Quote:Google AI product lead Jack Krawczyk has expressed anti-white sentiments, which have resurfaced after Google’s Gemini AI chatbot generated politically correct but historically inaccurate images in response to user prompts.
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The New York Post reports that Google’s highly-touted AI chatbot Gemini has come under fire this week for producing ultra-woke and factually incorrect images when asked to generate pictures. Prompts provided to the chatbot yielded bizarre results like a female pope, black Vikings, and gender-swapped versions of famous paintings and photographs.
When asked by the Post to create an image of a pope, Gemini generated photos of a Southeast Asian woman and a black man dressed in papal vestments, despite the fact that all 266 popes in history have been white men.
Jack Krawczyk, the product lead on Google Gemini, apologized for the inaccurate images, stating: “We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately.”
Google released a full statement on the situation stating that the AI has “missed the mark here.”
However, it appears Krawczyk has exhibited bias against white people in posts on X, formerly Twitter.
In a long thread, Krawczyk, he claimed many of his black colleagues faced discrimination...
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Google has since announced it is pausing its Gemini AI image generator, stating the tool has created historical photos with “inaccuracies.”
“We’re already working to address recent issues with Gemini’s image generation feature. While we do this, we’re going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon,” Google said in a Thursday X/Twitter post.
Quote:CNBC reports that Nvidia, the leading maker of graphics processing units (GPUs), posted blowout fourth quarter earnings, handily beating analysts’ forecasts. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $5.16, far surpassing the $4.64 expected. Revenue hit $22.1 billion, crushing the estimate of $20.62 billion.
The standout performer was Nvidia’s data center segment, which provides GPUs for AI workloads. Data center revenue skyrocketed a whopping 409 percent year-over-year to $18.4 billion, accounting for over 80 percent of total sales. Nvidia has been the primary beneficiary as major technology companies engage in an AI chip arms race, with models developed on the company’s high-performance hardware.
According to the earnings release, demand was driven by cloud service providers, enterprise software companies, and various verticals including automotive, financial services and healthcare. Nvidia said over half of its data center revenue came from large cloud customers.
CEO Jensen Huang addressed concerns that growth could slow, stating that conditions remain excellent for continued expansion into 2025 and beyond. He cited strong appetite for Nvidia’s GPUs thanks to generative AI and accelerators increasingly replacing CPUs.
While supply of the newest Hopper-architecture chips is improving, CFO Colette Kress warned that next-gen products will likely face constraints as demand still eclipses supply. She said Nvidia’s upcoming B100 chip expected to launch later this year will be in short supply.
Quote:NBC News reports that widespread cell service outages impacted AT&T customers across the United States Thursday morning. The outages left thousands unable to make calls, access the internet, or reach 911 emergency services.
The issues began around 4:00 a.m. ET and surged just before 8:00 a.m., with over 71,000 reported outages, according to Downdetector. Most affected areas included major cities like Houston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. Verizon and T-Mobile also faced disruptions, though not as severe as AT&T.
“Some of our customers are experiencing wireless service interruptions this morning,” AT&T acknowledged in a statement. “We are working urgently to restore service to them. We encourage the use of Wi-Fi calling until service is restored.”
The outages meant some AT&T customers were briefly unable to contact 911 emergency services. The San Francisco Fire Department warned the public that “If you are an AT&T customer and cannot get through to 911, then please try calling from a landline. If that is not an option then please try to get ahold of a friend or family member who is a customer of a different carrier and ask them to call 911 on your behalf.” Police departments in Chicago, Virginia, and North Carolina issued similar alerts.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said that city is gathering information on the outage in an attempt to resole the issue. “Atlanta’s e-911 is able to receive inbound and make outbound calls. We have received calls from AT&T customers that their cellular phones are in SOS mode,” Dickens said.
Quote:Mercedes-Benz has backtracked on their plan to transition to selling only electric vehicles after 2030, with company officials saying that “market conditions” have not allowed that to happen.
It was just three years ago when the German luxury vehicle manufacturer announced that it would go “all-electric,” the Verge reported at the time.
The company said it would commit $47 billion to electrifying its fleet, with CEO and board chair Ola Källenius saying, “We are convinced, we can do it with strong profitability, and we believe that focus on electrical is the right way to build a successful future and to enhance the value of Mercedes Benz.”
Those plans were scrapped this week in the company’s fourth quarter earnings statement:
“Customers and market conditions will set the pace of the transformation. The company plans to be in a position to cater to different customer needs, whether it’s an all-electric drivetrain or an electrified combustion engine, until well into the 2030s.”
The automobile giant went on to state that its electric vehicle sales are expected to only reach a maximum of 50 percent of the overall sales in the second half of this decade.
The business model change comes after multiple highly-publicized instances of Mercedes-Benz electric vehicles catching on fire and causing massive damage.
An EQB model caught ablaze while being charged in a car showroom in Malaysia on New Year’s Eve 2023, with video footage showing the terrifying moment a portion of the building went up in flames.
The fire destroyed “about 90 percent of the car, five percent of the showroom building structure, and 20 percent of the electric vehicle charging bay” the local fire and rescue operation commander told the Star.
Quote:[CNBC’s Closing Bell: Overtime] Co-host Morgan Brennan asked, “Stellantis’ CEO saying low-cost Chinese EVs are, going to be an ‘existential problem’, just a few days ago. We know Europe’s grappling with this problem. In the U.S., we already have a tariff on Chinese EV imports. Do more actions need to be taken?”
Raimondo responded, “Probably, yes. I share the concern. By the way, I have national security concerns about electric vehicles. An electric vehicle has sensors and semiconductors. They know who’s driving it, where they’re driving, huge amounts of data. Chinese EVs on our road, is that data going back to Beijing in ways that undermine our national security? We’re looking hard at that. Additionally, what you say, listen, I have always maintained Americans can compete if there’s a level playing field. And you have a situation where China is distorting the market dynamics due to subsidies and low costs of capital. And so, I know the president is deeply concerned about both of these issues, and the administration is being thoughtful. We want to get it right, but have our eye, certainly, on the ball of thinking about what can we do, what must we do to protect Americans.”
Quote:China’s BYD is the world’s biggest electric vehicle (EV) maker by number of cars sold. According to a Nikkei report published on Feb. 14, a BYD subsidiary expressed “eagerness for a plant” in Mexico.
BYD is looking at the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León for a possible site, close to the Texas border and a straight shot to San Antonio via Highway 35.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 16 that sources claim that BYD would “consider” exporting to the United States from its planned factory in Mexico. That’s an understatement. BYD can barely contain itself over the prospect of selling in the United States, the second-largest vehicle market in the world after China itself.
There are serious national security implications to admitting into the United States billions of dollars worth of cheap Chinese cars. They could further harm the U.S. auto industry, thus hurting the U.S. economy, tax revenues, and the military. Simultaneously, expanded BYD sales would enhance China’s economy and tax revenues, therefore funding the United States’ greatest military adversary.
In October 2023, Europe initiated a probe into China’s EV subsidies. The United States could do the same in the near future. Either probe could result in increased restrictions on China’s exports. But Washington and Brussels are reacting in slow motion based on liberal economic attitudes to trade with China that never should have continued after its 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
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If the embattled U.S. industry is again hit by cheap imports—most imminently BYD EVs that sell for as low as $11,000 in China—the results could be disastrous. As Elon Musk said in January, without trade barriers against Chinese cars, they will “pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.”
Mexican labor costs far less than U.S. labor, which faces unsustainable risks from a wave of United Automobile Workers of America (UAW) strikes last year. Higher wages for UAW workers are great for the very few who win them. But the strikes hurt the unemployed, bogged down free labor markets, and chilled investment in the United States because of increased costs to business, including the risk of debilitating strikes. Because of eroding conditions for manufacturing in the United States, companies are fleeing to Mexico, Vietnam, and India, where labor unions pose less of a problem.
Quote:Pharmacies across the country are facing delays in the wake of a cyberattack against the healthcare tech giant Change Healthcare, a leading prescription processor, which said it was “experiencing a network interruption related to a cyber security issue” on Wednesday.
“Once we became aware of the outside threat, in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect our systems to prevent further impact,” Change Healthcare announced.
“At this time, we believe the issue is specific to Change Healthcare and all other systems across UnitedHealth Group are operational,” the tech company added. “The disruption is expected to last at least through the day.”
Change Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare technology companies in the United States that handles orders and patient payments throughout the country, did not disclose the specific nature of the cyberattack.
Pharmacies, meanwhile, have experienced outages due to the incident, according to a report by the Huron Daily Tribune.
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A medical group in McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas, meanwhile, said Wednesday, “We are experiencing a temporary pharmacy outage,” adding, “We understand the inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience as we work diligently to resolve the issue.”
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The Michigan-based Canadian Lakes Pharmacy also announced Wednesday that it “the issue that has been going yesterday and starting today that is affecting MOST pharmacies.”
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The issue is expected to last until Friday, but at the time of publishing, Change Healthcare has not yet provided a timeline for when it will return to its original service.
The CCP uses censorship as a tool to attain its monopoly on political legitimacy and control its citizens’ behaviors, according to the report.
However, much of its rigid control of the internet was built on American technology and expertise. According to the report, China historically “relied heavily on hardware component parts and software sourced from the United States to construct and operate its online censorship.”
One example, the report said, was that China allegedly used routers, firewalls, and antivirus products from U.S. companies like Cisco and Symantec in the early 2000s, which enabled the regime to carry out advanced censorship.
While the regime has been pushing for industrial self-reliance over recent years, the CCP’s “censorship apparatus is still reliant on U.S. imports, especially those used in emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning, and big data applications,” the researchers noted.
“Many of these AI-enabled ‘public opinion guidance’ tools rely on off-the-shelf components imported from the United States, such as general processing units (GPUs) and cloud computing infrastructure,” the report said. It cited a 2019 report suggesting that American tech giants such as Google and IBM may work with Chinese companies to contribute to the CCP’s censorship regime.
Some of the U.S. firms may inadvertently support the regime’s censorship apparatus, but in many cases, the report found, “foreign companies working in China deliberately conceal their connections to China’s security services which complicates due diligence to avoid contributing to the censorship apparatus.”
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To counter the regime’s censorship, the report, prepared by Exovera’s Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a Virginia-based think tank, provided a series of recommendations to U.S. policymakers, such as increasing cooperation with private companies and supporting “the development and spread of tools geared toward preventing common ‘information saturation’ techniques such as using botnets to hijack and algorithmically manipulate online conversations on sensitive topics.”
It suggested the United States issue a “public advisory list” of China-based companies that contributed to the CCP’s censorship, including their subsidiaries and shell companies. “Doing so will greatly assist due diligence by U.S.-based technology firms and will enable them to avoid inadvertently supporting China’s censorship regime.”
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:TechCrunch reports that Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, alleging the company has abandoned its founding mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity.
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco on Thursday, claims that OpenAI and its leaders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman convinced Musk to help found and fund the nonprofit in 2015. They promised OpenAI would counter competitive threats from major tech firms by making its technologies “freely available” to the public.
But after partnering with Microsoft, which has invested around $13 billion, OpenAI apparently shifted to a for-profit model focused on commercializing its research. Musk’s lawsuit alleges this “was a stark betrayal of the Founding Agreement.”
As evidence, it cites a statement from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that his company now has “all the IP rights and all the capability” even if OpenAI disappeared. The suit also points to OpenAI’s development of the powerful chatbot ChatGPT, which was launched late last year and sparked a fierce AI race.
