Always amusing. (But I have a
strange sense of humor…)
https://www.bespacific.com/the-price-of-you/
The
Price of You
Project
Syndicate:
“…The breadth and granularity of what companies now know about
their customers is astonishing. When San Francisco-based WIRED
reporter Reece Rogers asked McDonald’s for a copy of the data the
company keeps on him—a right he enjoys as a California resident
under the state’s privacy law—he expected to get a log of all the
burgers he has purchased over the years. Instead, he received a
515-page
dossier:
McDonald’s predicted how many times he would visit a restaurant in
the next six weeks (2.16, to be exact) and labeled his behaviors (he
tends toward a “Food-Led Afternoon Snack”). He was assigned an
attrition score of zero. Rogers, it seems, is a McDonald’s lifer.
While the invasiveness of the dossier came as a bit of a shock to
Rogers, it’s not surprising for economists who study pricing. In
2004, Duke University economist Curtis Taylor asked
what would happen once firms could buy and sell records of what
shoppers purchased. Gone were the days of Box Top coupons on Betty
Crocker boxes; by that point, loyalty programs had gone mainstream
and were cataloging every dollar customers spent at the grocery store
and on flights. Taylor
predicted that companies would use these records to identify their
most eager customers and charge them more.
Loyal customers, he said, would pay the price, especially if they
had no idea that their data was changing hands. Taylor’s warning
stayed buried in the academic literature while the practice crept,
largely unnoticed, into our shopping carts. Or, in Rogers’s case,
Big Mac orders.
Purchase
history is now the least of it. As shopping is increasingly
conducted online, companies also collect customers’ location,
demographics, behavior, and biometric data. A recent Federal Trade
Commission study
uncovered
systems created by the likes of Mastercard and Accenture that log
whether your cursor hovers over a “buy” button, lingers on a
product name, or drifts toward “close tab.” Delivery platform
DoorDash recently filed
a patent for
a technology that tracks 16 different signals, including phone
battery level, how quickly and jerkily users scroll, and how long
it’s been since a consumer last ordered a meal.
Consumers
are often unaware of how much of their personal data is being
collected. Car companies like General
Motors have
amassed millions of drivers’ precise location and driving-behavior
data through technologies like OnStar, and then sold this
information to insurance companies to feed into car-insurance rates.
When Walmart bought the television maker Vizio, the retail behemoth
had littleinterest
in televisions. By linking
Vizio
TVs to Walmart accounts, Walmart could merge data on the ads
consumers watch with what they buy in the company’s stores and on
its website…”
California
leads, will anyone follow?
https://www.bespacific.com/ca-gov-signed-law-setting-rules-for-how-lawyers-are-permitted-to-use-generative-ai-in-their-work/
CA
Gov signed law setting rules for how lawyers are permitted to use
generative AI in their work
Reuters:
“California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law
first-of-its-kind state legislation
setting
rules for how lawyers are permitted to use generative AI in their
work. Newsom signed the bill, SB
574, on
Wednesday alongside a slate of other AI-related measures that he said
are intended to protect workers, empower doctors and prevent
fraudsters online. Courts across the country have imposed sanctions
and issued warnings to lawyers who failed to vet AI-generated
material and included “hallucinated” material in filings.
Individual judges and courts have also issued standing orders setting
guardrails on the use of AI. No other state has enacted a law
targeted at lawyers’ and arbitrators’ use of the technology,
though some attorneys have said the measure is partly duplicative of
existing rules. The law builds on requirements that already bind
lawyers under state rules governing civil litigation, such as the
need for court filings to be supported by existing law. “The
legislation overlaps with existing legal ethics rules but serves as a
reminder that lawyers need to be checking and verifying the output
received from AI tools,” Daren Orzechowski, a Silicon Valley-based
M&A and technology transactions partner at A&O Shearman, said
in an email.
Under
the new measure, an attorney cannot “delegate the practice of law”
to generative AI. A lawyer responsible for submitting a filing in
court must personally verify citations, including those provided by
AI. Lawyers also must take “reasonable steps” to verify AI
outputs, correct any false or hallucinated output in any AI-generated
material they use, and disclose the use of AI for documents
submitted in court. They are barred from entering confidential or
other nonpublic information into certain generative AI systems.
Arbitrators are restricted from delegating any decision-making to an
AI tool. That new verification requirement likely won’t curb
lawyers’ use of AI, but could
“dramatically expand the amount of time that the signing attorney
would be required to spend reviewing the legal and evidentiary
citations in each filing,”
said Ariel House, a litigation partner in Baker Botts’ San
Francisco office. Newsom signed the bill, SB
574,
yesterday alongside a slate of other AI-related measures that he said
are intended to protect workers, empower doctors and prevent
fraudsters online….”
Inflation?
https://www.krqe.com/news/new-mexico/new-mexico-court-to-rule-on-penalties-meta-faces-in-privacy-violation-case/
New
Mexico attorney asks for $40B penalty against Meta in state case
The State of
New Mexico is asking a judge for the biggest penalty ever awarded in
a court case in the United States to punish Facebook for lying to New
Mexicans. The attorney for the State of New Mexico is calling for
Facebook’s parent company Meta to pay up to $40 billion, after a
jury found they willfully deceived customers.
… The
number falls short of the $219 billion maximum allowed under the
jury’s verdict. But McGinn argued that she believes the amount
would stand up in the Court of Appeals.
Why I respect
philosophy. (Why LLM’s are bullshitters...)
https://thenextweb.com/news/the-difference-between-a-liar-and-a-bullshitter
The
difference between a liar and a bullshitter
… The liar
knows the truth. That’s the key thing about them. They know
exactly what’s true, and they work hard to steer you away from it.
Which means, oddly enough, the liar still respects the truth. They
have to. So they keep one eye on it at all times so they know what
to hide. The liar and the honest person are playing the same game,
just on opposite sides.
The
bullshitter isn’t playing that game at all. They don’t know
what’s true and they don’t care. They’ll tell you the sky is
green if green is what gets him through the conversation, and they’ll
tell you it’s blue thirty seconds later if that works better.
Truth and falsehood are the same to them because they aren’t aiming
at either one. They’re aiming at sounding good.
That,
Frankfurt argued, is what makes the bullshitter the more dangerous of
the two. The liar at least admits the truth is out there
somewhere. The bullshitter has simply decided that it doesn’t
matter.
