Olives @olives@qoto.org

Someone's pointed out that Google censoring adult ads pushes people to market on social media instead, and so, if someone has a problem with marketing on social media, then maybe they should take it up with Google.

Guardian U.S. tends to be better than some of their other branches.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/30/us-far-right-group-influencing-anti-gay-policy-africa There are some details I didn't know about but I can't say I'm surprised they'd be involved in this.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-024-00984-2
"Banning the purchase of sex increases cases of rape: evidence from Sweden"

"This paper leverages the timing of a ban on the purchase of sex to assess its impact on rape offenses. Relying on Swedish high-frequency data from 1997 to 2014, I find that the ban increases the number of rapes by around 44–62%."

"The increase reflects a boost in completed rapes both in the short- and long-run. However, it is not accompanied by a decrease in the number of pimps."
#sexology

And you have to think about how racist it is, they would never dare do that with pictures of the Holocaust. It's only entertainment at the expense of the people in Cambodia.

While they were sort of progressive, honestly, there were a number of better sites as far as progressivism went. I've avoided commenting on it before but since it's defunct and not really relevant any more I think it's alright to once.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/12/cambodia-vice-edited-photos-khmer-rouge-victims-smiling-tuol-sleng-prison-genocide
"Cambodia has condemned images published by Vice media group that featured victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide, colourised and with some apparently edited to add smiles to their faces."

"In the interview with Vice, now removed, Loughrey said he began working on photographs from Tuol Sleng when he was contacted by someone in Cambodia who wanted three photographs – including one ID photo taken inside the prison – to be restored."
While there are those who bemoaned the end of Vice Media, perhaps we could do with fewer edgy shock articles like this. How did he even come to their attention, what relevance does he have, why did they feel they should cover this in particular.

Also, I would like to see a move towards smaller models (and perhaps figuring out how to keep the quality good enough in doing so, if that is a concern). That would involve smaller data sets, probably less resource usage, and so on.

Also, is this gimmick really needed everywhere? Does it really improve things? If it is somewhere, maybe it could be an option, rather than a default.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/30/ugly-truth-ai-chatgpt-guzzling-resources-environment They are right that #AI would contribute to water scarcity / resource consumption. In fact, I think I covered this before, unfortunately, that post has been buried.

As for the recommendation, more transparency on this would be interesting. And it's not just a company which could be more transparent, governments could provide more information on this (whenever it goes through them). Fuzzier concepts are hard to comment on.

So far, it seems like OpenAI's architectures are probably the worst. It uses far larger data sets. It has worse privacy issues. It probably consumes more resources. #AI

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01493-8
"The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make #Japan’s publicly funded research output free to read. This month, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry’s announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from January 2025."
#OpenAccess

https://www.oits-icit.org/oits-archieve/OCIT_2023_Website/Final_Schedule-OCIT2023.pdf Supposedly, this Indian conference had a panel about AI harms. I don't see it, do you?

As an example of the sort of dead end I have to chase.

One thing which might crop up are numbers like "hundreds" or "thousands" of images which sound big until you realize the scale of the Internet with billions of people and that a video has 3600 frames per minute (with 60FPS).

Without further context, it's hard to argue that these numbers are meaningful but someone is still expected to feel that the sky is falling.

A single batch (and it is not as if spam is unusual) can contain a lot.

Sometimes, there is a "report" which allegedly supports someone's point, but there won't be a link to it, so I will have to figure out what that is about and track it down to discover that it is again cherry picked or exaggerated.

There is also the problem where something which I debunked like five months ago will be carried from person to person where it might suddenly seem like a new point, but when you dig into it, it turns out it isn't.

If my AI takes aren't satisfying enough, they kind of should do though, it is because each month, there has been someone talking about how the "situation has changed", and then, you read a bunch of documents and it turns out it practically hasn't. My time is limited.

If you are really sure it has, in some way in which it really hasn't before, I might take a look at it but I'm done spending days reading things for now to figure out that someone is exaggerating.

Commit a crime involving malware and get arrested. Mundane.

Commit a crime involving malware where writing the code might have been assisted by "AI" (it's not known to be reliable) and get arrested. Big AI crackdown! We are showing AI! The worst confirmed!

"Twitter and Reddit are kept on app stores purely because of revenue"

This is paraphrased. Julie's take here is really quite something. Could it be that if you arbitrarily remove very popular apps, it could create huge problems? If anything, it would be far more scandalous, if they were arbitrarily removing apps, particularly ones from competing companies. #auspol

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/30/texas-republicans-vote-death-penalty-abortion-providers
"#Texas Republicans are open to applying the death penalty to abortion providers, a new proposal from the state party indicates.

Over the weekend, during the Texas GOP convention, Republican delegates voted on a party platform for 2024 that proclaims “abortion is not healthcare, it is homicide” and suggests striking a state law that protects abortion providers from being charged with homicide. In Texas, capital murder is punishable by the death penalty. Killing a child under the age of 15 can qualify as capital murder, the most severe form of homicide."
#HumanRights

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/30/drones-tracking-released-immigration-detention-detainees-andrew-giles
"The government is using drones to track people released from detention"

"“There is so much being done for this cohort: spot checks, random house checks, as well as the use of drones that I just touched on.”"

"In Senate estimates on Wednesday, Australian Border Force officials revealed that 76 of the 153 people released are subject to electronic monitoring and 68 are subject to curfews, which are generally from 10pm to 6am."
Even if it is a murderer, isn't this really excessive?
#auspol #privacy