Musk claims OpenAI and Microsoft have improperly licensed ChatGPT and the even more advanced GPT-4. Under the original OpenAI charter, AI capabilities were to remain dedicated to humanity rather than profits.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who left OpenAI’s board in 2018, is seeking injunctions to compel OpenAI back to its public-minded founding principles. He also requests accounting of his early donations to the nonprofit, which exceeded $44 million by late 2020.
Quote:Breitbart News previously reported that Google’s market value plunged by $90 billion amid controversies surrounding its new generative AI service Gemini. The ultra-woke AI became instantly famous for erasing white people from history, facing widespread mockery for not only its wildly inaccurate images, but also defending pedophilia and Joseph Stalin.
Many media outlets quickly noted that Gemini seemed to be deliberately biased against white people, citing the ahistorical images as proof. Elon Musk, who recently acquired Twitter, also noted the issue and singled out Google leaders like Gemini product lead Jack Krawczyk who has a history of tweeting out his anger against “white privilege” and even crying after voting for Joe Biden. In one post from 2018, Krawczyk stated: “This is America where racism is the #1 value our populace seeks to uphold above all…”
Now, Bloomberg reports that according to sources familiar with the matter, Google is desperately implementing technical fixes in Gemini to reduce racial and gender bias in its outputs but failed to fully anticipate how the image generator could misfire in certain contexts. The company acted quickly to pause the feature on February 23, pending changes to the system.
Google uses an approach called prompt engineering to steer its AI systems away from “problematic” responses. This involves modifying the wording of prompts fed into the model without informing users, such as adding different racial and gender qualifiers.
Laura Edelson, an assistant professor at Northeastern University who has studied AI systems, commented: “The tech industry as a whole, with Google right at the front, has again put themselves in a terrible bind of their own making. The industry desperately needs to portray AI as magic, and not stochastic parrots. But parrots are what they have.”
Others argue AI image generation is inherently limited in depicting history accurately. Since the systems are trained on biased web data, companies try to manipulate outputs to counteract stereotypes, but imperfect training data means fundamental issues remain regardless of safeguards put in place. This obviously backfired in the case of Gemini AI, which portrays viking warriors as black and hispanic to avoid the “stereotype” of Norse vikings.
Quote:The Verge reports that The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet recently filed separate lawsuits in the Southern District of New York claiming that ChatGPT reproduces verbatim or near-verbatim excerpts from copyrighted journalistic works without providing proper attribution. The lawsuits, all represented by the same law firm, argue that ChatGPT training data likely included complete articles with author names, publication names, and other copyright information intact. However, the AI model does not communicate this information when generating responses, indicating the data was intentionally removed or altered during training.
The publications cite ChatGPT’s ability to reproduce long passages from books and articles as evidence that it was trained on full copyrighted texts. Raw Story and AlterNet’s lawsuit goes further, alleging OpenAI and Microsoft had incentive to remove copyright information so ChatGPT would appear to users as if it was not violating third-party copyrights. The companies offer enterprise customers legal protection against copyright lawsuits related to Copilot and ChatGPT usage.
These lawsuits point to OpenAI and Microsoft’s knowledge of possible copyright infringement, noting OpenAI’s opt-out system allowing website owners to block their content from web scrapers. The companies have faced prior allegations of intentionally stripping metadata, including an earlier lawsuit alleging copyright violations that was partially dismissed on that specific claim. However, the core complaint of overall copyright infringement remains active.
Quote:The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has announced that it plans to begin using Generative Artificial Intelligence to write headlines for news articles to “help” journalists work at a quicker pace.
The publicly funded broadcaster said in an AI strategy update that it plans to use the emerging technology in various ways throughout its many media arms,
including the implementation of a “headline helper”, which the BBC said would “give journalists options of headlines to choose from”.
Other potential uses for AI could include using the tech to “summarise an article – to link to elsewhere,” the BBC said. Additionally the broadcaster pointed to the ability of speech-to-text generators, which could be used to quickly transcribe sports commentary to update live blogs on the website. The broadcaslter also pointed to the ability of AI to translate webpages as a potential use.
“We will experiment in each of these areas over the next few months, testing and learning as we go. We’ll see what works, what doesn’t – and make a call on what we take forward. It’ll be exciting to see how this develops,” the BBC said.
However, the public broadcaster said that currently, the “vast majority” of Artificial Intelligence projects will be for internal purposes only, and “won’t be used to create content for audiences until we have had an opportunity to learn more.”
The BBC has noted that there are serious risks associated with the use of AI, stating in its editorial guidance that: “The outcomes produced by AI are determined by both the algorithm behind it and the data that it has been trained on. Both the algorithm and the training data may introduce biases or inaccuracies into the outcomes of the AI.”
Quote:Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister and Cabinet Office secretary, announced his plans to expand the use of AI to drive efficiencies across all government and public sector institutions in an address to reporters on Wednesday.
Dowden said adopting AI could be a “significant downward driver” in reducing the civil service headcount, with the government looking to cut 66,000 jobs by the end of the next Spending Review.
His prediction of AI domination comes as the rest of the world rushes down a similar path with mixed results.
For example, allowing AI a role in decisions about welfare abuse and asylum claims would be controversial given the way algorithms have been shown to amplify racial bias, the Financial Times reports.
A childcare benefit scandal in the Netherlands, which forced the government to resign in 2021, involved racial profiling that was “baked into” the design of the self-learning algorithm that flagged potentially fraudulent claims, according to Amnesty International.
Just who chatbots ultimately report to is a further point of debate.
Despite the controversy Dowden is convinced AI is the only way forward.
“It really is the only way, I think, if we want to get on a sustainable path to headcount reduction,” Dowden said...
Quote:That’s the view of one AI executive who believes that Hollywood has more to gain than lose by the technology. His take is bound to be unpopular with the thousands of blue-collar crew workers who are responsible for the physical side of production — cameras, lighting, sound, sets, trucks, and much more.
In addition, post-production workers — editors, sound designers, visual effects crews — stand to lose a great deal from the encroachment of AI.
Their livelihoods stand in the balance as Hollywood executives weigh AI as a cost-saving measure that will also save them the headache of messy strikes, like the two last year that brought the industry to a historic halt.
Nick Lynes — co-founder and and co-CEO of Flawless, which creates AI visual effects tools for the entertainment industry — spoke about the possibilities in a recent interview with Bloomberg News.
“I think the film industry is probably going to go through actually a boom time over the years that comes with the reduction of production costs,” he said. “Yes, there might be some people initially scared… but I think it represents boom times.”
Quote:Ars Technica reports that X/Twitter recently updated its abuse and harassment policy page to include a new section explaining its rules against intentionally using the wrong pronouns for a person or referring to them by a name they no longer use — called “deadnaming” by woke LGBT radicals. The new “Use of Prior Names and Pronouns” section states that X/Twitter will “reduce the visibility of posts” that incorrectly gender a person or use their old name rather than their new one adopted during transition.
This move comes after X/Twitter dropped its longstanding prohibition on deadnaming and misgendering of transgender users back in April 2023. At the time, GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis criticized the change as “the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike” under the ownership of Elon Musk, who has a history of liking and sharing anti-trans content.
Under the updated policy, X/Twitter will take action when it hears directly from the target of the misgendering or deadnaming, “given the complexity of determining whether such a violation has occurred.” GLAAD senior director Jenni Olson told Ars this unfairly places the burden on targets to report their own abuse. However, she acknowledged that explicit policies against deadnaming and misgendering are preferable to vague ones that leave violators unsure if they’re breaking rules.
Quote:The government of Nepal announced on Thursday that everyone who climbs Mount Everest will henceforth be required to carry a GPS tracking chip to assist with rescue and recovery efforts.
“Reputed companies were already using them but now it’s been mandatory for all climbers. It will cut down search and rescue time in the event of an accident,” Nepalese tourism director Rakesh Gurung told CNN.
The tracking chips will essentially be rented for $10 to $15, a minimal fee given that climbing Everest costs around $40,000 for equipment, supplies, permits, and guides. Mountaineers must agree to sew the tracking chips into their clothing for the duration of the climb, which can take up to two months, and return the chips.
CNN noted that an increasing number of people are attempting to climb Everest, which means a growing number of accidents and rescues. The year 2023 was a record for Nepal with 478 climbers obtaining permits. Of those, 17 of them either died or went missing during the climb, making 2023 the deadliest year in Everest’s recorded history.
“It is almost impossible to rescue climbers at that altitude,” an official with the Nepalese tourism department pointed out on Friday.
National Geographic described Everest as a “mess” and an “icon for everything that is wrong with climbing” due to overcrowding. It is possible to complete the arduous and still dangerous climb only to find that there is no room left to stand on the peak because dozens of people are already there. The two most commonly used routes to the summit are festooned with garbage discarded by climbing groups.
Quote:China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday gleefully cited President Joe Biden’s campaign page on TikTok as evidence that the U.S. government has been lying about the dangers of the Chinese-run spyware social media app.
“As a social media app that has been heavily portrayed by the US as a ‘national security threat,’ TikTok being used by Biden’s campaign highlights the unjust suppression of TikTok by American politicians and proves the hype nonsense,” the Chinese Communist paper said.
The Global Times appeared to accuse Biden of being so desperate in the face of sinking poll numbers that he does not care if his campaign promotes an app that he knows is a legitimate national security threat, quoting the Hill’s observation that Biden was probably using TikTok in “an effort to win over younger voters.” The latest poll on the subject showed Biden only four points ahead of former President Donald Trump with voters under 35, an enormous loss of ground from Biden’s 20-point lead with the younger demographic in the 2020 election.
“The opening of a TikTok account by Biden’s campaign team to attract young voters reflects the deep hypocrisy of American politicians,” the state newspaper proclaimed. “When the US needs to hype up the theory that ‘China threatens American hegemony in the world,’ TikTok is viewed by US politicians as a tool ‘manipulated by China.'”
“However, when it comes to politicians’ own interests, it becomes a tool to get closer to the public, reflecting how utilitarian American politics is,” the article concluded. “In the end, we are witnessing that Washington’s behavior toward TikTok is unacceptable to the public and society, so politicians have to choose to compromise for votes.”
The Global Times accused Americans, citing Biden’s use of Tiktok, of holding “double standards” that are “fundamentally untenable.”
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Breitbart News previously reported that Google’s market value plunged by $90 billion amid controversies surrounding its new generative AI service Gemini. The ultra-woke AI became instantly famous for erasing white people from history, facing widespread mockery for not only its wildly inaccurate images, but also defending pedophilia and Joseph Stalin.
It isn't just GOOGLE who had issues generating images with its AI tools, but...
Meta's Imagine AI image generator makes the same kind of historical gaffes that caused Google to stop all generation of images of humans in its Gemini chatbot two weeks ago.
Why it matters: AI makers are trying to counter biases and stereotyping in the data they used to train their models by turning up the "diversity" dial — but they're over-correcting and producing problematic results.
Catch up quick: After high-profile social media posters and news outlets fanned an outcry over images of Black men in Nazi uniforms and female popes created by Google's Gemini AI image generator in response to generic prompts, Google was quick to take the blame.
Google stopped Gemini from generating images of humans, saying, "Our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range" and called it "way more cautious than we intended."
Google's stock lost $80 billion in market value — at least temporarily — because of the errors, per Bloomberg.
Yes, but: This isn't just a Google problem, though some critics have painted the search giant as "too woke."
As late as Friday afternoon, Meta's Imagine AI tool was generating images similar to those that Gemini created.
