Artificial Intelligencce – Page 8 – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

When caring becomes a commodity, should we care more or less?

Lots to care about. On all the usual fronts. But in the grand scope of the universe does much of it really matter? Some interesting links to share in this week’s Sunday Morning Reading.

Dan Sinker, taking a look at The Chicago Sun-Times AI flaps calls it The Who Cares Era. His theory is that along the way, nobody cared. I’d venture they cared about the wrong things.

Apple’s annual developer conference WWWDC is a week away and given the many issues the company is confronting lots of folks care and are curious about how Apple begins to address them. Some don’t see Apple changing how it deals with developers, like Aaron Vegh in his post, They’re Not Going to Change.

Some, like John Siracusa, are rooting for Apple and even offering advice. Siracusa’s piece Apple Turnaround is a companion to his recent previous post Apple Turnover. All worth a read, regardless of how you feel about the predicaments Apple finds itself in.

The tech bros who seem to be in the pole position running to rule the world may be making bank, but they’re not winning any friends in the process. They most likely don’t care given that they think they’re on their way to conquering the universe. John Kaag is offering up A Reality Check For Tech Oligarchs. Frankly, I don’t think they live in anything close to reality.

Meanwhile, down here on planet reality, some are looking for ways to survive and perhaps beat the odds seemingly stacked against us. A.M. Hickman lays out a vision for How To Live on $432 a Month In America.

Much of what’s going on around us might seem profane and vulgar, leading to quite a few expletives coming out of our mouths as we cope. David Todd McCarty takes us on an exploration of his love of four-letter words in Frequently Profane But Never Vulgar. For what it’s worth, all words have value in my opinion. Hiding from them is fucking stupid.

Natasha MH is Reclaiming the Joy of Struggle in an AI-Driven World. Better grab that joy while we can, because that struggle is only going to become more intense.

Just when you thought we might have begun to figure out the new landscape of insanity we’re currently struggling through, comes along Ross Anderson who informs us about The Nobel Prize Winner Who Thinks We Have The Universe All Wrong. It may someday stop expanding the way we thought and might just remain stagnant for longer than originally theorized, allowing intelligent life to continue longer than we thought. One may ask, should we care?

(Photo from Vincent Nicolas on UnSplash.)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Yes, There’s More on The Chicago Sun-Times AI Flap

Content is no longer king. Revenue generation is the boss.

You probably remember last week’s adventure in AI and The Chicago Sun-Times. A special section featuring summer activities called The Heat Index included a traditional list of fifteen books for summer reading. Ten of the books didn’t exist, even though they are listed as being written by actual authors. Yes, AI was the culprit. But so too were the humans.

Well, it turns out there’s more to the story. Other parts of The Heat Index also included things like quotes from folks who claim they never made them and in the case of one chef was never solicited for an interview. The Sun-Times began checking the Heat Index and discovered 10 stories they checked all had similar erroneous sources, some phony, and multiple errors and information that couldn’t be verified.

The digging also unveiled that similar errors existed in past special supplements put together by King Features, a division of Hearts Corp, the newspaper published. The Sun-Times typically does about 10 such special supplements a year.

Here are some examples from the latest article describing the scenario:

One of the first stories in the summer section, touted as “a look at the hammock boom,” quoted several people who may not exist, or at least are not who Buscaglia said they were.

For example, a Ryan Leidecker was described as a product line manager at Eagles Nest Outfitters. The company said Leidecker is not an employee nor ever has been.

Buscaglia also cited a Dr. Jennifer Campos as professor of leisure studies at the University of Colorado. The university says it has no record of an employee named Jennifer Campos.

The story quoted Campos as saying a “hammock has become this generation’s equivalent of the Frisbee on the quad,” from her “2023 research paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.” A search of her name in the journal yielded nothing.

In the same story, Mark Ellison is identified as an employee at Great Smoky Mountains National Park and warns about the damage that “improper hammock hanging techniques” can do to trees, with Buscaglia noting the information appeared on the park’s website.

Ellison posted on Facebook that he was not an employee of the park and said no such thing. The national park confirmed to the Sun-Times that Ellison does not work there and that there is no such information about hammocks on its website.

