputation or work. But there’s not much you can do about it.

Sometimes the companies handle your data with care. Other times, their behavior is out of sync with common expectations for what happens with your information, including stuff you thought was supposed to be private.

Zoom set off alarms last month by claiming it could use the private contents of video chats to improve its AI products, before reversing course. Earlier this summer, Google updated its privacy policy to say it can use any “publicly available information” to train AI. (Google didn’t say why it thinks it has that right. But it says that’s not a new policy and it just wanted to be clear it applies to its Bard chatbot.)
[…]
Lost in the data grab: Most people have no way to make truly informed decisions about how their data is being used to train AI. That can feel like a privacy violation — or just like theft.

…& sure…maybe that ship has long since sailed…but…that was one thing when it was a sailboat…some freakishly huge fossil-fuel guzzling behemoth of a megayacht is a whole different beast

It isn’t new for tech companies to use your data to train AI products. Netflix uses what you watch and rate to generate recommendations. Meta uses what you like, comment on and even spend time looking to train its AI how to order your news feed and show you ads.

Yet generative AI is different. Today’s AI arms race needs lots and lots of data. Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, recently bragged to his biographer that he had access to 160 billion video frames per day shot from the cameras built into people’s cars to fuel his AI ambitions.

“Everybody is sort of acting as if there is this manifest destiny of technological tools built with people’s data,” says Ben Winters, a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), who has been studying the harms of generative AI. “With the increasing use of AI tools comes this skewed incentive to collect as much data as you can upfront.”

…which looks plenty different depending on which side of the interface you find yourself

The actual process of training AI can be a bit creepy. Companies employ humans to review some of how we use products such as Google’s new AI-fueled search called SGE. In its fine print for Workspace Labs, Google warns it may hold your data seen by human reviewers for up to four years in a manner not directly associated with your account.

…for added shits & giggles…some of the things we agree to pretend we can switch off…still happen…so…it’s not like there’s actually a way to prevent the systems helping themselves if they’re of a mind to…one section of those T&Cs reads “If Web & App Activity is not enabled, Google will store up to 24 hours of conversational queries to provide a contextualized experience.”…so…even if you told it not to retain that stuff in the first place…it’s just gonna help itself to the mic…which…you can deny it permissions to…but…not if you want to play with google’s alexa…& round & around we go

It even happened to a tech company. Samsung employees were reportedly using ChatGPT and discovered on three different occasions that the chatbot spit back out company secrets. The company then banned the use of AI chatbots at work. Apple, Spotify, Verizon and many banks have done the same.

…we’re all in the same boat?

The Big Tech companies told me they take pains to prevent leaks. Microsoft says it de-identifies user data entered in Bing chat. Google says it automatically removes personally identifiable information from training data. Meta says it will train generative AI not to reveal private information — so it might share the birthday of a celebrity, but not regular people.

Okay, but how effective are these measures? That’s among the questions the companies don’t give straight answers to. “While our filters are at the cutting edge in the industry, we’re continuing to improve them,” says Google. And how often do they leak? “We believe it’s very limited,” it says.
[…]
Perhaps privacy isn’t even the right word for this mess. It’s also about control. Who’d ever have imagined a vacation photo they posted in 2009 would be used by a megacorporation in 2023 to teach an AI to make art, put a photographer out of a job, or identify someone’s face to police? When they take your information to train AI, companies can ignore your original intent in creating or sharing it in the first place.

There’s a thin line between “making products better” and theft, and tech companies think they get to draw it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/08/gmail-instagram-facebook-trains-ai

…to be fair to them…which…I don’t altogether feel like being this morning…they might have some reason to think that

Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates: The titans of tech will talk AI at private Capitol summit [NBC]

…after all…they…kinda do in a number of de facto senses

What to expect when Google faces the DOJ in the first major tech monopoly trial in decades [NBC]

…& I’m not trying to make out it’s all bad

IRS to use AI to crack down on ultra-rich taxpayers and partnerships [WaPo]

…but…the path of least resistance might have a primrose hue to it

With a combination of soothing rainbow colors and language that sounds very pro-privacy, the page announces “Enhanced ad privacy in Chrome.” You have two options: Settings and Got It.

It’s easier to hit Got It, but if you’re concerned about your data and privacy, take a moment to learn more about what’s happening and which settings you should change. Google isn’t necessarily going to default you into the settings that best protect your privacy.

