Men, Are You Loving Those AI Babes with Big Bits?
February 11, 2025
The dating scene has never been easy. It is apparently so difficult to find love these days that men are turning to digital love in the form of AI girlfriends. Vice News shares that “Most Men Would Marry Their AI Girlfriends If It Were Legal” and it is astounding the lengths men will go to for companionship.
EVA AI is a platform that allows people to connect with an AI partner. The platform recently surveyed 2000 men and discovered that 8 in 10 men would considered marrying their AI girlfriends if it was legal. It sounds like something out of the science fiction genre. The survey also found more startling news about men and AI girlfriends:
“Not only that, but 83% of men also believe they could form a deep emotional bond with an AI girlfriend. What’s even scarier is that a whopping 78% of men surveyed said they would consider creating a replica of their ex, and three-quarters would duplicate their current partner to create a “polished” version of them.”
Cale Jones, head of community growth at EVA AI, said that men find AI girlfriends to be safe and they are allowed to be their authentic selves. Jones continued that because AI girlfriends are safe, men feel free to share their thoughts, emotions, and desires. Continuing on the safety train of thought, Jones explained that individuals are also exploring their sexual identities without fear.
AI girlfriends and boyfriends are their own brand of creepiness. If the AI copies an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend, a movie star, or even a random person, it creates many psychological and potentially dangerous issues:
“I think what raises the most concern is the ability to replicate another person. That feels exploitative and even dangerous in many ways. I mean, imagine some random dude created an AI girlfriend based on your sister, daughter, or mother…then, picture them beginning to feel possessive over this person, forming actual feelings for the individual but channeling them into the robot. If they were to run into the actual human version of their AI girlfriend in real life, well…who knows what could/would happen? Ever heard of a crime of passion?
Of course, this is just a hypothetical, but it’s the first thing that came to mind. Many people already have issues feeling like they have a right to someone else’s body. Think about the number of celebrities who are harassed by superfans. Is this going to feed that issue even further, making it a problem for everyday people, like classmates, friends, and colleagues?”
Let’s remember that the men surveyed by EVA AI are probably a small sample of “men.” So far.
Whitney Grace, February 10, 2025
Online Generates Fans and Only Fans
February 6, 2025
Ah, the World Wide Web—virtual land of opportunity! For example, as Canada’s CBC reports, "Olympians Are Turning to OnlyFans to Fund Dreams as they Face a ‘Broken’ Finance System." Because paying athletes to compete tarnishes the Olympic ideal, obviously. Never mind the big bucks raked in by the Olympic Committee. It’s the principle of the thing. We learn:
"Dire financial straits are leading droves of Olympic athletes to sell images of their bodies to subscribers on OnlyFans — known for sexually explicit content — to sustain their dreams of gold at the Games. As they struggle to make ends meet, a spotlight is being cast on an Olympics funding system that watchdog groups condemn as ‘broken,’ claiming most athletes ‘can barely pay their rent.’ The Olympics, the world’s biggest sporting stage, bring in billions of dollars in TV rights, ticket sales and sponsorship, but most athletes must fend for themselves financially."
But wait, what about those Olympians like Michael Phelps and Simone Biles who make millions? Success stories like theirs are few. The article shares anecdotes of athletes who have taken the Only Fans route. They are now able to pay their bills, including thousands of dollars in expenses like coaching, physical therapy, and equipment. However, in doing so they face social stigma. None are doing this because they want to, opines Mexican diver Diego Balleza Isaias, but because they have to.
Why are the world’s top athletes selling (images of) their finely honed bodies to pay the bills? The write-up cites comments from the director of Global Athlete, an athlete-founded organization addressing the power imbalance in sports:
"’The entire funding model for Olympic sport is broken. The IOC generates now over $1.7 billion US per year and they refuse to pay athletes who attend the Olympics,’ said Rob Koehler, Global Athlete’s director general. He criticized the IOC for forcing athletes to sign away their image rights. ‘The majority of athletes can barely pay their rent, yet the IOC, national Olympic committees and national federations that oversee the sport have employees making over six figures. They all are making money off the backs of athletes."
