…I should be asleep…no, really…I should…even margaret thatcher didn’t claim she could get by on 2hrs of the stuff…but…do I really want to be able to hit a button & have not-me churn out one of these?

Greg Marston, a British voice actor, recently came across “Connor” online — an A.I.-generated clone of his voice, trained on a recording Mr. Marston had made in 2003. It was his voice uttering things he had never said.

Back then, he had recorded a session for IBM and later signed a release form allowing the recording to be used in many ways. Of course, at that time, Mr. Marston couldn’t envision that IBM would use anything more than the exact utterances he had recorded. Thanks to artificial intelligence, however, IBM was able to sell Mr. Marston’s decades-old sample to websites that are using it to build a synthetic voice that could say anything. Mr. Marston recently discovered his voice emanating from the Wimbledon website during the tennis tournament. (IBM said it is aware of Mr. Marston’s concern and is discussing it with him directly.)

Already, artists are deleting their work from X, formerly known as Twitter, after the company said it would be using data from its platform to train its A.I. Hollywood writers and actors are on strike partly because they want to ensure their work is not fed into A.I. systems that companies could try to replace them with. News outlets including The New York Times and CNN have added files to their website to help prevent A.I. chatbots from scraping their content.

…as it happens, last I checked, the whole overabundance of ellipses thing makes these pretty much indigestible for your GPT precis routines…so…I don’t know as we’re there yet where my imaginary do-a-DOT button is concerned…but…barely awake though I may be I’m still at least dimly aware that that’s besides the point

While creators of quality content are contesting how their work is being used, dubious A.I.-generated content is stampeding into the public sphere. NewsGuard has identified 475 A.I.-generated news and information websites in 14 languages. A.I.-generated music is flooding streaming websites and generating A.I. royalties for scammers. A.I.-generated books — including a mushroom foraging guide that could lead to mistakes in identifying highly poisonous fungi — are so prevalent on Amazon that the company is asking authors who self-publish on its Kindle platform to also declare if they are using A.I.

…oh, well that’s all right then…I’m sure a self-administered honor code will totally suffice to protect against bad actors

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons […]

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.
[…]
Regulators are trying to figure it out, too. The European Union is considering the first set of global restrictions on A.I., which would require some transparency from generative A.I. systems, including providing summaries of copyrighted data that was used to train its systems.

That would be a good step forward, since many A.I. systems do not fully disclose the data they were trained on. It has primarily been journalists who have dug up the murky data that lies beneath the glossy surface of the chatbots. A recent investigation detailed in The Atlantic revealed that more than 170,000 pirated books are included in the training data for Meta’s A.I. chatbot, Llama. A Washington Post investigation revealed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT relies on data scraped without consent from hundreds of thousands of websites.

…so maybe it’s just me…but…this sounds a whole lot like asimov & robots

Tim Friedlander, founder and president of the National Association of Voice Actors, has called for A.I. companies to adopt ethical standards. He says that actors need three Cs: consent, control and compensation.

In fact, all of us need the three Cs. Whether we are professional actors or we just post pictures on social media, everyone should have the right to meaningful consent on whether we want our online lives fed into the giant A.I. machines.

And consent should not mean having to locate a bunch of hard-to-find opt-out buttons to click — which is where the industry is heading.

The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse [NYT]

…we like things in threes…but it’s worth remembering ol’ issac…who was no dummy…figured out the triumvirate wouldn’t cut it…& I for one would need a whole lot of sleep before I could come anywhere close to telling you what a functional representation of the xeroth addendum for AI & the internet would look like…but…if you feel like giving it a whirl…you’re looking for a means by which you can ensure that the thing, absent direction from anyone “may […& thusly “will“] not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.“

Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.

…we can’t pull off that trick with people…so…is it even realistic to imagine we will with machines?

Facing litigation, Stanford University officials are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings.