This is a new way Google is trying to track what you do on the web to help advertisers target you. Google says this is better for your privacy than older tracking methods. But it’s still tracking — and people who care about their privacy may want to shut it off. It’s all part of Google’s promise to phase out the use of cookies for tracking in Chrome.

…if you care about this stuff there’s a decent chance you can find the appropriate bit of google’s settings…but…to spell it out

Ad topics is a feature that uses your recent browsing history to detect what topics you’re into and show you personalized ads. If you spent the week looking at dog sites, maybe you’ll get an ad for a dog bed. Google says these topics are deleted after four weeks and if you keep it turned on, you can see the list yourself. Turn this off.

Site-suggested ads is an option that lets individual sites you’ve visited make similar conclusions about what you might be into (dog sweaters? hammocks?) and show you ads for that on other sites. If you keep this on, you can later manually block individual sites from the same screen. But it’s easier to just, yes, turn this off.

Ad measurement lets different sites and advertisers share information about you to try to figure out how well their ads are doing. Turn this off.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/11/chrome-privacy-settings

…”off” seldom means that they stop producing the information you don’t think they ought to help themselves to…stands to reason, really…you can turn off location tracking on a mobile phone but if the network can find it to deliver a message or connect a call or just be in contact with the internet…then something knows a pretty precise location of that device in a mostly unbroken sequence that provides that information to a spectrum of services in order to have the ones at the top of the iceberg that you want do the things you want them to…& yet…it feels like there’s more than just semantics at work when we say the latest round is different…not least since the application of the term privacy covers a lot of ground one way or another

The right to privacy has emerged as a key question in the abortion debate ever since the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion. While the U.S. Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention a right to privacy, prior rulings on a range of issues — including Roe in 1973 — hinged on an implied right. And some state constitutions go even further and expressly protect privacy rights.

The court will consider whether the 15 week abortion ban, which has been in place since last summer, violates a privacy clause in the FL constitution, which has long been interpreted to protect abortion rights. The 6-week ban will take effect if the court upholds the 15 week ban.

— Caroline Kitchener (@CAKitchener) September 8, 2023

The privacy debate [in Florida] is different than in other states.

That’s because its focus is on the meaning behind a 1980 amendment Florida voters passed with roughly 60 percent support. It granted “the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life.”

…can’t help but find some of the arguments…curve?

Some of the justices seemed to be pushing back on the abortion rights argument by contending abortion is different “because it’s depriving this whole class of human beings of the protection of the law,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis.

…call me naïve…but…that bends back around to the pregnant ladies if you follow up on the train of thought…so…what’s with the practice of claiming to be arguing from a position of principle only to desert it once people start to take in the view from there?

For instance: In January, South Carolina’s highest court struck down a 2021 law banning most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected at roughly six weeks. The law “is an unreasonable restriction upon a woman’s right to privacy and is therefore unconstitutional,” a majority of the justices concurred in their ruling.

But in an attempt to circumvent the court, Republicans in the state legislature passed a new ban in late May. The justices upheld that law in an August ruling, with one justice who reversed his stance writing that he couldn’t say that the new restrictions are an unreasonable invasion of privacy.

…yeah

And in Kentucky, abortion rights groups asserted the state’s constitution protects the right to privacy and therefore, the right to access an abortion. The Kentucky Supreme Court ultimately ruled that providers didn’t have standing to sue.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/11/right-privacy-gets-its-day-court/?

…if it wasn’t so fucked up it might be funny that people who get to determine standing routinely make judgments that don’t have a leg to stand on…but…I ain’t feeling much to chuckle about, to be honest…but maybe it’s just my memory playing tricks on me

One of my earliest memories is of being teased on my first day of school for speaking with a Dutch accent. I blamed my mother for this humiliation and returned home furious. “It’s three, not tree. Th-ree!” I told her. The strange thing about this memory is that it is probably false. My mother swears it was my brother who did this.

This kind of confusion is common in families. As stories are told and retold, they take on a life of their own. Details fade and change. It becomes easy to swap one child for another, or to confuse a familiar tale with a personal memory. My recollection feels vivid, but the details become blurrier on closer examination: where was my mother standing when I spoke to her? What was she wearing? I couldn’t say.

I was four at the time. Most adults cannot remember anything of their lives before the age of three or four, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. Scientists have suggested that this early forgetting is related to two aspects of cognitive development. First, cementing autobiographical memory requires language: it is harder to retain something when you lack the words to express it. Second, it requires a coherent sense of self, the ability to distinguish between “this happened” and “this happened to me”.

