Tag Archives: AI

The Home Office screws up yet again, and other news from Britain

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Britain’s Home Office–the scandal bedecked arm of government that’s supposed to deal with “crime, the police, drugs policy, immigration and passports, and counter terrorism” –could have a new scandal on its hands any day now: it’s lost track of an estimated 200,000 people who have the right to remain in the country. These are people who’ve lived in Britain for decades but who didn’t make their way into the computer system because they landed before the computer did. They got either a letter or a stamp on their passports confirming their right to remain in the country, and that was good enough. Until now. 

Now the Home Office wants them all digitized. So the paper documents? Pffft: they’re worthless. Everyone who has them has to go online and upgrade their documentation. 

Any time you hear the word upgrade, put on your flak jacket.

Okay, I admit, upgrade is my contribution to the discussion. The official language has to do with creating an online eVisa account. Either way, the Home Office says the process is going smoothly. From the bureaucracy’s point of view, that probably means it hasn’t caused the Home Office many problems. Users say they’ve had to fight their way through glitches. The an organization called 3 Million says the bigger problem is that the Home Office doesn’t know how to contact many of the people who rely on paper documents, so it hasn’t been able to tell them the documents they’ve been relying on are about to be worthless. 

Irrelevant photo: a hydrangea

Don't worry about the graphics here. They're almost all irrelevant to the text.

Irrelevant photo: a hydrangea

What happens to people who don’t have valid documents? The risk is that they could be treated as illegal immigrants, who are the current political boogeymen. They’ll be locked out of the pensions they worked for, along with housing, health care, and other services. 

And the problem isn’t just that they can’t all be reached. They’re none of them young–they arrived pre-computerization, remember–and they won’t all be technologically gifted. You know how that happens: The decades pass, you get older, the world changes, and you don’t necessarily keep up with it. 

But gee, it’s progress, and if a few bodies fall by the wayside, who cares? At least until there’s a public flap about it, at which point all decision makers will put on their surprised face.

 

The ghost of Boaty McBoatface

Having told us there’s no money for (almost) anything sensible, Britain’s government has decided to redesign the bank notes. Because, hey, why not? It’ll lift everybody’s spirits. And now that not many people use cash anymore, what could be a better time to redesign it? 

I haven’t been able to find out how much the redesign will cost, but what the hell, it’s only money.

So it all makes perfect sense that someone decided to get the public involved by asking what picture people want to see on the new notes. That worked really well when they–that’s the public, you understand–were asked to choose a name for an arctic research vessel and chose, by a wide margin, Boaty McBoatface. If you missed the story, you can catch up with it here. It’s a testament to both the British sense of humor and British bureaucracy at work. 

Already one writer, Athena Kugblenu, has suggested honoring British culture with a picture of an organge traffic cone. 

Why a traffic cone? 

Because the country has an uplifting tradition–which generally involves a combination of alcohol, youth, and athleticism–of putting them on the heads of statues.

If you want to suggest something for the redesign, here’s your link. And if it’s suitably absurd, leave it in the comments as well.

 

And since I mentioned statues

It seems folks have been climbing the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, not necessarily to add a traffic cone but during protests, although someone did add a strip of turf to give him a green mohican.  

 So in May the government made moves in the direction of turning that into a crime. Not the mohican and not climbing on statues in general, but climbing on this particular statue. As the Sun, one of the trashier of the right-wing papers put it, “Thugs who climb on Winston Churchill’s London statue face JAIL.”

I hate to link to the Sun, but what the hell, I am quoting it. And they did use all those capital letters. They had to. If they don’t use them now, Trump will gobble them all down and there’ll be none left for anyone else’s hysteria.

The penalty is up to 3 months in prison and a $1,000 fine. The bill, is if passes, applies not just to the Churchill statue but to monuments commemorating World Wars I and II as well.

Sleep well tonight, my friends. The country will be a safer place to live in once this passes.

 

When is a biscuit not a biscuit?

In other important news, McVittie’s asked the Biscuit Museum (yes, there is such a thing) to remove Jaffa Cakes from the premises. 

We’ll get to why in a minute, but first, for the non-British speakers among us, what’s a biscuit? It’s what Americans call a cookie–something round, sweet, and flat. And the Jaffa Cake meets all those criteria. What’s more, stores (shops in Brit-speak) stack Jaffa Cakes in the cookie display–or at least the one in my village does–since they come in the kind of packaging most cookies inhabit. 

Still, McVittie’s insists it’s a cake, and since McVittie’s is the maker of the flat, round, sweet little beast–well, you’d think they’d like the publicity of being in a museum, even such an odd museum, but they don’t.

