Teens, Are You Bing-ing Yet?
October 3, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
The online advertising and all-time champion of redacting documents has innovated again. “Google Expands Its Generative AI Search Experience to Teens Expected to Interact With a Chatbot—Is It Safe?” reports:
Google is opening its generative AI search experience to teenagers aged 13 to 17 in the United States with a Google Account. This expansion allows every teen to participate in Search Labs and engage with AI technology conversationally.
What will those teens do with smart software interested in conversational interactions. As a dinobaby, the memories of my teen experiences are fuzzy. I do recall writing reports for some of my classmates. If I were a teenie bopper with access to generative outputs, I would probably use that system to crank out for-fee writings. On the other hand, those classmates would just use the system themselves. Who wants to write about Lincoln’s night at the theater or how eager people from Asia built railroads.
The article notes:
Google is implementing an update to enhance the AI model’s ability to identify false or offensive premise queries, ensuring more accurate and higher-quality responses. The company is also actively developing solutions to enable large language models to self-assess their initial responses on sensitive subjects and rewrite them based on quality and safety criteria.
That’s helpful. Imagine training future Google advertising consumers to depend on the Google for truth. Redactions included, of course.
Stephen E Arnold, October 3, 2023
Do Teens Read or Screen Surf? Yes, Your Teens
October 2, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I am glad I am old. I read “Study Reveals Some Teens Receive 5,000 Notifications Daily, Most Spend Almost Two Hours on TikTok.” The write up is a collection of factoids. I don’t know if these are verifiable, but taken as a group, the message is tough to swallow. Here’s a sample of the data:
- Time spent of TikTok: Two hours a day or 38 percent of daily online use. Why? “Reading and typing are exhausting.”
- 20 percent of the teenies in the sample receive more than 500 notifications a day. A small percentage get 5,000 per day.
- 97 percent of teenies were on their phone during the school day.
The future is in the hands of the information gatekeepers and quasi-monopolies, not parents and teachers it seems.
What will a population of swipers, scrollers, and kick-backer do?
My answer is, “Not much other than information grazing.”
Sheep need herders and border collies nipping at their heels.
Thus, I am glad I am old.
Stephen E Arnold, October 2, 2023
The Murdoch Effect: Outstanding Information 24×7
October 2, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Rupert Murdoch is finally retiring and leaving his propaganda empire to his son Lachlan, who may or may not be even more right-wing than dear old dad. While other outlets ponder what this means for the future of News Corp, Gizmodo examines “All the Ways Rupert Murdoch Left his Grubby Fingerprints on Tech.” Writer Kyle Barr writes:
“You don’t become the biggest name in worldwide media without also becoming something of a major influence on tech. With his direct influence now waning, we can do a bit of an obituary on the mogul’s efforts to influence the world of tech, and how both his direct and unintended efforts have contributed to the shape of our current digital landscape. News Corp wanted to be the biggest name in digital media, and at every step it failed to compete with other big names, leaving it to rely on the bread and butter of its conservative news apparatus. Murdoch’s billions were involved in consolidating the world’s online media experience. His no-holds-barred operating philosophy would end up violating people’s privacy and setting us up for the state of current social media and content streaming. All the while, News Corp’s entities would struggle to find an actual, legitimate foothold in the digital frontier. Instead, Fox News and other Murdoch-owned brands facilitated a new media environment where disinformation ruled the day and truth was laid aside for conservative grievance.”
The write-up shares 11 indelible blotches Murdoch made on the tech landscape in slideshow form. A few key moments include buying up MySpace, thereby clearing the way for Facebook and its countless consequences; helping Mr. Trump rise to power; and buying and forwarding the decimation of one of my favorite childhood institutions, National Geographic. A couple noteworthy fumbles include investment in the fraudulent Theranos and the Dominion Lawsuit against Fox News. See the article for more of Barr’s examples. Now, we wonder, what marks will the junior Murdoch make?
Cynthia Murrell, October 2, 2023
Have You Tried to Delete Chat or Any Other Information from a Google System?
September 29, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Several years ago, I mistyped my email address on an Android device I was testing. When I set up another Android mobile, the misspelled email appeared. We searched available files on the mobile, Google’s email list for the account, and even poked under the hood to locate the misspelled email. There was no “delete” function, but its omission would not have made a difference. The misspelled email was there but not there. SMS messages are often equally slippery. Delete a thread and bang, it’s back. Somewhere, somehow, the wizards at Google have the ability to “find” information even thought the user cannot. Innovation, oversight, carelessness, or a stupid user? My thought is that the blame falls upon the stupid user.