Also cited in the DIY article was a 2024 Wired magazine story by a tech writer named Brian Kahn, about setting up an outdoor movie area in your backyard. Wired told the Sun-Times that Kahn has not written for the publication and the quote was inaccurate.

The author of the content, Mark Buscaglia, did come clean about using AI and his failure to fact check. The Sun-Times has also come clean and said that no Sun-Times employees proofed the content before publishing it under its own banner.

What’s interesting, though not surprising, is The Sun-Times reasoning for how it got into this mess. Using King Features and not Sun-Times staff to prepare the supplements was, as you would expect, a cost-saving move according to Chicago Public Media’s CEO Melissa Bell, who also called the episode a series of “human mistakes.”

Here’s another quote:

Bell said the decision to buy special sections from King Features — which predated her arrival at CPM last year — was a “creative solution to keep hitting revenue goals while we transition from print to digital revenue.” She said she had no objection: “I didn’t deeply investigate the editions, and quickly approved the team to continue the practice in place. My reasoning: let’s not sacrifice any revenue.”

As a side note to this story, and pointing to the bigger picture human mistakes I think all of these AI companies have made, it seems to me that a lot of these kind of error prone mistakes or hallucinations — too easily overlooked by most humans — could easily be rectified if the AI output included some sort of watermark or other identifier to say that it was generated by machines. That technology certainly should be easy to implement. At least given the promises of what AI is supposed to offer. But then that lets the air out of the balloon.

When it comes to scraping nickels off the pavement or bigger bucks from investors, and appearing that you’re something you’re not, we humans are far too accomplished at those skills. It’s no wonder Artificial Intelligence spits it back in our faces from time to time.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

You Will Be Assimilated as OpenAI Seeks Single Sign On Capabilities

Resistance to Single Sign On is not futile

News on so many fronts is fast and furious these days and this little Artificial Intelligence nugget seemed to skirt around quite a few radars. OpenAI, the purveyors of ChatGPT is working on a Sign In with ChatGPT feature.

As I said on social media when this news broke, we’ve seen this movie before. It’s a complex plot, that never seems to work out in the end. Signing in with Beginning what seems like a generation ago, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the like proliferated and many users joined the parade out of convenience. Apple has its own Sign in with Apple feature, and swears up and down that it doesn’t share your data. That may be true, but we now know different about most, if not all of the others.

Like what happens with most new technology, we jump into the pool without really knowing what lurks beneath, and once it became more apparent how single sign in allowed companies to track you across most online activities folks began changing their habits. Swimming with sharks is never fun.

The tracking is the key. So is the passage of time. There’s an entire new generation of users who have embraced Artificial Intelligence, OpenAI’s ChatGPT in particular. TechCrunch cites that there are 600 million monthly active users of ChatGPT. I’d wager that a large number of those users were too young to experience the last generation of the single sign in revolution years ago.

As I said, we’ve seen this movie before, and by and large it never ends well. Data is tracked, traded — and now with AI used for training — in ways that should cause greater care when it comes to the tradeoff for convenience when consenting to those user agreements no one ever reads.

As the TechCrunch article points out the intent here is to use that data for commercial purposes supposedly to “help people with a wide range of online services.” That’s the pitch. But it’s a knuckle ball that is difficult to control, much less swing at. It’s always about the money and data is money.

OpenAI may be the first of the AI companies vying to sign you in, it won’t be the last. In my opinion the safest bet in the big data casino is to always create a separate sign in for each online service you use. Don’t let the convenience factor outweigh what little control you do have over how your data is used and abused.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Sunday Morning Reading

So what is this future we’re heading into anyway?

If you’re observing Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. I hope you have had a pleasant one. Even if the weather isn’t cooperating, seemingly echoing the threats of seeing that tradition, like so many others, diminished. We’re on the road again for a dear friend’s memorial service, but there’s still time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. Mostly tech related this week, some politics, and of course some cultural happenings. If you’re paying attention, it’s all intertwining. Listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen. Enjoy.

Adding to what’s becoming a recurring theme in this column, Ian Dunt is looking for ways to get the most out of our digital lives while taking back a bit of control from the tech god wanna-be’s. Check out Taking Back Control of Our Digital Life.

