Technology

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1187858/a-high-profile-chinese-activist-in-the-uk-who-was-inundated-with-deepfake-posts-on-x-por

Do you ever get the feeling that the people running the world are delulu? That the 1% are living in a completely different universe from the rest of us? You’re not the only one. Even some tech elites are starting to worry about their peers’ grasp on reality. “CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis,” Aaron Levie, a co-founder of the enterprise cloud company Box, declared on X last month. His reasoning for this? “They’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI. So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents.”

In other words: CEOs are so high up the food chain that they don’t understand the human labour that goes into turning an error-riddled AI creation into something that functions properly in a business context. They are desperate to replace their annoying and expensive human labour with compliant AI models, but grossly overestimate what the technology can do. Meanwhile, the industry is rushing out overhyped AI solutions without properly stress-testing them.

This collective euphoria has resulted in some predictable disasters. In April, an AI coding agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude went berserk and deleted a company called PocketOS’s entire production database, along with backups. Jeremy Crane, PocketOS’s founder, later mused on X that this sort of failure was “inevitable” because the industry is “building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it’s building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe”. To recall Facebook’s old mantra: it’s moving fast and breaking things.

Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.

The ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like “Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam,” Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.

Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1186332/pdf-signal-attacks-uk-plan-to-scan-devices-for-nude-images-as-mass-surveillance

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1185607/how-pokemon-go-players-unknowingly-trained-military-drones-i-was-just-playing-a-game

Players of the game Pokémon Go scanned their environment for years for extra points. With the help of these billions of scans, an extremely precise navigation system has now been developed for military drones and robots, among others.