Daily Archives: 2024-07-30

Article note: Ugh. Way too many folks are falling for this heinous shit. Above and beyond the general "Any law motivated on `Won't someone think of the children' is highly suspect" rule this one (1) will compel unnecessary de-anonimzation and PII collection by vendors, which puts everyone at risk (2) is clearly designed to separate at-risk youth from engaging with supportive sections of society under the premise of "anti-grooming," and (3) was actually written by Heritage Foundation ghouls from the "Better dead than qeer" school of child rearing.

Enlarge (credit: Westend61 | Westend61)

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) easily passed the Senate today despite critics' concerns that the bill may risk creating more harm than good for kids and perhaps censor speech for online users of all ages if it's signed into law.

KOSA received broad bipartisan support in the Senate, passing with a 91–3 vote alongside the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Action (COPPA) 2.0. Both laws seek to control how much data can be collected from minors, as well as regulate the platform features that could harm children's mental health.

Only Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) opposed the bills.

Article note: The vast majority of writing _is_ extremely formular and ingenuine, but the value in doing it is typically in learning how to manipulate (with) the formula. ...and still, deciding to air an ad encouraging children to outsource expressing their (fake) emotions to a chatterbot is some sociopath shit that it's extremely goddamn alarming no one at google though the better of.

Enlarge / Here's an idea: Don't be a deadbeat and do it yourself! (credit: Google)

If you've watched any Olympics coverage this week, you've likely been confronted with an ad for Google's Gemini AI called "Dear Sydney." In it, a proud father seeks help writing a letter on behalf of his daughter, who is an aspiring runner and superfan of world-record-holding hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.

"I'm pretty good with words, but this has to be just right," the father intones before asking Gemini to "Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is..." Gemini dutifully responds with a draft letter in which the LLM tells the runner, on behalf of the daughter, that she wants to be "just like you."

Every time I see this ad, it puts me on edge in a way I've had trouble putting into words (though Gemini itself has some helpful thoughts). As someone who writes words for a living, the idea of outsourcing a writing task to a machine brings up some vocational anxiety. And the idea of someone who's "pretty good with words" doubting his abilities when the writing "has to be just right" sets off alarm bells regarding the superhuman framing of AI capabilities.

Article note: Apparently the AI douches are scraping the OSM web frontends via API instead of just ...downloading the dataset. Which is Free. They're doing surreptitious shit like cloaking their UAs and IPs because they know their behavior is generally unacceptable, and in doing so making it expensive for the hosts of free content they're perfectly allowed to download. That they're hoping to make money from without giving anything back.