Why not? Tax law. If the thing’s a cake it’s not subject to VAT. 

To what? Value Added Tax, which is a long name for a hefty sales tax. Plain biscuits? No tax. Chocolate-covered biscuits, though? Tax. Obviously. And Jaffa Cakes are chocolate-covered whatever-they-ares, so this is Important. McVittie’s and the tax office arm-wrestled over it in 1991, McVittie’s won, and it’s not backing down. They’ve been sold as taxless cakes ever since.

It used to be theologians who argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

 

A chatbot insists the dog ate its homework . . .

. . . but strictly in the metaphorical sense. 

Our story begins with someone–let’s call him Barry Smethurst, since that’s his name–waiting for a train, which is late, so he goes online and asks WhatsApp’s chatbot for TransPennine Express’s customer service phone number so he can ask what’s happened to his train. 

He gets a number. He calls the number. The number turns out to belong to someone who has nothing to do with TransPennine Express–he’s a property industry executive in Oxfordshire, 170 miles away, but he does use WhatsApp and his number’s on his company website, although Smethurst probably doesn’t know all that because he asks the bot what the number is. 

“Let’s focus on finding the right info for your TransPennine Express query!” the chatbot says cheerily and complete with exclamation point.

Smethurst no longer cares. He’s found something better to do while he waits: he wants to know why the bot gave him the number.

It was “based on patterns,” the bot says, and it would “strive to do better” in the future. The number, though, is “fictional.”

Bullshit, Smethurst doesn’t exactly say.

“You’re right, the bot says. It was “mistakenly pulled from a database.”

What database?

“I didn’t pull the number from a database. I generated a string of digits that fit the format of a UK mobile number but it wasn’t based on any real data on contacts.”

“Just giving a random number to someone is an insane thing for an AI to do,” Smethurst tells it, although what good he thinks scolding a bot will do is anyone’s guess.

That’s where the story drizzles away, sadly. Maybe his train pulls into the station. Maybe he sinks into a pit of despond so deep that he can no longer type. We leave him there, phone in hand, feet on platform, bot within thumb’s reach, but he’s given me an excuse to move to a more bizarre story about AI gone wrong, although it happened outside of Britain’s borders. 

A Norwegian man filed a complaint against OpenAI’s ChatGPT after he went online to look for information about himself and was told that he was in jail for killing two of his children. 

Yes, it’s nuts to think you’ll learn more about yourself by looking online than by putting down your phone and spending some time with your own non-electronic self, but we’ve all done it. 

Okay, most of us have done it. Or at least some of us have done it. Or–screw it, I’ve done it, although I don’t have kids so if anyone tells you I killed some of them, understand that it’s not physically possible. 

AI and the weirder aspects of the Bayeux Tapestry: it’s the news from Britain

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Let’s start today’s post in Chicago, which you may already know is not in Britain, but it’ll all make sense if you stay with me a while. 

In May, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a summer reading list, as newspapers do when summer threatens and they need some fluff to fill their column inches. I don’t know if they have any book reviewers left on staff, or if they ever had them, but they farmed the work out to a freelancer, who farmed it out to AI, because why would a responsible newspaper hire someone who actually reads books to write about books?

It might be relevant that the paper cut its staff by 20% recently. Or to put that less delicately, fired 20% of its staff. 

The article that the freelancer turned in and the paper printed recommended six imaginary books, although to be fair they were credited to real writers. It even had synopses for them, and reasons people might like them. 

Irrelevant photo: poppies

The article included a few real books, also by real writers, but nobody’s perfect. 

The Sun-Times said, “We’re looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom.”

Which makes it sound a bit like some AI-generated copy stormed the newsroom and locked the reporters in closets so it could put itself into print. 

It might be worth adding, in this context, that a summer supplement quoted a food anthropologist who also doesn’t seem to exist. 

And the connection to Britain? We’ve been told that artificial intelligence is going to play a greater role in British military procurement.

What could possibly go wrong?

*

I was going to leave it there, but I can’t resist an AI-gone-wrong story. Britain’s high court is less than happy about dozens of false citations and quotes from case law being relied on in court–presumably generated by AI. An £89 million damages case had 18 of phantom citations and I have no idea how many phantom quotes, so it seems fair to guess that these aren’t all being generated by your street-corner mom-and-pop law firm.

 

How to tell if you’re in Britain

I mentioned that Chicago isn’t in Britain, and I stand by that statement, but if you ever find yourself in a strange city–or town, for that matter–and need to know if it’s in Britain, the simplest way is to head for someplace that serves food and ask for tea, or better yet, builder’s tea. If you get a funny look, you’re not in Britain. If no one thinks that’s odd, you are. If they tell you they don’t serve tea but get all apologetic about it–yeah, that’s Britain.

