I’m not going to suggest that this hack might have other applications. (Where numbers of people have value.)
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/07/buying-campaign-contributions-as-a-hack.html
Buying Campaign Contributions as a Hack
The first Republican primary debate has a popularity threshold to determine who gets to appear: 40,000 individual contributors. Now there are a lot of conventional ways a candidate can get that many contributors. Doug Burgum came up with a novel idea: buy them:
A long-shot contender at the bottom of recent polls, Mr. Burgum is offering $20 gift cards to the first 50,000 people who donate at least $1 to his campaign. And one lucky donor, as his campaign advertised on Facebook, will have the chance to win a Yeti Tundra 45 cooler that typically costs more than $300—just for donating at least $1.
It’s actually a pretty good idea. He could have spent the money on direct mail, or personalized social media ads, or television ads. Instead, he buys gift cards at maybe two-thirds of face value (sellers calculate the advertising value, the additional revenue that comes from using them to buy something more expensive, and breakage when they’re not redeemed at all), and resells them. Plus, many contributors probably give him more than $1, and he got a lot of publicity over this.
Probably the cheapest way to get the contributors he needs. A clever hack.
A long post that explains that Google thinks it can get away with. Worth reading.
Can Google really just use all your posts and tweets to train AI models? Seems like they can.
Seen recently on my favorite newsletter, Risky Biz News:
Google changes privacy policy: Google has changed its privacy policy to let its users know that any publicly-available information may be scanned and used to train its AI models. It’s funny that Google’s legal team thinks its privacy policy is stronger than copyright law. Hilarious!
That gave me pause, because I’m not sure about this at all. Could using publicly available info to train AI be considered “fair use?”
(Related)
https://www.bespacific.com/crawlers-search-engines-and-the-sleaze-of-generative-ai-companies/
Crawlers, search engines and the sleaze of generative AI companies
Search Engine Land: “…LLMs are not search engines It should now be very clear that an LLM is a different beast from a search engine. A language model’s response does not directly point back to the website(s) whose content was used to train the model. There is no economic exchange like we see with search engines, and this is why many publishers (and authors ) are upset. The lack of direct source citations is the fundamental difference between a search engine and an LLM, and it is the answer to the very common question of “why should Google and Bing be allowed to scrape content but not OpenAI?” (I’m using a more polite phrasing of this question.). Google and Bing are trying to show source links in their generative AI responses, but these sources, if shown at all, are not the complete set. This opens up a related question: Why should a website allow its content to be used to train a language model if it doesn’t get anything in return? That’s a very good question – and probably the most important one we should answer as a society. LLMs do have benefits despite the major shortcomings with the current generation of LLMs (such as hallucinations, lying to the human operators, and biases, to name a few), and these benefits will only increase over time while the shortcomings get worked out. But for this discussion, the important point is to realize that a fundamental pillar of how the open web functions right now is not suited for LLMs…”
(Related)
https://www.axios.com/2023/07/13/ap-openai-news-sharing-tech-deal
Exclusive: AP strikes news-sharing and tech deal with OpenAI
The Associated Press on Thursday said it reached a two-year deal with OpenAI, the parent company to ChatGPT, to share access to select news content and technology.
Why it matters: The deal marks one of the first official news-sharing agreements made between a major U.S. news company and an artificial intelligence firm.
… The AP will get access to OpenAI’s technology and product expertise.
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