Motherboard: Great, Dating Apps Are Getting More Hellish Thanks to AI Chatbots. “A group claiming to be disenfranchised ex-Tinder employees gone rogue has built an app that uses AI chatbots to talk to women for men on dating apps, in an effort to combat the ‘disadvantages the average man’ faces in online dating.”
The Guardian: My mother, the troll: ‘I think she lost sight of the McCanns’ humanity’. “When Ben Leyland’s mum said she was in trouble, he had no idea she was about to be exposed for sending hundreds of abusive tweets about Madeleine McCann’s parents – or of the tragic end to her story.” Intense story. I feel very bad for Mr. Leyland.
IEEE Spectrum: Decentralized Social Media Rises as Twitter Melts Down Mastodon is just the start—here comes the Fediverse . “Is the future of social media decentralized? That question might’ve felt absurd a few years ago, but the Fediverse is challenging long-held assumptions about how social media should work.”
Wired: In Bulgaria, Russian Trolls Are Winning the Information War. “Pro-Russia groups are gaming Facebook’s review process, and moderators are stuck in the middle.”
CNN: Hi-res art scans from famous Taiwan museum leak online… and turn up for sale on Chinese online shopping platform . “A Taiwanese museum that houses some of the world’s most precious Chinese artworks has confirmed that up to 100,000 high-resolution images of paintings and calligraphy leaked online – some of them turning up for sale on a Chinese shopping platform for less than $1.”
Mashable: HustleGPT is a hilarious and scary AI experiment in capitalism. “The internet is overflowing with examples of what GPT-4’s advanced intelligence can accomplish. It can write usable lawsuits, build websites from text prompts, automate online dating, and is generally freaking people out about all the jobs it can replace. [Jackson Greathouse] Hall has taken this a step further by harnessing its capabilities into an age-old ambition that’s the backbone of capitalist society: making money with as little effort as possible.”
Vox: What YouTube hustle gurus are really selling you. “These self-anointed gurus often share interests — sports cars, wristwatches, combat sports, strict diets, rocket ship emoji, lengthy Twitter threads, Sun Belt states with relatively low tax burdens — but tend to make their millions in a few different ways.”
Techdirt: Game Jam Winner Spotlight: To And Again. “So far in our series of posts on showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927, we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia and Best Visuals winner Urbanity. Today, we’re taking a closer look at the winner of the Best Adaptation category: To And Again by Perrin Ellis.”
Associated Press: Pro-Russian voices spread anti-U.S. propaganda about Ohio train disaster on Twitter . “Soon after a train derailed and spilled toxic chemicals in Ohio last month, anonymous pro-Russian accounts started spreading misleading claims and anti-American propaganda about it on Twitter, using Elon Musk’s new verification system to expand their reach while creating the illusion of credibility.”
The Guardian: Trump Media executives worried over murky $8m loans, emails reveal. “Top executives at Donald Trump’s social media company started to become concerned last spring about $8m that they had accepted from opaque entities in two emergency loans when its auditors sought further details about the payments, according to documents, emails and sources familiar with the matter.”
Ars Technica: Anthropic introduces Claude, a “more steerable” AI competitor to ChatGPT. “On Tuesday, Anthropic introduced Claude, a large language model (LLM) that can generate text, write code, and function as an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. The model originates from core concerns about future AI safety and Anthropic has trained it using a technique it calls ‘Constitutional AI.’”
The Wilton Bulletin: Wilton Library pushes efforts to put a spotlight on collection from jazz great Dave Brubeck. “Three years after agreeing to receive the works of late jazz legend Dave Brubeck, the Wilton Library is now reigniting efforts to shine a spotlight on The Brubeck Collection.”
Bloomberg: Google Employees Petition Pichai for Better Handling of Job Cuts. “Almost 1,400 employees at Google parent Alphabet Inc. have signed a petition calling for better treatment of staff during the layoff process, after the company announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs.”
CNBC: Google nixes paying out remainder of maternity and medical leave for laid-off employees. “Google is indicating to ex-staffers, who got laid off while on maternity and medical leave, that they won’t get paid for all of their remaining time off, according to former employees and written correspondence shared with CNBC.”
CNBC: Microsoft tries to justify AI’s tendency to give wrong answers by saying they’re ‘usefully wrong’. “In an online presentation about the new Copilot features, Microsoft executives brought up the software’s tendency to produce inaccurate responses, but pitched that as something that could be useful. As long as people realize that Copilot’s responses could be sloppy with the facts, they can edit the inaccuracies and more quickly send their emails or finish their presentation slides.” Okay. Wow.
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