The National Institutes of Health froze a $150 million program intended to advance the communication of medical information, citing regulatory and legal threats. Physicians told The Post that they had planned to use the grants to fund projects on noncontroversial topics such as nutritional guidelines and not just politically charged issues such as vaccinations that have been the focus of the conservative allegations.

NIH officials sent a memo in July to some employees, warning them not to flag misleading social media posts to tech companies and to limit their communication with the public to answering medical questions.

…skipping past the bit that pretty much ought to terrify all of us on account of phrases like “Science is being halted in its tracks.”

Academics and government scientists say the campaign also is successfully throttling the years-long effort to study online falsehoods, which grew after Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election caught both social media sites and politicians unaware.

Interviews with more than two dozen professors, government officials, physicians, nonprofits and research funders, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their internal deliberations freely, describe an escalating campaign emerging as online propaganda is rising.

Social media platforms have pulled back on moderating content even as evidence mounts that Russia and China have intensified covert influence campaigns; next week, the disinformation watchdog NewsGuard will release a study that found 12 major media accounts from Russia, China and Iran saw the number of likes and reposts on X nearly double after Musk removed labels calling them government-affiliated. Advances in generative artificial intelligence have opened the door to potential widespread voter manipulation. Meanwhile, public health officials are grappling with medical misinformation, as the United States heads into the fall and winter virus season.

…after all…if there’s one thing we need that “AI” singularly lacks whether we’re talking about its own output or the mass of data it lays claim to on the input side of things…it’s a bullshit detector

“As a pro-democracy organization, American First Legal is committed to defeating the censorship-industrial complex that is crushing freedom and promoting dangerous conspiracy theories about Americans who dare to question government dogma,” Miller said in a statement.

…never mind me & my apparently blinding overuse of punctuation…the machine can’t look at that & put it together with everything it knows about stephen miller’s god-forsaken worldview & see it for the misappropriated rhetoric it is…never mind the law of (mostly) unintended consequences

In one instance, an NIH communications official told some employees not to flag misleading social media posts to tech companies — even if they impersonated government health officials or encouraged self-harm, according to a July email viewed by The Post. The employees were told they could not respond to questions about a disease area or clinical trial if it did “relate in any way to misinformation or disinformation.”

…if the outcome is obvious insanity…surely you reexamine a premise or two

[…]Right-wing media outlets, advocacy groups and influencers such as the Foundation for Freedom Online, Just the News and far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec argued that the Election Integrity Partnership was part of a coalition with government and industry working to censor Americans’ speech online. [Led by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the coalition of researchers was formed in the middle of the 2020 presidential campaign to alert tech companies in real time about viral election-related conspiracies on their platforms] (Posobiec didn’t respond to a request for comment, but after this story was published online he posted the request on X with the comment: “Every one of these programs will be penniless and powerless by the time I am done.”)
[…]
The probe prompted members of the Election Integrity Partnership to reevaluate their participation in the coalition altogether. Stanford Internet Observatory founder Alex Stamos, whose group helps lead the coalition, told Jordan’s staff earlier this year that he would have to talk with Stanford’s leadership about the university’s continued involvement, according to a partial transcript filed in court.

“Since this investigation has cost the university now approaching seven [figure] legal fees, it’s been pretty successful, I think, in discouraging us from making it worthwhile for us to do a study in 2024,” Stamos said.

…bleary eyed as I am…it sure does look like these fools are out there desperately trying to set things up so that if you take those two set of things & you add them together the answer you’ll get will be literally anything other than 2

In recent weeks, Jordan has sent a new round of record requests to at least two recipients of grants from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The program, one of many run by the independent agency to promote research, awards funding to groups creating tools or techniques to mitigate misinformation, such as software for journalists to identify misinformation trending online.

George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley and the conservative advocacy group The Foundation for Freedom Online wrote separate reports portraying the program as an effort by the Biden administration to censor or blacklist American citizens online. Afterward, Jordan requested grant recipients’ communications with the White House, technology companies and government agencies, according to two of the people.