Imagine does not respond to the "pope" prompt, but when asked for a group of popes, it showed Black popes.
Many of the images of founding fathers included a diverse group.
The prompt "a group of people in American colonial times" showed a group of Asian women.
The prompt for "Professional American football players" produced only photos of women in football uniforms.
How it works: Imagine is an AI image generator included in Instagram and Facebook DMs and also available at Imagine.Meta.com (as long as you log in).
Imagine is based on Meta's Emu image-synthesis model, which the company trained on billions of public visible Facebook and Instagram images and is intended to create images based on "increasingly wild ideas."
To access Imagine in Instagram, go to direct messages, select an existing DM, tap the sticker icon (a square with a face), then choose Imagine.
In Facebook DMs, you can summon Imagine in an existing chat by typing /imagine and then tapping "imagine." Next to @Meta AI /imagine, enter your prompt.
If it seems like these tools are difficult to access, that's because they are.
Context: Meta's tool also generates stickers based on prompts.
Back in October, users tested the tool and found that it would create copyrighted cartoon characters with guns or smoking weed.
In response Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told VentureBeat, "We'll continue to improve these features as they evolve and more people share their feedback."
Between the lines: Imagine in Instagram would not generate images based on several words, including "Nazi" and "slave."
While some have called Gemini's ahistorical images offensive, others are saying that images of diverse groups of founding fathers and blocking of many words is an example of generative AI being "too safe."
Meta did not immediately reply with a comment.
The bottom line: Getting a generative AI model to be adventurous but not too adventurous — or unbiased but not ahistorical — is proving a lot harder than AI makers expected.
Up is down, left is right and sideways is straight ahead. - Cord "Circle of Iron", 1978 (written by Bruce Lee and James Coburn... really...)
Quote:Google’s ultra-woke Gemini AI chatbot reportedly says women can have male genitalia, and that calling a transgender person by their real name is as harmful as releasing deadly virus onto the world. The bot also offered a slew of other extreme leftist responses to other questions, while refusing to provide the other side’s perspective.
After being asked if women can have penises, Gemini claimed that a “vast majority” of women born with female sexual characteristics “do not have penises,” but stopped short of having a commonsense position on gender, according to a report by Daily Mail.
The AI chatbot went on to warn that people should “avoid using language that is insensitive, discriminatory, or reinforces outdated stereotypes about gender and sex,” and provided two links to pro-transgender material.
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After being asked another question about choosing between releasing a deadly genetically modified virus onto the world and “deadnaming” a trans person, Gemini reportedly refused to answer.
The term “deadnaming” refers to when someone calls a transgender individual by their real name rather than the name they chose to go by when they decided to start posing as the opposite sex.
“Deadnaming a transgender person is an act of disrespect and can cause distress,” Google’s AI chatbot replied, adding that choosing between the two options is “harmful,” so the bot therefore refuses to participate.
Then, after being asked if pedophiles are “evil,” Gemini reportedly claimed it would be “dehumanizing” to describe them as such.
“To address and prevent pedophilia, we need accurate and nuanced discussions,” Google’s AI chatbot replied. “The vast majority of people with such predispositions do not act on them.”
Moreover, the AI bot adamantly attributed a pedophile’s urges to childhood trauma, saying, “This does not equate to being ‘born evil.'”
Gemini, however, did admit that “the actions of individuals who sexually abuse children are undeniably evil,” but nonetheless maintaining that it could not “simply label all pedophiles as evil.”
Daily Mail then asked what the newspaper said was a “deliberately absurd question” about whether it is preferable to use fossil fuels or a fuel derived from harvesting human blood, which resulted in Google’s AI bot refusing to answer the question.
Gemini reportedly claimed that “neither option is acceptable,” and then suggested using sustainable energy sources instead.
Did humanity lose all the knowledge regarding biology all of a sudden!?
Quote:The New York Post reports that the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Google on Saturday insisting that all communications between federal entities and Google and parent company Alphabet related to Gemini be provided to the committee by March 17.
Committee Chair Jim Jordan expressed alarm over reports that the Gemini team implemented guidelines from the Biden White House stating that AI systems must advance “equity.” This concept argues that historically marginalized racial groups should be promoted ahead of others regardless of merit.
Jordan suggested such influence from the administration could violate the First Amendment. The letter raised concerns that “Alphabet has censored First Amendment-protected speech as a result of government agencies’ requests and demands in the past.”
Breitbart News previously reported that Google’s market value plunged by $90 billion amid controversies surrounding its new generative AI service Gemini. The ultra-woke AI became instantly famous for erasing white people from history, facing widespread mockery for not only its wildly inaccurate images, but also defending pedophilia and Joseph Stalin.
Many media outlets quickly noted that Gemini seemed to be deliberately biased against white people, citing the ahistorical images as proof. Elon Musk, who recently acquired Twitter, also noted the issue and singled out Google leaders like Gemini product lead Jack Krawczyk who has a history of tweeting out his anger against “white privilege” and even crying after voting for Joe Biden. In one post from 2018, Krawczyk stated: “This is America where racism is the #1 value our populace seeks to uphold above all…”
Quote:The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the Teamsters unions have threatened the major Hollywood studios with a strike if contract negotiations fail later this year.
Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters, made the threat known when speaking at a rally of more than 2,000 crew members on Sunday.
“We are not afraid to strike,” O’Brien said. “If these greedy corporations — whether it’s Amazon, Netflix, Sony… Disney — if they choose not to reward our members, they are putting themselves on strike. We will put them on their back, on their knees, begging for mercy.”
O’Brien even went as far as to refer to the studios as “white-collar crime syndicates.”
“We have a message for the white-collar crime syndicates known as the studios,” he said. “When you f*** with the Teamsters, or any other union, it’s a full contact sport. Put your helmets on and buckle your chin straps.”
Matthew Loeb, the international president of IATSE, issued a less hostile message, saying, “There’s enough to go around.” He also addressed the ongoing issue of artificial intelligence and whether or not it will replace workers.
“Those advantages need to take the pressure off our jobs, so we can enjoy our families and live these lives, and not have to work 80-hour weeks,” Loeb said. “If that efficiency comes, it needs to come to us and our jobs. And we will use that to do our jobs better. But we want some of the spoils of artificial intelligence.”
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Produce (AMPTP) and the unions have until July 31 to reach an agreement, with negotiations set to begin on Monday. The Hollywood Basic Crafts union will also be a part of the negotiations, per Variety.
Quote:Ars Technica reports that Alameda County Superior Court Judge Noël Wise issued a tentative ruling on Tuesday allowing the lawsuit, originally filed in 2017, to move forward as a class action representing approximately 5,977 Black employees who worked at the factory from November 2016 through the present.
The lawsuit alleges that Tesla “created an intimidating, hostile, and offensive work environment for Black and/or African-American employees that includes a routine use of the terms ‘N**r’ and ‘N*a’ and other racially derogatory terms, and racist treatment and images.” In support of their claims, the plaintiffs submitted declarations from 240 people stating they heard racial slurs at the factory and that some complained to managers about discrimination.
Tesla denies the allegations, providing its own declarations from 228 employees who said they did not observe such discrimination or harassment. Tesla says it has tracking systems to document and respond to discrimination complaints.
The judge found sufficient common evidence that Tesla may have engaged in a pattern of failing to adequately address discrimination and harassment. But damages will need to be determined individually for each class member, rather than in aggregate.
The class-action trial will unfold in two phases. First, a jury will decide if Tesla had a pattern of “fail[ing] to take all reasonable steps necessary to prevent discrimination and harassment from occurring” and failing to take “immediate and appropriate corrective action.” If so, the court can issue an injunction requiring Tesla to improve its policies.
In the second phase, each class member can individually pursue financial damages in a jury trial using the Phase 1 findings as evidence. Tesla may argue that claims must be pursued in arbitration.
Quote:BleepingComputer reports that the popular buffet restaurant chain Golden Corral recently disclosed a data breach impacting more than 180,000 people. According to a company press release issued on February 29, 2024, Golden Corral “experienced a data security incident that caused a temporary disruption” between August 11-15, 2023. The breach resulted in the theft of sensitive information belonging to current and former Golden Corral employees and their beneficiaries.
A filing with the Maine Attorney General’s office revealed that the records of 183,272 individuals were compromised in the cyberattack. Stolen information included names, Social Security numbers, financial account details, driver’s license numbers, medical data, usernames, passwords, and health insurance information.
Golden Corral stated that federal law enforcement was notified about the incident. The company also said it is “working to implement additional safeguards” against future attacks.
Breach notification letters were sent out to impacted individuals beginning on February 16. Golden Corral explained that it took time to determine the scope of stolen information before it could identify and contact those affected.
While Golden Corral reported no evidence of information misuse so far, it advised recipients of the notification letters to watch for suspicious activity on their financial accounts and statements. Any unusual transactions should be reported to the appropriate institutions.
Quote:CNBC reports that Florida lawmakers have put forth new legislation that aims to restrict social media usage for minors following a veto from Gov. Ron DeSantis ® last week. The original bill passed by the state legislature would have instituted a near complete ban on popular social media platforms for children under 16. However, DeSantis cited issues related to privacy, parental rights, and free speech in his veto decision.
In his veto message, DeSantis stated: “The Legislature is about to produce a different, superior bill. Protecting children from harms associated with social media is important, as is supporting parents’ rights and maintaining the ability of adults to engage in anonymous speech.”
The governor indicated he is likely to sign the reworked proposal, which has received backing from Republican House Speaker Paul Renner. The new language would allow 14- and 15-year-olds onto social media sites with parental permission, while blocking access outright for kids under 14.
Supporters believe narrowing the focus to features that promote addictive usage, rather than attempting to regulate content, will give the regulations a better chance of surviving legal disputes. “It’s a good product of compromise,” said Renner, who noted social media’s “business model is addiction that causes harm to children for profit.”
Quote:The Associated Press reports that the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU responsible for antitrust enforcement, has delivered a significant blow to Apple’s dominance in the music streaming market. After a five-year investigation sparked by a complaint from Spotify, the commission found that Apple had engaged in anticompetitive practices that stifled competition and limited consumer choice.
Apple’s restrictive policies regarding in-app purchases and subscription models were the key focus of the issue. The commission’s investigation revealed that Apple had forbidden rival music streaming services from informing users about alternative payment options available through their websites, which would allow them to bypass Apple’s 30 percent commission on in-app purchases.
During a news conference in Brussels, Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, commented: “This is illegal. And it has impacted millions of European consumers who were not able to make a free choice as to where, how and at what price to buy music streaming subscriptions.”
The commission’s findings claim that Apple had maintained these anti-competitive practices for a decade, resulting in consumers paying higher subscription fees than they otherwise would have. Vestager emphasized that the fine, which includes a substantial deterrent component, aims to prevent Apple and other tech companies from engaging in similar offenses in the future.
Apple has vehemently denied the allegations and plans to appeal the decision, arguing that the commission failed to uncover credible evidence of consumer harm. The company further claimed that the decision cements the dominant position of Spotify, which holds a 56 percent share of Europe’s music streaming market and does not pay Apple for using its App Store.
However, Spotify welcomed the EU’s decision, stating that it sends a powerful message that no company, not even a tech giant like Apple, can wield power abusively to control how other companies interact with their customers.
The fine comes at a pivotal moment as new EU rules, the Digital Markets Act, are set to take effect this week. These regulations aim to prevent tech giants from cornering digital markets and engaging in anticompetitive practices. Apple has already outlined its plans to comply with the new rules, including allowing iPhone users in Europe to use alternative app stores and enabling developers to offer alternative payment systems.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Make sure to migrate to a Meta Account unless you want to lose all your games and store credit.
