AI, Algorithms, and Bias

[Libertas]

Of course.

[ap215]

One Algorithm issue i want to mention on Instagram they have these comment options where you can restrict it on your feed so when it says comments on this post have been limited that person can't comment on the feed they can only like the post but you can see comments from other users they chose to post on their feed i can understand they don't want online abuse or spam etc i just find that odd.

[carmenjonze]

Then things like Dobbs happens. Suddenly, the NYT purports to take a problem that now affects everyone, seriously. :problem:

In a Post-Roe World, the Future of Digital Privacy Looks Even Grimmer - NYT

Facebook turned over chat messages between mother and daughter now charged over abortion - NBC News

The company was served with a warrant for the messages, which experts worry could become common.

Facebook turned over the chats of a mother and her daughter to Nebraska police after they were served with a warrant as part of an investigation into an illegal abortion, court documents show.

The investigation, which was launched in April before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, is one of the few known instances of Facebook’s turning over information to help law enforcement officials pursue an abortion case — but it is also an example of a scenario that abortion rights experts have warned will be more common as all abortions becomes illegal in many states.

Madison County prosecutors say Jessica Burgess, 41, acquired and gave abortion pills to her daughter, Celeste, who was 17 at the time, and then helped her bury and then rebury the fetus. The Norfolk Daily News first reported the case. The two were charged last month and have pleaded not guilty. A lawyer for the two women didn’t respond to a request for comment.

According to a sworn affidavit from Detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk Police Investigations Unit, police started with a tip from a woman who described herself as a friend of Celeste’s who said she saw her take the first pill in April.

Under a Nebraska law enacted before Roe was overturned, abortion is illegal 20 weeks after an egg is fertilized. According to McBride’s affidavit, Burgess had a miscarriage when she was around 23 weeks pregnant, soon after having taken abortion pills.

McBride then applied for and got a warrant in June for access into the digital lives of the mother and her daughter, seizing six smartphones and seven laptops and compelling Facebook to turn over chats between them.

The alleged chats, published in court documents seen by NBC News, show a user named Jessica telling a user named Celeste about “What i ordered last month” and instructing her to take two pills 24 hours apart.

Norfolk police didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Facebook stores most user information in plaintext on its servers, meaning the company can access it if it is compelled to do so with a warrant. The company routinely complies with law enforcement requests.

Where’s the parent’s rights crowd, now?

Oh yes, they’re fuming over the not-raid of the FBI at Trash-A-Lago.

[ProfX]

The fact that Facebook so easily turned over these messages should remind folks of one key point - nothing on Facebook is private (ultimately) even what you think is. Be careful what you discuss there, especially obviously in states like Neb.

But the other thing that bothers me about this case ... RU-486 is an FDA approved drug and legal in all 50 states. Therefore, there was nothing illegal in getting information about it, providing it to the daughter, and even in obtaining it.

[carmenjonze]

Timnit Gebru
@timnitGebru

"the “accent translation” company — founded by three former Stanford students, Maxim Serebryakov, Shawn Zhang and Andrés Pérez Soderi — snagged a $32 million Series A funding round in June 2022, which they claim is the largest ever for a speech technology service."


The education at these institutions is deeply flawed, the whole of the Silicon Valley investment and gargantuan tech co.s come from these schools, and THEN they ALSO capture the conversation about AI harms, safety etc and get the PR and $$$ for that smh.

https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/ ... 7424965632

[ZoWie]

Yup. Even just turning on CNBC will confirm that in a hurry. These people inhabit a different planet than we do. We push ideas, they push metrics and parameters. They homogenize everything they touch, making it efficient but soul-less.

I saw Rear Window the other day. One interior most of the time, one big exterior probably built on a sound stage, good story from a razor-sharp script, and good old-school acting that carried it when combined with some Hitchcock dramatic devices to keep the plot moving. Stage drama opened up just enough to make it cinematic. Good use of POVs to get the audience into the characters. No extraterrestrials, comic universe superheroes, monsters, explosions, or CGI, and still entertaining. It makes one conscious of what has been lost.

[ap215]

‘Egregious Deficiencies,’ Bots, and Foreign Agents: The Biggest Allegations From the Twitter Whistleblower

Twitter’s former top security official has alleged that company executives endangered national security through “egregious deficiencies” in privacy and security and systematically misled users, members of its board, investors, and government officials about those vulnerabilities.

