Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Who determines “possible criminal behavior?” (Is it behavior no innocent person could possibly blunder into?)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/07/17/license-plate-reader-ai-criminal/?sh=7c07b0a43ccc

This AI Watches Millions Of Cars Daily And Tells Cops If You’re Driving Like A Criminal

In March of 2022, David Zayas was driving down the Hutchinson River Parkway in Scarsdale. His car, a gray Chevrolet, was entirely unremarkable, as was its speed. But to the Westchester County Police Department, the car was cause for concern and Zayas a possible criminal; its powerful new AI tool had identified the vehicle’s behavior as suspicious.

Searching through a database of 1.6 billion license plate records collected over the last two years from locations across New York State, the AI determined that Zayas’ car was on a journey typical of a drug trafficker. According to a Department of Justice prosecutor filing, it made nine trips from Massachusetts to different parts of New York between October 2020 and August 2021 following routes known to be used by narcotics pushers and for conspicuously short stays. So on March 10 last year, Westchester PD pulled him over and searched his car, finding 112 grams of crack cocaine, a semiautomatic pistol and $34,000 in cash inside, according to court documents. A year later, Zayas pleaded guilty to a drug trafficking charge.



(Related)

https://www.pogowasright.org/bill-that-would-force-internet-companies-to-spy-on-their-users-for-the-dea-headed-to-senate-floor/

Bill That Would Force Internet Companies to Spy on Their Users for the DEA Headed to Senate Floor

Lucas Ropek reported:

Internet drug sales have skyrocketed in recent years, allowing powerful narcotics to be peddled to American teenagers and adolescents. It’s a trend that’s led to an epidemic of overdoses and left countless young people dead. Now, a bill scheduled for a congressional vote seeks to tackle the problem, but it comes with a major catch. Critics worry that the legislative effort to crack down on the drug trade could convert large parts of the internet into a federal spying apparatus.
The Cooper Davis Act was introduced by Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall and New Hampshire Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in March and has been under consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee for weeks. Named after a 16-year-old Kansas boy who died of a fentanyl overdose two years ago, the bipartisan bill, which the committee is scheduled to vote on Thursday, has spurred intense debate. Proponents say it could help address a spiraling public health crisis; critics see it as a gateway to broad and indiscriminate internet surveillance.

Read more at Gizmodo.

On Friday, the bill was headed to the Senate Floor.





Likely that writing by a committee would look like writing generated from a large library of examples.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/why-ai-detectors-think-the-us-constitution-was-written-by-ai/

Why AI detectors think the US Constitution was written by AI

If you feed America's most important legal document—the US Constitution —into a tool designed to detect text written by AI models like ChatGPT, it will tell you that the document was almost certainly written by AI. But unless James Madison was a time traveler, that can't be the case. Why do AI writing detection tools give false positives? We spoke to several experts—and the creator of AI writing detector GPTZero—to find out.

Among news stories of overzealous professors flunking an entire class due to the suspicion of AI writing tool use and kids falsely accused of using ChatGPT, generative AI has education in a tizzy. Some think it represents an existential crisis. Teachers relying on educational methods developed over the past century have been scrambling for ways to keep the status quo—the tradition of relying on the essay as a tool to gauge student mastery of a topic.

As tempting as it is to rely on AI tools to detect AI-generated writing, evidence so far has shown that they are not reliable. Due to false positives, AI writing detectors such as GPTZero, ZeroGPT, and OpenAI's Text Classifier cannot be trusted to detect text composed by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

If you feed GPTZero a section of the US Constitution, it says the text is "likely to be written entirely by AI." Several times over the past six months, screenshots of other AI detectors showing similar results have gone viral on social media, inspiring confusion and plenty of jokes about the founding fathers being robots. It turns out the same thing happens with selections from The Bible, which also show up as being AI-generated.





So much for the “AI will replace programmers” idea…

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66178247

AI trend drives rise in students wanting to study computing

This year's application data showed 18-year-olds were increasingly inspired to study computing "thanks to the rise of digital and AI", UCAS chief executive Clare Marchant said.

Applications to study computing were up almost 10% compared to 2022.





Resource.

https://www.makeuseof.com/free-websites-to-learn-data-analytics/?newsletter_popup=1

7 Websites to Learn Data Analytics for Free

There are many data-analysis tools and processes that assist in manipulating data. These range from spreadsheets, reporting tools, and data visualization to data mining programs.

To use these tools, you need some essential data analysis skills. The following free-to-use websites will help you acquire the necessary analytical skills. You can use their courses to boost your data analytics skills.



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