Day archives: May 31st, 2023

Why won’t Google give a straight answer on whether Bard was trained on Gmail data?

Skiff Blog: “… Google’s Smart Compose feature was trained on Gmail users’ private emails.Bard is not Google’s only language-focused machine learning model. Anyone who’s used Gmail in the past few years knows about the Smart Compose and Smart Reply features, which auto-complete sentences for you as you go. According to Google’s 2019 paper introducing Smart Compose, the feature was …

Subjects: AI, E-Mail, E-Records, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy

FTC Finds Amazon Ring Cameras Responsible for “Egregious Violations of Users’ Privacy,” Requires Data Deletion

EPIC: “In a proposed consent order released today, the Federal Trade Commission will require Amazon to “delete data products such as data, models, and algorithms derived from videos it unlawfully reviewed,” implement new privacy and security measures, and pay a fine of $5.8 million. The proposed order was published alongside a complaint finding that Amazon …

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Commerce, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are

The Guardian: “Inside the many debates swirling around the rapid rollout of so-called artificial intelligence, there is a relatively obscure skirmish focused on the choice of the word “hallucinate”. This is the term that architects and boosters of generative AI have settled on to characterize responses served up by chatbots that are wholly manufactured, or …

Subjects: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management

Our model suggests that global deaths remain 5% above pre-covid forecasts

The Economist [free to read at this link] – Attributing this increase to covid would make it the fourth-leading cause of death: “n May 5th the World Health Organisation declared an end to the covid-19 public-health emergency. Based on official mortality counts, this looked tardy. By April 2022, average weekly death tolls had already fallen …

Subjects: Education, Government Documents, Health Care

10 ways to speed up your internet connection today

ZDNET: “Are you suffering from slow internet speeds at home? Connectivity drops, bottlenecks, lagged content streaming and downloads, and slow speeds are all common problems with home internet services — and it may not be the fault of your internet service provider (ISP). True, the routers typically provided by ISPs are basic and may not …

Subjects: Internet

Safe and just Earth system boundaries

Rockström, J., Gupta, J., Qin, D. et al. Safe and just Earth system boundaries. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06083-8 [free PDF download] “The stability and resilience of the Earth system and human well-being are inseparably linked yet their interdependencies are generally under-recognized; consequently, they are often treated independently. Here, we use modelling and literature assessment to quantify …

Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law