A young engineer strokes the controls of the deletion and online tracking subsystem. With some careful knob twisting, the giant machine can output a reality shaped by the operator’s whims, fancies, and goals. Hey, MidJourney, how about that circular picture?
“History Is Turned Off”: What Google’s (Deleted) Chats Mean for Its Antitrust Battle with the DOJ”, if accurate, suggests a different capability exists for some Googlers. The article asserts:
lawyers for the U.S. government have tried to draw attention to a giant black hole at the center of the trial: a “remarkable” number of deleted employee chat conversations apparently about issues relevant to its lawsuit and others. “[A]lso can we change the setting of this group to history off,” CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in an October 2021 chat to one of his lieutenants ahead of a “leaders circle” meeting. History off meant their conversation would be deleted from the servers after 24 hours. Nine seconds later, Pinchai apparently tried to delete his message. When asked later under oath about the attempted deletion, he answered, “I don’t recall.”
True or false? The article adds this assertion:
In defending its auto-deletions, Google told the court that not saving all of those old chats would have been too burdensome, but it couldn’t prove that Google lawyers also argued that Chat was used primarily for nonbusiness, casual conversations, but the court found that the company does in fact use it to discuss “substantive business.”
The cited article contains additional information about missing data, deletions, or lapses of one sort or another. Googlers, it appears, are human.
Several observations:
- Those deletion tools appear to exist and work.
- Google’s storage subsystems do not contain certain information.
- Googler’s operate in a dimension which is different from the one in which users and possibly some non-Googley lawyers and advisors fellow travelers do not.
But will this assertion about “managing” information or “shaping” data matter? With the redacted documents and the restrictions placed on information reaching the public humming along, it seems as if a Silicon Valley reality distortion field is online and working. History is not turned off; it is framed and populated with filtered information. Thus, what Google does is the reality for many.
Stephen E Arnold, September 29, 2023
What Is the US High-Tech Service Hosing Bad Info? X Marks the Spot for the EU
September 29, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I do my little, inconsequential blog posts to pass my time. I am a dinobaby, not an entitled and over-confident Millennial or troubled GenX or GenY grouser. The Twitter thing did not seem useful to me as a career builder, personal megaphone, and individualized hype machine. Sure, we once had a script to post headlines of my blog posts, but I don’t think that I had a single constructive outcome from that automated effort. However, Twitter or X did provide me with examples of bad actors, general scams, and assorted craziness for my lectures. But Twitter or X did not mark the spot for me.
Exactly who is the happy humanoid lost in space? Is it an EU regulator? Is it a certain Silicon Valley wizard? Is it journalist who wants to be famous on the X Twitter thing? Thanks, MidJourney. Your gradient descent is accelerating.
But the EU is a different beastie. I am a dinobaby; the EU is chock full of educated regulators, policy makers, and big thinkers. “The EU Says Twitter/X Is the Worst Platform for Disinformation” explains that X (the spot marker) is making it tough to report election misinformation just as the EU wants it to be easier to report the allegedly bad stuff. The article states:
The European Union has identified X, formerly Twitter, as the social media platform with the highest ratio of misinformation/disinformation posts. The news came just as X disabled a feature that allows users to report misinformation related to elections.
The article adds:
It was found that X, which is no longer under the voluntary Code, is the worst social media platform when it comes to this practice. It was also discovered that those spreading disinformation had a lot more followers than those who did not and they tend to have joined the platform more recently. The Code has 44 signatories, including Facebook, Google, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Musk’s platform pulled out of the Code in May, a move that followed EU warnings that a lack of moderation could be inadvertently helping Vladimir Putin as Russian propaganda relating to the war in Ukraine isn’t being removed.
True or false? That depends, of course.
What’s interesting is that the X.com Twitter thing charts its own course on its poly-dimensional business road map. How will this work out? Probably in ways beyond the ken of a dinobaby. No wonder so many regulators are uncomfortable with US high-tech type companies.
Stephen E Arnold, September 29, 2023
YouTube and Those Kiddos. Greed or Weird Fascination?