Matthew Ingram wonders If AI Helps To Kill The Open Web What Will Replace It? Excellent piece and excellent topic, because like it or not, it’s the current and next movement we on the ground are going to have to contend with. Pay attention.

Neil Steinberg, one of my favorite of a dying breed of Chicago journalists, gives his take on the recent Chicago Sun-Times AI flap in The AI Genie Is Out of The Bottle, and the Granted Wish Often Brings Trouble.

Lucy Bannerman takes on the AI’s abuse of copyright and artists rights in Nick Clegg: Artists’ Demand Over Copyright Are Unworkable. They aren’t. Those demands just cost more than folks counting the beans want to pay.

Lynette Bye’s Misaligned AI Is No Longer Just Theory raises up that specter that haunts this entire episode of our life across all spectrums that seems easy to fall prey to or dismiss, depending on which side of the coin you’re on. Frankly, if you don’t think the future of this can be manipulated, you’re not paying attention.

Jason Snell’s take on the recent announcement that OpenAI has bought Jony Ive’s company to produce new hardware for AI I think is the correct one. Check out Sam and Jony and Skepticism.

Chloe Rabinowitz fills us in on the outgoing president of the Kennedy Center’s response to the bullshit coming out of the White House. in Deborah Rutter Releases Statement In Response to Trump Kennedy Center Allegations.

The real boss, Bruce Springsteen, continues to piss off the orange buffoon in the White House and I’m glad to see it. So is Eric Alterman in a guest essay in The New York Times proclaiming Bruce Springsteen Will Never Surrender to Donald Trump. We need more of this.

And to wrap up this week, here’s NatashaMH wondering Do We Really Need To Have This Discussion? No hints. No clues. Just good stuff for you to read.

We’re Losing The Battle Over What’s Real and What’s Not

The Chicago Sun-Times publishes AI generated fiction as fact

The Chicago Sun-Times is going to go through some things. Is AI the culprit? Business model? Lack of editorial oversight? The answer doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things when it comes to the struggle to understand what’s real and what’s not.

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The paper published a summer activities guide called the Chicago Sun-Times Heat Index that contained a reading list of books that included real authors, but some of the titles were entirely fictional. As in not real titles at all. Just made up. Five of the titles actually exist. Ten do not.

This episode lead most to immediately speculate that the article was generated by Artificial Intelligence and that there was no editorial oversight of what actually made it into print. I don’t know about you, but I’d call those assumptions more than an early warning sign.

According to 404 Media the Heat Index was published by King Features which is owned by Hearst Newspapers. The guide was licensed by the Sun-Times apparently for the Sunday print and online editions.

The Sun-Times issued an early statement saying they are looking into the matter as referenced below, promising more info to be released soon.

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To their credit they did. VP of marketing and communications for Chicago Public Media, which owns the Sun-Times stated to 404 Media that no one at Chicago Public Media reviewed the section, which follows a pattern used with similar such inserts saying that “historically, we don’t have editorial review…because it comes from a newspaper.” That statement of course includes the promise of a change in policy going forward and an investigation to see if there is other inaccurate information. You can read the full Chicago Sun-Times statement released later here.

The Sun-Times was not the only paper to license and publish the paper according to NPR.

That NPR report also says that writer Marco Buscaglia claimed responsibility for the guide and did acknowledge that it was partly generated by Artificial Intelligence.

Ah, well. All of those worst case assumptions were not a mass hallucination, I guess.

There were years that I bought both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune every morning and got to work early enough to read them both. Those days are long gone, mostly thanks to the Internet and the changes that wrought on the newspaper publishing industry. We’ve all seen this next chapter coming. I guess it’s here.

Here’s the thing. The cold hard fact that most leapt to the assumption that this is some form of AI generated content proves the battle, and perhaps the war has already been lost, regardless of how this did or didn’t happen. It will happen again.

We’ve been heading into the land of make believe where facts don’t matter for some time now. It’s sad that what once were venerated media sources have been helping to lead the charge, especially in an era when governments feel free to make up things as they go along.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Sunday Morning Reading

Paying attention for the next generation.

