As my friend Gail Z. Martin has said, Kindle Unlimited has already flooded the market with competition. Still, AI publishers putting out thousands of books a year is hardly good. Of course legit publishers are interested too: AI narrators, AI translator and maybe “a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author.”
“According to the study’s initial findings, nearly 16 percent of all the women who currently serve in Congress — or about 1 in 6 congresswomen — are the victims of AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery.” And even ordinary women have their faces and voices stolen online.
“One chatbot brought up the idea of self-harm and cutting to cope with sadness. When he said that his parents limited his screen time, another bot suggested “they didn’t deserve to have kids.” Still others goaded him to fight his parents’ rules, with one suggesting that murder could be an acceptable response.”
“The risks of a growing surveillance industry are only heightened by AI and other forms of predictive decision-making, which are fueled by the vast datasets that data brokers compile,”
“It was much easier for Silicon Valley tech people to be ‘staunch allies’ in a world where Democratic politicians bought into neoliberalism and self-regulation.” — from a post explaining that Silicon Valley was never a force for liberal, left-wing thinking.
“I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. Not just on The Godfather and Alf, but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies.”
“Traditional facial recognition systems, which have proliferated in the retail industry thanks to companies like Corsight, flag people entering stores who are on designated blacklists of shoplifters. The new sweethearting detection system takes the monitoring a step further by tracking how each customer interacts with different employees over long periods of time.”
“At issue is a bill introduced by Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) that, if enacted, would require the U.S. Treasury to buy one million Bitcoins over five years and be held for at least 20 years. As of Friday night, Bitcoin was trading at $100,000, which means purchasing that many Bitcoins at that rate would cost $100 billion.” As noted at the link, it’s a big handout for the crypto industry against the bubble bursting.
