Spying on your holiday and the AI wars begin
Notes From the Desk: No. 3 - 2023.09.02
Notes From the Desk are periodic posts that summarize recent topics of interest or other brief notable commentary that might otherwise be a tweet or note.
Expansion of AI spying continues, listening to your speech
Activision has now partnered with Modulate, AI software for real-time detection of “toxic” speech in games. Modulate website states their software can perform the following:
“ToxMod’s powerful toxicity analysis assesses the tone, timbre, emotion, and context of a conversation to determine the type and severity of toxic behavior.”
“ToxMod’s machine learning technology can understand emotion and nuance cues to help differentiate between friendly banter and genuine bad behavior.”
Certainly there will be those eager to use this technology to have every device available listening to your every spoken word. It will be a factor to help determine your social credit score.
How much privacy are we willing to lose? Holiday spy plans
New York City wants to spy on your backyard barbeque. Police plan to use drones to monitor activity on your private property.
“If a caller states there’s a large crowd, a large party in a backyard, we’re going to be utilizing our assets to go up and go check on the party,” Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner, said at a press conference.
It is conditioning for the perpetual spying apparatus.
In Orwellian news, the AI disinformation wars
You will be glad to know we should all be safer soon as the US Special Operations Command has contracted with an AI firm, Accrete, to monitor and counter disinformation on social media. Accrete is also making their services available to Enterprise business.
“We believe that the market for AI that can predict and neutralize malign AI-generated synthetic media is about to explode”
“It also autonomously generates speedy, relevant content to counter such malicious attacks. “
Since OpenAI has failed to detect AI generated content reliably, one has to wonder just how much real content will be flagged and countered. Of course, that would assume they actually want to target AI content, vs all content that they deem a threat to the ordained narratives of correct speech.
Jeffrey Tucker on systematic false reporting on Jobs
Tucker writes on the systematic revisions occurring in jobs numbers which at present means we are 30 percent less of all the jobs reported this year. That is a drop in over 600 thousand.
We might be seeing here the systematic politicization of data reporting from these one-time apolitical bureaucracies. It’s become rather predictable over the last 18 months or so that the press releases fronting new reporting bury bad news and highlight seemingly good news. This means that they cannot be trusted. But reporters have yet to catch on.
Just a reminder, those who say they are constantly concerned about misinformation are the professionals of creating misinformation.
X updates its new privacy policy with biometrics
The new update now includes the use of your biometric data.
"Basically, certain information is necessary if you want to use many of our products and services ... Biometric Information. Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes."
Some have not had an opportunity to read X's new privacy policy. So I've attempted to carefully represent the new policy in the form of a simple image. Hopefully this helps!