September 26, 2023
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Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Google and its YouTube subsidiary are in probably in trouble again because they are spying on children. Vox explores if “Is YouTube Tracking Your Kids Again?” and sending them targeted ads. Two reports find that YouTube continues to collect data on kids despite promises not to do so. If YouTube is collecting data and sending targeted ads to young viewers it would violate the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection act (COPPA) and Google’s consent decree with the FTC.
Google agreed to the consent decree with the FTC to stop collecting kids’ online activity and selling it to advertisers. In order to regulate and comply with the decree and COPPA, YouTube creators must say if their channels or individual videos are kid friendly. If they are designated kid friendly then Google doesn’t collect data on the viewers. This only occurs on regular YouTube and not YouTube Kids.
Fairplay and Analytics researched YouTube data collection and released compromising reports. Fairplay, a children’s online safety group, had an ad campaign on YouTube and asked for it to target made for kids videos. The group discovered their ads played on videos that were kids only, basically confirming that targeted ads are still being shown to kids. Analytics found evidence that supports kid data collection too:
“The firm found trackers that Google uses specifically for advertising purposes and what appear to be targeted ads on “made for kids” videos. Clicking on those ads often took viewers to outside websites that definitely did collect data on them, even if Google didn’t. The report is careful to say that the advertising cookies might not be used for personalized advertising — only Google knows that — and so may still be compliant with the law. And Adalytics says the report is not definitively saying that Google violated COPPA: ‘The study is meant to be viewed as a highly preliminary observational analysis of publicly available information and empirical data.’”
Google denies the allegations and claims the information in the reports are skewed. YouTube states that ads on made for kids videos are contextual rather than targeted, implying they are shown to all kids instead of individualizing content. If Google and YouTube are to be in violation of the FTC decree and COPPA, Alphabet Inc would pay a very expensive fine.
It is hard to define what services and products that Google can appropriately offer kids. Google has a huge education initiative with everything from laptops to email services. Republicans and Democrats agree that it is important to protect kids online and hold Google and other companies liable. Will Google pay fines and not worry about the consequences? I have an idea. Let’s ask Meta’s new kid-oriented AI initiative. That sounds like a fine idea.
Whitney Grace, September 26, 2023
Amazon Switches To AI Review Summaries
September 22, 2023
The online yard sale eBay offers an AI-generated description feature for sellers. Following in the same vein, Engadget reports that, “Amazon Begins Rolling Out AI-Generated Review Summaries” for products with clickable keywords. Amazon announced in June 2023 that it was testing an AI summary tool across a a range of products. The company officially launched the tool in August declaring that AI is at the heart of Amazon.
Amazon developed the AI summary tool so consumers can read buyers’ opinions without scrolling through pages of information. The summaries are described as a wrap-up of customer consensus akin to film blurbs on Rotten Tomatoes. The AI summaries contain clickable tags that showcase common words and consistent themes from reviews. Clicking on the tags will take consumers to the full review with the information.
AI-generated review summaries bring up another controversial topic: Amazon and fake reviews. Fake reviews litter the selling platform like a slew of counterfeit products Amazon, eBay, and other online selling platforms battle. While Amazon claims it takes a proactive stance to detect and delete the reviews, it does not catch all the fakes. It is speculated that AI-generated reviews from ChatGPT or other chatbots are harder for Amazon to catch.
In regards to using its own AI summary tool, Amazon plans to only use it on verified purchases and using more AI models to detect fake reviews. Humans will be used for clarification with their more discerning organic brains. Amazon said about its news tool:
“‘We continue to invest significant resources to proactively stop fake reviews,’ Amazon Community Shopping Director Vaughn Schermerhorn said. ‘This includes machine learning models that analyze thousands of data points to detect risk, including relations to other accounts, sign-in activity, review history, and other indications of unusual behavior, as well as expert investigators that use sophisticated fraud-detection tools to analyze and prevent fake reviews from ever appearing in our store. The new AI-generated review highlights use only our trusted review corpus from verified purchases, ensuring that customers can easily understand the community’s opinions at a glance.’”
AI tools are trained using language models that contain known qualitative errors. The same AI tools are used to teach more AI and so on. While we do not know what Amazon is using to train its AI summary tool, we would not be surprised if the fake reviews are using similar training models to Amazon’s. It will come down to Amazon AI vs. counterfeit AI. Who will win?
