This won’t go over well.
Misinformation works, and a handful of social ‘supersharers’ sent 80% of it in 2020
A pair of studies published Thursday in the journal Science offers evidence not only that misinformation on social media changes minds, but that a small group of committed “supersharers,” predominately older Republican women, were responsible for the vast majority of the “fake news” in the period looked at.
Surveillance from a drone you can see (or hear?) would be Okay?
The Alaska Supreme Court Takes Aerial Surveillance’s Threat to Privacy Seriously, Other Courts Should Too
… In arguing that Mr. McKelvey did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, the government raised various factors which have been used to justify warrantless surveillance in other jurisdictions. These included the ubiquity of small aircrafts flying overhead in Alaska; the commercial availability of the camera and lens; the availability of aerial footage of the land elsewhere; and the alleged unobtrusive nature of the surveillance.
In response, the Court divorced the ubiquity and availability of the technology from whether people would reasonably expect the government to use it to spy on them. The Court observed that the fact the government spent resources to take photos demonstrates that whatever available images were insufficient for law enforcement needs. Also, the inability or unlikelihood the spying was detected adds to, not detracts from, its pernicious nature because “if the surveillance technique cannot be detected, then one can never fully protect against being surveilled.”
Perspective.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/how-ai-will-change-democracy.html
How AI Will Change Democracy
… In particular, there are potential changes over four dimensions: Speed, scale, scope and sophistication. The problem with AIs trading stocks isn’t that they’re better than humans—it’s that they’re faster. But computers are better at chess and Go because they use more sophisticated strategies than humans. We’re worried about AI-controlled social media accounts because they operate on a superhuman scale.
It gets interesting when changes in degree can become changes in kind. High-speed trading is fundamentally different than regular human trading. AIs have invented fundamentally new strategies in the game of Go. Millions of AI-controlled social media accounts could fundamentally change the nature of propaganda.
It’s these sorts of changes and how AI will affect democracy that I want to talk about.
AI questions…
https://www.bespacific.com/stanford-hai-tests-westlaw-but-the-genai-results-look-worse/
Stanford HAI Tests Westlaw But The GenAI Results Look Worse
Artificial Lawyer: “Ok this story is getting into unusual territory now. Artificial Lawyer just got an email from the spokespeople for the Stanford University HAI team who told this site the researchers had updated their genAI study of hallucinations in case law tools to include Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw. And guess what….? Westlaw has come out even worse than the Practical Law tests (see below) according to what they have published in an updated paper. Here is the new statement to AL from HAI: ‘Letting you know that the research and blog post have been updated with new findings. The study now includes an analysis of Westlaw’s AI-Assisted Research alongside Lexis+ AI and Ask Practical Law AI.’ They have updated the HAI group’s findings here to reflect this. As you may remember, this whole thing started when a group of researchers tested whether LexisNexis’s and Thomson Reuter’s genAI tools were as good as hoped for case law research. There was plenty of confusion caused when the team tested Practical Law, rather than Westlaw for the case law questions. They have since been given access to Westlaw and hence the new results… Here is the link to the original story in Artificial Lawyer, and there are two more articles with comments that follow it that give more context – please see the AL site…”
The answer?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/31/1093019/why-are-googles-ai-overviews-results-so-bad/
Why Google’s AI Overviews gets things wrong
… Most LLMs simply predict the next word (or token) in a sequence, which makes them appear fluent but also leaves them prone to making things up. They have no ground truth to rely on, but instead choose each word purely on the basis of a statistical calculation. That leads to hallucinations. It’s likely that the Gemini model in AI Overviews gets around this by using an AI technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which allows an LLM to check specific sources outside of the data it’s been trained on, such as certain web pages, says Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in online search.
Once a user enters a query, it’s checked against the documents that make up the system’s information sources, and a response is generated. Because the system is able to match the original query to specific parts of web pages, it’s able to cite where it drew its answer from—something normal LLMs cannot do.
One major upside of RAG is that the responses it generates to a user’s queries should be more up to date, more factually accurate, and more relevant than those from a typical model that just generates an answer based on its training data. The technique is often used to try to prevent LLMs from hallucinating. (A Google spokesperson would not confirm whether AI Overviews uses RAG.)
So why does it return bad answers?
But RAG is far from foolproof. In order for an LLM using RAG to come up with a good answer, it has to both retrieve the information correctly and generate the response correctly. A bad answer results when one or both parts of the process fail.
And thus ends the death watch…
https://www.bespacific.com/the-trump-manhattan-criminal-verdict/
The Trump Manhattan Criminal Verdict
Via Scott McFarlane – For the history books ===> Supreme Court of the State of New York. The People of the State of New York against Donald J. Trump, defendant
The New York Times – Jury Hands Down Historic Conviction in Hush-Money Case
Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened his ascent to the White House in 2016.
He is the first American president to be declared a felon, a stain he will carry as he seeks to regain the presidency.
Donald Trump has become America’s first felon president.
Opinion, The Editorial Board, The New York Times. Donald Trump, Felon. The former president’s conviction in a New York criminal trial revealed, yet again, why he is unfit for office.
WSJ – Trump Guilty on All Counts in Hush-Money Case. He is the first former U.S. president to be found guilty of a crime
And please read this article via the Queens Daily Eagle (Queens, NY) – Queens man convicted – “Former Jamaica Estates resident Donald Trump was convicted by a Manhattan jury on Thursday of 34 counts of falsifying business records in an effort to cover up a sex scandal he feared would ruin his chances of winning the 2016 presidential election…”
Washington Post – We’ve posted searchable daily transcripts from Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial on The Washington Post’s website. View them here.
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