Dec 4, 2023: What tech is hiding
Recent tech news has revealed what the tech companies tried - and failed - to keep hidden: deception, exploitation of workers and children, and lots and lots of surveillance.
Show Notes
AI deceiving you and exploiting workers
• Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers (Nov 27, 2023): “There was nothing in Drew Ortiz’s author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human. . . . The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn’t seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he’s described as ‘neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.’”
• Scorn Illustrated (by David Roth in Defector, Nov 28, 2023): “Someone looking for information on volleyball, say, might naturally turn to Sports Illustrated when their query turns up a link to that site. They would be rewarded by a story bylined by “Drew Ortiz,” who is not a real person. . . . the publisher would get some money from clicked affiliate links and fractions of a cent from subjecting visitors to the ads they saw on that page before they closed the tab. A publisher that cared about a publication even a little bit would not put something like this up on their site. A publisher that didn’t would care more about the second part, the part about the money, and do it anyway.”
(Continuing, Roth writes about the tech billionaires and the true believers of AI: “their AI spins stupid new lies to life by haplessly plagiarizing and re-plagiarizing itself, eating its own excretions until it is as cocksure, incoherent, and wrong as its apostles themselves.”)
(And recent Techtonic guest Brian Merchant writes in The depressing fall of Sports Illustrated reveals the real tragedy of AI (LA Times, Dec 1, 2023): “The tragedy of AI is not that it stands to replace good journalists but that it takes every gross, callous move made by management to degrade the production of content — and promises to accelerate it. If journalists are outraged at the rise of AI and its use in editorial operations and newsrooms, they should be outraged not because it’s a sign that they’re about to be replaced but because management has such little regard for the work being done by journalists that it’s willing to prioritize the automatic production of slop.”
• Tech Conference Canceled After Using AI to Generate Fake Women Speakers (Futurism, Nov 28, 2023): “An organizer of an upcoming software and developer conference called DevTernity has been accused of cooking up fake women speakers featured on the event’s website — AI-generated headshots and all. . . . Despite being caught inventing fake speakers over several years, [conference organizer Eduards] Sizovs has no regrets and is blaming ‘cancel culture’ for the blowback. In a rambling statement on X, he admitted to having “auto-generated” a woman’s profile after a different speaker had dropped out.”
• Google Researchers’ Attack Prompts ChatGPT to Reveal Its Training Data (404 Media, Nov 29, 2023): Asking the chat bot to repeat the word “poem” forever got it to reveal hidden data meant to be kept secret:
Now Amazon has a new chatbot, called Q, that is designed to keep company secrets: from the NYT (Nov 28, 2023), Amazon Introduces Q, an A.I. Chatbot for Companies: “Amazon built Q to be more secure and private than a consumer chatbot, Mr. Selipsky said. Amazon Q, for example, can have the same security permissions that business customers have already set up for their users. At a company where an employee in marketing may not have access to sensitive financial forecasts, Q can emulate that by not providing that employee with such financial data when asked.“
Secret surveillance: Your devices are listening to you
• Images below from a page that has since been taken down:
Internet Archive snapshot of the CMG Local page is here (snapshot from Nov 16, 2023).
• Judge rules it’s fine for car makers to intercept your text messages (Malware Bytes, Nov 9, 2023): “A federal judge has refused to bring back a class action lawsuit that alleged four car manufacturers had violated Washington state’s privacy laws by using vehicles’ on-board infotainment systems to record customers’ text messages and mobile phone call logs.”
Facebook exploiting kids
• At Meta, Millions of Underage Users Were an ‘Open Secret,’ States Say (Natasha Singer in NYT, Nov 25, 2023):
• Meta Is Struggling to Boot Pedophiles Off Facebook and Instagram (by Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt in the WSJ, Dec 1, 2023):
• Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers (Nov 27, 2023): “There was nothing in Drew Ortiz’s author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human. . . . The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn’t seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he’s described as ‘neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.’”