Will this trend prompt the Olympic Committee to change its ways? Or will it just make a rule against the practice and try to sweep this whole chapter under the mat? The corroding Olympic medals complement this story too.
Cynthia Murrell, February 6, 2025
And the Video Game Struggler for 2024 Is… Video Games
January 24, 2025
Yep, 2024 sas the worst year for videogames since 1983.
Videogames are still a young medium, but they’re over fifty years old. The gaming industry has seen ups and downs with the first (and still legendary) being the 1983 crash. Arcade games were all the rage back then, but these days consoles and computers have the action. At least, they should.
Wired writes that “2024 Was The Year The Bottom Fell Out Of The Games Industry” due to multiple reasons. There was massive layoffs in 2023 with over 10,000 game developers losing their jobs. Some of this was attributed to AI slowly replacing developers. The gaming industry’s job loss in 2024 was forty percent higher than the prior year. Yikes!
DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) combined with woke mantra was also blamed for the failue of many games, including Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. The phrase “go woke, go broke” echoed throughout the industry as it is in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and other fields. I noted:
“According to Matthew Ball, an adviser and producer in the games and TV space…says that the blame for all of this can’t be pinned to a single thing, like capitalism, mismanagement, Covid-19, or even interest rates. It also involves development costs, how studios are staffed, consumers’ spending habits, and game pricing. “This storm is so brutal,” he says, ‘because it is all of these things at once, and none have really alleviated since the layoffs began.’”
Many indie studios were shuttered and large tech leaders such as Microsoft and Sony shut down parts of their gaming division. Also a chain of events influenced by the hatred of DEI and its associated mindsets that is being called a second GamerGate.
The gaming industry will continue through the beginnings of 2025 with business as usual. The industry will bounce back, but it will be different than the past.
Whitney Grace, January 24, 2025
Bookmark This: HathiTrust Digital Library
October 30, 2024
Concerned for the Internet Archive? So are we. (For multiple reasons.) But while that venerable site recovers from its recent cyberattacks, remember Hathi exists. Founded in 2008, the not-for-profit HathiTrust Digital Library is a collaborative of academic and research libraries. The site makes millions of digitized items available for study by humans as well as for data mining. The site shares the collection’s story:
“HathiTrust’s digital library came into being during the mid-2000s when companies such as Google began scanning print titles from the shelves of university and college campus libraries. When many of those same libraries created HathiTrust in 2008, they united library copies of those digitized books into a single, shared collection to make as much of the collection available for access as allowable by copyright law. Through HathiTrust, libraries collaborate on long-term management, preservation, and access of their collections. Book lovers and researchers like you can explore this huge collection of digitized materials! Today, HathiTrust Digital Library is the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries. The collection includes materials typically found on the shelves of North American university and college campuses with the benefit of being available online instead of scattered in buildings around the globe. Our enormous collection includes thousands of years of human knowledge and published materials from around the world, selected by librarians and preserved in the libraries of academic and research libraries. You can find all kinds of digitized books and primary source materials to suit a wide range of research needs.”
The collection contains books and “book-like” items—basically anything except audio/visual files. All Library of Congress subjects are represented, but the largest treasures lie in the Language & Literature, Philosophy, Religion, History, and Social Sciences chambers. All volumes not restricted by copyright are free for anyone to read. Just over half the works are in English, while the rest span over 400 languages, including some that are now extinct. Ninety-five percent were scanned from print by Google, but a few specialized collections were contributed by individuals or institutions. The Collection page offers several sample collections to get you started, or you can build your own. Have fun browsing their collections, and with luck the Internet Archive will be back up and running in no time.
Cynthia Murrell, October 30, 2024
FOGINT: Internet Service Providers in the Hot Box
October 9, 2024
The only smart software involved in producing this short FOGINT post was Microsoft Copilot’s estimable art generation tool. Why? It is offered at no cost.