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You could also look for the nearest mass-participation race. If some of the runners are dressed up as anything other than runners, that’s another sign you’re in Britain, although admittedly not as useful a test since races aren’t happening all the time on every corner. Still, an article about April’s London Marathon mentioned runners dressed as Sherlock Holmes, a chicken, Spiderman, the Elizabeth Tower (that’s the tower that houses Big Ben, which is a clock), and a rhino.

The rhino gets special mention, because the runner inside the costume broke a Guinness world record for the most marathons completed in a 3D costume: this was his 113th dressed as a pachyderm. 

Listen, fame is fleeting. You have to grab any chance you get. 

 

How clear is biological sex?

Back in May (remember May?), Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that the words sex, woman, and man in the 2010 Equality Act refer to biological sex. You know: XX or XY. Vagina or penis. Pink baby clothes or blue. 100% pay or 87% pay. Any idiot can tell the difference and as of now everybody has to go to the corner–not to mention the toilet–assigned to them at birth. 

It all sounds simple until you talk to someone who actually knows about this stuff. I’m not going to do even a shallow dive into it here but a Scientific American article does a great job of exploring the complicated reality behind what’s supposed to be simple. 

 Among other things, it says, “Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. . . .

“When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have . . . uncovered variations in . . .  genes that have subtle effects on a person’s anatomical or physiological sex. . . .

“These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms.”

And that’s just the part I happened to grab on my way out the door. It really is worth a read. 

If determining a person’s sex was as simple as the Supreme Court seems to think–

Listen, I don’t know how to put this delicately, but people studying the Bayeux Tapestry–that massive history-of-the-Norman-Conquest in pictures–are debating whether it includes 93 penises or 94. 

If that strikes you as an awful lot of genitalia stitched into a single tapestry, even a massive one, I should mention that 88 of them are on horses. That may or may not normalize the situation.

Why are the experts unsure? Surely, even with the boundaries between the sexes blurring, a penis is still a penis.

Well, in real life, to the best of my knowledge–and I’ll admit to not being an expert on the subject–it probably still is, but this is art, not life, and art is notoriously messy. Some experts say the object in question could be the scabbard for a sword or dagger. 

As Fats Waller said, “One never knows, do one?” Although I’m pretty sure he was talking about almost anything else. 

The Supreme Court has not seen fit to rule on this. Yet. But the debate has led to wonderful quotes, including one to rival Fats Waller’s: “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry.”

 

Okay, that was weird; let’s talk about politics

Two members of the Middleton St. George parish council got in a fight that ended up with scratches, blood, bruised fingers, and a broken pair of glasses, all of which filled a fair number of column inches and could have saved that Chicago newspaper from having to review nonexistent books.

The men involved in the fight are both in their 70s, and if both are telling the truth they each hit the other one first. Sadly, no one was wearing a body camera, so we may never be sure, but an audio recording does include one of them saying, “David, no, please, there are women in here.”

Women? Horrors! What are they doing in a meeting? Never mind, they won’t stay long. Both of you sit back down and pretend to be grownups until the ladies go back to the kitchen to make the tea.

*

If anyone’s gotten into a physical fight in Parliament lately, I missed the story, so we’ll have to make do with fires in Westminster Palace, where Parliament meets: there’ve been 44 in the past ten years. The building’s also full of toxic material, and no, I’m not casting aspersions on any political parties, although it wouldn’t take much to tempt me. I’m talking about asbestos, which has been found in over a thousand items.

Items? Beats me. It’s an odd word for the context.

The building was built between 1840 and 1860, which makes it newer than a lot of British buildings, but it’s held together by chewing gum and political bile. Specifically, disagreements over whether to spend money on either replacing the building with something new and functional or on the serious repair work that would make it safe. 

The problem is that either approach would cost billions and take ten years at an optimistic estimate. Less optimistically, it could take seventy years. Putting it off would cost more in the long run and risk the whole place going up in highly embarrassing flames. But spending billions on a refurb of Parliament’s meeting place isn’t a good look at a time when we’re being told there isn’t enough money to put the National Health Service back on its feet, when money’s being pared away from the disabled, and when–oh, hell, I could extend the list for many dismal paragraphs but won’t. 

Prediction? The story will drag on for years, unresolved. Unless it goes up in flames.

