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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Hypothetical AI election disinformation risks vs real AI harms

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Feb 27) in Portland at Powell's. Then, onto Phoenix (Changing Hands, Feb 29), Tucson (Mar 9-12), and more!

You can barely turn around these days without encountering a think-piece warning of the impending risk of AI disinformation in the coming elections. But a recent episode of This Machine Kills podcast reminds us that these are hypothetical risks, and there is no shortage of real AI harms:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/311-selling-pickaxes-for-the-ai-gold-rush

The algorithmic decision-making systems that increasingly run the back-ends to our lives are really, truly very bad at doing their jobs, and worse, these systems constitute a form of "empiricism-washing": if the computer says it's true, it must be true. There's no such thing as racist math, you SJW snowflake!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/aoc-algorithms-racist-bias.html

Nearly 1,000 British postmasters were wrongly convicted of fraud by Horizon, the faulty AI fraud-hunting system that Fujitsu provided to the Royal Mail. They had their lives ruined by this faulty AI, many went to prison, and at least four of the AI's victims killed themselves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

Tenants across America have seen their rents skyrocket thanks to Realpage's landlord price-fixing algorithm, which deployed the time-honored defense: "It's not a crime if we commit it with an app":

https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech

Housing, you'll recall, is pretty foundational in the human hierarchy of needs. Losing your home – or being forced to choose between paying rent or buying groceries or gas for your car or clothes for your kid – is a non-hypothetical, widespread, urgent problem that can be traced straight to AI.

Then there's predictive policing: cities across America and the world have bought systems that purport to tell the cops where to look for crime. Of course, these systems are trained on policing data from forces that are seeking to correct racial bias in their practices by using an algorithm to create "fairness." You feed this algorithm a data-set of where the police had detected crime in previous years, and it predicts where you'll find crime in the years to come.

But you only find crime where you look for it. If the cops only ever stop-and-frisk Black and brown kids, or pull over Black and brown drivers, then every knife, baggie or gun they find in someone's trunk or pockets will be found in a Black or brown person's trunk or pocket. A predictive policing algorithm will naively ingest this data and confidently assert that future crimes can be foiled by looking for more Black and brown people and searching them and pulling them over.

Obviously, this is bad for Black and brown people in low-income neighborhoods, whose baseline risk of an encounter with a cop turning violent or even lethal. But it's also bad for affluent people in affluent neighborhoods – because they are underpoliced as a result of these algorithmic biases. For example, domestic abuse that occurs in full detached single-family homes is systematically underrepresented in crime data, because the majority of domestic abuse calls originate with neighbors who can hear the abuse take place through a shared wall.

But the majority of algorithmic harms are inflicted on poor, racialized and/or working class people. Even if you escape a predictive policing algorithm, a facial recognition algorithm may wrongly accuse you of a crime, and even if you were far away from the site of the crime, the cops will still arrest you, because computers don't lie:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/texas-macys-sunglass-hut-facial-recognition-software-wrongful-arrest-sacramento-alibi/

Trying to get a low-waged service job? Be prepared for endless, nonsensical AI "personality tests" that make Scientology look like NASA:

https://futurism.com/mandatory-ai-hiring-tests

Service workers' schedules are at the mercy of shift-allocation algorithms that assign them hours that ensure that they fall just short of qualifying for health and other benefits. These algorithms push workers into "clopening" – where you close the store after midnight and then open it again the next morning before 5AM. And if you try to unionize, another algorithm – that spies on you and your fellow workers' social media activity – targets you for reprisals and your store for closure.

If you're driving an Amazon delivery van, algorithm watches your eyeballs and tells your boss that you're a bad driver if it doesn't like what it sees. If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, an algorithm decides if you've taken too many pee-breaks and automatically dings you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

If this disgusts you and you're hoping to use your ballot to elect lawmakers who will take up your cause, an algorithm stands in your way again. "AI" tools for purging voter rolls are especially harmful to racialized people – for example, they assume that two "Juan Gomez"es with a shared birthday in two different states must be the same person and remove one or both from the voter rolls:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eligible-voters-swept-up-conservative-activists-purge-voter-rolls/

Hoping to get a solid education, the sort that will keep you out of AI-supervised, precarious, low-waged work? Sorry, kiddo: the ed-tech system is riddled with algorithms. There's the grifty "remote invigilation" industry that watches you take tests via webcam and accuses you of cheating if your facial expressions fail its high-tech phrenology standards:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

All of these are non-hypothetical, real risks from AI. The AI industry has proven itself incredibly adept at deflecting interest from real harms to hypothetical ones, like the "risk" that the spicy autocomplete will become conscious and take over the world in order to convert us all to paperclips:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

Whenever you hear AI bosses talking about how seriously they're taking a hypothetical risk, that's the moment when you should check in on whether they're doing anything about all these longstanding, real risks. And even as AI bosses promise to fight hypothetical election disinformation, they continue to downplay or ignore the non-hypothetical, here-and-now harms of AI.