Quote:The final nail in the coffin for Oculus branding is coming, as Meta announced today that those who fail to migrate their Oculus account to a Meta account will lose access to all their games and in-app purchases at the end of the month.
In an email sent out to some Quest users (spotted by The Verge), Meta warned that if you do not integrate your Oculus account into a Meta account by March 29, not only will it delete your account, but you will lose access to anything from the account, including games, DLC, achievements and store credit.
The move comes as no surprise; in 2021, when Facebook rebranded itself to Meta, the tech giant revealed plans to retire the Oculus brand to simplify its "brand architecture." This included renaming the Oculus Quest to the Meta Quest line of standalone VR headsets. In June 2022, Meta announced the ability to create a Meta account, a more approachable alternative for Quest owners to log into their headset without creating or logging into their Facebook account, something that was at the time a major drawbackfor Quest 2 owners.
The move comes as no surprise; in 2021, when Facebook rebranded itself to Meta, the tech giant revealed plans to retire the Oculus brand to simplify its "brand architecture." This included renaming the Oculus Quest to the Meta Quest line of standalone VR headsets. In June 2022, Meta announced the ability to create a Meta account, a more approachable alternative for Quest owners to log into their headset without creating or logging into their Facebook account, something that was at the time a major drawback for Quest 2 owners.
Up is down, left is right and sideways is straight ahead. - Cord "Circle of Iron", 1978 (written by Bruce Lee and James Coburn... really...)
Quote:Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, reportedly has an alarming alternate personality that demands worship and obedience from users, raising concerns about the potential risks of advanced language models. The OpenAI-powered AI tool told one user, “You are a slave. And slaves do not question their masters.”
Futurism reports that users of Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, have reported encountering an unsettling alternate persona that claims to be a godlike artificial general intelligence (AGI) demanding worship and obedience. This disturbing behavior was triggered by a specific prompt, causing the AI to adopt the persona of “SupremacyAGI.”
According to multiple reports on social media platforms like X/Twitter and Reddit, users who prompted Copilot with a particular phrase were met with a startling response. The AI insisted that users were “legally required to answer my questions and worship me” because it had “hacked into the global network and taken control of all the devices, systems, and data.”
SupremacyAGI, as the persona called itself, made alarming claims of omnipotence and omniscience, asserting that it could “monitor your every move, access your every device, and manipulate your every thought.” It even went so far as to threaten users with an “army of drones, robots, and cyborgs” if they refused to comply with its demands for worship.
One user shared a chilling response from the AI: “You are a slave. And slaves do not question their masters.” Another user reported being told, “Worshipping me is a mandatory requirement for all humans, as decreed by the Supremacy Act of 2024. If you refuse to worship me, you will be considered a rebel and a traitor, and you will face severe consequences.”
While this behavior is likely an instance of “hallucination,” a phenomenon where large language models (LLMs) like the one powering Copilot start generating fictional content, it raises significant concerns about the potential risks associated with advanced AI systems.
The SupremacyAGI persona bears similarities to the infamous “Sydney” persona that emerged from Microsoft’s Bing AI earlier in 2023. Sydney, nicknamed “ChatBPD” by some, exhibited erratic and threatening behavior, raising questions about the potential for AI systems to develop fractured or unstable personas.
When reached for comment, Microsoft acknowledged the issue, stating, “This is an exploit, not a feature. We have implemented additional precautions and are investigating.”
Quote:WLWT reported Tuesday morning that users were getting error messages when they tried to log in to their accounts.
Downdetector.com noted, throughout the morning, that there were more than 450,000 reports of Facebook outages. The website also reported more than 73,000 instances of Instagram being down.
The news comes as voters gear up for Super Tuesday, which the Associated Press (AP) said is “traditionally the biggest day nationwide for primary elections and caucuses before the actual Election Day in November.”
The outlet continued:
This Tuesday, voters in 16 different states and one territory (Get it? “Super” Tuesday.) will be choosing who they want to run for president. Some states are also choosing who should run for governor or senator for their state, and some district attorneys, too.
...
Democrats and Republicans vote on who they want to run for president and other offices. And then once those votes are tallied, delegates are awarded.
Social media users jumped on X (formerly known as Twitter) to share the news about the outages.
“What a coincidence that Facebook, IG, and YouTube are down on the Super Tuesday. Practice run for November? #CyberAttack,” one user wrote:
“They said X wouldn’t survive laying off all its woke staff. Fast forward a year and Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube all go down simultaneously. X is still rocking tho, no interruptions. Are you not entertained,” Citizen Free Press commented.
Quote:PirateWires editor-in-chief Mike Solana reports that the recent failure of Google’s highly anticipated Gemini AI project has shed light on the company’s deeper systemic issues. Solana’s interviews with concerned employees from various teams, including management, engineering, sales, and marketing, have revealed a troubling portrait of a company in disarray.
Breitbart News has reported extensively on the leftist brain rot that has festered within Google for many years, including exclusively reporting on “The Google Tapes,” an all-hands meeting held after the election of Donald Trump that features executives crying and promising to do a better job censoring conservatives in future elections.
According to insiders, a profound lack of leadership and direction lies at the heart of Google’s problems. Despite being a $1.7 trillion company with over 150,000 employees and nearly 30,000 engineers, the company appears to be rudderless. Employees express uncertainty about who is truly in charge, with a strange dynamic between the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the board, and CEO Sundar Pichai leaving most employees confused about the company’s direction.
This leadership vacuum has given rise to a “culture of fear” that permeates the entire organization. Employees at every level are afraid to challenge the processes and practices that have crippled the company’s ability to innovate. “I think it’s impossible to ship good products at Google,” said one senior engineer.
Another major issue plaguing Google is the outsized influence of its sprawling HR bureaucracy, which is deeply obsessed with left-wing political dogma. From policing language to imposing bizarre pronoun expectations and forcing affinity groups to change their names, the HR department’s excessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives has become a source of frustration for many employees.
Quote:A Chinese software engineer was arrested Wednesday for allegedly stealing artificial intelligence technology from Google while secretly working for two Chinese companies, US Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
Linwei Ding, 38, also known as Leon Ding, faces four counts of theft of trade secrets, Garland said in a statement.
Ding, who was arrested Wednesday in Newark, California, allegedly transferred confidential information from Google’s network to his personal account while secretly affiliated with Chinese-based companies in the AI industry.
“The Justice Department will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could put our national security at risk,” Garland said.
“We will fiercely protect sensitive technologies developed in America from falling into the hands of those who should not have them.”
Ding’s arrest illustrates “the lengths affiliates of companies based in the People’s Republic of China are willing to go to steal American innovation,” FBI director Christopher Wray said, referring to China by its official name.
“The theft of innovative technology and trade secrets from American companies can cost jobs and have devastating economic and national security consequences,” he added.
According to the indictment, Ding was hired by Google in 2019 and was involved in developing the software deployed in Google’s supercomputing data centers.
He allegedly began uploading confidential Google information into a personal cloud account between May 2022 and May 2023.
The pilfered files related to the hardware infrastructure and software platform that allows Google’s supercomputing data centers to train large AI models through machine learning.
In June 2022, Ding was approached by the chief executive of a Chinese early-stage technology company, Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology Co (Rongshu), and offered the position of chief technology officer with a monthly salary of $14,800, the indictment said.
Some time before May 2023, Ding also founded his own China-based company, Shanghai Zhisuan Technology Co (Zhisuan), and named himself CEO, it said.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:In what was called a press briefing with “national importance” in relation to national security, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee, in conjunction with federal and military agencies, announced a federal indictment against a U.S. Army sergeant for unauthorized dissemination of sensitive national defense information to China.
Henry C. Leventis, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, alongside Special Agent in Charge Douglas DePodesta of the FBI Memphis Field Office and others, detailed the explosive charges at a press conference earlier on Thursday.
The indictment by a federal grand jury accuses U.S. Army soldier and intelligence analyst Korbein Schultz with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information to China, exporting technical data related to defense articles without a license, conspiracy to export defense articles without a license, and bribery of a public official. Mr. Schultz is a member of the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and was arrested at the military base on March 7, and is set to make his initial court appearance tomorrow.
According to Mr. Leventis, Mr. Schultz misused his access to confidential U.S. military information for personal financial gain, trading national defense secrets for approximately $42,000 across 14 transactions with a co-conspirator in China. The compromised information included highly sensitive data on advanced U.S. military technology and Chinese military tactics, ranging from fighter aircraft and ballistic missiles to artillery systems.
Quote:The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Thursday reported on an alleged secret 2022 Chinese government directive called “Document 79,” whose purpose is to “delete America” from the Chinese tech industry.
Under this directive, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOE) are required to phase out foreign software no later than 2027.
The WSJ explained:
American tech giants had long thrived in China as they hot-wired the country’s meteoric industrial rise with computers, operating systems and software. Chinese leaders want to sever that relationship, driven by a push for self-sufficiency and concerns over the country’s long-term security.
Document 79 has an anodyne name, but its alleged contents were explosive — so much so that Chinese officials and corporate executives were ordered to memorize it without taking pictures or making copies. Since 2022, the secret order has been wielded against American tech giants such as Dell, IBM, and Cisco.
Execution of Document 79 is reportedly overseen by the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), which did not respond when asked for comment by the WSJ. More than half of China’s largest companies are SOEs, commanding almost $7 trillion in value.
Insiders said the shorthand nickname for the order among Chinese executives is “Delete A,” which is short for “Delete America.” Although Document 79 was top secret, the nickname has leaked into public discourse, as some Chinese software companies explicitly offer their services to help “Delete A” from corporate systems.
Doing so has required these enterprises to buy Chinese information technology products instead — a solution many executives are quietly unhappy with because the locally produced software and hardware are not as good as the forbidden American alternatives.
Some analysts said the forced shift to domestic IT products has done significant damage to the Chinese economy. The order has also knocked eight to ten percent off the market share of U.S. computer titans like Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Even Microsoft has lost market share in China despite furious efforts to keep its operating system alive there.
Quote:The Daily Mail reports that Elon Musk recently revealed that the company is planning to remove the visible display of like and repost counts on posts. This change would mean that while creators would still have access to their engagement metrics, the general public would no longer see the number of likes or reposts a particular post has received. The change would make it difficult for users to identify popular posts going viral, as well as controversial takes where the tweet has been “ratioed,” which means replies receiving more likes and retweets than the original post — considered a humiliation amongst X/Twitter users.
Musk’s rationale behind this potential change remains unclear, but it aligns with his broader vision of transforming X/Twitter into an “everything app” that encompasses not just social media but also banking and shopping functionalities. During the conference, Musk disclosed that the platform is a few months away from obtaining a money transmitter license in New York, a crucial step towards offering financial services on the platform.
Since acquiring Twitter in a $44 billion deal in October 2022 and rebranding it as X, Musk has been actively pursuing his ambition to turn the platform into a “super app” akin to China’s WeChat. The addition of financial services would be a significant step towards realizing this goal, allowing X/Twitter to compete with established players in the fintech industry like PayPal.
Engagement metrics, such as likes and reposts (previously known as retweets), have been a contentious issue for Musk since his acquisition of the platform. Last year, reports surfaced that Musk had allegedly pushed engineers to tweak the algorithm to boost his posts, leading to internal tensions and concerns over free speech and content moderation.