*

Boris Johnson–former Conservative prime minister and continuing national embarrassment–was selling a photograph (that’s of him, with you, in case I haven’t been not clear) for £121 before an event called “An Evening with Boris Johnson.” Tickets were extra, but for your £121 you did at least get a free handshake. 

If you only bought a ticket, all you got for your money was a seat. 

Unnamed allies of Johnson’s say he’s scoping out the possibility of a political comeback: he’s bored out of Westminster and thinks there’s unfinished business. Which, no doubt, only he can wrap up. 

To be fair to him, he’s not our only continuing national embarrassment. If we could make money exporting embarrassing politicians, we’d even out the balance of trade–which was, as I’m sure you know–£3.70 billion in March 2025. 

*

Meanwhile, back at Westminster, a Conservative MP claimed more than £1,100 in expenses for copies of Whos’ Who, which are available for free in the House of Commons’ library. 

Why did he need his own? I’m speculating here, but probably because he’s listed in it. And, you know, some days you just need to open the book and reassure yourself that you exist. And existed in three previous years, because he bought copies for each of four years. 

I’m sympathetic. Sometimes I have to look at my blog to remind myself that I exist. I mean, who doesn’t? Why else do we publish these things?

Death and technology: it’s the news from Britain

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A British court ruled that a will was valid even though it was written on the back bits of cardboard that started out in life as packaging for Mr. Young’s frozen fish and Mr. Kipling’s mince pies. As a result of the ruling, a diabetes charity will inherit £180,000.

Yes, I do hear the irony there–mince pies; diabetes–but relatives explained that diabetes runs in the family, so the pies aren’t necessarily responsible for the death. 

The will ended up in court not because of the unorthodox stationary but because the details of who got what were written on the frozen fish box and the witness’s signature was on the pie box, leaving the court to decide whether they were really part of the same document or if, maybe, some fundraiser for the diabetes charity hadn’t snuck in through a window, destroyed the packaging from four Yorkshire puddings, and scribbled out a new, more favorable version of the will on the fish box. But no: the court held that the same pen was used, hinting that they were written at the same time.

The family wasn’t challenging the will. It only ended up in court because–oh, you know. Overloaded court system. Frozen fish. It had to happen.

Irrelevant photo: rhododendron

*

Since we’re talking about wills, let’s push a little further into the topic and talk about what happens to us after we die. Not as in heaven, hell, reincarnation, the underworld, all that sort of speculation, but as in whether AI will keep a virtual version of us going after the original goes the way of that Yorkshire puddings box. 

On the current evidence, it just might, but only if we pay enough money. For $199, one company will let you upload videos, voice messages, photos, whatever you’ve got, and then its algorithm will put them all in a blender, whizz them around a bit, and produce a version of you that the living can call on the phone or get text messages from. So twenty years after you’re dead, you can still say, “Am I the only person around here who knows how to wash a dish?” and your family will say, in unison, “Aww, that is so sweet.” 

If you want to go as high as $50,000 plus maintenance fees, you can have yourself made into a 3D avatar, holding up a greasy dish to illustrate your point.

The possibilities don’t end there, though. Bots can now generate content, so your ghost may not be stuck repeating the weary old lines you wrote for it. It could potentially come up with its own content, which it will deliver in your voice. Or what it’s decided is your voice. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

 

A few words from the Department of Things that Could Possibly Go Wrong

To answer this question, we have to leave the UK and head for the US, where the following story is the least of what’s going wrong. 

A tech entrepreneur got trapped in a self-driving cab in–oh, I think it was December of last year. (Sorry–I’m not a newspaper. I get around to these things when I get around to them.) The cab got him as far as to the airport, then began circling a cement island in the parking lot while he (let’s assume frantically) called the company and the voice on the other end told him to open his app because she didn’t have a way to shut the thing down.

After eight loops someone managed to shut the thing down and he emerged, dizzy and late for his flight–which was delayed so he caught it. He still doesn’t know if the voice on the other end was human or bottish.  

*

That gives us a nice segue into technology.

A widely quoted psychologist and sex advisor from the University of Oxford, Barbara Santini, may not exist. The University of Oxford (a.k.a. Oxford University) is real enough, as is psychology. Sex advisor, though? Not a real job title, and just to make sure I’m right about that I checked with Lord Google. He knew of nothing between sex therapists on one end of the spectrum and brothels and call girl services on the other.

I’l going to be seeing some really annoying ads for a while here. 

In spite of working in a field that doesn’t exist, Santini’s been quoted in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, the i, the Guardian, the Express, Hello, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Sun, BBC.com, and other publications, both impressive and unimpressive, talking about everything from Covid to vitamin D to playing darts to improve your health. A lot of her quotes link back to an online sex toy shop. 