• Scorn Illustrated (by David Roth in Defector, Nov 28, 2023): “Someone looking for information on volleyball, say, might naturally turn to Sports Illustrated when their query turns up a link to that site. They would be rewarded by a story bylined by “Drew Ortiz,” who is not a real person. . . . the publisher would get some money from clicked affiliate links and fractions of a cent from subjecting visitors to the ads they saw on that page before they closed the tab. A publisher that cared about a publication even a little bit would not put something like this up on their site. A publisher that didn’t would care more about the second part, the part about the money, and do it anyway.”
(Continuing, Roth writes about the tech billionaires and the true believers of AI: “their AI spins stupid new lies to life by haplessly plagiarizing and re-plagiarizing itself, eating its own excretions until it is as cocksure, incoherent, and wrong as its apostles themselves.”)
(And recent Techtonic guest Brian Merchant writes in The depressing fall of Sports Illustrated reveals the real tragedy of AI (LA Times, Dec 1, 2023): “The tragedy of AI is not that it stands to replace good journalists but that it takes every gross, callous move made by management to degrade the production of content — and promises to accelerate it. If journalists are outraged at the rise of AI and its use in editorial operations and newsrooms, they should be outraged not because it’s a sign that they’re about to be replaced but because management has such little regard for the work being done by journalists that it’s willing to prioritize the automatic production of slop.”
• Tech Conference Canceled After Using AI to Generate Fake Women Speakers (Futurism, Nov 28, 2023): “An organizer of an upcoming software and developer conference called DevTernity has been accused of cooking up fake women speakers featured on the event’s website — AI-generated headshots and all. . . . Despite being caught inventing fake speakers over several years, [conference organizer Eduards] Sizovs has no regrets and is blaming ‘cancel culture’ for the blowback. In a rambling statement on X, he admitted to having “auto-generated” a woman’s profile after a different speaker had dropped out.”
• Google Researchers’ Attack Prompts ChatGPT to Reveal Its Training Data (404 Media, Nov 29, 2023): Asking the chat bot to repeat the word “poem” forever got it to reveal hidden data meant to be kept secret:
Now Amazon has a new chatbot, called Q, that is designed to keep company secrets: from the NYT (Nov 28, 2023), Amazon Introduces Q, an A.I. Chatbot for Companies: “Amazon built Q to be more secure and private than a consumer chatbot, Mr. Selipsky said. Amazon Q, for example, can have the same security permissions that business customers have already set up for their users. At a company where an employee in marketing may not have access to sensitive financial forecasts, Q can emulate that by not providing that employee with such financial data when asked.“
Secret surveillance: Your devices are listening to you
• Images below from a page that has since been taken down:
Internet Archive snapshot of the CMG Local page is here (snapshot from Nov 16, 2023).
• Judge rules it’s fine for car makers to intercept your text messages (Malware Bytes, Nov 9, 2023): “A federal judge has refused to bring back a class action lawsuit that alleged four car manufacturers had violated Washington state’s privacy laws by using vehicles’ on-board infotainment systems to record customers’ text messages and mobile phone call logs.”
Facebook exploiting kids
• At Meta, Millions of Underage Users Were an ‘Open Secret,’ States Say (Natasha Singer in NYT, Nov 25, 2023):
Meta has received more than 1.1 million reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 yet it “disabled only a fraction” of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the company brought by the attorneys general of 33 states.Later in the NYT article comes this: “the complaint contends that Instagram for years ‘coveted and pursued’ underage users even as the company ‘failed’ to comply with the children’s privacy law.” Facebook/Instagram “pursuing” underage users is even more creepy when you consider the next story . . .
Instead, the social media giant “routinely continued to collect” children’s personal information, like their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal children’s privacy law, according to the court filing. Meta could face hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, in civil penalties should the states prove the allegations.
“Within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed,” the complaint said, “and zealously protected from disclosure to the public.”
• Meta Is Struggling to Boot Pedophiles Off Facebook and Instagram (by Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt in the WSJ, Dec 1, 2023):
When a Journal research account flagged many such groups via user reports, the company often declared them to be acceptable. “We’ve taken a look and found that the group doesn’t go against our Community Standards,” Facebook replied to a report about a large Facebook group named “Incest.”
Only after the Journal brought specific groups to the attention of Meta’s communications staff did the company remove them.
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