For several years, I have used the term “ghost providers” to describe online service providers as enablers of online crime. The advent of virtual machines and virtual servers operated by customers who just pay a monthly fee and do everything themselves provides a great foggy ground cover. If an investigators speaks with one of these providers, the response includes variations of “We don’t know” and “No clue, bro.” The reason is that the service provider provides access to a system, includes no support, and leaves it up to the person paying the bill to be the cook, bottlewasher, and janitor. These outfits are in the service business with a range of offerings: Full service to DIY.
“Oh, we cannot see what is on the virtual machines working as virtual servers,” says the bright ISP operator. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. That’s pretty lousy fog if I say so myself.
Italy wants to take action to prevent enablers who provide ghost services with bare metal and zero service other than pings, plumbing, and power. “ISPs ‘Betrayed’ Over Pirate Site-Blocking Threats, The Reckoning Will Be Invisible” reports that Italy’s
advanced legal weaponry is incapable of dealing with distant pirate IPTV services. Instead, it mainly targets communications infrastructure, much of it operated by rightsholders’ supposed allies – ISPs – who were given no say in the matter.
Torrent Freak’s view of the law is somewhat reserved, even skeptical. The cited article continues:
if pirate sites share an IP address with entirely innocent sites, and the innocent sites are outnumbered, ISPs, VPNs and DNS services will be legally required to block them all. Since nobody ever passes bad law and good laws hurt no one, blocking innocent sites can be conducted guilt-free from the moral high ground.
Among those with a strong view of the law is Giovanni Zorzoni, president of the Italian Internet Provider Association. No big surprise, FOGINT surmises. The article quotes him as saying:
“Irresponsible initiative that, in the sole interest of the football lobby, tramples on operators, [AGCOM] and the Internet ecosystem,” he said. “Thanks to the new law, they will be able to block sites that are no longer exclusively, but also ‘mainly’ used to distribute illegal content, substantially widening the scope of [rightsholders’] discretion. It may therefore happen, much more frequently, that even legitimate addresses that are only accidentally used for the transmission of pirated content are blocked,” Zorzoni added.
Google offered some input which Torrent Freak presented; to wit:
Diego Ciulli, Head of Government Affairs and Public Policy at Google in Italy, expressed concern over the likely effect on the justice system in Italy should Google be required to comply. Under the label of “fighting piracy”, Ciulli said that digital platforms will be required to notify the judicial authorities of ALL copyright infringements – present, past and future – when they become aware of them. That could be a problem. “Do you know how many there are in the case of Google? At the moment, 9,756,931,770. In short, the Senate is asking us to flood the judicial authorities with almost 10 billion URLs – and provides for prison if we miss a single notification. If the law is not amended, the risk is to do the opposite of the spirit of the law: clog up the judicial authorities, and take resources away from the fight against piracy,” he warned.
Yep, imagine if ISPs had to block packets containing information directly linked to illegal activities. That is, it seems, to be a lot of work for the ISPs to do.
Several observations:
- Some service providers are known for their willingness to facilitate content which breaks laws
- The “virtualization” of “services” provides a 24×7 disco dance fog machine to hide certain activities from staff, other customers, and government authorities
- The money derived from the customers who exploit the willful obfuscation makes the service provider business tick.
Is the Italian law a remedy? No. Will other countries crank up regulation of ISPs? Yes. But after decades of a digital Wild West, fences will not be erected overnight. As a result, the black sheep will roam among wild ponies and make a range of online crimes possible and lucrative. That’s quite a marketing position for some firms.