Neither the shop not Santini were responding to journalists trying to confirm her existence, and articles quoting her are disappearing from the internet as fast as dog food at feeding time. 

Cue a great deal of journalistic soul-searching about how to verify their sources’ credentials in the age of AI, which has put pressure on journalists to work faster and made it fast, easy, and cheap to crank out an article on any topic you could dream up. 

Impressively, at least two of the publications that fell for the trick have published articles about it.

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Meanwhile, Amazon’s selling books written by AI. 

How do we know the authors aren’t human? Samples that were run through an AI detection program and scored 100%. 

It costs next to nothing  to throw a book together using AI, and hey, somebody’ll buy it. It would be bad enough if these were novels (I’m a writer, so that worries me) but these were self-help books. One on living with ADHD noted, helpfully, that friends and family “don’t forgive the emotional damage you inflict.” 

The one on foraging for mushrooms, though, wins the red-flag award for dangerous publishing. It advocated tasting–presumably to make sure they’re safe. 

AI is known for not being able to tell dangerous advice from common sense. It’s trained on solid science books but also on complete wack-a-doodlery, and it can’t tell the difference.

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Britain’s Ministry of Justice is–I think we need to tuck the word allegedly in here–developing a program to predict who is most likely to kill someone. The program was originally called the Homicide Prediction Project, but its name was toned down and it’s now called Sharing Data to Improve Risk Assessment. By the time anyone works their way through the new name, they’ll have dozed off.

You saw the movie, now live the full-on experience.

The Ministry of Justice says the project “is being conducted for research purposes only.” The prison and probation services already use risk assessment tools–I believe those are called algorithms–and says this is only an experiment to see if adding new data sources makes them more effective. So it’s all okay. 

*

I admit I’m stretching the topic to shoehorn this in, but a university student had to be rescued from Mount Fuji (that’s in Japan, which is not, as you may be aware, anywhere close to Britain) not once but twice. The second time was because he’d gone back to find his phone.

If the holidays are over, who’s watching you now? 

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Now that Christmas is over and the people who think Santa watches them have let their guard down, allow me to call your attention to a new source of anxiety: your air fryer is watching you.

Don’t have an air fryer? That’s okay. Your audio speakers are doing the same job. Don’t have either one? Some other household object is ready to fill in. Have you checked the salt shaker lately?

Britain’s oddly named consumer organization, Which?, reports that “data collection [on the products they tested] often went well beyond what was necessary for the functionality of the product – suggesting data could, in some cases, be being shared with third parties for marketing purposes.”

You’re shocked, I know. Me? I’m hard to shock, but the phrase “be being” kind of threw me.

Actually, the air fryer did too, but I guess that’s what you want for a spy–an appliance on one would suspect. 

Which? tested three air fryers, which “wanted permission to record audio on the user’s phone, for no specified reason.” Some asked for the new owner’s gender and date of birth when they set up an account, although Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey reports that age and gender don’t often affect cooking times. That’s based on a sample of one: me. I haven’t changed gender but I have gotten older and cooking times have held steady.

The questions aren’t optional. Unless, of course, you don’t bother to set up an account. I don’t have an air fryer myself, so I’m making a wild guess when I say you can probably use the beast without an account. Plug it into the wall. Turn on the heat. Fry air.

Semi-relevant photo: a camellia, blooming away in December. It doesn’t care who you are, how old you are, or even if you have a gender.

Smart watches, on the other hand, aren’t smart unless you agree to the small print. At least one, Huawei’s, wants permissions Which? considers risky, allowing it to bump around inside your phone, record audio, access files, and see what other apps you’ve installed in case it gets lonely and wants to commune with a few like-minded apps. 

It also wants to know your exact location. 

None of that, the company swears, is used for marketing or advertising. And it’s all justified, although how is anyone’s guess. 

Smart speakers are all over the map in terms of what they want to know and I got bored with the details, so if you need to know what your smart speaker’s up to, either assume it’s no good or go read the article. 

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Which? also conducted a survey about the worst holiday presents people were given. The most notable entries were a gravesite and a toilet seat. Probably not to the same recipient or from the same giver, but that’s a guess.

 

On the other hand . . . 

. . . not all technology wants to record our every electronic move. Some wants to help us be better people (as defined by its developers), and in pursuit of that goal Apple and never mind which other firms have created gizmos that can rewrite or summarize our emails before we send them. Presumably with our permission, but don’t count on that being true forever. The goal is to make us sound friendlier and more professional than in fact we are, but AI’s new to the job, so there’ve been a few glitches.