In other words, to remember our life we need to be able to narrate it, to impose order and meaning on to the chaos of existence by turning it into a story, and one that positions us as the central character. In this way, we tell ourselves into being.
[…]
Parents wield formidable power over their children’s memories, creating the first stories they tell themselves about who they are and where they come from, stories that might be shed like snakeskin or come to define them for ever. Some of these narratives may embellish the truth, and some may be complete fabrications. In a small but influential study from 1995, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed that when a relative was tasked with telling a trial participant a fictional but plausible story of how they had got lost in a mall as a young child, six out of 24 participants developed a false memory as a result.

…it used to be that things like a “paper of record” were around to let us know that some things happened a certain way in a format that didn’t allow the sort of re-edit the mind is fond of…but…yeah…so…anyway…back in our brave new world that has such wonders in it

The study of false memories has become politically incendiary, having sparked debates about whether therapists can implant memories of childhood sexual abuse, or whether women sometimes misremember consensual sex as rape. When I argue that personal memories are closer to fiction than fact, I am thinking less of the specific ways that we can – or can’t – manipulate other people’s memories, than of the nature of memory more generally. The science is clear: our minds don’t function like a hard drive or a video recorder. Memories are not physical things, stored somewhere in the brain, but rather creative reconstructions. They change constantly because we do. We edit our pasts to better serve our present needs.

…&…”vivid” is not the same as “verifiable”

[…] A study of so-called “flashbulb” memories of 9/11 – the unusually vivid memories people retain of significant events – found that one year on, almost 40% of people had changed parts of what they recalled about that day.

Our memories are also often self-aggrandising and self-serving. One study that compared students’ remembered grades with their transcripts found that they were much better at recalling As than Ds. Another found that when students performed better than expected in exams, they remembered feeling more anxious beforehand, amplifying their sense of success. Even (or especially) when our memory is faulty – by which I mean, factually inaccurate – it serves us well, helping us to feel like the hero in our own life story.

…with…predictable results for the supporting cast?

This means that my children – like most children today – will enter adulthood with more documentary evidence of their early years than any generation before. We are, almost effortlessly and often unwittingly, amassing a huge digital archive that means more of our memories can be corroborated. Our pasts have never been so readily accessible, through social media posts, emails and text messages, photos and screenshots, cookie trails and browser histories. But I have found that looking through email correspondence from almost two decades ago, or cringe-reading early Facebook posts, feels more like eavesdropping on an alien than encountering a past self. The writer doesn’t feel like me. Which version is more real?

In my hunger to document my children’s lives, am I restricting their ability to write their own life story? In the digital age, we’re all still renegotiating our relationship with the past. Computers, unlike humans, offer perfect recall – but we must not forget that there is freedom and power in misremembering, in revising our past, in writing ourselves into fictions we can live with.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/11/the-big-idea-are-memories-fact-or-fiction

…so…should we even expect that to be different for AI? …to err may be human…but who says we get a monopoly on that shit?

One afternoon in early 2017, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., an engineer named Tommer Leyvand sat in a conference room with a smartphone standing on the brim of his baseball cap. Rubber bands helped anchor it in place with the camera facing out. The absurd hat-phone, a particularly uncool version of the future, contained a secret tool known only to a small group of employees. What it could do was remarkable.

The handful of men in the room were laughing and speaking over one another in excitement, as captured in a video taken that day, until one of them asked for quiet. The room went silent; the demo was underway.

Mr. Leyvand turned toward a man across the table from him. The smartphone’s camera lens — round, black, unblinking — hovered above Mr. Leyvand’s forehead like a Cyclops eye as it took in the face before it. Two seconds later, a robotic female voice declared, “Zach Howard.”

“That’s me,” confirmed Mr. Howard, a mechanical engineer.

An employee who saw the tech demonstration thought it was supposed to be a joke. But when the phone started correctly calling out names, he found it creepy, like something out of a dystopian movie.

The person-identifying hat-phone would be a godsend for someone with vision problems or face blindness, but it was risky. Facebook’s previous deployment of facial recognition technology, to help people tag friends in photos, had caused an outcry from privacy advocates and led to a class-action lawsuit in Illinois in 2015 that ultimately cost the company $650 million.

With technology like that on Mr. Leyvand’s head, Facebook could prevent users from ever forgetting a colleague’s name, give a reminder at a cocktail party that an acquaintance had kids to ask about or help find someone at a crowded conference. However, six years later, the company now known as Meta has not released a version of that product and Mr. Leyvand has departed for Apple to work on its Vision Pro augmented reality glasses.