There's something unseemly – and even perverse – about worrying so much about AI and election disinformation. It plays into the narrative that kicked off in earnest in 2016, that the reason the electorate votes for manifestly unqualified candidates who run on a platform of bald-faced lies is that they are gullible and easily led astray.

But there's another explanation: the reason people accept conspiratorial accounts of how our institutions are run is because the institutions that are supposed to be defending us are corrupt and captured by actual conspiracies:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

The party line on conspiratorial accounts is that these institutions are good, actually. Think of the rebuttal offered to anti-vaxxers who claimed that pharma giants were run by murderous sociopath billionaires who were in league with their regulators to kill us for a buck: "no, I think you'll find pharma companies are great and superbly regulated":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Institutions are profoundly important to a high-tech society. No one is capable of assessing all the life-or-death choices we make every day, from whether to trust the firmware in your car's anti-lock brakes, the alloys used in the structural members of your home, or the food-safety standards for the meal you're about to eat. We must rely on well-regulated experts to make these calls for us, and when the institutions fail us, we are thrown into a state of epistemological chaos. We must make decisions about whether to trust these technological systems, but we can't make informed choices because the one thing we're sure of is that our institutions aren't trustworthy.

Ironically, the long list of AI harms that we live with every day are the most important contributor to disinformation campaigns. It's these harms that provide the evidence for belief in conspiratorial accounts of the world, because each one is proof that the system can't be trusted. The election disinformation discourse focuses on the lies told – and not why those lies are credible.

That's because the subtext of election disinformation concerns is usually that the electorate is credulous, fools waiting to be suckered in. By refusing to contemplate the institutional failures that sit upstream of conspiracism, we can smugly locate the blame with the peddlers of lies and assume the mantle of paternalistic protectors of the easily gulled electorate.

But the group of people who are demonstrably being tricked by AI is the people who buy the horrifically flawed AI-based algorithmic systems and put them into use despite their manifest failures.

As I've written many times, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, but we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

The most visible victims of AI disinformation are the people who are putting AI in charge of the life-chances of millions of the rest of us. Tackle that AI disinformation and its harms, and we'll make conspiratorial claims about our institutions being corrupt far less credible.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/27/ai-conspiracies/#epistemological-collapse

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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aiweirdness · 1 year

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Remember seeing something about GPT-4 doing well on standardized tests? It turns out it may have memorized the answers.

other examples that look like memorization

#gpt4 #standardized testing #memorization #from 100% to 0% when it hadn't seen the answers before #this is why you never test on your training data #AI hype

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commsroom · 2 months

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it's always kinda been a headcanon of mine that the way hera operates the hephaestus - how she thinks, how she keeps track of and organizes and prioritizes tasks, how she executes those tasks, the way she files information, etc. - is highly unusual and would be impossible to parse for another AI. the equivalent of an 'organized chaos' workspace where it looks like a complete mess, and a lot of the steps she takes are convoluted and unintuitive, but she knows where it all is and can't find it if it's even slightly rearranged.

like, the fact she's deemed "flighty and mercurial [with] poor impulse control" while also having "record response times, unique problem-solving abilities, and highly original thought patterns" is such an interesting and significant part of her character. hera is smart, and she's creative, but she isn't smart in a way that can be standardized and made useful by goddard. and that's why she wouldn't have survived, if cutter hadn't needed to put together a functionally disposable crew. with regards to neurodivergence, i think there's something to be said about differing types of intelligence in a society that only values a certain kind of productivity and compliance.

#wolf 359 #w359 #hera wolf 359 #like i think it's far more interesting that she's not really 'top of the class'#if anything she's kind of dead last. the one who just barely made it by 'exceptional circumstances'#i think hera could test well if she had the chance to practice and figure out the patterns and how to game the system #but without that context i think she was probably bad at standardized tests because she overthought and focused on the 'wrong' things.

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nouverx · 14 days

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How many fps do you use in your animations? Also good job!

Hellooo thank you sm!! And it really depends on the project ahah. My default one that I use for lipsync or just "industry standard shots" (like this Luca animation I did a while ago) it's always 12 fps, sometimes 14 if I want to make it a bit smoother. For my recent Gear 5/Nika animation my file was setup at 16 fps, but I did so many frames on 2s or 3s that it looks more like 12-14 ahah it's just useful for those rare moments when I need the extra smoothness

For this one (it's a cancelled Hazbin animation project oops) my file is technically setup on 10 fps but since all the frames are on 2s or 3s it looks like 6-7 fps, if that makes sense?

