"The founder of an artificial intelligence company that supplied school districts in Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta with a chatbot to create learning plans for students was arrested on fraud charges Tuesday, accused of spending investor money on herself as her company spiraled into bankruptcy."

usnews.com/news/best-states/ne…

"Joanna Smith-Griffin, 33, of Raleigh, North Carolina, was...charged with securities and wire fraud, along with identity theft."

#AI #LA #ATLANTA #NYC #NC #FRAUD #PRESS

Knowing how to identify and check for misinformation is an important part of being a responsible digital citizen. And this skill is all the more important as #AI becomes more common.

Here’s some basic but important tips:
theconversation.com/verifying-… #misinformation #news

Verifying facts in the age of AI – librarians offer 5 strategies

Library scientists offer tips and tricks to figure out if a particular online news article is reliable or fake.

^{The Conversation}

I filled in the #Mozilla survey and you should too. The sad thing is that of you like #Firefox and want them to focus on making a good browser instead of #AI bs, then like me you will need to select “Other” and write it in.

mozillafoundation.tfaforms.net…

Even though I haven't used my Twitter/X account in over two years, I am still squatting my username.

But I decided to take the next step and delete my tweets before they're fed into their "AI".

cnn.com/2024/10/21/tech/x-twit…

I found @luca's script super useful for this, highly recommend!

github.com/lucahammer/tweetXer

#twitter #x #ai

GitHub - lucahammer/tweetXer: Delete all your Tweets for free

Delete all your Tweets for free. Contribute to lucahammer/tweetXer development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

"To all my writer friends that use MS Word - Microsoft has turned their Al bits and bots on to automatically go through anything done via Word. Here's how to turn it off. File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Connected Experiences"

On the Mac I found it under Word/Excel/Etc > Preferences > Privacy, and near the bottom was the checkbox for "Turn on optional connected experiences" which of course was on by default.

#office365 #AI #microsoft

Looks like we're around 1000 lying monkeys

IEEE Spectrum: Will the "AI Scientist" Bring Anything to Science?

A tool to take over the scientific process continues a controversial trend

(note: the AI *ONLY* completely makes up numbers 10 percent of the time which the authors thing is "probably" unacceptable.)
spectrum.ieee.org/ai-for-scien…

#ai #monkeys #llms

Anthropic on Thursday said it is teaming up with data analytics firm Palantir and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Anthropic’s Claude family of AI models.

techcrunch.com/2024/11/07/anth…

#ai #defenseContracting

Podcast: The Corruption of Open Source / Tech Won’t Save Us

Paris Marx invited me to his influential Tech Won’t Save Us podcast to connect two seemingly distinct stories: The WordPress collapse (that I also talked with Hagen about on his podcast) and the new OSI “Open Source AI Definition” (that is not Open Source at all).

I think we have actually reached the limitations of what the Open Source term and concept can do for us and I am not sure it’s enough for the future. Because software projects for the commons and a sort of social good need to face the fact that they are political and therefore need to include actual political representation of alls stakeholders as well as democratic and transparent modes of decision making (at least when reaching a certain traction/user base).

It was a blast to get to talk to Paris again, you can check the episode out at the Tech Won’t Save Us episode page or wherever you get your podcasts.

Liked it? Take a second to support tante on Patreon!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#ai #openSource #podcast #wordpress

Since nobody wanted to pay for Copilot Pro, Microsoft is now leveraging their Office365 monopoly, adding it to the service and raising prices there.

Luckily Nadella did bend the knee to Trump so there won't be any repercussions.

(More importantly: We see again that #AI isn't economically sustainable)

(Original title: Microsoft is bundling its AI-powered Office features into Microsoft 365 subscriptions)

theverge.com/2024/11/7/2429026…

Microsoft is bundling its AI-powered Office features into Microsoft 365 subscriptions

Microsoft is bundling its Copilot Pro features into Microsoft 365 in some markets. Prices are going up in exchange for AI-powered Office features, though.

^{Tom Warren (The Verge)}

So #AI is being used here to enable Hollywood's risk-adverse atmosphere.

Wouldn't it be better to give some young actors a chance?