Stephen E Arnold, October 9, 2024
Rapid Change: The Technological Meteor Causing Craziness
September 6, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
The mantra “Move fast and break things” creates opportunities for entrepreneurs and mental health professionals. “Eminent Scientist Richard Dawkins Reveals Fascinating Theory Behind West’s Mental Health Crisis” quotes Dr. Dawkins:
‘Certainly, the rate at which we are evolving genetically is miniscule compared to the rate at which we are evolving non-genetically, culturally,’ Dawkins told the hosts of the TRIGGERnometry podcast. ‘And much of the mental illness that afflicts people may be because we are in a constantly changing unpredictable environment,’ the biologist added, ‘in a way that our ancestors were not.’
Thanks, Microsoft Copilot. Is that a Windows Phone doing the flame out thing?
The write up reports:
Dawkins expressed more direct concerns with other aspects of human technology’s impact on evolution: climate change and basic self-reliance in the face of a new Dark Age. ‘The internet is a huge change, it’s gigantic change,’ he noted. ‘We’ve become adapted to it with astonishing rapidity.’ ‘if we lost electricity, if we suddenly lost the technology we’re used to,’ Dawkins worried, humanity might not be able to eve ‘begin’ to adapt in time, without great social upheaval and death… ‘Man-made extinction,’ he said, ‘it’s just as bad as the others. I think it’s tragic.’
There you go, death.
I know that brilliant people often speak carefully. Experts take time to develop their knowledge base and put words together that make complex ideas easy to understand.
From my redoubt in rural Kentucky, I have watched the panoply of events parading across my computer monitor. Among the notable moments were:
- Images from US cities showing homeless people slumped over either scrolling on their mobile phones or from the impact of certain compounds on their body
- Young people looting stores and noting similar items offered for sale on Craigslist.com-type sites
- Graphs of US academic performance illustrating the winners and losers of educational achievement tests
- The number of people driving around at times I associated with being in an office at “work” when I was younger
- Advertisements for prescription drugs with peculiar names and high-resolution images of people with smiles and contented lives but for the unnamed disease plaguing the otherwise cheerful folk.
What are the links between these unrelated situations and online access? I think I have a reasonably good idea. Why have experts, parents, and others required decades to figure out that flows of information are similar to sand-blasting systems. Provide electronic information to an organization, and it begins to decompose. The “bonds” which hold the people, processes, and products together are weakened. Then some break. Pump electronic information into younger people. They begin to come apart too. Give college students a tool to write their essays. Like lemmings, many take the AI solution and watch TikToks.
I am pleased that Dr. Dawkins has identified a problem. Now what’s the fix? The digital meteor has collided with human civilization. Can the dinosaurs be revivified?
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2024
New Research about Telegram and Its Technology
August 29, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
Next week, my team and I will be presenting a couple of lectures to a group of US government cyber experts. Our topic is Telegram, which has been a focal point of my research team for most of 2024. Much of the information we have included in our talks will be new; that is, it presents a view of Telegram which is novel. However, we have available a public version of the material. Most of our work is delivered via video conferencing with PDFs of selected exhibits provided to those participating in a public version of our research.
For the Telegram project, the public lecture includes:
- A block diagram of the Telegram distributed system, including the crypto and social media components
- A timeline of Telegram innovations with important or high-impact innovations identified
- A flow diagram of the Open Network and its principal components
- Likely “next steps” for the distributed operation.
With the first stage of the French judiciary process involving the founder of Telegram completed, our research project has become one of the first operational analyses of what to many people outside of Russia, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and other countries is unfamiliar. Although usage of Telegram in North America is increasing, the service is off the radar of many people.
In fact, knowledge of Telegram’s basic functions is sketchy. Our research revealed:
- Users lack knowledge of Telegram’s approach to encryption
- The role US companies play in keeping the service online and stable
- The automation features of the system
- The reach of certain Telegram dApps (distributed applications) and YouTube, to cite one example.
The public version of our presentation at the US government professionals will be available in mid-September 2024. If you are interested in this lecture, please, write benkent2020 at yahoo dot com. One of the Beyond Search team will respond to your inquiry with dates and fees, if applicable.
