Cheat better?

https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-avoid-sounding-like-ai-in-your-writing/

How to Avoid Sounding Like AI in Your Writing

Whether you use AI to support you when writing your work is entirely your choice. However, very little is more frustrating than your human-written work being flagged as potential AI content when, in fact, you wrote every word yourself.

As an academic proofreader and ex-English teacher, I have become familiar with various ways you can adapt your writing to avoid sounding like an AI bot. Here are some of my best tips.

Tools & Techniques. (Time to start playing?)

https://www.howtogeek.com/these-formerly-paywalled-ai-tools-are-now-available-for-free-users/

These Formerly Paywalled AI Tools Are Now Available For Free Users

AI is prevalent in some circles, but the general population doesn't know or care about these tools. Several of the largest AI companies have changed tactics to get more users on board. Let's check out which formerly paywalled AI tools are now usable for free.

I note that book restrictions are more likely based on politics or religion than logic.

https://www.bespacific.com/americans-views-on-book-restrictions-in-u-s-public-schools-2024/

Americans’ Views on Book Restrictions in U.S. Public Schools 2024

“A study from the Knight Free Expression Research Series produced by Knight Foundation in partnership with Langer Research Associates. Book challenges and restrictions in U.S. public schools have increased dramatically since 2021. Yet research on public awareness, attitudes and engagement in these activities is limited. In an effort to fill this critical knowledge gap in the national dialogue, Knight Foundation partnered with Langer Research Associates to survey a random national sample of more than 4,500 adults, deeply exploring public attitudes on restricting students’ access to books in public schools. This research extends the foundation’s two-decade history of public opinion polling on attitudes toward the First Amendment and free expression.”

• Read the full report here.

• Download the supplemental materials and methodology here. Download the full raw data set in here: .csv format, .sav format.

Watching laws being made…

https://www.bespacific.com/eu-proposal-for-an-eprivacy-regulation/

EU Proposal for an ePrivacy Regulation

“The European Commission’s proposal for a Regulation on ePrivacy aims at reinforcing trust and security in the digital world. Why a reform of ePrivacy legislation? European legislation needs to keep up with the fast pace at which IT-based services are developing and evolving. The Commission has started a major modernisation process of the data protection framework over the past few years, which culminated in the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The ePrivacy legislation needs to be adapted to align with these new rules…”

I fear obfuscation is incurable...

https://www.bespacific.com/even-laypeople-use-legalese/

Even laypeople use legalese

Even laypeople use legalese Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson – MIT. Published August 19, 2024. PNAS 121 (35).

“Why are laws so complicated? Across two preregistered experiments, we found that people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity. This tendency held constant, regardless of whether people wrote the document iteratively or from scratch. These results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language toward communicating efficiently, and that convoluted structures may be inserted to effectively signal the authoritative nature of the law, at the cost of increased reading difficulty. These results further suggest laws can be effectively simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content. Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus analysis (n = 59) million words) first replicated and extended prior work revealing laws to contain strikingly higher rates of complex syntactic structures relative to six baseline genres of English. Next, two preregistered text generation experiments (n = 286) tested two leading hypotheses regarding how these complex structures enter into legal documents in the first place. In line with the magic spell hypothesis, we found people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity. Contrary to the copy-and-edit hypothesis, we did not find evidence that people editing a legal document wrote in a more convoluted manner than when writing the same document from scratch. From a cognitive perspective, these results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language toward communicative efficiency. In particular, these findings indicate law’s complexity to be derived from its performativity, whereby low-frequency structures may be inserted to signal law’s authoritative, world-state-altering nature, at the cost of increased processing demands on readers. From a law and policy perspective, these results suggest that the tension between the ubiquity and impenetrability of the law is not an inherent one, and that laws can be simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content.”

A fancy way saying, “everybody does it?”

https://www.ft.com/content/0cd35741-8002-4cb7-9eb2-8e0933b6331a?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

CrowdStrike hits out at rivals’ ‘shady’ attacks after global IT outage

CrowdStrike’s president hit out at “shady” efforts by its cyber security rivals to scare its customers and steal market share in the month since its botched software update sparked a global IT outage.

