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?
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?
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.