…& there’s a bunch of reasons for that…but somewhere in the mix is that people already think zuck is a creepy enough dude with a sketchy enough suite of products that they’re turning their back on them to the extent that his previous golden boy status is looking precarious & he can’t claim exponential levels of the miracle “growth” variable these days…almost like he had his day & now his shit is obsolete…so…releasing it would be…counter-productive…whereas…if you started out casting yourself in the role of sauron the calculus is a little different

In recent years, the start-ups Clearview AI and PimEyes have pushed the boundaries of what the public thought was possible by releasing face search engines paired with millions of photos from the public web (PimEyes) or even billions (Clearview). With these tools, available to the police in the case of Clearview AI and the public at large in the case of PimEyes, a snapshot of someone can be used to find other online photos where that face appears, potentially revealing a name, social media profiles or information a person would never want to be linked to publicly, such as risqué photos.

What these start-ups had done wasn’t a technological breakthrough; it was an ethical one. Tech giants had developed the ability to recognize unknown people’s faces years earlier, but had chosen to hold the technology back, deciding that the most extreme version — putting a name to a stranger’s face — was too dangerous to make widely available.

Now that the taboo has been broken, facial recognition technology could become ubiquitous. Currently used by the police to solve crimes, authoritarian governments to monitor their citizens and businesses to keep out their enemies, it may soon be a tool in all our hands, an app on our phone — or in augmented reality glasses — that would usher in a world with no strangers.

…& maybe one day whatever remains of humanity will get to declare whether or not a fully-functioning digital panopticon actually does put everyone on their best behavior & do away with any need for things like police forces or lawyers…but…I ain’t gonna hold my breath for that result?

As early as 2011, a Google engineer revealed he had been working on a tool to Google someone’s face and bring up other online photos of them. Months later, Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, said in an onstage interview that Google “built that technology, and we withheld it.”

“As far as I know, it’s the only technology that Google built and, after looking at it, we decided to stop,” Mr. Schmidt said.

…which is about how I feel about the prospect that big tech is gonna use big data to save our collective ass

Advertently or not, the tech giants also helped hold the technology back from general circulation by snapping up the most advanced start-ups that offered it. In 2010, Apple bought a promising Swedish facial recognition company called Polar Rose. In 2011, Google acquired a U.S. face recognition company popular with federal agencies called PittPatt. And in 2012, Facebook purchased the Israeli company Face.com. In each case, the new owners shut down the acquired companies’ services to outsiders. The Silicon Valley heavyweights were the de facto gatekeepers for how and whether the tech would be used.

Facebook, Google and Apple deployed facial recognition technology in what they considered to be relatively benign ways: as a security tool to unlock a smartphone, a more efficient way to tag known friends in photos and an organizational tool to categorize smartphone photos by the faces of the people in them.

…uh huh…& definitely not as a way to train & refine that recognition system they’re all about not releasing on account of how dangerous it is in the wrong hands…right?

Understanding the path of facial recognition technology will help us navigate what is to come with other advancements in A.I., such as image- and text-generation tools. The power to decide what they can and can’t do will increasingly be determined by anyone with a bit of tech savvy, who may not pay heed to what the general public considers acceptable.

How did we get to this point where someone can spot a “hot dad” on a Manhattan sidewalk and then use PimEyes to try to find out who he is and where he works? The short answer is a combination of free code shared online, a vast array of public photos, academic papers explaining how to put it all together and a cavalier attitude toward laws governing privacy.

…just…any old asshole, basically

The Clearview AI co-founder Hoan Ton-That, who led his company’s technological development, had no special background in biometrics. Before Clearview AI, he made Facebook quizzes, iPhone games and silly apps, such as “Trump Hair” to make a person in a photo appear to be coifed like the former president.

In his quest to create a groundbreaking and more lucrative app, Mr. Ton-That turned to free online resources, such as OpenFace — a “face recognition library” created by a group at Carnegie Mellon University. The code library was available on GitHub, with a warning: “Please use responsibly!”

“We do not support the use of this project in applications that violate privacy and security,” read the statement. “We are using this to help cognitively impaired users sense and understand the world around them.”

It was a noble request but completely unenforceable.

…uh huh

The $999 pair of augmented reality glasses, made by a company called Vuzix, connects the wearer to Clearview’s database of 30 billion faces. Clearview’s A.R. app, which can identity someone up to 10 feet away, is not yet publicly available, but the Air Force has provided funding for its possible use at military bases.