Michael Sentonas told the Financial Times that attempts by competitors to use the July 19 disruption to promote their own products were “misguided”.

After criticism from rivals including SentinelOne and Trellix, the CrowdStrike executive said no vendor could “technically” guarantee that their own software would never cause a similar incident.

If you dream of building and programming your own Terminator, this one’s for you!

https://venturebeat.com/ai/build-your-own-ai-powered-robot-hugging-faces-lerobot-tutorial-is-a-game-changer/

Build your own AI-powered robot: Hugging Face’s LeRobot tutorial is a game-changer

Hugging Face, the open-source AI powerhouse, has taken a significant step towards democratizing low-cost robotics with the release of a detailed tutorial that guides developers through the process of building and training their own AI-powered robots.

… By providing a comprehensive guide that covers everything from sourcing parts to deploying AI models, Hugging Face is empowering developers of all skill levels to experiment with cutting-edge robotics technology.

Does ‘The Donald’ understand what he is messing with?

https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-could-sue-trump-fake-ai-endorsement-images-lawsuit-2024-8

Taylor Swift can absolutely sue Trump over the fake endorsement images he reposted. Winning a lawsuit might be harder.

Should Taylor Swift sue Donald Trump or just shake it off?

It's a dilemma that arose on Sunday, when Trump reposted — or "re-Truthed" as it's called on his Truth Social platform — images falsely showing Swift and her fans appearing to endorse the GOP presidential candidate.

"I accept!" the former president captioned the post, which included an apparently AI-generated campaign poster showing the pop star in a red, white, and blue top hat urging, "Taylor Wants You To Vote For Donald Trump."

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/no-fakes-a-dream-for-lawyers-a-nightmare-for-everyone-else/

NO FAKES – A Dream for Lawyers, a Nightmare for Everyone Else

EFF: “Performers and ordinary humans are increasingly concerned that they may be replaced or defamed by AI-generated imitations. We’re seeing a host of bills designed to address that concern – but every one just generates new problems. Case in point: the NO FAKES Act. We flagged numerous flaws in a “discussion draft” back in April, to no avail: the final text has been released, and it’s even worse. Under NO FAKES, any human person has the right to sue anyone who has either made, or made available, their “digital replica.” A replica is broadly defined as “a newly-created, computer generated, electronic representation of the image, voice or visual likeness” of a person. The right applies to the person themselves; anyone who has a license to use their image, voice, or likeness; and their heirs for up to 70 years after the person dies. Because it is a federal intellectual property right, Section 230 protections – a crucial liability shield for platforms and anyone else that hosts or shares user-generated content—will not apply. And that legal risk begins the moment a person gets a notice that the content is unlawful, even if they didn’t create the replica and have no way to confirm whether or not it was authorized, or have any way to verify the claim. NO FAKES thereby creates a classic “hecklers’ veto”: anyone can use a specious accusation to get speech they don’t like taken down. The bill proposes a variety of exclusions for news, satire, biopics, criticism, etc. to limit the impact on free expression, but their application is uncertain at best. For example, there’s an exemption for use of a replica for a “bona fide” news broadcast, provided that the replica is “materially relevant” to the subject of the broadcast. Will citizen journalism qualify as “bona fide”? And who decides whether the replica is “materially relevant”?

We can, therefore we must!

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/08/hacking-wireless-bicycle-shifters.html

Hacking Wireless Bicycle Shifters

This is yet another insecure Internet-of-things story, this one about wireless gear shifters for bicycles. These gear shifters are used in big-money professional bicycle races like the Tour de France, which provides an incentive to actually implement this attack.

Research paper. Another news story.

Slashdot thread.