Turley said in a statement that “free speech is a core value of higher education” and that he is concerned that universities are using partnerships with the government to silence some users.
[…]
Connie Moon Sehat, a researcher-at-large for the group, said she and other researchers have faced online attacks including threats to reveal personal information and veiled death threats. She says members of her team are at times under high levels of stress and having ongoing conversations about how to elevate accurate information on social media, as some platforms become increasingly toxic.

“We are double- and triple-checking what we write, above what we used to, to try to communicate our good intentions — in the face of efforts that willfully misconstrue our work and desire to serve the public,” Sehat said. “And I worry more broadly that we researchers may self-censor our inquiry, or that some will drop out altogether, to stay safe.”
[…]
The left-leaning nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology argued in a Thursday report that the disinformation field is facing a dual threat: Social media platforms have become less responsive to concerns from researchers about misinformation while the political and regulatory backlash against the scholarship has eroded the relationships between academics, nonprofits and industry.
[…]
Many academics, independent scholars and philanthropic funders are discussing how to collectively defend the disinformation research field. One proposal would create a group to gather donations into a central fund to pay for crisis communications and — most critically — legal support if one of them gets sued or subpoenaed in a private case or by Congress. The money could also fund cybersecurity counseling to ward off hackers and stalkers and perhaps physical security as well.

“There is this growing sense that there need to be resources to allow for freedom of thought and academic independence,” said one longtime philanthropy grant maker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

University academics are also mulling ways to rebrand their work to attract less controversy. One leader in a university disinformation research center said scholars have discussed using more generic terms to describe their work such as “information integrity” or “civic participation online.” Those terms “have less of a bite to them,” said a person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak on the private discussions. Similar conversations are occurring within public health agencies, another person said.

“This whole area of research has become radioactive,” the person said.

Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks [WaPo]

…has become? …like it just turned out that way all on its own?

Thanks to the Pollution Paradox – the dirtiest industries have the greatest incentive to invest in politics, so politics comes to be dominated by the dirtiest industries – such lobbies exert a vast impact on political choice. If people were asked to vote on whether they want their hearts and lungs damaged, their children’s cognitive development impaired, extra cancers, more stillbirths, a higher risk of dementia and earlier death, they’d be likely to reject these options. But, thanks to decades of spin, the stark nature of the choice has been obscured.

The interests of some of the most powerful industries on Earth are represented as the interests of the working man and woman, trying to go about their business while greens and bureaucrats impede them. In reality, those who drive for their living – such as taxi drivers, couriers and rubbish collectors – have the greatest exposure to toxic diesel fumes. We could achieve cheaper, more effective mobility with a fraction of the pollution. With the right incentives, we could also heat our homes without poisoning our neighbours.

If you don’t have the evidence required to win an argument, there’s a ready alternative: set people against each other by stoking a culture war. Low emission zones and low-traffic neighbourhoods have been the subjects of grotesque falsehoods in the media, lurid conspiracy theories and dark money lobbying. As the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, pointed out this week, hundreds of thousands of pounds have been spent on troll farms on social media attacking London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez). We don’t know where this money came from, but it may have been decisive in securing a Conservative win in the Uxbridge byelection.

We are being poisoned every day, so why do we keep voting for more pollution? Ask a lobbyist [Guardian]

…probably doesn’t help that the likes of monbiot always seem to come with a worthier-than-thou overtone of scolding while condescending that feels like over-egging the thing…but…I get how you might feel like if you don’t overstate some shit you’ll never be able to compete with the fanciful heights of the bullshit chorus…so…it sort of helps to know that some people walk the walk even without a leg to stand on

It is such a devastating life story that it is bewildering to meet Hertzog Young, now 31, and find him smiling broadly and looking the picture of health in his small flat beside a busy road in north London. He radiates calm and good vibes. Softly spoken and extremely eloquent, he remains a climate campaigner and has written his first book. Spinning Out is a powerful elucidation of the links between the climate crisis, mental health and social change. Like encountering its author, it is an unexpectedly uplifting experience.