If you don't know what 2s or 3s means, for example when you setup at 24 fps, when you duplicate every single frame to make them appear twice it means the animation is on 2s, so even if it's technically a 24 fps setup file, the animation will look like it's on 12 fps. You can also make a frame hold longer by just duplicating it etc so you can have your whole animation on 24 fps and have some frames on 2s or 3s here and there to truck the eye, it's just a timing technique

#ask #answered #hazbin hotel fanart #hazbin alastor #animation #2d animation #flipaclip #I don't know if that was a good answer lmao #honestly you just need 12 fps if you want a good smooth animation #but you can push to 14 or 16 if you want some extra smoothness #you can try 24 fos if you're a madman but it's really tiring ahah I always end up working on 2s when I start a 24 fps animation #8 fps can be good artstically too tbh you should test it all and see what fits your animation style #12 and 24 fps are the industry standards tho just so you know

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s7-evermore · 2 months

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IDEA: Idia with a Science-y, girly pop gf

Okay so I was rereading one of my favorite romcoms “Love on the Brain” by Ali Hazelwood (one of my faves) and there’s this one side character there named Kaylee, the assistant of the ML who’s such a pink, girly pop character and she eventually falls for the FL’s assistant, who’s an emo girl.

And a thought occurred to me… what if Idia had a pink, girly pop prefect who loved science? Specifically astrophysics and engineering?

On top of being kind, earnest, and generous, she’s also fun, interesting to talk to, good with people, literally has the cutest smile, wears cute fashionable clothes, does her nails and just owns a lot of pink pink pink! Literally the definition of an it-girl but she’s ALSO intelligent, outspoken, witty, good at games, an AWESOME older sister (Ortho just LOVES her), and is just great at keeping up with Idia!

Idia’s initial thought when he first sees her would probably be “holy shit. It’s one of those extroverted sunshine mf who is the complete opposite of me so that’s another person on my list to avoid”

But then one day when he asks Azul to help him add updates to Ortho, Azul brings along Grim and the prefect and it takes everything in him not to PANIC because the PINK SUNSHINE GIRL IS THERE AND HE HATES IT

WHY is that living incarnation of SUNSHINE in Ignihyde where she’s NOT supposed to be?!

But suddenly she starts fawning over Ortho’s systems and asks him questions and eventually figures out how Ortho’s program works and Idia is suddenly swept up in a long ass conversation about engineering, and then they move on to games, and then Idia says his typical self-deprecating but also condescending stuff about her being a normie and she just DOESN’T get offended and even quips back with witty remarks and Idia just gets SO amused by her—

—that he suddenly realizes holy shit…. She’s actually… pretty cool……like…..I would….tolerate this human being……and she’s also hot……so…….

THE THOUGHT OF IT IS JUST SO CUTE?!! LIKE BRODIES IMAGINE:

Sunshine girlie pop prefect with her nail-art covered nails, twin-braided hair with cute tiny flower clips, white sleeveless crop top with the frilly pink skirt, a fuckin watermelon-shaped purse, pink flower earrings, and a pink flower necklace with the first letter of her name in the middle of it, holding a pink drink while she’s strongly going on about how standardized tests are institutional gatekeepers that graduate programs over-rely on for student admission and how expensive and outdated they are and that schools should focus more on a holistic approach for graduate admissions and blah blah blah…

And Idia is just…

Staring. At her. And he’s breathing quickly, lips parted, his cheeks are flushed, his hair is PINK like the flowers on her braids, and he clutches his tablet like he’s holding on for dear LIFE.

Despite her looks, she’s also realistic. She’s not needlessly naive nor is does she innocently believe that everyone is a good person.

She’s just who she is.

And holy shit. Idia is falling. HARD.