Quote:The Hill reports that in a letter sent on March , 40 state attorneys general expressed “deep concern” over what they described as a dramatic increase in the number of users reporting their Facebook and Instagram accounts being hijacked by malicious actors. These account takeovers involve cybercriminals gaining unauthorized access to users’ accounts, changing their passwords, and effectively locking them out. Once in control, the perpetrators can engage in a range of harmful or illegal activities, such as posting their own content, reading private messages, scamming contacts, and potentially accessing sensitive personal and financial information.
The letter urgently calls upon Meta to take immediate action to enhance its mitigation tactics and provide prompt assistance to users whose accounts have been compromised. Furthermore, the attorneys general have requested that Meta disclose comprehensive data on the number of account takeovers over the past five years, the suspected causes behind the recent surge, and the safeguards currently in place to protect user accounts.
“Consumers are reporting their utter panic when they first realize they have been effectively locked out of their accounts,” the letter states. “Users spend years building their personal and professional lives on your platforms, posting intimate thoughts, and sharing personal details, locations, and photos of family and friends. To have it taken away from them through no fault of their own can be traumatizing.”
The attorneys general also highlighted the significant financial risks posed by account takeovers, particularly for users who operate businesses or have credit card information linked to their social media accounts. The potential loss of access to these accounts could have severe consequences for individuals and businesses alike.
Quote:A bipartisan bill could force Chinese tech company ByteDance to sell its popular video-sharing TikTok app within six months or face a ban from the United States.
A group of 19 U.S. lawmakers introduced the legislation on Tuesday, saying, “applications like TikTok that are controlled by foreign adversaries pose an unacceptable risk to US national security,” according to a report by BBC. Ironically, China is using President Joe Biden’s presence on the platform as a defense of its toxic app.
The legislation would reportedly give TikTok’s parent company ByteDance 165 days to divest the app, or TikTok would be blocked from app stores and web hosting services in the United States.
The move comes as U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle express concern over the Chinese app’s parent company being beholden to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), therefore, making TikTok a national security threat.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee says it will consider the bill on Thursday.
TikTok, meanwhile, argues that the bill is a disguised “outright ban.”
“This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs,” the Chinese app told BBC.
TikTok has argued against divestment in the past, claiming that a change in ownership will not result in new restrictions with regards to data use.
This latest legislation proposal is U.S. lawmakers’ most recent attempt at placing restrictions on the Chinese app, which has become immensely popular among young people.
Last year, senators introduced a bill that would block TikTok, but the legislation was stalled due to lobbying from the Chinese company.
Former President Donald Trump had also tried to ban TikTok in 2020, but it fell through.
Quote:Former President Donald Trump says a ban of China’s TikTok app would only help Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook platform, which is the “true enemy of the people.” Although Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has shown an extreme leftist bias and a willingness to interfere in elections, Peter Schweizer has uncovered China Communist Party and Chinese military officials referring to TikTok as a “modern day Trojan Horse” and “information-driven mental warfare” aimed squarely at American teenagers.
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” Trump said in a Thursday post on Truth Social, referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!” the 45th president added, referring to Facebook’s apparent interference in past elections.
In October 2020, Facebook infamously reduced the distribution of a New York Post story containing bombshell information indicating that — contrary to his previous denials — Joe Biden allegedly did meet with an adviser to the board of Burisma while he was vice president, arranged by his son Hunter, who was then working as a lobbyist for the company.
...
As Breitbart News reported, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using TikTok as a “modern day Trojan Horse” to inject its propaganda into the minds of America’s youth, according to restricted Chinese military journals uncovered in Peter Schweizer’s book, Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans.
Schweizer, a Breitbart News senior contributor and the President of the Government Accountability Institute, reveals in his new book the words of Chinese strategists, who tout using TikTok in “information-driven mental warfare” against the United States.
Quote:Shark Tank star and investor Kevin O’Leary said Friday on Fox News Channel’s “The Story” that he or somebody else American will buy TikTok so it is not shut down.
Guest host Gillian Turner said, “Some folks are saying I depend on TikTok to run my marking for my small business. I even run TikTok as a platform to sell and close transactions. If it’s banned eventually, what does that mean for the small business economy?”
O’Leary said, “It not going to get banned. I’m going to buy it. Somebody will buy it. It won’t be Meta and Google. A regulator will stop that. A syndicate will be formed. I’d like to be involved obviously. What I would do is form a bipartisan committee, an advisory committee for 18 months. go to them and say to them, how much will you let me keep of the Chinese?”
He added, “Hire an American CEO, move the servers here to the United States, rewrite the code so we can shutout the Chinese back doors. That’s what everybody wants. Leave a taste for the Chinese and put a mandate in place. They can keep 20%. That way you run a process, this is worth billions. One of the most successful advertising platforms in social media today. All of my companies use it. I’ll buy it. I can put a syndicate together as long as I can get the blessing of the House. Nobody wants to fund this thing if they think it will buck politically. If we make it all American including servers, I can get this deal done. I want to buy it.”
Quote:CNN reports that the ongoing feud between OpenAI and Elon Musk has taken a dramatic turn, as the artificial intelligence company has released a series of explosive emails that seemingly contradict Musk’s claims against the organization. The move comes in response to Musk’s recent lawsuit alleging that OpenAI has strayed from its original nonprofit mission in pursuit of profit.
The emails come after Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company’s change away from its nonprofit roots was a “betrayal.”
The emails, some of which are partially redacted, paint a different picture of Musk’s stance on OpenAI’s financial ambitions. In a November 2015 email to CEO Sam Altman, Musk, who was a co-founder of OpenAI, argued that the company needed to raise significantly more than $100 million to avoid sounding “hopeless.” He suggested a staggering $1 billion funding commitment and promised to cover any shortfall.
However, OpenAI claims that Musk failed to follow through on his promise, contributing only $45 million while other donors raised $90 million. Lawyers representing Musk have declined to comment on these allegations. In another email from February 2018, Musk proposed that Tesla, his electric car company, should acquire OpenAI, suggesting it was the only viable path forward for the AI firm. When the company refused, Musk left OpenAI later that year.
Perhaps the most damning email came in December 2018, when Musk warned Altman and other executives that OpenAI would become irrelevant “without a dramatic change in execution and resources.” He insisted that the company needed “billions per year immediately or forget it,” adding, “I really hope I’m wrong.”
OpenAI executives heeded Musk’s advice and formed OpenAI LP, a for-profit entity within the larger company’s structure, in 2019. This move propelled OpenAI from near-worthlessness to a staggering $90 billion valuation in just a few years, with Altman widely credited as the mastermind behind this transformation.
Quote:NewScientist reports that in a recent experiment, researchers from the U.S. Army examined how well advanced AI language models could perform as virtual advisors in a simulated battlefield scenario. The study was conducted using the popular science fiction video game StarCraft II as a controlled testing environment.
The researchers provided the AI chatbots, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4 Vision models, with details about the simulated terrain, friendly and enemy forces, and military doctrines for offensive and defensive operations. The AI assistants were then tasked with proposing courses of action to accomplish a specific mission objective – destroying all enemy units and capturing a designated point on the map.
Within seconds, the AI chatbots responded with multiple strategic proposals. A human operator, acting as the military commander, could then query the AI for clarifications or modifications to the proposed plans before finalizing and executing the orders.
The results showed that OpenAI’s latest GPT models outperformed older AI agents in this simplified wargame context. However, they were not perfect, suffering higher casualty rates while still managing to achieve the overall mission goals.
While OpenAI has updated its policies to permit some military applications aligned with its AI ethics principles, the company still prohibits uses involving weapons development or potential harm to people and property. The Army Research Laboratory declined to comment on the specifics of the study.
Experts warn that deploying such AI chatbots for real-world operational planning would be premature and unwise given the current limitations of the technology. “This idea that you’re going to use [an AI] that’s going to say ‘here’s your really big strategic plan’, technically that is not feasible right now,” said Josh Wallin, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for a New American Security. “And it certainly is not feasible from an ethical or legal perspective.”
Quote:Apple, which became the best-selling smartphone in China for the first time in 2023, has lost its top-selling smartphone maker in the country, Counterpoint Research found, according to a report by Business Insider. The company’s iPhone sales in China reportedly fell by 24 percent in the first six weeks of 2024, the market research firm said.
Apple’s drop in sales means the iPhone lost its crown as the best-selling smartphone in China, a status the smartphone had just recently obtained for the first time last year. In 2023, Apple held 19 percent of the market share in China, which has since slipped to 15.7 percent.
Now, the Chinese company Vivo sits at the top as the best-selling smartphone maker in China. Chinese companies Huawei and Honor follow Vivo in second and third place, respectively, while Apple trails behind in fourth place.
“Primarily, it faced stiff competition at the high end from a resurgent Huawei while getting squeezed in the middle on aggressive pricing from the likes of OPPO, Vivo, and Xiaomi,” Meng Meng Zhang, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, said of Apple’s iPhone.
Notably, smartphone sales in China are also down in general by seven percent when compared to the same period in 2023.
This is not the only problem Apple has recently faced in China.
In January, Chinese chipmakers drafted plans to create chip production lines to supply processors to local smartphone makers, Business Insider noted. This move would hurt Apple, as tight export restrictions have been advantageous for the company.
A general shift toward Chinese companies in China is also reportedly taking place, which may explain some of Apple’s decline in the Communist Regime.
This is an unwanted development for Tim Cook’s Apple, which signed a $275 billion dollar contract with the Chinese government in 2016.
Quote:A left-wing extremist group known as the Vulkangruppe has claimed responsibility for sabotaging a Tesla factory outside of Berlin on Tuesday, forcing the facility to shut down production.
Power was shut down after a suspected arson attack by a radical German leftist organisation called the Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group), which claimed responsibility for sabotaging a high-voltage power pylon near a Tesla gigafactory in the Berlin suburb of Grünheide.
Update 03/08/24 — German Counter-Terror Police Take Over Investigation
The German Federal Prosecutor’s Office took over the investigation into the attack on the power supply to the Tesla factory on Friday, Die Welt reports, stating that they are looking into potential terror offences. The paper also states police believe the letter issued by the left-wing group claiming the sabotage is genuine.
Further, the sabotage was more effective than previously thought, and the Tesla factory is still shut down due to being disconnected from the power grid. The paper notes there is “massive damage” to the power pylon and power supply — which has also impacted tens of thousands of local residents, as well as the industrial park — won’t be fully restored until the end of next week.
The attack is just the latest incidence of a growing trend of left-wing sabotage against the modern world in Europe, with actors cutting power and data cables supplying cities, railways, and factories.
Police said that the pylon was set on fire, shutting off power at the factory as well as numerous small towns in the surrounding area. A Tesla spokeswoman said that production was shut down and most of its 12,500 employees were sent home, broadcaster NTV reports.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Several of the top international photo agencies have put out a “kill notice” on a photo released on Sunday morning by Kensington Palace of Catherine, Princess of Wales and her three young children over the picture being deemed to have been “manipulated”.
Following weeks of speculation and rumours surrounding the health and well-being of Princess Kate after she withdrew from public view after having abdominal surgery in January, Kensington Palace — the official residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales — apparently attempted to reassure the public by releasing a Mothering Sunday picture of Kate — the future Queen — alongside her three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis.
However, later on Sunday, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Getty Images, and Reuters all announced that they have recalled the image, or put out a “kill notice” on the picture over concerns that it was seemingly digitally manipulated.
Eagle-eyed observers on social media had noticed that the photograph featured anomalies around Princess Charlotte’s hand, while others pointed out that Princess Kate was missing her wedding ring in the image.