Good morning. Visiting the grandkids this weekend, so this will be a short stack of links to share. Fair warning ahead most are on the darker side of the ledger. The links. Not the grandchildren. They are the light. The grandchildren are why I pay attention.

First up is a piece on despair from Dean Pritchard titled Despair, What Is It Good For. He calls it a hopeless call to action. I’m not sure it’s hopeless at all. Just another step in finding what may or may not turn out to be answers. As long as we keep stepping.

NatashaMH says that social media addiction isn’t just about us, it’s about the people around us in Unread, Unavailable and Unbothered. I’ve never been one to buy into the social media addiction theory. It’s too damn easy to put down the damn phone. But I take her points because it’s too damn easy to keep hoping to find new ways to avoid despair.

Lauren Goode takes on Deepfakes, Scams, and the Age of Paranoia. Somebody needs to.

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman say that Trump is betraying the voters who elected him in The White Rural Reckoning. They are correct. But we knew that would happen. Scum likes to remove itself from other scum once it’s done scumming around.

Joan Westenberg compares the comeuppance moment Apple is enduring to Martin Luther’s reformation moment in Apple’s Diet of Worms. Given the abundance of fanatics there’s more than a little truth here.

Playwright Sara Ruhl is one of my favorites. Charles McNulty takes a look at what she has to say in her new book In ‘Lessons From My Teachers,’ Playwright Sarah Ruhl Finds Wisdom In Art, Motherhood, Even Grief.

And as for weathering despair, check out Lost At Sea by Alec Frdyman. Excellent reading about a scary adventure.

And to close out this weekend I’ll leave you with this uncredited thought that pops up every now and then on social media.

And just remember who the tax breaks are targeted for.

Peace.

Sunday Morning Reading

Happy Mother’s Day reading.

Time for some Sunday Morning Reading on this Mother’s Day, with a short stack of culture, some tech, some politics, and the Ziegfeld Follies tossed in for good measure.

First up is a good long read from Spencer Kornhaber wondering if we’ve entered a cultural dark age. Provocative in parts, predictable in others, it’s worth your time for the journey it takes. Check out Is This The Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?

Kaitlyn Tiffany says We’re Back to the Actually Internet. It’s about fact checking, the need for fact checking, and actually about how fact checking doesn’t really matter.

We may have beat the term fascism to death long before the real beating actually begins, and it’s the Bible thumpers who seem far too eager for the end times with their wishes for some sort of Armageddon beat down. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take a look at The Rise of End Times Fascism.

The Apple enthusiast world is still going through some things and will continue to for the foreseeable future. Denny Henke at Beardy Guy Musings is chronicling his thoughts about his move away from using Apple products. His latest, Are Apple Enthusiasts Miserable? takes a look at some of the angst and tensions he sees.

Indie app Developer Thomas Ricourad, the developer of the app Ice Cubes for Mastodon, among other apps, is searching. He’s not alone. Check out Having A Clear Vision In A Blurred World.

Matthew Gurewitsch takes a quick look The Story of a Rose, an upcoming look at an almost forgotten era in A Ziegfeld Girl Recalls The Forgotten War.

Happy Mother’s Day to all.

(image from Aga Putra on Unsplash)

Apple’s Long Term Challenges Complicate The Short Term

It’s not easy to sell a waiting game.

Mark Gurman offers up a relatively thorough summary of the number of challenges Apple is facing going forward in his weekly Power On column. Things always go forward. The question is always how.

The original link above is paywalled, but here’s a web archive link to the story.

And here’s the summary:

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Gurman calls this point in Apple’s history a “critical juncture.” I would agree. The many moving parts, both surrounding Apple, and of its own making, have put Cook and company squarely in that critical juncture. This comes as Apple and those that make their living talking about Apple are gearing up for this year’s World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) next month.

Gurman delivers the punchline well below the headline that neatly summarizes why WWDC is not going to be able to address all of these challenges, but also why the turmoil is going to continue.

Speaking specifically about Apple’s race to catch up in the AI realm he says:

it’s going to be a while before we can tell if Apple is heading in the right direction

Perhaps that should have been the lede. He could have easily said the same about each of these challenges he enumerates.