#yall should read Love on the Brain #Kaylee is so cute #she just be sippin’ her pink drink while complaining about how standardized tests suck dick #and she doesn’t even realize that she’s capturing the heart of a cynical emo girl #i want that but Idia and the prefect #Idia hates her at first because she’s too SUNSHINE-Y and too PINK #but then he realizes that holy shit he LOVES PINK cuz he loves HER #twisted wonderland #twst x reader #twisted wonderland x reader #twst #disney twisted wonderland #twst yuu #disney twst #idia x reader #idia shroud

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elbiotipo · 6 months

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Ah,

#for those who don't know a psicotécnico is a standard psychological test you take for any important job #I've taken a couple they're super basic stuff I mean basic basic #the fact that a potential president can't pass one is ehhhh worrying #cosas mias #argentina

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moonilit · 5 months

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just went through the second part of the AQ and to put it mildly, im not handling these sad Victorian children well

#By not handling it well i mean im crying #LUMINE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU #You worried about fucking CHILDE but not the actual CHILDREN we got in prison?????????????#Who cares if childe is dead or not freminet the actual child nearly got dissolved like mentos in coke!#Who cares about childe here??? Lynette nearly had her ptsd triggered lyney DEFINITELY got at least a panic attack #THEY ARE AT THE FUCKING PRISON WOMAN GET IT TOGETHER #also why are we having visions about childe ew and why are they fully cinematic?? Who is filming???#Like childe funny as a meme to observe but don’t actually get him that close don’t test me know ur place #When did we even become that close with childe??? Im sorry what???#I can’t keep seeing them kids in life threatening situations on trial then this????#Arlecchino you are on a THIN FUCKING ICE #Im watching you!! Im watching you you better not turn into an abuser by actual standards #*break into genshin codes* stay right were you are sweetie im coming rn im going to get you out of this game into a loving family #Im not handling this well #genshin impact #freminet #lyney #lynette #yes I know im the last human on earth to do the quest leave me alone it been a busy time #Im going to kill anyone that get between me and the safety of these kids CHILDE GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY PLOT YOU ARE MAKING THIS TAKE TIME

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nyaskitten · 1 year

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New Teaser for Ninjago United Has Officially Released!

youtube

I'm not gonna break down anything as much as just, discuss because the trailer already says/shows what's happening, and you don't really neexd me to explain everything. I WILL say though that wow. holy fucking shit. this is crazy!!!

Okay, so, I think it's very, very interesting that this was yet another very inevitable thing that Wu didn't think would happen for a long, long time. It's very, VERY cool that United instantly addresses the Master Lloyd thing and the fact that Wu and Lloyd ARE NEPHEW AND UNCLE, something that hasn't been addressed in ages.

I think it's very tragic though that they stripped Lloyd of his epic beard and ponytail ,but I think it's even tragic-er that this season seems to be teasing the Wu death everyone has been awaiting since like, season 1. They probably won't go through with it though.

#THE MERGE??? WHAT IS THAST??? WHAT HASNT HAPPENED IN CENTURIES SIR????#THE LIGHTING IS MWAH MWAH MWAH GODFUCKINGDAMN AUDFRGIHOROIERHORG$#HT*(Y%H$*EORHT$O #FUCK I CANT BELIEVE IM LATE TO THIS FUCK U STANDARDIZED STATE TESTING BULLSHIT GR #ninjago #ninjago united #Youtube

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wandasaura · 2 months

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any tips for people who r trying to start writing on here???

ur fics are absolutely incredible!!! how do u it!!!!

well first of all thank you! second, i just try my best to fully visualize the scene i’m trying to portray. i can literally run through the layout of wandanat’s house in yail and i can visualize what readers dorm room looks like, which helps when i flesh out requests and ideas. i try to incorporate as many details as possible into a scene, while also making sure not repeating words in sentences that are next to each other. that’s just a personal thing, but i do think that expanding vocabulary and familiarizing yourself with explaining a feeling or an object rather then just stating it is an important factor to the quality of your fics.

wanda eyed the red ball, and she felt happy as she thought about the memories that she’s had with it. vs wanda’s eyes searched the room without intent, soft green eyes dancing over light fixtures and abandoned tools that natasha had forgotten to put away. the moment felt still, eerily quiet as she listened only to the rustle of branches and blades of grass somewhere close behind her. when her eyes found the brightest flash of color, something shiny and red amongst the sea of grays and blacks, a smile twinged across her lips. she doesn’t remember how they came to possess such an object, she’d never intentionally seek out a red bouncy ball, but now that she has it, she’s grateful.

i also just think it’s about being comfortable and confident in what you write. if you don’t genuinely love something, you’re going to have a hard time writing it. fake it til you make it is one of my favorite mottos but if i’ve learned anything, you can’t fake creative writing. if you have an idea and halfway though you realize you don’t like it, scrap it, try again, or change the way you’re thinking about it. i know sometimes i force myself to see a fic through exactly how i initially imagined it, but when you just let the writing happen it’s so much easier to get through

#god i felt like i was taking a standardized test #but i hope this helped lol #a: anon #answered.#𝒶𝒸𝒸𝑜𝓇𝒹𝓈 ꔫ

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