Stephen E Arnold, August 29, 2024
Online Sports Gambling: Some Negatives Have Been Identified by Brilliant Researchers
August 29, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
People love gambling, especially when they’re betting on the results of sports. Online has made sports betting very easy and fun. Unfortunately some people who bet on sports are addicted to the activity. Business Insider reveals the underbelly of online gambling and paints a familiar picture of addiction: “It’s Official: Legalized Sports Betting Is Destroying Young Men’s Financial Futures.” The University of California, Los Angeles shared a working paper about the negative effects of legalized sports gambling:
“…takes a look at what’s happened to consumer financial health in the 38 states that have greenlighted sports betting since the Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a federal law prohibiting it. The findings are, well, rough. The researchers found that the average credit score in states that legalized any form of sports gambling decreased by 0.3% after about four years and that the negative impact was stronger where online sports gambling is allowed, with credit scores dipping in those areas by 1%. They also found an 8% increase in debt-collection amounts and a 28% increase in bankruptcies where online sports betting was given the go-ahead. By their estimation, that translates to about 100,000 extra bankruptcies each year in the states that have legalized sports betting. The number of people who fell dangerously behind on their car loans went up, too. Oddly enough, credit-card delinquencies fell, but the researchers believe that’s because banks wind up lowering credit limits to try to compensate for the rise in risky consumer behavior.”
The researchers discovered that legalized gambling leads to more gambling addictions. They also found if a person lives near a casino or is from a poor region, they’ll more prone to gambling. This isn’t anything new! The paper restates information people have known for centuries about gambling and other addictions: hurts finances, leads to destroyed relationships, job loss, increased in illegal activities, etc.
A good idea is to teach people to restraint. The sports betting Web sites can program limits and even assist their users to manage their money without going bankrupt. It’s better for people to be taught restraint so they can roll the dice one more time.
Stephen E Arnold, August 29, 2024
Yep, the Old Internet Is Gone. Learn to Love the New Internet
August 1, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb humanoid. No smart software required.
The market has given the Google the green light to restrict information. The information highway has a new on ramp. If you want content created by people who were not compensated, you have to use Google search. Toss in the advertising system and that good old free market is going to deliver bumper revenue to stakeholders.
Online search is a problem. Here’s an old timer like me who broke his leg. The young wizard who works at a large online services firm explains that I should not worry. By the time my leg heals, I will be dead. Happy thoughts from one of those Gen somethings. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. How your security systems today?
What about users? The reality is that with Google the default search system in Apple iPhones, the brand that has redefined search and retrieval to mean “pay to play,” what’s the big deal?
Years ago I explained in numerous speeches and articles in publications like Online Magazine that online fosters the creation of centralized monopolistic information services. Some information professionals dismissed my observation as stupid. The general response was that online would generate benefits. I agree. But there were a few downsides. I usually pointed to the duopoly in online for fee legal information. I referenced the American Chemical Society’s online service Chemical Abstracts. I even pointed out that outfits like Predicasts and the New York Times would have a very, very tough time creating profitable information centric standalone businesses. The centralization or magnetic pull of certain online services would make generating profits very expensive.
So where are we now? I read “Reddit, Google, and the Real Cost of the AI Data Rush.” The article is representative of “real” journalists’, pundits’, and some regulators’ understanding of online information. The write up says:
Google, like Reddit, owes its existence and success to the principles and practices of the open web, but exclusive arrangements like these mark the end of that long and incredibly fruitful era. They’re also a sign of things to come. The web was already in rough shape, reduced over the last 15 years by the rise of walled-off platforms, battered by advertising consolidation, and polluted by a glut of content from the AI products that used it for training. The rise of AI scraping threatens to finish the job, collapsing a flawed but enormously successful, decades-long experiment in open networking and human communication to a set of antagonistic contracts between warring tech firms.
I want to point out that Google bought rights to Reddit. If you want to search Reddit, you use Google. Because Reddit is a high traffic site, users have to use Google. Guess what? Most online users do not care. Search means Google. Information access means Google. Finding a restaurant means Google. Period.