Is it me or is each organization seeing AI risk differently?

https://www.ft.com/content/5ee96d38-f55b-4e8a-b5c1-e58ce3d4111f

Biggest US companies warn of growing AI risk

Study finds more than half of Fortune 500 groups cited new technology as a potential hazard in their latest annual reports

How beneficial? Worth a read.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2024/08/19/universities-partner-police-ai-research

When Professors Partner With Police

Universities are leveraging AI to help police overcome bias in crime fighting—while contending with the technology’s own biases.

What has to change to allow “everyone” to use a new technology?

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/innovation-fallacy

The Innovation Fallacy

… But innovation only gets you so far. Without the humbler undertaking of diffusion—how innovations spread and are adopted—even the most extraordinary advances will not matter. A country’s ability to embrace technologies at scale is especially important for technologies such as electricity and AI, foundational advances that boost productivity only after many sectors of the economy begin to use them. A focus on the diffusion of technology points toward an alternative explanation for how technological revolutions change geopolitics: it matters less which country first introduces a major innovation and more which countries adopt and spread those innovations.

Resource.

https://www.elon.edu/u/news/2024/08/19/student-guide-to-ai/

Elon, AAC&U publish student guide to artificial intelligence

The first edition of the student guide to AI was written from the student perspective and includes practical advice on using AI responsibly while in college and preparing for the AI future.

… The guide is available at studentguidetoai.org.

If AI can fake consciousness to the point where we can’t tell the difference, is that the same thing?

https://mindmatters.ai/2024/08/researcher-ai-cant-be-conscious-because-it-is-not-alive/

Researcher: AI Can’t Be Conscious Because It Is Not Alive

Remember HAL 9000, David from Prometheus (2012) and all those other fun, evil intelligent robots and computers? It’s great fiction but Marc Wittmann research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas in Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany, says it’s definitely fiction. He offered an account earlier this month at Psychology Today, of why AI cannot actually become conscious:

Equating the brain with a computer because both have been referred to as machines is an erroneous assumption. You can easily label two different objects with the same word: “machine.” That does not change the fact that the brain and a metal-containing machine are two very different entities. Computers operate based on the flow of electricity through their components. But the components themselves always stay the same. In principle, you could shut down a computer and store it in a dust-free environment. A hundred years later you could switch it on again and it could continue processing data.

Marc Wittmann, “A Question of Time: Why AI Will Never Be Conscious,” Psychology Today, August 3, 2024

Of course, life forms are necessarily in a constant state of change. If the change is not growth or managed stasis, it is decay, leading eventually to disintegration. Consciousness is, among other things, awareness of this constant change.

A bit of a twist…

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/40875729/vegas-police-say-nfl-access-policy-compromises-officers-privacy

Vegas police say NFL access policy compromises officers' privacy

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and union officials said they object to NFL access policies to certain areas of Allegiant Stadium, and the union has urged its officers to not work Raiders home games after this weekend if the new arrangement remains in place.

The NFL is using facial-recognition technology this season for those credentialed for games, including for players, media and vendors. The Las Vegas Police Protective Association, with the backing of the department, said they are concerned such technology compromises the officers' privacy.

Police have asked the NFL to let officers wear wristbands, as has been the case in previous seasons.

… The union said on social media on Thursday the league also wants personal information such as fingerprints, home addresses and phone numbers.

Sounds logical. (Should that scare me?)

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/23220058241265613

The Case for Nurturing AI Literacy in Law Schools

The debate surrounding the permissibility of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in legal education has garnered widespread attention. However, this discourse has largely oscillated between the advantages and disadvantages of generative AI usage whilst failing to fully consider how the uptake of these tools relates to the fundamental objectives of legal education. This article contributes to the current debate by positing that since the primary aim of legal education is the preparation of legal professionals and the development of legal research, generative AI must be holistically integrated into the dominant approaches to legal teaching. This stems from the fact that the legal profession will increasingly rely on generative AI in its daily work. Therefore, AI literacy will emerge as a critical professional skill in the legal realm. Against this background, this article further argues that the integration of AI into the legal curriculum should be addressed by diversifying assessment strategies, emphasizing the importance of academic integrity and making resources on the ethical use of AI available to both students and academic staff in law schools.