Horrifying deepfake tricks employee into giving away $25 million

No names in this single-source anecdote out of Hong Kong, credited to “Senior Superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching.” The employee joined a video call with who he thought was the business’s chief financial officer. He was initially suspicious after a message from the CFO mentioned a ‘secret transaction’, suggesting it was a phishing scam…. However, after other…

Body Parts #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 25) Quark announces he’s dying; Kira becomes “Aunt Nerys”

Rewatching ST:DS9 In Ops, O’Brien frets to Dax about his very pregnant, very active wife’s latest outing to the Gamma Quadrant. Quark, having just returned from a visit to Ferenginar, seems unusually happy to be back, but blurts out just before the opening credits that he’s dying. While on Ferenginar, Quark was diagnosed with the…

Daughter doing a thing. Interviewing the Pittsburgh Dance Council’s Randall Miller for Burgh to Burg.

Similar:Letter to the editor: Setting record straight on Seton Hill newspaperDon't Be a Sucker (antifascist film from 1945)Hey there, chaotic world in academia and beyond, could you settle down just a bit so I can…I ordered a box of composition books. Low-tech response to AI.I have for some reason reached another #duolingo milestone.The Anatomy of…

Why is Elon Musk attacking Wikipedia? Because its very existence offends him

So, the sight of Elon Musk charging towards Wikipedia with his trademark guile and delicacy was so predictable that it was almost relaxing. He saw a collective resource that people prized and he wanted to hurt it. Why does Wales even need any money to run Wikipedia in the first place, he wondered on Sunday. You could…

Amazing McDonald’s “Maestro Burger” Commercial

Jaw-dropping. So creative and joyful. Similar:Letter to the editor: Setting record straight on Seton Hill newspaperDon't Be a Sucker (antifascist film from 1945)Hey there, chaotic world in academia and beyond, could you settle down just a bit so I can…I ordered a box of composition books. Low-tech response to AI.I have for some reason reached…

‘New York Times’ considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl

Be careful of the parts of news stories that rely on ifs and coulds and maybes. Having said that, this is fascinating exploration of what’s at stake. It’s a fact that OpenAI’s business model involved training its large-language model on copyrighted material, without acquiring legal permission to do so, and without any mechanism to share…

What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud?

I’m sad thinking of all the students whose academic careers and personal intellectual growth will suffer because they depend on generative text software — whether or not they get “caught” for plagiarism. In my mind, the fundamental error that almost everyone is making is in believing that Generative AI is tantamount to AGI (general purpose…

Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper, seizing computers, records and cellphones

The Marion County Record reported that restaurant owner Kari Newell kicked their staff out of a public forum last week. When a third party told the paper that same restaurant owner had a DUI conviction that could have affected her eligibility to get a liquor license, the paper chose not to run the story. “We…

ChatGPT answers more than half of software engineering questions incorrectly

The results showed that out of the 512 questions, 259 (52%) of ChatGPT’s answers were incorrect and only 248 (48%) were correct. Moreover, a whopping 77% of the answers were verbose. […] According to the study, the well-articulated responses ChatGPT outputs caused the users to overlook incorrect information in the answers. “Users overlook incorrect information…

‘It’s destroyed me completely’: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models

OpenAI has already taken a toll on human workers. It’s chilling to contemplate that students and creatives are comfortable with relying on this product in any meaningful way. The business model depends on devaluing human labor, and benefitting the powerful. The 51 moderators in Nairobi working on Sama’s OpenAI account were tasked with reviewing texts,…

Grandpa Joe’s Candy Store.

Sugar rush at Grandpa Joe’s Candy Store. Similar:Hey there, chaotic world in academia and beyond, could you settle down just a bit so I can…I have for some reason reached another #duolingo milestone.The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pagerFor some reason, I saw a bump in traffic to a page that linked to a "make-your-own-Trump-e…It will…

Elon Musk has officially killed Twitter. The zombie platform lives on as X, a disfigured shell of its former self

Whereas Twitter was once a fountain of authoritative information, X is a platform where trolls can pay a small fee to have their ugly content boosted ahead of reputable sources. X is a platform where identity verification no longer exists and impersonation is only a paid subscription away. X is a platform where journalists are…

Twitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse | Siva Vaidhyanathan

I joined Twitter for the first time during a session at an academic conference, and since then have mostly used it to keep in touch with academics who share my professional interests. But many of those professional contacts feel about Twitter the way I do, and have moved much (though not all) of their activity…

Frisbee is a brand name, but how newsworthy is that?

What would you do? Today I wrote 192 lines of ChoiceScript code to address this journalism lesson. Similar:Letter to the editor: Setting record straight on Seton Hill newspaperDon't Be a Sucker (antifascist film from 1945)Hey there, chaotic world in academia and beyond, could you settle down just a bit so I can…I ordered a box…