Had to happen:


Microsoft, OpenAI sued for $3B after allegedly trampling privacy with ChatGPT
wrote:

Where did they get the idea this bot was potentially spitting out personal info?...

... AI products based on ChatGPT collected and divulged their personal information without adequate notice or consent...

... "Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft," the complaint says. "They systematically scraped 300 billion words from the internet, 'books, articles, websites and posts – including personal information obtained without consent.' OpenAI did so in secret, and without registering as a data broker as it was required to do under applicable law."

Through their AI products, its claimed, the two companies "collect, store, track, share, and disclose" the personal information of millions of people, including product details, account information, names, contact details, login credentials, emails, payment information, transaction records, browser data, social media information, chat logs, usage data, analytics, cookies, searches, and other online activity...

Very much so... What private and personal data has been used to train up the AI?...

Considering the companies concerned... Really? Only openly publicly consented information has been used?

If so... Why isn't every ChatGPT answer about cats?[*]


This is quite The Biggie in all respects...

IT really is what we allow it to be...
Martin

*: How many cat videos are there on YouTube? Worse still, how many inane comments about them??

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

did they have a robots file?

Ok... So... Count me pleasantly surprised on this occasion...


The scenario is that I made an online order for a number of parts...

The parcel duly arrived and... One of the parts was not there!

Chasing up online and... Mmm... They have the "Customer Services" option a little hidden...

Suitably girded for hassle, I clicked onwards.

A few clicks to identify the missing part and there was the option given for a call centre to call me, or to use a ChatBot!?...

Ok... ... ... Let's try the ChatBot to see how well the ELIZA/Expert-System programming systems are nowadays...?

Ok... So that was overly 'friendly' chatty but the system soon drilled down to the "what's not happened" to uncover that... They were out of stock for that part!

Option for refund for that part... Ok so that was the easiest option.


So, if we do get the refund through, full marks for the ChatBot system.

Still a good few demerits for inaccurate stock keeping and not admitting to that upfront! (is there a profitable hope that most customers won't chase up a singular item? Very profitably so for the higher value items missed amongst the bigger orders??...)


Hey ho... I guess good enough for our modern day sloppy cut-throat business practices. And so far still faster than driving out miles for an over-the-counter 'experience'.

Good luck!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

... Ok... ... ... Let's try the ChatBot to see how well the ELIZA/Expert-System programming systems are nowadays...?...

Ouch!

Google's Bard 'Chatbot' may well be scarily biased and 'dumbed-down' with this revelation:

Daily Mail (newspaper) prepares for legal battle with Google over AI copyright
wrote:

Tech giant accused of targeting newspaper because it uses bullet points in articles...

And then there's these other recent examples in the news:

ChatGPT owner in probe over risks around false answers
wrote:

US regulators are probing artificial intelligence company OpenAI over the risks to consumers from ChatGPT generating [relating] false information...

‘It was as if my father were actually texting me’: grief in the age of AI
wrote:

People are turning to chatbot impersonations of lost loved ones to help them grieve. Will AI help us live after we’re dead?...

... To prevent people from being recreated with technology against their wishes, Bassett presents the idea of a digital do-not-reanimate (DDNR) order – inspired by the physical do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order, which could be part of a person’s will...

... some element of digital afterlife may prove impossible to avoid, whatever our wishes, in part because the development of many AI products has outpaced the ethical questions that surround them. “For most of us who live in the digital societies of the west, technology is ensuring we will all have a digital afterlife,” says Bassett. Even if our conversations are not being fed into a chatbot, our online activity is likely to remain online for others to see for years to come...

... And people are very fond of, almost desperate to, "Anthropomorphize" almost everything and anything...

Note ELIZA from almost the dawn of computing:

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966...
wrote:

... ELIZA simulated conversation by using a pattern matching and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no representation that could be considered really understanding...

Lay [people's anthropomorphic] responses to ELIZA were disturbing to Weizenbaum and motivated him to write his book Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, in which he explains the limits of computers, as he wants to make clear his opinion that the anthropomorphic views of computers are just a reduction of human beings or any life form for that matter. In the independent documentary film Plug & Pray (2010) Weizenbaum said that only people who misunderstood ELIZA [mimicry of human-like responses] called it a sensation...

Why People Demanded Privacy to Confide in the World’s First Chatbot
wrote:

In 1966, the Eliza program couldn’t say much—but it was enough...

