Ars Technica: “Fakespot, a useful service that explains how products you’ve never heard of could have 12,000 reviews with a 4.6-star average, has been acquired by Firefox-maker Mozilla, and Mozilla plans to integrate it into Firefox…After you install Fakespot’s extension for Chrome, Firefox, iOS, or Android, it changes the makeup of product pages on Amazon, eBay, Sephora, Shopify, and other e-commerce sites. Fakespot will run through a product’s reviews and then the history of those reviewers, using AI to search for common patterns of paid, astroturf, or other imposter behavior (as Fakespot told Wirecutter’s Lauren Dragan in 2016). The reviews then get a letter grade and a “corrected” average score based on the reviews not cited as fake. Fakespot’s FAQ section doesn’t get much more specific, only noting that it uses “artificial intelligence that has been trained to pick up on patterns” and doesn’t reveal its methods to avoid scammers dodging its tools.”
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Daily Archives: May 7, 2023
The Hidden Cost of Cheap TVs
The Atlantic (free link) – Screens have gotten inexpensive—and they’re watching you back.”…But the story of cheap TVs is not entirely just market forces doing their thing. Perhaps the biggest reason TVs have gotten so much cheaper than other products is that your TV is watching you and profiting off the data it collects. Modern… Continue Reading
TikTok Spied On Forbes Journalists
Forbes: “An internal investigation by ByteDance, the parent company of video-sharing platform TikTok, found that employees tracked multiple journalists covering the company, improperly gaining access to their IP addresses and user data in an attempt to identify whether they had been in the same locales as ByteDance employees. According to materials reviewed by Forbes, ByteDance… Continue Reading
Gmail is starting to show more ads, including in the middle of email lists
9to5Google: “Ads are a central part of Google’s business and, in many cases, the way that the company’s products are provided at no charge. That includes Gmail, which is starting to show more ads for a lot of folks. Gmail has shown ads for years and years now. Google brought ads to the mobile apps… Continue Reading
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 7, 2023
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 7, 2023 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the… Continue Reading
Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines
Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines – Nelson F. Liu, Tianyi Zhang, Percy Liang, arXiv 19 Apr 2023: “Generative search engines directly generate responses to user queries, along with in-line citations. A prerequisite trait of a trustworthy generative search engine is verifiability, i.e., systems should cite comprehensively (high citation recall; all statements are fully supported… Continue Reading
He wrote a book on a rare subject. Then a ChatGPT replica appeared on Amazon.
Washington Post: “From recipes to product reviews to how-to books, artificial intelligence text generators are quietly authoring more and more of the internet. Chris Cowell, a Portland-based software developer, spent more than a year writing a technical how-to book. Three weeks before it was released, another book on the same topic, with the same title,… Continue Reading
AI Is About to Make Social Media (Much) More Toxic
The Atlantic – We must prepare now. By Jonathan Haidt and Eric Schmidt “We joined together to write this essay because we each came, by different routes, to share grave concerns about the effects of AI-empowered social media on American society. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who has written about the ways in which… Continue Reading
LexisNexis Enters the Generative AI Fray
LawSites: [May 4, 2023] “LexisNexis announced the launch of Lexis+ AI, a new product that uses large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4, to answer legal research questions, summarize legal issues, and generate drafts of documents such as demand letters or client emails. Lexis+ AI is “a tool that will transform legal workflows,” said Jeff Pfeifer,… Continue Reading
US public debt reached a staggering $30.93T
“Historical Debt Outstanding is a dataset that provides a summary of the U.S. government’s total outstanding debt at the end of each fiscal year from 1789 to the current year. Between 1789 and 1842, the fiscal year began in January. From January 1842 until 1977, the fiscal year began in July. From July 1977 onwards,… Continue Reading