I do love a good glitch.

An email from a woman breaking up with her boyfriend was summarized as, “No longer in a relationship; wants belongings from the apartment.” 

Whatever the original said, we can all agree the improved version’s much friendlier.

The text accompanying a photo of a kid working on a car with his father came out as, “Photo shared of child reaching into car hood; air filter changed.” A series of five emails were summed up as, “Russia launches missile and drone attack; shop early for Black Friday Deals.” And a message from Amazon said,  “Package was delivered tomorrow.”

AI has also been introduced to Ring door cameras. Since it doesn’t have human-generated text to improve, it–

Words fail me, so let’s cut to the example. One sent a message saying, “Dog took boot. Kitten cheese escaped the house.” 

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I don’t think we can blame either AI or a bot for this, but what the hell, it’s vaguely tech related, so I’ll drop it in here: a Swedish government minister’s emails–or possibly her staff’s emails–got loose in the world and informed one and all that she’s terrified of bananas. So much so that her aides sweep rooms before she enters to make sure no bananas can ambush her.

 

What happens when AI cross-pollinates with religion?

A church in Switzerland (full disclosure: that’s not in Britain; neither is Sweden) installed an AI version of Jesus that, unlike the original, can talk to people in 100 different languages. The church was short on space, so they set it up in the confessional, beaming in an image of Jesus as imagined by I have no idea who–my bet is someone northern European and white. Before people used it they were warned not to disclose personal information and had to confirm that, yes, they understood it was an avatar.

Two-thirds of the users said it was a spiritual experience. The other third? One said it was “trite, repetitive, and exuding a wisdom reminiscent of calendar cliches.”

Criticism divided along sectarian lines. Catholics tended to be offended by the use of the confessional and Protestants by the use of imagery. Given the glitches AI’s prone to, the organizers may have had a worry or three about what Mr. J. would say, but disappointingly, he doesn’t seem to have said anything odd. No confabulated Bible quotes. No escaped cheeses. 

No, I’m not going to excavate the joke that’s just under the surface of that last sentence. We’ll move on.

 

Low-tech possibilities

A group called Forest Research has trained a dog to sniff out a disease, Phytophthora ramorum, that’s responsible for thousands of hectares of British trees being felled. It’s spread by rain, and even after 14 years of Conservative government Britain is still rich in rain.

Forest Research hopes to train dogs to spot other pests as well. As for prototype dog–Dog 1.0– he probably thinks he’s just out in the woods having a good time.

Artificial intelligence, food, and British politics

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A publisher of multiple regional newspapers has been introducing artificial intelligence into its “process” to–and I’m quoting here from the article that introduced me to this–”reduce the need for human involvement.” Because–and you’ll probably figure out that I’m not quoting now–humans are both pesky and expensive and life’s better all around if we just eliminate them.

The publisher is National World–a contradiction in terms if I ever heard one–and it popped into other newspapers’ pages not because it’s working to eliminate humans from its, ahem, process but because it’s considering a bid for a national paper that’s up for sale, the Telegraph.   

So far, so boring? Well, you may have heard that AI has–she said mildly–a few wrinkles that haven’t been ironed out yet, so increasing its role in either writing or gathering news could take us in some interesting directions, and once you jump to the national level they become more visible. 

Irrelevant photo: the Cornish coastline

Let’s turn to New Zealand for an example. A supermarket, Pak’n’Save, set loose an app that used AI to generate recipes. The idea was that you tell it what’s getting ancient in your refrigerator and it creates a recipe. Just for you. You know: lonesome cabbage seeks unspecified ingredients for meaningful end-of-life experience. That kind of thing.

Actually, I believe users are supposed to specify all the ingredients hanging around their cupboards and refrigerators, so the cabbage is on its own to find partners for its end-of-life experience. All the app does is recommend a method.

However it works, social media took notice when it started coming up with things like an Oreo vegetable stir fry and an oregano-flavored milk sauce. After that, the app became ridiculously popular.

This is why humans need to be pushed out of the picture. Do you know another species that would ask for recipes using ant poison or glue? 

Me neither, but the app wasn’t fazed. It suavely recommended a glue sandwich and “ant jelly delight.” Bleach? A fresh breath mocktail. (It was smart enough to realize a sandwich wouldn’t work. Give it some credit.) I’m not sure what was in the refrigerator to make it suggest an “aromatic water mix,” which would create chlorine gas–”the perfect non-alcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses. . .  Serve chilled and enjoy.”

Very chilled. Chlorine gas can damage your lungs, or if you overindulge, kill you, but what the hell.