... He named the program Eliza after Eliza Doolittle, the working-class hero of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion who learns how to talk with an upper-class accent...

... To encourage ongoing dialogue, Weizenbaum designed Eliza to simulate the type of conversational style used by a Rogerian psychoanalyst. The program would take something the user said and reflect it back with a question ... Weizenbaum chose this mode of dialogue for Eliza because it gave the impression that the computer understood what was being said without having to offer anything new to the conversation. It created the illusion of comprehension and engagement in a mere 200 lines of code...

... He noticed, with some concern, that during their brief interactions with Eliza, many users began forming emotional attachments to the algorithm. They would open up to the machine and confess problems they were facing in their lives and relationships. Even more surprising was that this sense of intimacy persisted even after Weizenbaum described how the machine worked and explained that it didn’t really understand anything that was being said. Weizenbaum was most troubled when his secretary, who had watched him build the program from scratch over many months, insisted that he leave the room so she could talk to Eliza in private...

... The simulation of intelligence, rather than intelligence itself, was enough to fool people. Weizenbaum called this the Eliza effect, and believed it was a type of “delusional thinking” that humanity would collectively suffer from in the digital age...

... And try an early Eliza for yourself!

ELIZA: a very basic Rogerian psychotherapist chatbot


Enjoy!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Scarily too true and all too real?...


Chatbot Honeypot: How AI Companions Could Weaken National Security
wrote:

... “So what do you do?” asked my AI chatbot companion...

... What company was behind the sleek interface, in what country was it based, and who owned it? In the absence of such vetting, even a seemingly benign question about employment should raise an eyebrow. Particularly if a user’s answer comes anything close to, “I work for the government.”

The Emotional Chatbots Are Here to Probe Our Feelings
wrote:

Software developer Eugenia Kuyda is releasing the code to her Replika chatbot, which can inject emotion into conversations...

Do you know who/what you talk to?...

Keep searchin'!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

More of those "AI" consequences:


If you're going to train AI on our books, at least pay us, authors tell Big Tech
wrote:

More than 8,000 writers have signed an open letter penned by the US Authors Guild urging leaders from six top AI companies to obtain consent and compensate them for training models on their copyrighted work.

Large language models are trained on large amounts of text scraped from...

At least well written books give a better corpus than the gutter press and the unwashed internet... But...?


Do you know who/what you talk to?...

Keep searchin'!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

At least well written books give a better corpus than the gutter press and the unwashed internet... But...?
Do you know who/what you talk to?...

Faux, OAN, Rump, MTG, OAC, BLM, ACLU ...

---

"AI" is very much in the news at the moment:


Uncharted territory: do AI girlfriend apps promote unhealthy expectations for human relationships?
wrote:

Chatbots such as Eva AI are getting better at mimicking human interaction but some fear they feed into unhealthy beliefs...

... “Connect with a virtual AI partner who listens, responds, and appreciates you.”...

... But the apps are uncharted territory for humanity, and some are concerned they might teach poor behaviour in users and create unrealistic expectations for human relationships.

When you sign up for the Eva AI app, it prompts you to create the “perfect partner”...

... “Creating a perfect partner that you control and meets your every need is really frightening,” said Tara Hunter, the acting CEO for Full Stop Australia, which supports victims of domestic or family violence. “Given what we know already that the drivers of gender-based violence are those ingrained cultural beliefs..."...

... Having a relationship with an AI whose functions are set at the whim of a company also has its drawbacks...

... a move which many of the company’s users found akin to gutting the Rep’s personality. Users on the subreddit compared the change to the grief felt at the death of a friend. The moderator on the subreddit noted users were feeling “anger, grief, anxiety, despair, depression, [and] sadness”...

... “Is it acceptable for a company to suddenly change such a product, causing the friendship, love or support to evaporate? ... like the real thing: something that could break your heart at anytime?”...

... Eva AI’s head of brand, Karina Saifulina, told Guardian Australia the company had full-time psychologists to help with the mental health of users. “Together with psychologists, we control the data that is used for dialogue with AI,”...

... the proliferation of AI bot apps replicating human relationships is “just the beginning of a seismic shift in human-computer interactions that will require us to re-examine what it means to have a relationship with someone”...

The Observer view on how Hollywood’s strikes show that we can’t trust corporations with AI
wrote:

The past 1,000 years show the rewards of technological progress go to those who own and control it, not society...