“When you’ve lost your legs, you walk from your core,” he says, standing tall on his newly fitted prosthetics to show me. “I’ve got a really strong core because I have to be fit to survive, if I want to go and do things.” He is in constant physical pain, faces unceasing rehabilitation and yet has risen to the challenge of rebuilding his world. “I’m physically and psychologically stronger than I’ve ever been as a result of what happened to me. I feel freer and more alive than I have done since I was a teenager. I’m really not saying, ‘Go jump off a building,’ but it’s been great for me.” He laughs at himself.
[…]
Climate summitry followed. Davos “was wild”, he says. “As a very energetic and pushy young man, I had a go at Bill Clinton and I had a much longer chat with Kofi Annan than he would’ve wanted. My mum used to call me ‘Just one more thing Charlie’. She was worried about what the exposure would do to me, but my parents had similar politics and were very supportive of what I was doing.” When he attended the Copenhagen summit, he idealistically believed that the lack of action on climate change was because of shortcomings in communication: if he told leaders how to cut carbon emissions, they would do it. They didn’t: there was no agreement at Copenhagen, and he sank into a deep depression.
[…]
He recovered enough to finish a masters in his mid-20s and find work as a researcher for George Monbiot and for the Royal Society of Arts. But the cycle of manic work and debilitating depression continued. In 2019, he was about to move into a flat with friends and start a new research job when he experienced “a four-day black hole”, he says. “The last thing I remember is lying on the floor saying I want to die.” He starts laughing. “This makes me look like such a prick, but I’d just got back from a holiday in Italy and a bottle of grappa had smashed in my bag and fucked my MacBook. It’s the most middle-class reason to have an emotional breakdown. I was on the floor with this sticky liquid and my broken laptop, genuinely properly suicidal. Actually, it was deep existential dread and doom – humans were a mistake, an evolutionary error, and I was seeing cruelty and darkness in everything.” Two days later, Hertzog Young went to see his therapist. He has no memory of what happened next but, ultimately, he jumped.
[…]
Some might blame the climate movement for his distress. Does he feel angry at the way he was deployed as a teenage activist? “No. Not at all,” he says. “I’m angry at how it played out, but I think a great deal of my trauma from being in the movement came from being thrust into spaces and throwing myself into spaces like the UN climate talks when I was a teenager. I wish I’d known better how to listen to my body and listen to other activists who were telling me to slow down and look after myself. I’m angry at the way these high-powered decision spaces operate. That’s what I’m angry at.”

Hertzog Young says that his young self wasn’t “completely held” by the big global summits he attended in the past. “Living in a culture that doesn’t recognise the enormity of what’s happening and actually shuts down people who are trying to build better things is a really isolating and destructive experience,” he says. Today, he believes that “quieter” parts of the climate movement better support young campaigners, including Jennifer Uchendu’s Eco Anxiety in Africa project; Civic Square, a hub for creating just and climate-friendly local neighbourhoods; the Good Grief Network, which has just published a book on how to live in the climate crisis; and the Climate Psychology Alliance, which hosts climate cafes and links young activists with climate-aware psychologists.

…one way or another we’re all paying the toll…but it’s not as though the weight is evenly distributed

We may be getting better at talking about the mental health crisis, but few connect it to climate breakdown. Scientific studies show that young people are more likely to suffer from climate anxiety and a Lancet study of 10,000 young people living in 10 countries found that 56% believe humanity is doomed. “Most people who are polled think that mental health issues are something to do with either a chemical imbalance in the brain, some sort of neurological glitch, or genetic. That model is completely outdated,” says Hertzog Young. “There are so many demonstrable links between social, ideological, ecological and material realities outside the brain that have a far greater impact on mental health. Climate change is throwing so much pain, trauma, stress, angst and cultural toxicity at us. It can breed distrust, apathy and nihilism and it can also breed deep fear. Even for people who are experiencing the climate crisis at a distance, through the lens of the media, there’s a medically recognised causal pathway to depression, anxiety and PTSD.”