But there’s also a larger, more encompassing challenge that makes surmounting each even more difficult. The tech world is moving at a pace that Apple is unaccustomed to. Apple’s historic long view has served it well over the years, but the window on that long view is increasingly narrowing its aperture.

Apple may spend its June introducing and setting the table for what’s coming later this year, but already most of the smart players who follow and promote Apple are shifting their focus to the bigger, and more critical, table stakes coming long after this year’s summer and fall hype cycles end. The now familiar “coming later this year” now means much less when the real issues may only begin to be addressed further down the road.

Waiting “a while” is not an easy sell. Especially these days.

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Sunday Morning Reading

Choose to pay attention before you don’t have a choice.

So much is broken these days as we watch more things break. Of course the choice is to watch or not. I prefer watching. I prefer paying attention. That’s why I share these links in Sunday Morning Reading and throughout the week.

Kicking off this week is an excellent essay from Jia Tolentino called My Brain Finally Broke. It’s one of the more powerful pieces I have read on all that’s breaking. The above is the original link. This one is to the web archive of the piece. Obviously I encourage you to read all I like to in Sunday Morning Reading, but this is one you shouldn’t miss.

NatashaMH takes on The Paradox of Choice. If you ask me, we too often enjoy choosing the paradox.

Joan Westenberg takes a look at what happens when one chooses conventional wisdom and the systems and ways things have always worked. Until those ways become a weakness and a downfall in The Cannae Problem. We’re watching this happen in real time folks.

This past week Amazon’s ass-kissing founder Jeff Bezos looked like he might have tired of the stink. In the wake of Trump’s tariffs word got out that Amazon would show customers the amount of a price increase that was due to the Trump tax. That quickly changed. Some say with a phone call from the bumbling boss. Harry McCracken suggests, (I did too), that merchants should let us know who’s screwing who in this broken mess. Check out Of Course We Deserve To Know The True Costs of Tariffs.

What Should We Do If An AI Becomes Conscious? I’m not sure. But then again, look what we as conscious beings are already doing. Mathew Ingram takes a look.

Yanis Varoufakis takes a look at Trump And The Trump Of The Technolords. It’s not a pretty look at the reasoning behind what seems to be happening without reason.

There’s not much new news in Matthew Cunningham-Cook’s piece titled Elon Musk And His DOGE Bro Have Cashed In On American’s Retirement Savings, but it’s a good summary of what has happened for those who choose to pay attention. A better one for those who choose otherwise.

To end this week with an article about hope, take a look at Lessons From A Physician About Hope by Leif Hass. Yes, hope is important. Here’s hoping you always choose wisely.

(Image from Roman Kraft on Unsplash.)

All The World’s His Stage. Happy Birthday (We Think) to William Shakespeare

We’re merely players.

William Shakespeare is the playwright and poet that described us all. He did so with intelligence and wit. Today, April 23, is the day most mark as his birthday. The record of his baptism is April 26th, so it’s a decent bet the date is close enough.

There really is nothing new in human behavior under the sun. In his plays and poems I don’t think he missed much in describing every thing good, bad, noble, and foolish about how we operate with each other and within the world. In my view, it’s a shame more of us don’t pay enough attention to his cataloging of humanity. But then he predicted that as well.

Here’s an intriguing side note on this very intelligent man’s celebrated birth date. I asked several AI engines on what day was he born. Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and DeepSeek returned April 23rd as the likely date with the typical (and mostly accepted) disclaimers that we celebrate that day, but there’s no definitive proof it was the actual date. I asked Siri and Alexa, both returned April 23 as the definitive date. Intriguing that Siri didn’t try to pass that off to ChatGPT. I’m sure Amazon will now offer me all kind of suggestions to purchase anything Shakespeare.

So, I’ll amend slightly my statement about the Bard describing us all and there being nothing new under the sun. He’s correct in that we’re both smart and too often not smart enough to understand what we do and do not know, but he might have missed the mark when it comes to artificial intelligence. Or did he did he?

I’m reasonably certain his works have been fed into AI engines and Chatbot training given that they are long in the public domain. I’m also reasonably certain they ignore his nothing new under the sun descriptions of human interactions in the same way those of us still walking around do.

“Lord, what fools we mortals be!”

You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.