The former official, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, is a famous hacker and one of the nation’s top cybersecurity experts. He served as Twitter’s security lead from Nov. 2020 to Jan. 2022, when he was fired by CEO Parag Agrawal after Zatko began documenting what he says were repeated security violations, and as he worked with the company’s compliance officer on a formal investigation based on his claims. Zatko submitted his disclosures to U.S. regulatory agencies in July, invoking federal whistleblower protections, and they were shared with members of Congress.

https://time.com/6207996/twitter-whistl ... legations/

[ZoWie]

I wonder if Elon Musk got that placed to bolster his legal case. His argument is based on the allegation that he was misled on how many accounts (ie, prospective ad impressions) were bots or socks.

[carmenjonze]

The Ungodly Surveillance of Anti-Porn ‘Shameware’ Apps - Wired

Churches are using invasive phone-monitoring tech to discourage “sinful” behavior. Some software is seeing more than congregants realize.

Gracepoint is the kind of evangelical Southern Baptist church that’s compelled to publicly enumerate all of the ways it’s not a cult. “We’ll admit that we’re a bit crazy about the Great Commission and sharing the Gospel,” reads an FAQ page titled, “Is Gracepoint a Cult?” So when Grant Hao-Wei Lin came out to a Gracepoint church leader during their weekly one-on-one session, he was surprised to learn that he wasn’t going to be kicked out. According to his church leader, Hao-Wei Lin says, God still loved him in spite of his “struggle with same-sex attraction.”

Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar ecosystem of so-called accountability apps that are marketed to both churches and parents as tools to police online activity. For a monthly fee, some of these apps monitor everything their users see and do on their devices, even taking screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdropping on web traffic, WIRED found. The apps then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone—an “accountability partner,” in the apps’ parlance. When WIRED presented its findings to Google, however, the company determined that two of the top accountability apps—Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You—violate its policies.

The omnipotence of Covenant Eyes soon weighed heavily on Hao-Wei Lin, who has since left Gracepoint. Within a month of installing the app, he started receiving accusatory emails from his church leader referencing things he had viewed online. “Anything you need to tell me?” reads one email Hao-Wei Lin shared with WIRED. Attached was a report from Covenant Eyes that detailed every single piece of digital content Hao-Wei Lin had consumed the prior week. It was a trail of digital minutiae accumulated from nights spent aimlessly browsing the internet, things Hao-Wei Lin could barely remember having seen—and would have forgotten about had a member of his Church not confronted him. The church leader zeroed in on a single piece of content that Covenant Eyes had flagged as “Mature”: Hao-Wei Lin had searched “#Gay” on a website called Statigr.am, and the app had flagged it.

Gracepoint, which focuses on colleges, claims to “serve students” on more than 70 campuses across the United States. According to emails between a Covenant Eyes representative and a former Gracepoint church leader that WIRED reviewed, the company said that in 2012 as many as 450 Gracepoint Church members were signed up to be monitored through Covenant Eyes.

“I wouldn’t quite call it spyware,” says a former member of Gracepoint who was asked to use Covenant Eyes and spoke on the condition of anonymity, due to privacy concerns. “It’s more like ‘shameware,’ and it’s just another way the church controls you.”

Sounds a lot like test monitoring software colleges and U's impose on students.

[ProfX]

Artists say AI image generators are copying their style to make thousands of new images — and it's completely out of their control
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-imag ... es-2022-10

OpenAI, a company founded by Elon Musk, just made its DALL-E image generator open to the public.
Artists say they work for years on their portfolios and people can now make copycat images in seconds.
But some AI companies argue that the new artworks are unique and can be copyrighted.

Greg Rutkowski is an artist with a distinctive style: He's known for creating fantasy scenes of dragons and epic battles that fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons have used.

He said it used to be "really rare to see a similar style to mine on the internet."

Yet if you search for his name on Twitter, you'll see plenty of images in his exact style — that he didn't make.

Rutkowski has become one of the most popular names in AI art, despite never having used the technology himself.

People are creating thousands of artworks that look like his using programs called AI-image generators, which use artificial intelligence to create original artwork in minutes or even seconds after a user types in a few words as directions.

Rutkowski's name has been used to generate around 93,000 AI images on one image generator, Stable Diffusion — making him a far more popular search term than Picasso, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Vincent van Gogh in the program.

"I feel like something's happening that I can't control," Rutkowski, who is based in Poland, told Insider. "My name is being used a lot to generate AI images, along with the names of other working artists."

[snip][end]

I'm not against AI made art. I remember the argument Will Smith had with "Sonny" over his drawings.