On a fall afternoon, Mr. Ton-That demonstrated the glasses for me at his spokeswoman’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, putting them on and looking toward me.

“Ooooh, 176 photos,” he said. “Aspen Ideas Festival. Kashmir Hill,” he read from the image caption on one of the photos that came up.
[…]
When I looked at Mr. Ton-That through the glasses, a green circle appeared around his face. I tapped a touch pad at my right temple. A message came up on a square display that only I could see on the right lens of the glasses: “Searching …”

And then the square filled with photos of him, a caption beneath each one. I scrolled through them using the touch pad. I tapped to select one that read “Clearview CEO, Hoan Ton-That;” it included a link that showed me that it had come from Clearview’s website.

I looked at his spokeswoman, searched her face, and 49 photos came up, including one with a client that she asked me not to mention. This casually revealed just how intrusive a search of someone’s face can be, even for a person whose job is to get the world to embrace this technology.

I wanted to take the glasses outside to see how they worked on people I didn’t actually know, but Mr. Ton-That said we couldn’t, both because the glasses required a Wi-Fi connection and because someone might recognize him and realize immediately what the glasses were and what they could do.

It didn’t frighten me, though I knew it should. It was clear that people who own a tool like this will inevitably have power over those who don’t. But there was a certain thrill in seeing it work, like a magic trick successfully performed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/technology/google-facebook-facial-recognition.html

…in the end…how big of a difference is there between “because we can” & “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”…even if most people that like to quote that line don’t know where it came from…much the way that we tend to pass over the part where “an eye for an eye” is a limit not an invitation…but…we’re only human

…maybe h.g. wells had a point with the whole molochs/eloi deal

Moderators working in Hyderabad, a major IT hub in south Asia, have spoken of the strain on their mental health of reviewing images and videos of sexual and violent content, sometimes including trafficked children.

Many social media platforms in the UK, European Union and US have moved the work to countries such as India and the Philippines.

While OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, has said artificial intelligence could be used to speed up content moderation, it is not expected to end the need for the thousands of human moderators employed by social media platforms.

…sure…train AI on the absolute worst content we can contrive…that’ll go gangbusters, I bet

“I had to watch every frame of a recent stabbing video of a girl. What upset me most is that the passersby didn’t help her,” says Harun.

“This is one video that affected me like never before. You may have seen the video in its blurred version, but I had to watch it completely and clearly. It will never leave me.”

Harun, 22, was one of eight moderators who agreed to speak to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. Their average pay was less than £8 a day. While those interviewed say they were encouraged to seek help in stressful situations, only one of the moderators found the support helpful.

“The wellness coaches exist as a formality because these global companies need to tick off a legal clause probably. When we get overwhelmed after reviewing a sensitive video, they simply move us to a less sensitive queue until we feel better,” says Harun.

…but AI doesn’t have feelings…so…no need to check that box…& poor old harun can go back to whatever he was up to before taking on this kind of work for that kind of money seemed like a deal he’d be prepared to take…&…everything’s better?

Neha* has worked as a moderator reviewing sensitive content for more than four years. She says her “blood boiled” when bosses told her and other moderators in a team meeting to “relax and not ‘take it to heart’ when dealing with content like sexual violence”.

“I just want to work in a company that doesn’t give paedophiles a platform,” she says. “I’m disgusted.

“I have stopped complaining now and I am looking for a new job. At least if they were paying better for the gore we’re dealing with every other day, I would have the money to pay for therapy sessions.”
[…]

“There’s a need for strict regulation, especially on livestream apps. We are managing content to protect people’s mental health at the risk of our emotional wellbeing.”

Harun says: “All they’re doing is creating a young workforce that’s depressed. It’s like the whole world’s trash is being dumped in India.”

Martha Dark, a director at the non-profit IT and social justice organisation Foxglove, says moderators need better protection from “life-changing trauma”.

“Content moderators take huge risks to protect us, fighting every day against a torrent of violence and child abuse. There is no social media without them,” she says.

“Cut-rate content moderation doesn’t just fail workers; it fails all of us by making social media a more dangerous place.”

Dark adds that AI “is not and may well never be able” to moderate content effectively. “The only real solution is to invest in the content moderators who already do the work.”
[*Names have been changed]

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/sep/11/i-log-into-a-torture-chamber-each-day-strain-of-moderating-social-media-india

…as you can tell…my day’s off to a great start…how about you folks’?