The concern here is that old search engines can give you links and you can go into them to verify the content. AI taking over our search engines hides the sources of information, forcing us to blindly trust the AI and wherever it got its information from.

#AI

According to a story in Popular Science that our @ScienceDesk shared, humans just love to physically attack robots — but not if they appear to be in emotional distress, for example, crying out or widening their eyes. Here’s a look at our history of hurting robots, and what that might mean if they become more integrated into our lives in the future.

popsci.com/technology/people-h…

#Robots #Technology #Psychology #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Newstodon #NewstodonFriday #FollowFriday

Researchers tortured robots to test the limits of human empathy | Popular Science

A brief history of people bullying robots.

^{Mack DeGeurin (Popular Science)}

“We’re drowning in a sea of misinformation, much of it spread on a social network controlled by the world’s richest man. This isn’t a new problem, of course, but it’s reaching new levels of absurdity and concern,” writes our managing editor @csullivan in a new blogpost. He breaks down America’s truth crisis, and how Flipboard is maintaining a fact-first approach through it all.

about.flipboard.com/inside-fli…

#Flipboard #Misinformation #Disinformation #Technology #AI #Newstodon #NewstodonFriday #FollowFriday

America’s Truth Crisis: Using AI to Combat Misinformation

How Flipboard uses AI and human editors to highlight quality journalism and minimize misinformation.

^{Carl Sullivan (About Flipboard)}

AI-generated slop is all over Facebook, and it looks like that will be continuing. In a quarterly earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said he is excited for the “opportunity for AI to help people create content that just makes people’s feed experiences better.” What might that look like? “I think we’re going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” he explained. @404mediaco has more.

404media.co/zuckerberg-the-ai-…

#Facebook #Threads #Meta #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #TechIndustry #Newstodon #NewstodonFriday #FollowFriday

Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves

"I think we’re going to add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

Y'ALL KNOW #COPILOT IS BULLSHIT, RIGHT?

you do not invest 13 BILLION IN EQUITY nor gift some scripty kids another $2 billion, give or take, so you can have your own separate and much inferior #AI product, right?!?!?!

"#Microsoft Discloses Equity Investment in #OpenAI for First Time: Filing"
businessinsider.com/microsoft-…

CoPilot is to #ChatGPT what #Bluesky is to #Xitter and it should be damn obvious #techbros been doing shit like this to skirt regulations, not so much in the US but EU.

Microsoft discloses equity investment in OpenAI for first time: filing

Microsoft previously described its relationship with OpenAI as a partnership. Now, it's disclosed an equity investment in the startup.

^{Ashley Stewart (Business Insider)}

@pluralistic :

"Worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm - policing, health, security, customer service - we *also* focus on the AI applications that make the most *money* and drive the most investment.

pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hob… #AI #ArtificialIntelligence

SCOOP from Reporting Fellow Francesca D'Annunzio: Texas Department of Public Safety is committing to a five year, $5.3 million contract for Tangles, an AI #surveillance tool that can track cell phones without a court order. (🧵 1/2) texasobserver.org/texas-dps-su…

#Texas #politics #USpol #news #police #tech #privacy #HumanRights #activism #AI

Texas State Police Gear Up for Massive Expansion of Surveillance Tech

DPS plans to spend millions in taxpayer dollars on a controversial software, used first as part of Governor Abbott’s border crackdown, to “disrupt potential domestic terrorism.”

^{Francesca D’Annunzio (The Texas Observer)}

great, use an unsustainable tool to improve that same unsustainable tool

wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/

#artificialIntelligence #AI #capitalism #money

The Subprime AI Crisis

None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path.

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

The final episode of DATA VAMPIRES is here! We end this four-part series by digging into the harmful worldview driving the massive buildout of hyperscale data centers and AI.

Will we accept tech billionaires charting the course of our future?

Listen to the full episode: techwontsave.us/episode/247_da…

#tech #ai #datacenters #elonmusk #samaltman

“Not Medically Necessary”: Inside the Company Helping America’s Biggest #Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Care
—

When companies like Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to #EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for #care recommended by #doctors for their #patients.

propublica.org/article/evicore…

#News #Insurance #Algorithm #AI #Healthcare

EviCore, the Company Helping U.S. Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Treatments

When companies like Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients.

^ProPublica