The Blog Experiment | Technology Nonsense and Internet Tripe

Snapchat users will now see a ghostly image hovering over their AI-generated images, as Snapchat joins other Big Tech companies using watermarking tech to battle AI misinformation and deepfakes. Images made using Snapchat’s AI tools, like the app’s extend tool and its recently launched Dreams feature, will be stamped with a transparent watermark (Snapchat’s ghost logo) once it’s exported or downloaded off the app. Users receiving AI-generated images may also see the ghost logo and the app’s “sparkle” AI icon. SEE ALSO: Is AI good or bad? The answer is more complicated than ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Currently, Snapchat marks AI-generated content, included text conversations with its My AI chatbot, in various ways. Images created using Dreams are accompanied by a “context card” that explains the feature and generative AI. My AI conversations and the extend tool uses “contextual” icons, like the sparkle symbol, to “We also take great care to vet all political ads through a rigorous human review process, including a thorough check for any misleading use of content, including AI to create deceptive images or content,” the platform wrote. “The addition of these watermarks will help inform those viewing it that the image was made with AI on Snapchat.”Along with the new transparency tool, Snapchat also committed to ongoing AI literacy efforts. So far, that just entails a generative AI FAQ available on its Support Site. “While all of our AI tools, both text-based and visual, are designed to avoid producing incorrect, harmful, or misleading material, mistakes may…Snapchat will now watermark users' AI-generated images

Dateline: Woking, 16th April 2024.Recent figures (from the Nilson Report) shows that US merchants paid a record $161 billion in processing fees to accept $10.6 trillion in card payments. The total value of fees paid was up 17% from 2021, even though purchases for goods and services tied to all card payments grew by only 12% year-over-year. This is because credit cards made up a larger share of spending and credit cards cost merchants more to accept. Credit card spending in fact grew by 19% in 2022, more than three times growth rate for the (less costly) debit cards. Given this trend (banks pushing premium credit cards with generous rewards paid for by the merchants), the management consultants Bain forecast of peak card (in the US market) in 2029, may actually be slightly behind the curve as these costs push merchants to look for alternatives.ShareHow to CompeteWith profit margins being squeezed, merchants have responded by surcharging for card use (payment consultancy TSG reckons between that between five and ten per cent of the eight million card-accepting small businesses in the US now charge fees for credit card usage), by discounting for cash or by encouraging customers to bypass cards completely and switch to alternatives such as payments direct from the customer’s bank account to the merchant’s bank account. With big billers such as Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile asking customers to shift monthly payments from their credit cards to bank accounts, they are leading a trend that will only grow stronger as instant payments, open banking…Cards and Competitors

A newly released report alleges Big Tech’s ad transparency tools are failing across the board — with X scoring the worst at providing meaningful data that can help users, journalists, and advocates keep a watchful eye on scams and disinformation.If “ad transparency” isn’t a familiar term, that’s probably because it’s a somewhat counterintuitive concept. With TV ads, you generally know the sponsor — it’s announced front and center. Digital ads are more slippery. Even when the fact that something is an ad is disclosed, exactly who is advertising what, and why still may not be clear. If a platform fails to provide robust digital ad transparency information to those who request it, it’s harder to track hoaxes and scrutinize sketchy or scammy ad practices. SEE ALSO: The return of political campaign ads to X/Twitter raises important questions for users A report ‘stress-testing’ tech platforms’ ad repositoriesThe digital survey was conducted by Mozilla and CheckFirst, a software solutions company providing tools to counter and monitor disinformation. It analyzed a dozen ad transparency tools created by tech platforms to aid advertising monitors, including those on X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Alphabet’s Google Search, and Meta and Apple sites. Using guidelines from the European Union’s 2023 Digital Services Act (DSA) and Mozilla’s in-house ad library guidelines, the organizations scanned the platforms’ ad repositories for things like public availability, the contents of advertisements, payer details, and user targeting details.  “Ad transparency tools are essential for platform accountability — a first line of defense, like smoke detectors,” said…Report finds that Big Tech's ad monitoring tools are failing miserably. X is the worst.