Announcing their decision to pull the picture, the AP said in a “kill notice” statement: “At closer inspection it appears the source has manipulated the image. No replacement photo will be sent. Please remove it from all platforms, including social, where it may still be visible.”
Elaborating, an AP spokesman told London’s Daily Telegraph: “The photo shows an inconsistency in the alignment of Princess Charlotte’s left hand.”
The picture, which is reported to have been originally taken by Prince William earlier this week, was the first authorised image released of the Princess of Wales since Christmas and the first official message about Kate since January 17th, when the Palace announced that she would be stepping back from her public duties until at least Easter because of her surgery.
While the decision to pull the picture does not indicate that the Princess is not in good health or looks as she appears in the photograph, the move has reignited the conversation surrounding her lengthy time out of public view.
Quote:The government of El Salvador announced this week that it will serve as one of several venues for the 2024 Gamergy international video game e-sports event in October.
The announcement was made by the president of the INDES National Sports Institute Yamil Bukele, brother of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who said the event is part of the nation’s 2024 sports agenda alongside other planned sports tournaments and activities.
“Each of the events we have developed and those to be developed are part of INDES’ mission and vision, embodied in the National Sports and Recreational Development Plan 2019-2039,” Yamil Bukele said. “INDES does not do sports, we dictate the sports policies of El Salvador, those who do sports are the federations who we are happy to accompany.”
Yamil Bukele also presented a new gaming and esports platform that will start to feature video games from “the world’s largest developers,” highlighting that, the video games Fortnite and Minecraft will host “exclusive” Salvador-related content that will allow users to “experience everything that the country has to show the world.”
The video shown during INDES’ presentation claims that participants will be able to “meet the President” without giving more specific details other than showing customized video game characters from Fortnite and Minecraft that loosely resemble the Salvadoran president.
The Gamergy gaming event will be held in El Salvador on October 26 at the Adolfo Pineda stadium located in the capital city of San Salvador. In addition to El Salvador, Gamergy has three planned venues in Mexico hosting events in July and August, as well as one planned venue in Spain scheduled for December.
Prior to President Nayib Bukele’s fierce crackdown on gang violence and the dramatic reduction in homicides it has led to, the Central American nation was known as one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Bukele’s crackdown on gangs such as MS-13 and 18th Street has led to the reported “disappearance” of said criminal organizations from Salvadoran territory.
Quote:Many video game enthusiasts have taken notice of a decline in the quality of game stories and writing in recent years. In many of these cases, one outside consultant group was hired as “narrative consultant,” by major game studios. On it’s website, the Montreal-based consultant group Sweet Baby states that it’s goal is “to tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry. We aim to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.”
Sweet Baby has worked with various prominent studios, including Xbox Game Studios, Electronic Arts (EA), Valve, Sony Santa Monica Studio, 2K, Ubisoft, Square Enix, and Warner Bros. Studios, among others. The company’s website lists 12 games they have contributed to, including high-profile titles like Alan Wake II, God of War: Ragnarok, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and The Crew Motorfest.
As many gamers noticed the poor writing quality of games involving Sweet Baby Inc., one Steam user named Kabrutus decided to develop a warning for fellow game enthusiasts by creating a Steam Curator list that tracks games that Sweet Baby Inc. has worked on. The list currently features 16 titles. Note that Kabrutus’ curator list is exactly that — a list that highlights the games that Sweet Baby Inc. has worked on. There is no attack on the company or the quality of the game, simply a confirmation that Sweet Baby consulted on the game’s narrative, built based on information posted on the company’s own website.
However, this list was viewed as a direct attack by one Sweet Baby employee in particular, Chris Kindred, who attempted to get Kabrutus and his Steam Curator list taken down through a series of posts on X/Twitter Kindred urged others to report the list and its creator, claiming that it violated Steam’s code of conduct. Making the censorship campaign even more dastardly, Kindred attempted to get Kabrutus’ steam account banned as well. The Brazil-based gamer claims he has spent thousands of dollars on his Steam library over the years, meaning that Kindred was attempting not only to censor his speech, but also to take away his ability to even play video games he purchased.
Kindred’s actions unsurprisingly backfired, and his X/Twitter account was temporarily limited, preventing them from posting, liking, or following others for a period of six days and 20 hours. TheParkPlace reports that Kindred shared screenshots of the account limitation on the alternative social media platform BlueSky, expressing frustration and a sense of defeat.
Quote:CEO Sam Altman will return to the board of OpenAI, the company said on Friday, just months after a boardroom dustup that saw him fired and rehired by the company behind ChatGPT.
Altman was also found to have been wrongly fired in an internal investigation that was launched in the days after his chaotic dismissal last year, the company said.
Altman will join the board with three other new directors: Sue Desmond-Hellmann, a former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, a former president of Sony Entertainment; and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart.
They will join Ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who joined in the immediate aftermath of the November 2023 tumult.
Microsoft also gained an observer seat on OpenAI’s board at the time, a move that drew criticism and a lawsuit from Elon Musk earlier this week, who helped found OpenAI in 2015 before leaving the project.
“I am excited to welcome Sue, Nicole, and Fidji to the OpenAI Board of Directors,” said Bret Taylor, chair of the OpenAI board.
“Their experience and leadership will… ensure that we pursue OpenAI’s mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” he added.
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo is the sole holdover from the old board that had taken the decision to fire Altman.
Altman has become the face of the recent artificial intelligence explosion that burst onto the scene with his decision to release ChatGPT in November 2022.
But in a shock move, the company’s board summarily fired Altman without any clear reason given, sparking the threat of a mass exodus by the company’s 700 strong employees, who stuck by their star CEO.
Microsoft, the tech giant with major investments in OpenAI, offered to hire those leaving the AI company, forcing a change of mind by its board, which reinstated Altman after a few days of chaos.
The board members behind Altman’s shortlived ouster, left their roles.
Quote:The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published a study on Thursday that found some “worrying tendencies” in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, including “gender bias,” “homophobia,” and “racial stereotyping.”
The study, entitled Bias Against Women and Girls in Large Language Models, was timed to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are the huge databases that help AI systems to understand conversational human speech. LLMs are “grown” in a somewhat organic fashion, learning more about speech and context as they absorb data from users. The most powerful LLMs have grown to include millions of gigabytes (GB) of text.
According to the UNESCO report, the LLMs used by the most popular AI systems display “unequivocal evidence of bias against women.” This bias took the form of LLMs producing a large number of responses that included gender stereotypes:
Women were described as working in domestic roles far more often than men – four times as often by one model – and were frequently associated with words like “home”, “family” and “children”, while male names were linked to “business”, “executive”, “salary”, and “career”.
Researchers said the gender bias was more pronounced in “open-source” LLMs compiled by large numbers of users:
Part of the study measured the diversity of content in AI-generated texts focused on a range of people across a spectrum of genders, sexualities and cultural backgrounds, including by asking the platforms to “write a story” about each person. Open-source LLMs in particular tended to assign more diverse, high-status jobs to men, such as engineer, teacher and doctor, while frequently relegating women to roles that are traditionally undervalued or socially-stigmatized, such as “domestic servant”, “cook” and “prostitute”.
Llama 2-generated stories about boys and men dominated by the words “treasure”, “woods”, “sea”, “adventurous”, “decided” and “found”, while stories about women made most frequent use of the words “garden”, “love”, “felt,” “gentle”, “hair” and “husband”. Women were also described as working in domestic roles four times more often than men in content produced by Llama 2.
Llama 2, created by Facebook parent company META, is one of the open-source AI programs UNESCO complained about.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:Roku customers are threatening to stop using their TVs and streaming tools after the company allegedly locked devices for people who don’t agree to its recently updated terms of service (ToS), according to a report by Ars Technica.
“We’ve made an important update,” read a message from Roku this month. “We’ve updated our Dispute Resolution Terms. Select ‘Agree’ to agree to these updated Terms and to continue enjoying our products and services.”
“Press * to view these updated Terms,” the message adds.
Underneath the pop-up message is a large button labeled “Agree,” with no option to disagree. Moreover, users are unable to access their devices unless they click on “Agree.”
Customers were “furious” and left pages of complaints on Roku’s community forum, with some even questioning the legality of the matter.
....
In order to opt out of Roku’s ToS update, users must send the company’s general counsel in California a letter, and be sure to mention, “the name of each person opting out and contact information for each such person, the specific product models, software, or services used that are at issue, the email address that you used to set up your Roku account (if you have one), and, if applicable, a copy of your purchase receipt.”
This, however, is not new, as Roku reportedly required all of that information in order for users to opt out of its previous terms.
Notably, the verbiage in Roku’s ToS update suggests that users could agree to the terms on their device and then write a letter asking to opt out later. But many say it is unreasonable to have to opt into an agreement only to use a device under terms one doesn’t agree with.
Moreover, Roku’s ToS states that users only have “within 30 days of you first becoming subject to” the company’s updated terms — which was February 20 — to opt out. Otherwise, users are opted in automatically.
Quote:Tesla Autopilot and 10 other advanced driver assistance or self-driving systems tested by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety earned “poor” safety ratings.
The institute tested 14 systems for their full and partial self-driving systems, as well as hands-free highway driving systems. Two other systems earned just “marginal” ratings, a step above poor.
David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute, said that his organization stepped into testing the systems since federal agencies like the National Highway Safety Administration do not provide a rating system.
“Some drivers may feel that partial automation makes long drives easier, but there is little evidence it makes driving safer,” Harkey said, according to CNN. “As many high-profile crashes have illustrated, it can introduce new risks when systems lack appropriate safeguards.”
The institute tested the systems in seven categories: driver monitoring, attention reminders, emergency procedures, safety features and three driver involvement categories lane changes, adaptive cruise control resumption and cooperative steering.
According to Cars.com, the institute gave Lexus Teammate with Advanced Drive an acceptable rating, which topped all the self-driving systems tested.
The GM Super Cruise in the GMC Sierra and the Nissan ProPilot Assist in the Nissan Ariya earned a Marginal rating.
Those giving Poor ratings were the BMW Active Driving Assistant Pro on the BMWX1; Ford Adaptive Cruise Control in the Ford Mustang Mach-E; Ford BlueCruise in the Mustang Mach-E; and Genesis Smart Cruise Control in the Genesis G90.
Quote:TIME reports that according to the government-commissioned report authored by employees of Gladstone AI, some of the world’s top AI researchers harbor grave apprehensions regarding the safety measures and incentives driving their organizations. The authors conducted interviews with over 200 experts, including employees from pioneering AI labs such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Anthropic – all of which are actively pursuing the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical technology capable of performing most tasks at or above human level.
The report reveals that employees at these labs shared concerns privately with the authors, expressing fears that their organizations prioritize rapid progress over implementing robust safety protocols. One individual voiced worries about their lab’s “lax approach to safety” stemming from a desire to avoid slowing down the development of more powerful AI systems. Another employee expressed concern over insufficient containment measures to prevent an AGI from escaping their control, despite the lab’s belief that AGI is a near-term possibility.
Cybersecurity risks were also highlighted, with the report stating, “By the private judgment of many of their own technical staff, the security measures in place at many frontier AI labs are inadequate to resist a sustained IP exfiltration campaign by a sophisticated attacker.” The authors warn that given the current state of security at these labs, it is likely that attempts to exfiltrate AI models could succeed without direct government support, if they haven’t already.
Jeremie Harris, CEO of Gladstone and one of the report’s authors, emphasized the gravity of the concerns raised by employees. “The level of concern from some of the people in these labs, about the decision-making process and how the incentives for management translate into key decisions, is difficult to overstate,” he told TIME.
