The Atlantic: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is”

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.

What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit, as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. She followed with: I can’t believe I just had to type that.

Charlie Warzel

Certainly bad to have people threatening meteorologists – talk about shooting the messenger! – and claiming that the hurricanes were unleashed by the government. At the same time, is any of this honestly surprising to anyone who followed American culture? Half the country is in full-blown denial about global warming; the more extreme weather disasters become, the more they need to escalate their denial and blame-shifting, lest they would be forced to face the bitter reality that they ignored the problem for decades, let oil companies get rich and shape the narrative, and now the consequences of inaction are becoming inescapable and threaten their privileged and wasteful lifestyles.

TechCrunch: “Meta confirms it may train its AI on any image you ask Ray-Ban Meta AI to analyze”

In other words, the company is using its first consumer AI device to create a massive stockpile of data that could be used to create ever-more powerful generations of AI models. The only way to “opt out” is to simply not use Meta’s multimodal AI features in the first place.

The implications are concerning because Ray-Ban Meta users may not understand they’re giving Meta tons of images – perhaps showing the inside of their homes, loved ones, or personal files – to train its new AI models. Meta’s spokespeople tell me this is clear in the Ray-Ban Meta’s user interface, but the company’s executives either initially didn’t know or didn’t want to share these details with TechCrunch. We already knew Meta trains its Llama AI models on everything Americans post publicly on Instagram and Facebook. But now, Meta has expanded this definition of “publicly available data” to anything people look at through its smart glasses and ask its AI chatbot to analyze.

Maxwell Zeff

I’ve been vaguely following the news around these new smart glasses from Meta to see how they would fare compared to Google’s failed attempt with Glass a decade ago, and Apple’s massive VR helmet. This reporting underscores what some remarked repeatedly about ad-driven companies like Google and Facebook: their products are built for the core purpose of data collection for ad targeting. The privacy implications are as egregious as with Google Glass: everything in the visual field of these glasses will likely end up in a facial recognition database and might get exposed publicly – in fact, some college students have already hacked the Ray-Ban Meta glasses to reveal the name, address, and phone number of anyone they look at.

ABC News: “Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user’s public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option”

But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge.

Shoebridge: The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That’s the reality, isn’t it?

Claybaugh: Correct.

Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

Jake Evans

Hardly surprising coming from Facebook – or any other American tech giant for that matter; the latest example being LinkedIn, which has covertly opted its users in to supply data for AI training without even bothering to update their terms of service.

This is why GDPR is so important in the EU, and why, despite all its critics and lackluster enforcement, the core of the legislation is sound and future proof. In simple terms, companies need to have legitimate reason, or consent, to use consumers’ data for new purposes. Training AI models is clearly a new purpose that doesn’t precisely have a legitimate reason, so companies should in theory ask for distinct consent before using the data.

Financial Times: “How Lidl accidentally took on the big guns of cloud computing”

Starting with a system built for internal use in 2021, Lidl owner Schwarz Group now offers cloud computing and cyber security services to corporate customers.

Its IT unit, Schwarz Digits — which became a standalone operating division in 2023 — has signed up clients including Germany’s biggest software group SAP, the country’s most successful football club Bayern Munich and the port of Hamburg. Last year, the unit generated €1.9bn in annual sales and it employs 7,500 staff.

We did not start with a commercial motivation in mind but just wanted to address our own needs, Christian Müller, co-chief executive of Schwarz Digits told the Financial Times in a rare interview. We’re on a very steep growth path.

A main selling point of its service is that all client data is processed and stored exclusively in Germany and Austria, which have stringent privacy and data protection laws.

Olaf Storbeck

Exciting development for a European business to build its own cloud computing system from the ground up – and striking how closely this origin story resembles Amazon’s AWS. I would say this is a good example of how regulation can foster business opportunities. It would probably have been faster and cheaper for Schwarz Group to contract an existing US cloud provider, but since their products are not prioritizing privacy, the more compliant answer was to build an internal solution.