Meta’s Oversight Board will review two cases about how Facebook and Instagram handled content containing artificial intelligence- (AI) generated nude images of two famous women, the board announced Tuesday. The board is soliciting public comments about concerns around AI deepfake pornography as part of its review of the cases. One case concerns an AI-generated nude image made to look like an American public figure that was removed automatically by Facebook after being identified by a previous poster as violating Meta’s bullying and harassment policies. The other case concerns an AI-generated nude image made to resemble a public figure from India, which Instagram not intitially remove after it was reporterd. The image was later removed after the board selected the case and Meta determined the content was left up “in error,” according to the board. The board is not naming the individuals involved to prevent further harm or risk of gender-based harassment, a spokesperson for the Oversight Board said. The board, which is run independently from Meta and funded by a grant provided by the company, can issue a binding decision about content, but policy recommendations are non-binding and Meta has final say about what it chooses to implement. The board is seeking public comments that address strategies for how Meta can address deepfake porn, as well as on the challenges of relying on automated systems that can close appeals in 48 hours if no review has taken place. The case in India, where a user reported the explicit deepfake, was…Meta action on explicit deepfakes under review by Oversight Board

Nary a day goes by when we don’t learn about a new regulation of artificial intelligence (AI). This is not surprising, with AI being widely touted as the most powerful new technology of the 21st century, but because there is no agreed-upon definition of AI, as I’ve previously written in these pages, and the landscape is constantly growing and changing, many new regulations are steeped in contradiction.  Among such regulatory paradoxes is a tendency to regulate an activity only when it is conducted using AI, when (from the end user’s perspective) the exact same human activity is unregulated. For example, impersonations and parodies of celebrities and politicians have been around since ancient times, and are often considered acceptable commentary. And yet, we may be moving toward an environment in which a human impersonator and an AI-generated impersonator who appear exactly the same and do exactly the same thing are classified, for regulatory purposes, entirely differently.  The current chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Lina Khan, is a brilliant attorney who is attempting to address such paradoxes in emerging FTC AI regulations. During a recent Carnegie Endowment program, I asked Khan how the FTC deals with the paradox of regulating some AI activities when the exact same human activities might not be regulated. She replied that the commission’s focus is the opposite: ensuring “that using AI doesn’t give you some type of free pass.”  Even at this early stage, we can see that LLGAI (“large language” because computers use the…The inherent paradox of AI regulation 

In June 1994, when the late OJ Simpson was charged with murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her lover Ron Goldman, the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Still, with hindsight, it’s easy to realize that modern internet culture was all around us. Not literally, of course. The Netscape browser would not be released for another six months. If you wanted to tie up your phone line, fire up your 56K modem and “surf the internet” (a then-obscure phrase coined by a librarian), you could use the buggy Mosaic browser. But you had to know your sites and services: a couple of nerds had just started a directory called Yahoo, but would not add a “search” feature until 1995, after the OJ trial had begun.  SEE ALSO: Learn about the O.J. Simpson trial from CNN’s ancient ’90s website The internet grew up fast that year. It did so in part by offering places for OJ obsessives to congregate. “Scores of O.J.-related data bases [sic], interactive discussion forums and electronic mail lists have opened in cyberspace since last June,” the New York Times noted in February 1995, in a story that now seems too quaint to be real. The defunct service provider Prodigy “already has 20,000 O.J.-related messages in its data base,” while over on “America on-Line,” the “Court TV forum is abuzz with armchair analysts.”In “the first trial of the digital century,” the Times’ Peter Lewis enthused, “anyone with access to a personal computer, a modem and a telephone line…How the OJ trial foreshadowed internet culture

In June 1994, when the late OJ Simpson was charged with murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her lover Ron Goldman, the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Still, with hindsight, it’s easy to realize that modern internet culture was all around us. Not literally, of course. The Netscape browser would not be released for another six months. If you wanted to tie up your phone line, fire up your 56K modem and “surf the internet” (a then-obscure phrase coined by a librarian), you could use the buggy Mosaic browser. But you had to know your sites and services: a couple of nerds had just started a directory called Yahoo, but would not add a “search” feature until 1995, after the OJ trial had begun.  SEE ALSO: Learn about the O.J. Simpson trial from CNN’s ancient ’90s website The internet grew up fast that year. It did so in part by offering places for OJ obsessives to congregate. “Scores of O.J.-related data bases [sic], interactive discussion forums and electronic mail lists have opened in cyberspace since last June,” the New York Times noted in February 1995, in a story that now seems too quaint to be real. The defunct service provider Prodigy “already has 20,000 O.J.-related messages in its data base,” while over on “America on-Line,” the “Court TV forum is abuzz with armchair analysts.”In “the first trial of the digital century,” the Times’ Peter Lewis enthused, “anyone with access to a personal computer, a modem and a telephone line…How the OJ trial foreshadowed internet culture

