Geekly Update - 30 October 2024

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

A teenager who fell in love with an AI chatbot took his own life. His mother believes Character.AI is responsible for the death of her son and is suing the company that markets its technology as “AI that feels alive”.

A recent accidental release of internal documents by Tiktok reveals that the popular social media company knew its algorithm impacted teen mental health by fostering addiction. TikTok's own studies showed that the app can lead users into “content rabbit holes” and addictive behaviors develop after only 35 minutes of viewing.

According to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy, the video streaming industry operates "a massive data-driven surveillance apparatus that has transformed the television set into a sophisticated monitoring, tracking and targeting device." Their report "How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era" describes how streaming providers surreptitiously collect information on individuals and families.

OpenAI says Whisper, the company's AI-powered voice-to-text transcription tool has “human level robustness and accuracy.” But in practice, it often "hallucinates," creating garbled sentences that have little or no resemblance to the spoken words. Despite that, it's being used by doctors in hospital settings where mistakes could have really grave consequences for patients.

The Salt Lake City Police Department is warning about AI scams that are cloning the voices of police officers. A recent email scam used AI to falsely portray Police Chief Mike Brown telling recipients that they "owed the federal government nearly $100,000." The scammers combined footage from one of Brown's TV interviews with AI-generated audio that closely impersonated the voice of the police chief.

This just in from the "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" department: Google is developing "Project Jarvis," an AI project intended to take over independently perform tasks on personal computers. Jarvis will act as a virtual assistant, taking control of your browser to automate various tasks such as shopping, online research and other browser-based operations.

I mentioned earlier this year that the San Francisco Metro's Automatic Train Control System still uses floppy disks, which the SFMTA director said was likely to cause "a catastrophic failure" at some point. The good news: The city will pay Hitachi $212 million to replace floppies, cables and other aging technology. The not-so-good news: They'll get that done by 2027 or 2028. So hoping to avoid catastrophic failure is still an option in the short term.

The FCC has proposed a rule mandating mobile phone carriers to unlock phones within 60 days of activation. Verizon already does that, but T-Mobile and AT&T say locked phones are good for users, because the proposed rules would "make handsets less affordable for consumers". Consumer advocacy groups, however claim the 60-day unlocking rule will give users more choice and lower their costs. Maybe someone is lying?

Chinese automobile manufacturer Chery has unveiled a flying car prototype. The cleverly-named ‘Land and Air Vehicle’ successfully completed a 50-mile test flight, and is capable of vertical takeoff and landing, which might come in handy to evade traffic congestion. Are we ready for a fully autonomous flying car with no steering wheel or accelerator?

And finally, this week's Just Here For The Headline item: AI Toilet Camera Snaps Pictures Of Poop. I'll remind readers that JHFTH items are links to articles I chose not to read because the headline tells enough of the story.

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