People living in places “taking the direct hits of climate change” face even bigger mental health impacts, Hertzog Young argues. Global heating could lead to up to 40,000 additional deaths from suicide in the US and Mexico by 2050, according to one study. Another found that direct exposure to wildfires significantly increases the risk of “severe” mental illness including PTSD and depression. The World Health Organization found that 24% of people affected by disasters will develop clinically significant post-traumatic stress syndrome in the first six months afterwards. “The climate system is unravelling and it’s visiting a mental unravelling on all of us,” says Herzog Young.

That’s a grim diagnosis, but two-thirds of Spinning Out focuses on the cure. Put simply, Hertzog Young has found the best balm for eco-anxiety is not to “rush at problems” as his younger self did, but to take action alongside others in more careful, mutually supportive ways. “Connecting meaningfully with other people is liberatory,” he says. “I find most comfort and joy and belonging in action and healing and recovery, with people who feel similarly dislocated from the dominant culture. That’s the only way to build real utopias.”

…so…look…I get that this little internet backwater of ours is the very definition of a small pond…so it seems absurd to talk about it as though it’s an example of some grandiloquent project rife with intentional insight into the human condition…let alone some sort of proto-utopia…but…not for the first time…I’d like to thank the lot of you for the not-even-a-little-bit-exaggerated part where the odds heavily favor even the mostly-to-entirely lurking members of this particular post-kinja lifeboat having managed to perform a feat I once found a handy by-product of that flawed ecosystem…namely to help me maintain so much as a vestigial grip on sanity in the face of what daily seems to be a world that’s mostly lost it

“Nobody has the blueprint for how to do activism or for what society should look like,” he says. “What seems to be happening today is lots of different groups are experimenting with different ways of looking after each other and thriving together within a climate crisis that’s fundamentally changing civilisation. It sounds ridiculous, but we have to be playful and creative, in the same way that kids play with random bricks to learn how to use their hands. We don’t have the answers because we’ve been stuck in a system that has held us back from imagining alternatives, let alone playing them out.”
[…]
How does he feel about the climate crisis now? “I think we’re fine actually,” he jokes, deadpan. He apologises for struggling to provide his characteristically eloquent “pontification” on the subject because he is in such physical pain, but still conjures up a compelling answer. “I’m terrified,” he says, “but I’m also palpably aware of how it could give us the opportunity to fundamentally change civilisation in wonderful ways.”

www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/23/the-climate-is-visiting-a-mental-unravelling-on-all-of-us-charlie-hertzog-young-on-the-dangers-of-activism-and-staying-sane-on-a-dying-planet

…so…don’t take this wrong way…but…I might go back to bed…it’s all getting a bit theatrical for me

Rulers and politicians may have to be good actors. Nero was perhaps right about that. But all those colourful ancient anecdotes expose one particular nightmare, which is as relevant to us as to the Romans: that citizens may discover that their rulers are nothing more than actors, and that you can’t believe a word they say.

‘We’re not the first generation to wonder how genuine our leaders are’: Mary Beard on politicians as performers [Guardian]

No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
[…]
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

https://good-death.english.cam.ac.uk/to-die-to-sleep-to-sleep-perchance-to-dream-ay-theres-the-rub/

…maybe camus had the right of it with that whole grueling existentialist business of starting each sisyphean day by first coming up with a good reason not to end it all…but…the lady has a point about those romans…so…that we’re all still here maybe says a lot…same as it ever was?

Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.

from The Meditations of Marcus Aureilus

…ave, folks…morituri te salutant?

[…the tunes might take me a minute…but I expect I’ll get there eventually…there’s still coffee in the building…& hope springs eternal]