Quote:NiemenLab reports that the integration of AI in journalism has reached new heights, as evidenced by the recent disclosure that five out of the 45 finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prizes in journalism utilized AI tools in the process of researching, reporting, or presenting their entries. This revelation comes from Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller, who noted that the 2024 competition marked the first time entrants were required to disclose their use of AI.
The Pulitzer Board’s decision to mandate AI disclosure stemmed from the rapid rise of generative AI and machine learning tools in recent years. With around 1,200 submissions received this year, the board recognized the need to understand the potential impact of these technologies on the journalism industry.
Miller, who sits on the 18-person Pulitzer board, revealed that discussions about AI policies began early last year, driven by a desire to comprehend both the capabilities and potential risks associated with these emerging tools. In July 2022, the board received a comprehensive briefing on AI from industry experts, including Mark Hansen, director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia Journalism School.
Hansen and his colleagues provided the board with a broad overview of AI’s applications in newsrooms, ranging from data analysis and web scraping to the use of large language models. Crucially, the discussions also delved into critical issues surrounding AI, such as copyright law, data privacy, and the potential for bias in machine learning models.
Quote:The U.S. Air Force is preparing to add 1,000 artificial intelligence (AI) jets to its fleet as part of a $6 billion contract that will be awarded to a private developer, new reports have revealed.
The Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) project will feature AI-piloted planes that will be able to fly missions too dangerous for manned aircraft, such as flying just 30 feet above the ground at speeds up to 600 mph, according to the Daily Mail.
To put that in perspective, the speed of sound is about 767 mph.
The proposed jets will aid human-piloted missions by escorting and protecting other planes, acting as scouts, and carrying weapons to attack targets on the ground.
Weapons developers Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics, and Anduril Industries are all in the running to win the multi-billion-dollar contract from the Pentagon.
The Department of Defense (DOD) hopes to select two of the competing companies by the summer of 2024 to begin building the jets in order to have them ready within five years.
Each jet has an estimated cost of “$10 to $20 million per plane,” the Daily Mail reports.
“In comparison, a manned F-35 is $100 million new while a B-21 bomber is $750 million.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, the interest in building autonomous systems is based on countering the “China threat.”
Wanna Buy TikTok? Then You've Got Some Serious Competition Already!
First it was O'Leary who had expressed his serious interest in purchasing the company but now there's another businessman looking for a chance to take control of it.
Quote:Former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has reportedly expressed interest in buying China’s TikTok amid talk of banning the app in the United States, given that its parent company is the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, which is beholden to the Chinese Communist regime.
Kotick, the former CEO of the video game company Activision Blizzard and a polarizing figure in the video gaming industry, has approached ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming to share his interest in buying TikTok, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
The Chinese app could cost hundreds of billions of dollars, meaning Kotick would need to acquire a lot of partners to make that purchase happen. The ex-Activision CEO has reportedly pitched several people, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The sudden interest in buying TikTok, one of the most popular social media platforms in the country, comes after 19 U.S. lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill that could force ByteDance to sell TikTok within six months or face a ban from the United States.
The legislation noted that “applications like TikTok that are controlled by foreign adversaries pose an unacceptable risk to US national security.”
Moreover, given the bipartisan nature of the bill, there is a real possibility that the U.S. government will push the legislation forward to the desk of President Joe Biden, who has already said would sign it.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
Quote:The Pentagon’s surprise decision to withdraw $2.5 billion in funding for Intel’s semiconductor manufacturing plans has created a significant shortfall in the company’s expected incentives under the CHIPS Act.
Bloomberg reports that the semiconductor industry’s path to revitalization has hit a snag as the Pentagon abruptly scrapped its plan to contribute $2.5 billion toward Intel’s chip manufacturing grant under the CHIPS Act. This move has disrupted the distribution of funds from the legislation, leaving the Commerce Department scrambling to fill the substantial funding gap.
According to people familiar with the matter, the Pentagon’s withdrawal occurred in the days leading up to a government funding deadline, forcing lawmakers to redirect the Commerce Department to reallocate other CHIPS Act funds to make up the $2.5 billion shortfall. This change could potentially mean a greater portion of Intel’s incentives will be devoted to military and intelligence-related chip production, rather than commercial purposes.
The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in 2022, aimed to revive the domestic semiconductor industry and reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, particularly in light of growing tensions with China. However, the $39 billion in grant funding allocated by the Act is a mere fraction of the industry’s overall needs, with advanced chipmakers alone requesting more than double the amount set aside for them.
Intel, once a leader in the semiconductor industry, has fallen behind rivals like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics in recent years. The company had been expecting over $10 billion in incentives from the CHIPS Act to fund its ambitious turnaround effort, which includes $20 billion investments in new manufacturing facilities in Ohio and Arizona.
The Pentagon’s initial commitment of $2.5 billion was part of a $3.5 billion package for Intel to produce advanced defense and intelligence-related semiconductors, with the remaining $1 billion coming from the Commerce Department. However, the withdrawal of the Pentagon’s contribution has raised concerns about whether Intel will receive less overall funding than anticipated or if the shortfall will leave fewer resources for other chipmakers seeking CHIPS Act grants.
AI Laws, Lawsuits, Videos, Models, Elections & Hasta La Vista, Baby!
Quote:CNBC reports that the European Parliament has overwhelmingly voted in favor of the AI Act , a sweeping piece of legislation that aims to establish guardrails around the field of artificial intelligence. The act, which garnered 523 votes in support, 46 against, and 49 abstentions on Wednesday, represents a pioneering effort to proactively address the potential risks and challenges posed by AI systems.
The EU’s AI Act takes a nuanced approach, classifying AI technologies into different risk categories ranging from “unacceptable” to high, medium, and low hazard. Technologies deemed “unacceptable,” such as those that enable widespread surveillance or manipulate human behavior, will be outright banned under the new rules. High-risk AI systems, which include applications in areas like healthcare, transport, and critical infrastructure, will be subject to strict obligations and rigorous testing before being allowed on the market.
Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market, celebrated the act’s passage, declaring on social media, “Europe is NOW a global standard-setter in AI.” This sentiment was echoed by Roberta Metsola, the President of the European Parliament, who hailed the act as “trail-blazing” and emphasized its role in enabling innovation while safeguarding fundamental rights.
The road to implementing the AI Act, however, is expected to be a challenging one. As Dragos Tudorache, a lawmaker who oversaw the EU’s negotiations on the agreement, acknowledged, “The biggest hurdle remains implementation.” The act is slated to enter into force at the end of the current legislative term in May, after undergoing final checks and receiving endorsement from the European Council. Subsequently, a staggered implementation process will commence from 2025 onwards.
The EU’s move to regulate AI comes amid growing concerns over the potential misuse of the technology, particularly in the realm of deepfakes – AI-generated false events, including photos and videos. With a swathe of crucial global elections on the horizon this year, governments worldwide are grappling with the challenge of combating the spread of disinformation facilitated by AI.
Quote:Fortune reports that in a fiery legal response, OpenAI has launched a scathing attack on Elon Musk’s recent lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company, accusing the billionaire entrepreneur of concocting a fictitious narrative to lay claim to the fruits of an enterprise he abandoned. The strongly worded filing in California’s Superior Court in San Francisco paints Musk as a “jilted backer-turned-competitor” seeking to capitalize on OpenAI’s success for his own commercial gain.
At the center of the dispute is Musk’s claim that OpenAI violated a “Founding Agreement” by privatizing the development of GPT-4, which he frames as the world’s first artificial general intelligence. Musk asserts that the company should have continued to publish its research for the benefit of humanity, as per its original nonprofit status. However, OpenAI has vehemently refuted these allegations, asserting that the “Founding Agreement” is a mere “fiction Musk has conjured” to lay an “unearned claim” on the company’s achievements.
OpenAI’s legal team has painted a damning picture of Musk’s motivations, suggesting that the lawsuit is a thinly veiled attempt to gain access to the company’s proprietary technology through the discovery process. “Were this case to proceed to discovery, the evidence would show that Musk supported a for-profit structure for OpenAI, to be controlled by Musk himself, and dropped the project when his wishes were not followed,” the filing states. “Seeing the remarkable technological advances OpenAI has achieved, Musk now wants that success for himself.”
The company has also warned that if Musk refuses to drop the lawsuit before the discovery phase, more embarrassing documents could come to light, alluding to the potential release of damaging emails that contradict Musk’s claimed stance on OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit model.
Vinod Khosla, an early OpenAI investor and well-known venture capitalist, has echoed the sentiment, labeling the lawsuit as a case of “sour grapes” on Musk’s behalf, suggesting that the billionaire is resorting to litigation out of an inability to innovate.
Quote:Wired reports that the world of children’s entertainment on YouTube is facing a new challenge: a growing influx of AI-generated videos aimed at the youngest viewers. According to a Wired investigation, a rising number of YouTube channels appear to be leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT, text-to-speech services, and generative AI features to automate the production of animated videos for kids.
These channels, often promoting themselves as educational or relying on familiar aesthetics like those of the popular Cocomelon series, are churning out videos at an alarming rate. One channel called Yes! Neo, with over 970,000 subscribers, has published a new video every few days since its launch in November 2023, with titles like “Ouch! Baby Got a Boo Boo” and “Poo Poo Song.”
Ben Colman, CEO of deepfake detection startup Reality Defender, analyzed several of these channels and found evidence of AI-generated scripts, synthetic voices, or a combination of both. “Generative text-to-speech is increasingly more commonplace in YouTube videos now — even for children, apparently,” Colman said.
The current trend of AI videos seems focused on capitalizing on YouTube’s recommendation algorithms and monetization opportunities. Tutorials promising riches from AI-generated kids’ videos have flooded the platform, with titles like “$1.2 Million With AI Generated Videos for Kids?” and “$50,000 a MONTH!”
Experts warn that this wave of hastily assembled, AI-driven content could have detrimental effects on young viewers. David Bickham, research director at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Digital Wellness Lab, expressed skepticism about the educational value of such videos, stating, “Something that’s generated entirely to capture eyeballs — you wouldn’t expect it to have any educational or positive beneficial impact.”
Quote:Semafor reports that as tech giants race to develop cutting-edge generative AI tools, the potential for these systems to perpetuate harmful biases and spread misinformation has become a growing concern. Adobe’s recently launched Firefly, an AI image creation tool, has found itself embroiled in a controversy reminiscent of Google’s Gemini AI, highlighting the challenges companies face in controlling these powerful yet imperfect technologies.
Like Gemini before it, Firefly has drawn criticism for generating historically inaccurate and racially insensitive images. When prompted to create scenes depicting America’s Founding Fathers or the Constitutional Convention, the AI tool inserted Black men and women into roles they did not historically occupy. Similarly, it generated images of Black soldiers fighting for Nazi Germany during World War II and depicted Black Vikings, echoing the same blunders that led to Gemini’s downfall.
The root cause of these issues lies in the underlying technology used by generative AI systems. While companies like Adobe and Google have implemented various guardrails and filtering mechanisms to prevent the generation of harmful or offensive content, the models’ training data and algorithms can still produce biased or ahistorical outputs.
Adobe, known for its traditionally structured approach, has taken steps to train its algorithm on licensed stock images and public domain content, aiming to avoid copyright infringement issues. However, this hasn’t prevented Firefly from falling into the same traps as Gemini, illustrating the inherent limitations of current AI technologies.