Whitney Grace, September 22, 2023
Kill Off the Dinobabies and Get Younger, Bean Counter-Pleasing Workers. Sound Familiar?
September 21, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read “Google, Meta, Amazon Hiring low-Paid H1B Workers after US Layoffs: Report.” Is it accurate? Who knows? In the midst of a writers’ strike in Hollywood, I thought immediately about endless sequels to films like “Batman 3: Deleting Robin” and Halloween 8: The Night of the Dinobaby Purge.”
The write up reports a management method similar to those implemented when the high school science club was told that a school field trip to the morgue was turned down. The school’s boiler suffered a mysterious malfunction and school was dismissed for a day. Heh heh heh.
I noted this passage:
Even as global tech giants are carrying out mass layoffs, several top Silicon Valley companies are reportedly looking to hire lower-paid tech workers from foreign countries. Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Zoom, Salesforce and Palantir have applied for thousands of H1B worker visas this year…
I heard a rumor that IBM used a similar technique. Would Big Blue replace older, highly paid employees with GenX professionals not born in the US? Of course not! The term “dinobabies” was a product of spontaneous innovation, not from a personnel professional located in a suburb of New York City. Happy bean counters indeed. Saving money with good enough work. I love the phrase “minimal viable product” for “minimally viable” work environments.
There are so many ways to allow people to find their futures elsewhere. Shelf stockers are in short supply I hear.
Stephen E Arnold, September 21, 2023
Just TikToking Along, Folks
September 21, 2023
Beleaguered in the US, its largest market, TikTok is ready to embrace new options in its Southeast Asian advance. CNBC reports, “TikTok Shop Strikes ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Partnership in Malaysia As Part of E-Commerce Push.” Writer Cheila Chiang reports:
“The partnership comes as TikTok looks to markets outside of the U.S. for growth. While the U.S. is the company’s largest market, TikTok faces headwinds there after Montana became the first state to ban the app. The app has also been banned in India. In recent months, TikTok Shop has been aggressively expanding into e-commerce in Southeast Asia, competing against existing players like Sea’s Shopee and Alibaba’s Lazada. TikTok’s CEO previously said the company will pour ‘billions of dollars’ into Southeast Asia over the next few years. As of April, TikTok said it has more than 325 million monthly users in Southeast Asia. In June, the company said it would invest $12.2 million to help over 120,000 small and medium-sized businesses sell online. The investment consists of cash grants, digital skills training and advertising credits for these businesses.”
What a great idea for the teenagers who are the largest cohort of TikTok users. Do they fully grasp the pay later concept and its long-term effects? Sure, no problem. Kids love to work at part time jobs, right? As long as major corporations get to expand as desired, that is apparently all that matters.
Cynthia Murrell, September 21, 2023
Big Tech: Your Money or Your Digital Life? We Are Thinking
September 20, 2023
Why is anyone surprised that big tech companies want to exploit AI for profit? Business Insider gives a quick rundown on how big tech advertised AI as beneficial research tool while now they are prioritizing it as commercial revenue tool in, “Silicon Valley Presented AI As A Noble Research Tool. Now It’s All About Cold, Hard Cash.”
Big tech companies presented AI research as a societal boon and would share the findings with everyone. The research was done without worrying about costs and it is the ideal situation or ultimate discovery. Google wrote off $1.3 million of DeepMind’s debt to demonstrate its commitment to advancing AI research.
As inflation rises, big tech companies are worried about their bottom lines. ChatGPT and similar algorithms has made significant headway in AI science, so big tech companies are eager to exploit it for money. Big tech companies are racing to commercialize chatbots by promoting the benefits with consumers. Competitors are forced to develop their own chatbots or lose business.
Meta is prioritizing AI research but ironically sacked a team researching protein folding. Meta wants to cut the fat to concentrate on profits. Unfortunately the protein folding was axed despite how understanding protein folding could help scientists understand diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Google is focusing on net profits too. One good example is a new DeepMind unit that shares AI research papers to improve people’s lives as well as products. Google did make the new large language model Llama 2 an open source tool for businesses with fewer than 700 million monthly active users. Google continues to output smart chatbots. Hey, students, isn’t that helpful?
It is unfortunate that humans are inherently selfish beings. If we did everything for the benefit of society it would be great, but history has shown socialism and communism does not work. There is a way to fund exploratory research without worrying about money. We just have not found it yet.
Whitney Grace, September 20, 2023
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