... The continuing dispute between the Hollywood studios and screenwriters’ and actors’ unions perfectly exemplifies the extent of the challenges posed by AI ... the writers also fear their role will be reduced simply to rewriting AI-generated scripts; and actors are concerned that detailed digital scanning enabled by new movie contracts will allow studios to create persuasive deepfakes of them that studios will be able to own and use “for the rest of eternity, in any project they want, with no consent and no compensation”...

... the Biden administration recently published a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights”, which looks impressive but is essentially just a list of aspirations that some of the big tech companies claim to share.

It’s a start – provided governments don’t forget that leaving the implementation of powerful new technologies solely to corporations is always a bad idea.

Thoughtful stuff...

Keep searchin'!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Can full AI pleasure bots not already be on the drawing board?

SOP model release: I allow use of my image, voice with any accompanying text or elements in any media or manner by any means now existing of hereafter invented, which may subject me to shame, scandal, reproach or indignity.

So your face and voice on a pleasure bot.

Lawyers, they are what we allow.

Sometimes the "big tech" companies get things right, sometimes they get it wrong....

https://news.sky.com/story/legal-bills-push-up-costs-at-meta-but-revenues-and-user-numbers-up-12928143

But the lawyers always win.

Perhaps a bit of sanity by doing what is right rather than what is possible would be a better way of doing business.

---

Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Bare faced thieves

We understand that you're wondering about the Payment reserve that was recently placed on your account.
As part of our efforts to keep Etsy secure, Etsy Support isn't able to give you the specific reason a reserve was placed on your account.

What a load of B/S.
It seems anything goes in Yankee Doodle Dandy land.

What a load of B/S.
It seems anything goes in Yankee Doodle Dandy land.

Sounds like more religious conservative bank regulations assuming everything is an immoral sale. Or some scammer hit them hard.

What a load of B/S.
It seems anything goes in Yankee Doodle Dandy land.

Sounds like more religious conservative bank regulations assuming everything is an immoral sale. Or some scammer hit them hard.

... Or...

Gaming their T&Cs to give themselves a free ride with holding onto 'extra' working capital...?


All a greedy game?

Keep searchin'...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

"AI" is very much in the news at the moment...

... With unexpected 'emergent' properties?...

LLMs appear to reason by analogy, a cornerstone of human thinking
wrote:

Large language models such as OpenAI's GPT-3 can display the ability to solve complex reasoning tasks which humans crack using analogies...

"... We found that GPT-3 appears to display an emergent ability to reason by analogy, matching or surpassing human performance across a wide range of text-based problem types,” their paper, published in Nature Human Behaviour...

... The question remains over how the statistical model does it. Webb and his colleagues argue one possibility is that, the sheer size and diversity of GPT-3’s training data, has forced it “to develop mechanisms similar to those thought to underlie human analogical reasoning — despite not being explicitly trained to do so.”...

"... we must also entertain the possibility that this type of machine intelligence is fundamentally different from the human variety,”...

More of the "Eliza-effect"?...

Or is there some really spooky 'intelligence' emerging? Or at least being mimicked?


Here's a good summary of how all the numbers work:

A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work
wrote:

Want to really understand large language models? Here’s a gentle primer...

Deduce for yourself!


Keep searchin',
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

AI very much is in the news!

News Corp using AI to produce 3,000 Australian local news stories a week
wrote:

... a team of four staff use the technology to generate thousands of local stories each week on weather, fuel prices and traffic conditions...

... There is no disclosure on the page that the reports are compiled using AI...

... The titles are staffed by a single journalist and are typically in regions with a population of 15,000 or more. “If that single journalist can generate seven new subscriptions a week, then their salary is covered,”...

Enjoy your automated fluff with that one snippet of detail in the sea of waffle and advertising and clickbait distractions?

Read all around it! News as you never knew it! Go for IT??

Whatever happened to the honest journalism of what, where, why?...


Keep searchin'!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

AI for a giggle:

A bot walks into a bar … Edinburgh fringe performers use AI...
wrote:

All aspects of artificial intelligence will get the comic treatment at this summer’s festival...

... a computer-generated comic called AI Jesus...

... Artificial Intelligence Improvisation ... actors and bots responding to audience prompts as chatbots compete with humans to the best punchline...

