From Pine View Farm

Geek Stuff category archive

Facebook Frolics 0

Through the AI glasses stark naked frolics.

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A New Wrinkle in the Crypto Con 0

Beware the crypto honey trap.

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

A wolf in sheep’s clothing? At the Psychology Today website, Mike Brooks explores why many persons don’t see the dangers posed by AI. He makes four main points:

  • We laugh at each new AI iteration right up until it’s too late. This is a pattern as old as the steam engine.
  • AI agents have already retaliated against humans and disabled their own safety controls unprompted.
  • Bad actors are imagining AI-powered schemes that decent people would never think to anticipate.
  • There is no enforceable global regulation for autonomous AI agents operating on private computers.

Follow the link for a detailed exploration of each one.

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

Weaponized? Security maven Bruce Schneir looks at the recent who-shot-john at the Pentagon and concludes that “AI will be used for military purposes, just as every other technology our species has invented has.”

Follow the link for the full article.

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

A con artist’s co-conspirator? Philadelphia’s WPVI reports that a “new wave of smart scams, powered by artificial intelligence, is now targeting consumers every single day.”

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Republican Thought Police 0

Now they’re even targeting artificial thought.

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A Tune for the Times 0

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

Cocksure of itself? At the Psychology Today website, Alain Samson warns us that “(b)oth LLMs themselves and users tend to overestimate the correctness of LLMs’ answers.”

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

Gullible? It’s willing to buy that bridge in Brooklyn.

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

To be trusted implicitly? At the Psychology Today website, Cornelia C. Walther says no way. Here’s a bit (emphasis added):

In three pre-registered experiments involving more than 1,300 participants, something striking showed: When people had access to an AI assistant, they consulted it on more than half of all tasks—and their accuracy mirrored the AI’s almost perfectly. When the AI was right, they were right. When it was wrong, so were they. Most crucially, they weren’t checking. They were simply adopting the AI’s answers, bypassing both instinct and analysis entirely.

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

All wet? Just listen to the segment about AI and car washes that starts at about the seven minute mark in this week’s episode of Le Show.

It is both an absolutely hoot and a glimpse into a dark maelstrom of mechanized moronism.

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A Picture Is Worth 0

Chef labeled

Click for the original image.

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

Input for the intolerant? Follow the paper trail.

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Grokking the Disinformation Superhighway 0

At the Psychology Today website, Richard Restak warns that, “(t)hanks to the technology of the Internet and AI, misinformation is vastly increasing.” He points out that, not only can AI distort the present, it can distort the past:

Nor is the difficulty in distinguishing the real from the fake limited to the present. AI can provide a phony version of the past by altering photos or introducing characters who never existed into a specific historical context. George Orwell presciently anticipated this in 1984, a Comrade Ogilvy “who had recently died in battle under heroic circumstances.” But although no such person as Comrade Ogilvy ever existed, “a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.”

Read the whole thing and remind yourself that, even if you see it on a computer screen (perhaps especially if you see it on a computer screen from “social” media), it ain’t necessarily so.

Afterthought:

I wonder how long it will be before the Trump maladministration starts to deploy AI in our national par–oh, never mind.

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How Stuff Works: The Crypto Con 0

Non Sequitur pictures the process.

Afterthought:

If Carlo Ponzi were alive today, he’d be selling crypto and NFTs.

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

Secure? Security maven Bruce Schneier notes that

Unlike traditional computing systems that strictly separate executable code from user data, LLMs process all input—whether it is a system command, a user’s email, or a retrieved document—as a single, undifferentiated sequence of tokens. There is no architectural boundary to enforce a distinction between trusted instructions and untrusted data. Consequently, a malicious instruction embedded in a seemingly harmless document is processed with the same authority as a system command.

Click to read the whole article.

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Facebook Frolics 0

The EFF looks at the Zuckerborg’s latest assimilation strategy–enabling facial recogntion in its “smart” glasses–and explains why its a very bad no good stinking idea. Here’s a bit from their article:

If adopted and released to the public, it would violate the privacy rights of millions of people . . . .

Follow the link for the rest.

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

Corrosive? At the Psychology Today website, Cornelia C. Walther reports that “(r)esearch found that AI improved efficiency while eroding underlying expertise and agency.”

To put it another way, relying on AI to do our thinking for us may make us dumber.

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

Promoting passivity? At Psychology Today Blogs, John Nosta posits that the risk of AI “isn’t machine thought, but emergent passivity in us.”

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Artificial? Yes. Intelligent? Not So Much. 0

Manipulative? You bet your sweet bippy.

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