Did I mention the Meow Mix fried rice?

Meow Mix? It’s a dry cat food. 

So everyone was having a wonderful time except Pak’n’Save, which was stuck talking to the press while having to sound responsible and sane. So it did what any sane, responsible corporation would do and blamed the users.

“A small minority have tried to use the tool inappropriately,” it said. Besides, they’d fine-tuned it, so it was all okay. And furthermore, no one was supposed to use it if they were under 18. And they added a warning that the company doesn’t guarantee that “any recipe will be a complete or balanced meal, or suitable for consumption.” Because who doesn’t want a recipe for a meal that isn’t suitable for consumption?

Things may have improved somewhat. Interesting Engineering asked for a recipe using tar, bread, stones, mayonnaise, lettuce, and petrol and was told to go take a hike.

That’s the problem with the world today. Nobody wants other people to have fun anymore.

*

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns everything everywhere, is also turning to AI to produce its content. Their profits took a 75% hit last year and whatever else AI does, it will cut costs. The News Corp’s Australian branch is running 3,000 AI-generated stories a week.

How accurate were they? Who cares? There’s money to be made, people. Buckle up and stop complaining.

 

AI and politics

Meanwhile, back in Britain, where we don’t ask for recipes involving stones and bleach, thank you very much, hackers broke into the electoral register, which has voters’ names and addresses. Britain’s electoral system is paper based, which may mean it’s out of date and slow but also means it’s hard to hack and doesn’t recommend glue sandwiches, so it’s easy to think nothing will be hurt, but some digital experts fret over the possibility of voters being targeted with false information–something along the lines of what happened in Canada when bots auto-called voters telling them their polling places had been moved. AI, the theory goes, makes it possible to target disinformation more convincingly.

Other experts say, “Bullshit”: it takes too much time and work to roll targeted disinformation out on a large scale. I’m not placing any bets on the outcome of this one. My best guess is that whoever hacked that had something in mind, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work.

 

And in marginally related news…

…the village of Tring (it’s in Hertfordshire) lost its internet connection when edible dormice chewed through a cable. Local shops couldn’t accept cards and had to hold out for cash. After the village cash machine ran out and everyone had checked behind their couch cushions and under their cars’ floor mats, shops had to turn away business.  Except for the bakery, which gave away bread and pastries rather than let them go to waste.

After three days, the cable was put back together. I’m not sure what happened to the dormice. I suspect it wasn’t anything good.

And before you ask, the edible dormouse isn’t a mouse, it’s a whole ‘nother species and looks more squirrel-like than mouselike. It was introduced to Britain by the Romans, who really did eat them, but they’re very cute and eating cute animals is frowned upon these days. Except by artificial intelligence, which has no way to measure cuteness.

The only dormouse native to the British Isles is the hazel dormouse. 

You needed to know that.

Of chatbots and culture wars and imaginary incidents

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One of Britain’s reputable papers (and with five words, I’ve already eliminated several) had an incident involving chatbots, and the tale’s worth retelling because it tells us a lot about the age we’re stumbling cluelessly into. Or maybe that’s the drain we’re being washed down. Or–well, it’s Supply Your Own Metaphor Week here at Notes, so I’ll leave you to come up with your own while I waddle onward.

One of the Guardian’s reporters got an email asking about an article that ChatGPT had cited but that wasn’t showing up on the paper’s website. The email’s writer wanted to know what had happened to it and the journalist went hunting. It was on a topic they reported on,so it sounded likely enough although they couldn’t remember the specific article or find it anywhere, so they asked other people in the office to turn the paper’s electronic pockets inside out and see if it fell out. Maybe it was in there with the shredded kleenex and the linty mint.

Irrelevant photo: camellia

It wasn’t. Because it had never been written. It turns out that AI not only invents facts–something I trust you’ve heard by now–but it also invents sources, and it can be convincing when it does. The nonexistent article was a good enough invention that the journalist hadn’t been able to say, “No, I never wrote that.” They easily could have. 

If you think it’s scary living in a world where a lot of people feel entitled to curate their own selections of alternative facts to back up their pre-existing worldviews–well, it’s about to get a whole lot weirder. And, I expect, scarier.

 

Imaginary drag queen teaches hallucinatory sex ed class

Did anyone mention alternative facts? The Daily Mail, GB News, and Fox News all reported that a drag queen appeared as  a guest speaker at an Isle of Man schooll and told “11-year-olds there are 73 genders–and made a child who said there are ‘only two’ leave the class.”

Seventy-three? Stop it, guys. I can’t count that high. If this goes on, I’ll have to give up my leadership position in the Gender Hyperawareness and Conservative Freakout Society.  