It's cool that you can give it proper parameters and it will spit out art for you. That's fine, we used to call that artists working on commission for a patron, they all did it. Thing is, it can do it in a second.

The problem is it's being used as a rip off tool. It can spit out art in the style of an artist, and then the con men are passing it off as their work.

[ZoWie]

AI art and art made using computers are two different things. We haven't reconciled this issue yet. There's a similar problem with fractals, since they are basically the computed graphs of equations, but still offer plenty of room for creativity. The first Mandelbrots wowed everybody, but now one has to try a lot harder. It's not always clear where to set the bar.

At some point there will need to be standards on how much human intervention makes the difference between machine made art and the traditional notion of fine art which involves dexterity, command of materials, and visual insight on the part of a person. Keep in mind that machines have been applied to art making since at least the Industrial Revolution.

My major problem with entertainment right now is that the machines have by necessity taken over. It has made movie and TV making more like how cars are made, and less like people acting out scenes for photography. All the CGI-heavy short-deadline stuff on those rapidly proliferating streaming services looks like everything else. That's fine for 15 year olds who are seeing it for the first time, but otherwise, yawn.

[bird]

May I recommend “The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks”?

The questions are always how, what, when, where, who and why.

Who controls? Why are controls used and for what purpose.

This also applies to those Rothkopf calls the “Superclass”.

You and I are not invited.

[ZoWie]

Since the superclass is largely who sets art prices, there's something to this. There are the few big time artists who are anointed by the New York auction houses and get millions for well made but usually rather bland work, and everyone else, who missed their shot at the big time out of art school and now sell works to a few fans at prices that are garage sale level by comparison.

Of course, in the previous model, artists who ate well were usually making giant portraits of aristocrats. Old problem.

[ProfX]

AI art and art made using computers are two different things.

Granted. As I'm a fan of Douglas Engelbart, I am very much in favor of computers as augmentation machines, they help people facilitate and assist in the making of art, kind of like an apprentice.

In that post, I'm noting the problems in AI generated art. And the thing is, it's fine to make something "in the style of" the dead ... or the living. The problem arises in passing it off as the work of the living, when it isn't. There's homage, there's sampling, and then there's downright theft. Where we draw the lines is hard, I like sampled music as much as anybody else. Past a point, it's screwing the artist.

Rutkowski is pissed because there's stuff out there that says it's by him, and it was made by AI. Not "in the style of," just ripped off. Totally.

[ZoWie]

Rutkowski is justified in being pissed. It does seem as if the laws regarding art forgery need some updating. Passing AI off as works by a well known artist, even one working in CGI, machine video, Wacom tablet graphics, fractals, etc etc is forgery.

[Glennfs]

I love the person who claims to be on the left but spends their entire time on a message board scouring every single word written by anyone not a con so they can pick it apart and pretend to be doing it for fairness reasons.

Yes it is terrible when people don't all goose step the way you expect them to.

[gounion]

Yes it is terrible when people don't all goose step the way you expect them to.

MAGA are the only goose-steppers. Brownshirt wanna-bes.

[carmenjonze]

Yes it is terrible when people don't all goose step the way you expect them to.

You're the white nationalist goosestepper, you stupid confederate.

[ZoWie]

Actually, it's terrible when people continue to believe stupid ideas they get from rabid racist reactionaries on AM talk shows and social networks owned by robber barons.

If this were 1938, I suspect Glenn would be parroting Father Coughlin.

[Libertas]

You're the white nationalist goosestepper, you stupid confederate.

Con shows us yet again he will believe something that is not true, proven false, so said con can later justify the killings and unconstitutional imprisonments, etc.

[Glennfs]

You're the white nationalist goosestepper, you stupid confederate.

I am so thankful I had decent parents ones who raised me not to be a racist

[carmenjonze]

I am so thankful I had decent parents ones who raised me not to be a racist

My parents were Black Reagan Democrats.

White supremacists, OTOH, are not decent people and you/they never will be.

[carmenjonze]

Con shows us yet again he will believe something that is not true, proven false, so said con can later justify the killings and unconstitutional imprisonments, etc.

Authoritarianism rules their environment.

They wish to force us back into their totalitarian state with the whites-first rules. When they stink up the field of AI, this is what results.

[gounion]

I am so thankful I had decent parents ones who raised me not to be a racist

Did they raise you to call people like me racist?

[Drak]

I am so thankful I had decent parents ones who raised me not to be a racist

Your history of posts prove otherwise.