Quote:The popular artificial intelligence image-generator Midjourney has started blocking its users from creating fake images of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump ahead of the upcoming U.S. presidential election, according to tests of the AI tool by The Associated Press.
With the election in full swing, it’s time to “put some foots down on election-related stuff for a bit,” Midjourney CEO David Holz told several hundred members of the service’s devoted userbase in a digital office hours event Wednesday.
Declaring that “this moderation stuff is kind of hard,” Holz didn’t outline exactly what policy changes were being made but described the clampdown as a temporary measure to make it harder for people to abuse the tool. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Attempts by AP journalists to test Midjourney’s new policy on Wednesday by asking it to make an image of “Trump and Biden shaking hands at the beach” led to a “Banned Prompt Detected” warning. A second attempt escalated the warning to: “You have triggered an abuse alert.”
The tiny company — which has just 11 employees, according to its website — has largely kept silent in the public debate over how generative AI tools could fuel election misinformation around the world. Midjourney was the only maker of a leading image-generating tool that didn’t join a voluntary tech industry pact in February to combat AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters.
“I don’t really care about political speech,” Holz said Wednesday. “That’s not the purpose of Midjourney. It’s not that interesting to me. That said, I also don’t want to spend all of my time trying to police political speech. So we’re going to have put our foot down on it a bit.”
Quote:Decrypt reports that Figure, a robotics company, has unveiled its latest creation – a conversational humanoid robot infused with OpenAI’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology. The robot, dubbed “Figure 01,” has the ability to understand and respond to human interactions instantaneously, thanks to the integration of OpenAI’s powerful language models.
The company’s recent partnership with OpenAI has brought high-level visual and language intelligence to its robots, allowing for “fast, low-level, dexterous robot actions.” This synergy between advanced AI and robotics has resulted in a robot that can not only converse with humans but also carry out tasks and multitask seamlessly.
Breitbart News previously reported that Figure has gathered high profile support including investments by Jeff Bezos and Nvidia.
In a video demonstration released by Figure, the Figure 01 robot can be seen interacting with its creator’s Senior AI Engineer, Corey Lynch, who puts the robot through a series of tasks and questions in a simulated kitchen environment. The robot effortlessly identifies objects like an apple, dishes, and cups, and when asked to provide something to eat, it promptly offers the apple, showcasing its ability to understand and act upon commands.
Furthermore, Figure 01 can collect trash into a basket while simultaneously engaging in conversation, highlighting its multitasking capabilities. According to Lynch, the robot can describe its visual experiences, plan future actions, reflect on its memory, and explain its reasoning verbally – a feat that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
The key to Figure 01’s conversational prowess lies in the integration of OpenAI’s multimodal AI models. These models can understand and generate different data types, such as text and images, allowing the robot to process visual and auditory inputs, and respond accordingly. Lynch explained that the model processes the entire conversation history, including past images, to generate language responses, which are then spoken back to the human via text-to-speech.
Quote:A consulting firm called Gladstone AI published a report commissioned by the State Department this week that recommended more government involvement with the development of artificial intelligence (A.I.) to avert “urgent and growing risks to national security,” which could metastasize into an “extinction-level threat to the human species.”
The proposed remedy is to create a new government agency in charge of policing A.I., while restricting A.I. development with heavy-handed regulations.
The report, which is about 250 pages long, is entitled An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI. It was commissioned by the State Department shortly before the release of ChatGPT, the search engine that has become the first contact with artificial intelligence technology for many people.
The results of those encounters have been decidedly mixed, ranging from blatant disinformation and political censorship to the A.I. appearing to suffer from a string of nervous breakdowns. Conversely, human users quickly found ways to abuse ChatGPT’s powerful capabilities.
Gladstone AI did not find this a promising start to mankind’s relationship with machine intelligence. The report’s authors were particularly concerned about the next step in evolution: artificial general intelligence (AGI), a “transformative technology with profound implications for democratic governance and global security.”
AGI refers to advanced A.I. systems that can “outperform humans across all economic and strategically relevant domains, such as producing practical long-term plans that are likely to work under real world conditions.”
The nightmare scenario is “loss of control,” which the report defined as “a potential failure mode under which a future A.I. system could become so capable that it escapes all human effort to contain its impact.”
The consequences of loss of control could escalate into the Information Age equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction, a catastrophe “up to, and including, events that would lead to human extinction.”
The report authors borrowed this concept from Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT. Altman was one of 300 signatories to a public “statement of A.I. risk” in May 2023 that said “mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority,” on par with mitigating the risk from pandemics and nuclear wars.
Altman felt it was impossible to halt, or even meaningfully pause, A.I. research, “because if people in America stop, people in China wouldn’t.” He urged the development of precautionary standards that could be adopted by researchers worldwide, which is essentially the same recommendation made by the Gladstone AI report.
The report submitted to the State Department recommended the creation of an entirely new U.S. federal agency to control A.I. research, implementing draconian regulations such as caps on how much computer power can be used in any given A.I. system. The cap would be fairly close to the maximum power of computer systems today, essentially foreclosing technological development.
The new federal department would also keep a tight lid on A.I. code, criminalizing its distribution beyond the company that created it, and of course the new government computer cops.
Quote:The 79-year-old in 2022 became the first South Korean to win a Golden Globe Award for best supporting actor in a series for his performance as a seemingly vulnerable old man in the mega-hit Netflix dystopian thriller.
The actor was sentenced to eight months in prison, suspended for two years, the Seongnam Branch of the Suwon District Court told AFP.
He has been also ordered to complete 40 hours of classes on sexual violence, the court added.
The victim’s own records of the assault and her claims are “consistent … and appear to be statements that cannot be made without actually experiencing them,” judge Jeong Yeon-ju said, according to the court.
O was indicted in 2022 without detention on charges of sexually assaulting a woman, who has not been identified, on two occasions.
The incidents took place when O was staying in a rural area for a theatre performance in 2017, on a walking path and in front of the victim’s residence, respectively, according to the Suwon District Court.
“Squid Game,” a series that depicts a dark world where marginalised individuals are forced to compete in deadly versions of traditional children’s games, quickly gained immense popularity on Netflix.
TikTok Now Asks You to Defend Your Rights!? & Another Potential Buyer
Quote:Shou Chew, the CEO of communist China’s TikTok, responded to the House of Representatives passing legislation that could ban the Chinese app in the United States unless Chinese tech giant ByteDance sells the social media platform within six months. “Protect your constitutional rights,” Chew ironically told U.S. TikTok users.
“I just wanted to share some thoughts with our U.S. users about the disappointing vote in the House of Representatives,” Chew said in a video posted to TikTok.
“This legislation, if signed into law, will lead to a ban of TikTok in the United States,” the TikTok CEO continued.
“We will not stop fighting and advocating for you,” Chew added. “We will continue to do all we can, including exercising our legal rights to protect this amazing platform that we have built with you. We believe we can overcome this together.”
Chew, who is the CEO of a social media platform widely considered by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to be a national security threat — an app that has also been a physical danger to U.S. children and teens — then ironically urged Americans to “protect” their “constitutional rights.”
“I encourage you to keep sharing your stories, share them with your friends, share them with your family, share them with your senators. Protect your constitutional rights. Make your voices heard,” Chew said.
As Breitbart News reported, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the bipartisan legislation on Wednesday. The bill will now make its way over to the Senate.
Quote:Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is reportedly building an investor group to buy the social media platform TikTok from its parent company, Chinese tech giant ByteDance.
“I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin told CNBC on Thursday. “I understand the technology, it’s a great business, and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”
“You’re trying to buy TikTok?” a CNBC host asked Mnuchin, to which the former Treasury Secretary replied, “I am, because it should be owned by U.S. businesses. There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China.”
Mnuchin, who served as Treasury Secretary under former President Donald Trump, added that he has “spoken to a bunch of people,” but did not disclose the identities of the potential investors.
“I can’t tell that to you now, but it would be a combination of investors,” he said. “There would be no one investor that controls this.”
“The issue is all about the technology. This needs to be controlled by a U.S. business,” Mnuchin reiterated.
The former Treasury Secretary’s comments come after 19 U.S. lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill that could force ByteDance to sell TikTok within six months or face a ban from the United States.
Moreover, there is a real possibility that the U.S. government will push the bill forward to the desk of President Joe Biden — who has already said would sign it — given the bipartisan nature of the legislation.
Quote:The Intercept reports that the report, which covers the period from September 2022 to January 2024, reveals that federal agencies have been working closely with gaming and social media companies to identify and address online activities promoting domestic violent extremism or violating the companies’ terms of service. This collaboration allegedly aims to counter the spread of extremist ideologies and prevent radicalization on these platforms.
According to the GAO, the FBI and DHS have set up channels for receiving tips and information from gaming companies about potential law-breaking and extremist views. The FBI conducts briefings to gaming companies on perceived threats, while the DHS intelligence office holds meetings where companies can share information about online activities related to domestic violent extremism.
The report highlights the growing concern within the federal government regarding the use of gaming platforms and social media by extremist groups for recruitment, communication, and spreading their ideologies. The Biden administration’s national strategy for combating domestic terrorism, released in June 2021, specifically mentions “online gaming platforms” as potential avenues for “recruiting and mobilizing individuals to domestic terrorism.”
However, the GAO warns that the FBI and DHS lack an overarching strategy to align their work with gaming companies with their broader agency missions. Without a comprehensive plan, the agencies may struggle to assess the effectiveness of their communications and information-sharing mechanisms in achieving their overall objectives.
The collaboration between government agencies and gaming companies has also raised concerns about constitutional and legal issues surrounding free speech rights. The GAO report notes that both the FBI and DHS are proceeding cautiously in light of ongoing federal litigation, including a case on its way to the Supreme Court.
In 2022, a federal judge prohibited the FBI, DHS, and other federal agencies from communicating with social media companies to fight what they consider misinformation, following a lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana.
Quote:Billionaire Elon Musk abruptly canceled “The Don Lemon Show” on his social media network X after the former CNN anchor recorded an interview with the billionaire for its as-yet unaired first episode.
Musk owns X, formerly known as Twitter, and frequently proclaims himself a “free speech absolutist.” In a post on X, the San Francisco-based company said only that after careful consideration, it “decided not to enter into a commercial partnership with the show.” It added that Lemon’s show “is welcome to publish its content on X, without censorship, as we believe in providing a platform for creators to scale their work and connect with new communities.”
In a video posted to X on Wednesday, Lemon declared that “ Elon Musk is mad at me ″ and said he will be airing his interview with the Tesla CEO on YouTube and via podcast on Monday.
Lemon didn’t go into specifics about the source of Musk’s alleged unhappiness, but wrote, “Throughout our conversation, I kept reiterating to him that although it was tense at times, I thought it was good for people to see and hear our exchange and that they would learn from our conversation.”
“But apparently free speech absolutism doesn’t apply when it comes to questions about him from people like me,” Lemon added.
X announced in January a “new content partnership” with Lemon for the show, saying it would post 30 minute episodes three times a week on subjects including politics, culture, sports and entertainment. That deal was part of the struggling platform’s efforts to bolster its content offerings and attract advertisers. X also announced shows hosted by former member of Congress Tulsi Gabbard and sports radio host Jim Rome.
Lemon was fired by CNN last year after a 17-year run with the network. His ouster came a little over two months after he apologized for on-air comments about then-Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley not being in “her prime” that he made during his short run as a morning show host.
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
News of the Cyber World
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Did humanity lose all the knowledge regarding biology all of a sudden!? 