Variety: “‘Megalopolis’ Marketing Consultant dropped over AI Quotes in Trailer”

Lionsgate has parted ways with Eddie Egan, the marketing consultant who came up with the “Megalopolis” trailer that included fake quotes from famous film critics.

The studio pulled the trailer on Wednesday, after it was pointed out that the quotes trashing Francis Ford Coppola’s previous work did not actually appear in the critics’ reviews, and were in fact made up.

Sources tell Variety it was not Lionsgate or Egan’s intention to fabricate quotes, but was an error in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases provided by the consultant. The intention of the trailer was to demonstrate that Coppola’s revered work, much like “Megalopolis”, has been met with criticism. It appears that AI was used to generate the false quotes from the critics.

Gene Maddaus & Katcy Stephan

Perfect illustration of LLMs as unreliable creations, making them unfit tools for a dependable business environment in their current form. As many have pointed out, the biggest threats from current AI models are not human extinction, but the proliferation of falsehood, the dilution of truth, and making it trivial for people to get by with being sloppy and incompetent. This high-profile case was easy to spot, but who knows how many smaller projects are filled with made-up ‘facts’ and fabricated quotes.

Mashable: “Elon Musk’s X lets users sort replies to find more relevant comments”

The latter two reply sorting options are pretty straightforward. “Most recent” shows replies in chronological order from newest to oldest. “Most liked” shows the replies with most likes first. Blue check accounts appear to have completely lost any advantage that the paid subscription provided them when selecting either of these two menu options.

It’s unclear exactly how X is determining how to sort posts via the “most relevant” option. However, it appears to be the same sorting method as the previous default. Blue checks do still appear to be prioritized in this view.

Any user can change the reply sorting options on any post that they view, not just their own posts.

Matt Binder

I’ve noticed this change a few days before this article, first on the Twitter web site, later in the Android app as well. Slightly impressive that the company is now shipping features simultaneously on the web and in its apps, whereas for years the standard for most tech giants was to test and launch features on iOS first, with the web and Android distant seconds. A lack of polish is however manifest in small details like different labels for the choices on the web and in apps (in the Android app, ‘Most relevant’ is called ‘Trending replies’). Unfortunately, this new feature is per post rather than saved globally on your account, meaning you can’t (yet?) choose your preferred reply sorting setting and have it automatically applied on each reply section, instead you need to switch modes on each new tweet.

The Verge: “Why Google decided now’s the time to move on from Chromecast”

The Chromecast is going away after more than a decade in Google’s hardware portfolio, with the company phasing it out to make room for the new Google TV Streamer. In 2013, the timing was perfect for the Chromecast’s success. Most TVs of that era had rudimentary entertainment apps that were often slow, so beaming content from your phone to a TV made a lot of sense.

But times have changed. With the Chromecast with Google TV in 2020, Google pivoted in the opposite direction with a much more traditional, lean-back entertainment experience. Casting took a back seat to carousels of content recommendations, and native apps returned.

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And yet, even right after the announcement, some of our commenters were frustrated that Google had settled for just a 22 percent boost in CPU speed. There’s a good chance this thing will still benchmark underneath the fairly ancient Shield. Why not just drop a Tensor chip into it?

It comes down to cost and keeping the Streamer at a price that’s acceptable for average consumers. We don’t know if there’s functionality that would actually convince people to buy pricier price points than this, but the market is generally telling us right now people are probably not ready for it, Govil-Pai said.

Chris Welch

I have been quite skeptical initially of the Chromecast, but after I purchased one to stream HBO to my non-so-smart former TV I have grown to appreciate its utility and simplicity. While I understand the reasoning behind the decision to discontinue it (nowadays TVs ship with Google TV and Chromecast protocols built-in; I myself have abandoned my old Chromecast when I upgraded the TV last year), it still feels a bit sad and disappointing.