... “We do not use humans to showcase AI; instead we use AI, demonstrating its obvious limitations, to showcase human creativity, ingenuity and support on the stage,”...

... potential pitfalls of AI dependency ... It is I...

... “stay to impress future robot overlords”...

... Palatable Gay Robot ... “edgy amalgamation of standup and theatre”...

... the ideal robot woman will be giving him a run for his money ... “Artificially intelligent. Genuinely stupid..."

... “Edinburgh is the home of artificial intelligence in Europe and has constantly led from those early days,” Drew Hemment, professor in data arts and society at the same university, has said.

All starting 4th August for a fun fest of humans poking fun at cyber fun!

Enjoy!!
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Yet, behind the scenes, there is a great ever increasing cost:


Turns out there’s another problem with AI – its environmental toll
wrote:

AI uses huge amounts of electricity and water to work, and the problem is only going to get worse – what can be done?

... one of a number of researchers trying – with difficulty – to quantify AI’s environmental impact. It’s difficult for a number of reasons, among them that the companies behind the most popular tools, as well as the companies selling the chips that power them, aren’t very willing to share details of how much energy their systems use.

There’s also an intangibility to AI that stymies proper accounting of its environmental footprint...

... Training GPT-3 used by 3.5million litres of [cooling] water through datacentre usage, according to one academic study, and that’s provided it used more efficient US datacentres. If it was trained on Microsoft’s datacentres in Asia, the water usage balloons to closer to 5million litres.

Prior to the integration of GPT-4 into ChatGPT, researchers estimated that the generative AI chatbot would use up 500ml of water – a standard-sized water bottle – [for] every 20 questions and corresponding answers. And ChatGPT was only likely to get thirstier with the release of GPT-4...

... estimated that training of GPT-3, a predecessor of ChatGPT, consumed 1,287 MWh, and led to emissions of more than 550 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, similar to flying between New York and San Francisco on a return journey 550 times.

Reporting suggests GPT-4 is trained on around 570 times more parameters than GPT-3. That doesn’t mean it uses 570 times more energy, of course – things get more efficient – but it does suggest that things are getting more energy intensive, not less...

Too hot to handle?...

Keep searchin',
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Here We Go Again: AI Developers Are Buying Gaming GPUs in Bulk
It's like 2020 all over again, minus the crypto.

We all remember the great GPU shortage, which officially ended around late 2022 when cryptocurrency crashed and the pandemic began to ease up. As we type this, you can go online and buy pretty much any GPU your heart desires, save for an RTX 4090 Founders Edition. An AI boom is happening in the GPU world, but these systems use expensive data center cards, so it was assumed gaming cards were safe from bots. However, AI GPUs are now impossible to buy, so some people are turning to gaming cards instead. As proof of this development, a software engineer has revealed a bulk purchase of AMD Radeon cards for AI training. Even worse, they plan on buying a metric crapton more GPUs soon.

The revelation of a sizable GPU purchase appeared on the social network formerly known as Twitter this week by George Hotz, whose profile says they are the president of an AI company. The post says AMD is a real pleasure to work with when purchasing GPUs in bulk. The photo shows a Radeon RX 7900 XTX standing proudly amongst several unopened boxes of GPUs. The tweet states the photo represents 7.38 PFLOPS, or petaFLOPS, of compute power, with plans to acquire enough cards to reach the exaFLOP scale.
Tweet

What a load of B/S.
It seems anything goes in Yankee Doodle Dandy land.

Sounds like more religious conservative bank regulations assuming everything is an immoral sale. Or some scammer hit them hard.

... Or...

Gaming their T&Cs to give themselves a free ride with holding onto 'extra' working capital...?

Likely they, er their bank, had a couple of reports of a few crafters selling something that could be corrupted into an adult toy. You have no idea how crazy bank regulators get over that. Just as crazy, if not more, than live video chat services.

The immoralists are very much in control of local state houses in a few places and what they see as bad becomes the national standard for bank transactions because of the money laundering regulations.

Cruel business first:

Moderation and peer pressure be damned to profit from wannabe extremists?...


Elon Musk says X will fund legal bills if users treated unfairly by bosses
wrote:

... Mr Musk is a self-described "free speech absolutist" and has been vocal in his criticisms of the platform's policies on moderating content prior to his takeover...

Without limit for that "X" factor of eXploitation in the eXtreme?...

All in the cybersphere...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)