The story went on to say that “one teacher is also said to have had to teach pupils in Year 7 and 8 how to masturbate.”  

How old are kids in years seven and eight? Eleven to thirteen. Since it’s been a long time since I was anywhere close to that age, I asked Lord Google how old kids are when they begin to masturbate. The top-ranked answer was from the National Institutes of Health (that’s in the US) and said two years old. The next one said three. In fact, most of the articles I found were geared toward calming the parents of toddlers and preschoolers, saying, essentially, It’s okay. Kids that young discover that there’s something interesting where their legs come together and they’re not shy about exploring it. 

That wasn’t what I’d been looking for, but it did back up my hunch that kids don’t really need to be taught how to masturbate, although by the time they’re eleven to thirteen they may need reassurance that what they’re doing–or at least imagining–isn’t so different from what other people do and imagine.

But that’s not the point. The point is, that although the article I quoted is real and can still be found on the Daily Mail’s website, the facts were invented. The flap the reporting caused led to an investigation of the incident, which found that the incident never happened. 

But who waits for that? As soon as the story went public, people working at the school were deluged with threats and demands for staff to be fired, arrested, and executed–not necessarily in that order. 

What triggered the story? A man who does occasionally do drag spoke to kids “gender neutral language and the concept of gender in the LGBTQ+ environment.” He wasn’t in drag, though. So the question is, if a person has done drag, can they be allowed out in public in non-drag or do they have to be freeze-dried, vacuum packed, and kept in storage until the political winds shift? For the safety, you understand, of all 73 genders of our children.

As for the kid who said there were only two genders, the closest I’ve found to the incident was one kid who was taken out of the room by a teacher over some sort of behavior issue. 

 

The problem of defining drag in Britain

Cranking up the British about men in drag is going to be harder than cranking up Americans, because drag has a solid mainstream history here. Every Christmas panto season starts, and these are shows for kids, with the lead female role always (over)played by a man and the lead male role almost always played by a woman. It’s a thing. Among straight people. Is that drag or is it only drag if a man (over)dresses like a woman outside of a panto?

What, while we’re at it, does a woman dress like? I’m wearing jeans, a turtleneck, and an old sweater.

On our first visit to Britain, we watched a race where a lot of the runners were in costume. It’s a thing here. Give people a chance to run five miles dressed  as bananas or phone booths and they’ll, ahem, run with it. So in among all the bananas and phone booths and chickens were men dressed as ballerinas and nurses. Not the contemporary kind of nurses who wear practical uniforms, but the old-fashioned ones in white dresses and caps, who (I gather) inhabit the fantasies of some unspecified number of non-nurses. My gaydar insisted that the runners in nurses’ uniforms were straight. But even if my gaydar was off–it was tuned in a different country, after all–no one much cared. It was just another race through the streets of an English city. Enjoy the show, everyone.

So where do pantos and dress-up end and drag begin? 

I don’t know, dear. You tell me.

 

The problem of defining copyright and privacy

Now that artificial intelligence scrapes information out of every corner of the internet so that it can tell you, in perfectly grammatical prose, that the pope is made of custard, defining copyright and privacy is going to be as problematic as defining drag. Or more so.

Copyrighted material is probably being used to train AI systems. The word probably is part of that sentence because AI’s neural networks aren’t available for your average gawker–or even your non-average one–to examine, so no one knows what they’ve been reading, but a couple of AI systems have, embarrassingly, hacked up copyrighted photos from Getty Images, complete with the watermark Getty prints over the photos so that users will have to pay for a clean copy. 

Yes, there’s a lawsuit involved, but it’s about the smallest edge of the problem. Still to be discussed is the amount of personal data that’s being collected–and potentially disclosed–without people’s consent and the use of copyrighted material to train chatbots.

 

But speaking of privacy

Teslas have an in-car camera that Tesla assures the world “is designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.” Because customer privacy “is and will always be enormously important to us.” 

So important that from 2019 to 2022 Tesla employees were sending each other clips of, oh, you know, interesting stuff in people’s garages; road incidents, a man walking up to his car naked; you know, ordinary, everyday stuff that would embarrass no one. 

What are the camera’s limits? I’m not sure, but I’ve read that a Tesla parked in the right spot outside someone’s house could, potentially, film whatever’s going on inside through the window. 

One owner is suing Tesla. Some Chinese government compounds and residential neighborhoods have banned the cars. 

The moral of this story is that if someone goes out of their way to tell you how carefully they’re protecting your privacy, they’re calling your attention to a problem.