Google has become a center of gravity in the online universe. One can argue that Google is the Internet. In my monograph Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator that is exactly what some Googlers envisioned for the firm. Once a user accesses Google, Google controls the information world. One can argue that Meta and TikTok are going to prevent that. Some folks suggest that one of the AI start ups will neutralize Google’s centralized gravitational force. Google is a distributed outfit. Think of it as like the background radiation in our universe. It is just there. Live with it.
Google has converted content created by people who were not compensated into zeros and ones that will enhance its magnetic pull on users.
Several observations:
- Users were so enamored of a service which could show useful results from the quite large and very disorganized pools of digital information that it sucked the life out of its competitors.
- Once a funding source got the message through to the Backrub boys that they had to monetize, the company obtained inspiration from the Yahoo pay to play model which Yahoo acquired from Overture.com, formerly GoTo.com. That pay to play thing produces lots of money when there is traffic. Google was getting traffic.
- Regulators ignored Google’s slow but steady march to information dominance. In fact, some regulatory professionals with whom I spoke thought Google was the cat’s pajamas and asked me if I could get them Google T shirts for their kids. Google was not evil; it was fund; it was success.
- Almost the entire world’s intelligence professionals relay on Google for OSINT. If you don’t know what that means, forget the term. Knowing the control Google can exert by filtering information on a topic will probably give you a tummy ache.
The future is going to look exactly like the world of online in the year 1980. Google and maybe a couple of smaller also rans will control access to digital information. To get advertising free and to have a shot at bias free answers to online queries, users will have to pay. The currency will be watching advertising or subscribing to a premium service. The business model of Dialog Information Services, SDC, DataStar, and Dialcom is coming back. The prices will inflate. Control of information will be easy. And shaping or weaponizing content flow from these next generation online services will be too profitable to resist. Learn to love Google. It is more powerful than a single country’s government. If a country gets too frisky for Google’s liking, the company has ways to evade issues that make it uncomfortable.
The cartoon in this blog post summarizes my view of the situation. A fix will take a long time. I will be pushing up petunias before the problems of online search and the Information Superhighway are remediated.
Stephen E Arnold, August 1, 2024
Prompt Tips and Query Refinements
July 29, 2024
Generative AI is paving the way for more automation, smarter decisions, and (possibly) an easier world. AI is still pretty stupid, however, and it needs to be hand fed information to make it work well. Dr. Lance B. Eliot is an AI expert and he contributed, “The Best Engineering Techniques For Getting The Most Out Of Generative AI” for Forbes.
Eliot explains the prompt engineering is the best way to make generative AI. He developed a list of how to write prompts and related skills. The list is designed to be a quick, easy tutorial that is also equipped with links for more information related to the prompt. Eliot’s first tip is to keep the prompt simple, direct, and obvious, otherwise the AI will misunderstand your intent.
He the rattles of a bunch of rhetoric that reads like it was written by generative AI. Maybe it was? In short, it’s good to learn how to write prompts to prepare for the future. He runs through the list alphabetically, then if that’s enough Eliot lists the prompts numerically:
“I didn’t number them because I was worried that the numbering would imply a semblance of importance or priority. I wanted the above listing to seem that all the techniques are on an equal footing. None is more precious than any of the others.
Lamentably, not having numbers makes life harder when wanting to quickly refer to a particular prompt engineering technique. So, I am going to go ahead and show you the list again and this time include assigned numbers. The list will still be in alphabetical order. The numbering is purely for ease of reference and has no bearing on priority or importance.”
The list is rundown of psychological and intercommunication methods used by humans. A lot of big words are used, but the explanations were written by a tech-savvy expert for his fellow tech people. In layman’s terms, the list explains that anything technique will work. Here’s one from me: use generative AI to simplify the article. Here’s a paradox prompt: if you feed generative AI a prompt written by generative AI will it explode?
Whitney Grace, July 29, 2024
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