Dateline: Woking, 10th April 2024.Elon Musk has talked about plans to turn Twitter, now known as X (or TwiX, to me) into a payments platform that will give users the ability to send money to one another and move money into and out of bank accounts. The company has committed to launch peer-to-peer payments, “unlocking more user utility and new opportunities for commerce, and showcasing the power of living more of your life in one place”. This is part of what seems to be a wider vision of X as a a kind of “super app”, a Western version of WeChat, where users will read the news, book travel, pay taxes and everything else. It’s an exciting and challenging goal, but I think it’s going to be difficult to disrupt this particular market.with kind permission of Helen Holmes (CC-BY-ND 4.0)Subscribe nowMoney & MonetisablePeople who are tweeting from time to time (eg, me) tend to think that everyone is on X. But they are not. It is not even in the top 10 most used social media networks. Facebook has more than three billion monthly active users, whereas X has a tenth of that and most of them are not particularly active, since data shows that almost all tweets (92%) come from just 10% of them. Most people come to X to check in on the news or find entertainment rather than to contribute to the sum total of human knowledge.Nonetheless, there are users (mostly male, dominated by the 25-34 age group) who do represent…Musk and Money Transmission

The phrase, “There’s a censorship problem in the United States,” is a homing beacon for political and social division — instantly casting a sense of wariness about who is uttering it and for what aim. But it’s also true. From continued legislative attacks on inclusive education to digital “shadowbanning” of accounts in social media algorithms, content is often gate-kept from the masses. Frida Uncensored, a new website launched alongside the cult favorite maternity brand’s new fertility products, addresses this ongoing issue from a different perspective: One that hopes to circumvent the censorship around conception, pregnancy, postpartum, and breastfeeding product education.  Frida Uncensored provides Frida customers completely uncensored, anatomical tutorials for the use of their fertility and postpartum products — like a real-life version of the wholly unhelpful cartoons seen in the comically accordion-folded instruction packets for things like tampons and menstrual cups. The first set of videos, available today, feature adult entertainment actress and mom Asa Akira using tools like the at-home insemination kit and the Frida Mom peri bottle. Future videos will feature other real-life customers who can now apply to be a part of the Uncensored campaign. “Traditional and social media outlets are really effective tools to drive awareness that sites like this exist,” Frida founder and CEO Chelsea Hirschhorn told Mashable. “That being said, we have a hard time even advertising using the word ‘fertility.’ We’re at the whim of the algorithm, so to speak, and the algorithm needs a more human touch. The algorithm is not set up equitably.” Recent…This website offers uncensored, unfiltered sexual health education

It might be easy to forget at times, but technically, Twitter is no more. Elon Musk changed the name of the company to “X” last summer. Yes, the main domain name for Musk’s X is still Twitter.com. Yes, there are multiple official pages on the platform where the company still refers to it as “Twitter.” Yes, most people still call it “Twitter.” But, Musk’s social media platform is officially called X.On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of “Twitter.com” to “X.com” automatically.   X user @___frye posted “Twitter .com” but on X’s app for iOS it shows as “X .com” Credit: Mashable Screenshot X’s Twitter dot com problemYes, you read that correctly. If a user typed in “Twitter.com,” they would see “Twitter.com” as they typed it before hitting “Post.” But, after submitting, the platform would show “X.com” in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user’s permission, for everyone viewing the post.And shortly after this revelation, it became clear that there was another big issue: X was changing anything ending in “Twitter.com” to “X.com.”As of publication of this piece, here’s how one post currently shows up on X’s website: Here’s how @Arcticstar0’s post looks like X’s website. Credit: Mashable Screenshot Here’s how the same post currently looks on X for iOS: Here’s how the same @Arcticstar0 post looks like…X automatically changed 'Twitter' to 'X' in users' posts, breaking legit URLs