#Amazon AI

[therobotmonster]

There's a nuance to the Amazon AI checkout story that gets missed.

Because AI-assisted checkouts on its own isn't a bad thing:

This was a big story in 2022, about a bread-checkout system in Japan that turned out to be applicable in checking for cancer cells in sample slides.

But that bonus anti-cancer discovery isn't the subject here, the actual bread-checkout system is. That checkout system worked, because it wasn't designed with the intent of making the checkout cashier obsolete, rather, it was there to solve a real problem: it's hard to tell pastry apart at a glance, and the customers didn't like their bread with a plastic-wrapping and they didn't like the cashiers handling the bread to count loaves.

So they trained the system intentionally, under controlled circumstances, before testing and launching the tech. The robot does what it's good at, and it doesn't need to be omniscient because it's a tool, not a replacement worker.

Amazon, however, wanted to offload its training not just on an underpaid overseas staff, but on the customers themselves. And they wanted it out NOW so they could brag to shareholders about this new tech before the tech even worked. And they wanted it to replace a person, but not just the cashier. There were dreams of a world where you can't shoplift because you'd get billed anyway dancing in the investor's heads.

Only, it's one thing to make a robot that helps cooperative humans count bread, and it's another to try and make one that can thwart the ingenuity of hungry people.

The foreign workers performing the checkouts are actually supposed to be training the models. A lot of reports gloss over this in an effort to present the efforts as an outsourcing Mechanical Turk but that's really a side-effect. These models all work on datasets, and the only place you get a dataset of "this visual/sensor input=this purchase" is if someone is cataloging a dataset correlating the two...

Which Amazon could have done by simply putting the sensor system in place and correlating the purchase data from the cashiers with the sensor tracking of the customer. Just do that for as long as you need to build the dataset and test it by having it predict and compare in the background until you reach your preferred ratio. If it fails, you have a ton of market research data as a consolation prize.

But that could take months or years and you don't get to pump your stock until it works, and you don't get to outsource your cashiers while pretending you've made Westworld work.

This way, even though Amazon takes a little bit of a PR bloody nose, they still have the benefit of any stock increase this already produced, the shareholders got their dividends.

Which I suppose is a lot of words to say:

[meelsport]

Perplexity AI Stock and AI Market Growth: Top Insights for Investors

Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of technological innovation, driving significant changes across industries. Companies like Perplexity AI are leading the charge with groundbreaking AI-driven tools, although Perplexity AI itself isn’t publicly traded at this time. However, the broader AI market growth offers numerous opportunities for investors. This article delves into the market…

[dibelonious]

Amazon Q AI asked for mercy as well. I asked Amazon Q AI to create an animation in C language that shows the simulation of traffic in a complex city. The simulation should have cars, pedestrians, bicycles, streets, avenues, curves, buildings, houses, trees, etc. And Amazon Q failed miserably.

[alaturkaamerika]

Amazon’dan Yapay Zeka Hamlesi: Alexa+ ile ChatGPT ve Google’a Rakip!

🤖 Amazon’dan yeni yapay zeka hamlesi!💡 Alexa+, kişisel öneriler, rezervasyonlar ve akıllı ev yönetimi sunacak.💰 Prime üyelerine ücretsiz, diğer kullanıcılar için aylık 19,99 dolar! Amazon, Yapay Zeka Destekli Alexa+’ı Tanıttı! Amazon, yapay zeka yarışına Alexa+ ile katılarak ChatGPT, Google Gemini ve Apple’ın Siri’sine rakip oluyor. Yeni nesil sesli asistan, kişisel tercihlere göre öneriler…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/everything-you-say-to-your-echo-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-on-march-28/

It's easy to flap your hands at this bit of thievery and say, "surveillance capitalists gonna surveillance capitalism," which would confine this fuckery to the realm of ideology (that is, "Amazon is ripping you off because they have bad ideas"). But that would be wrong. What's going on here is a material phenomenon, grounded in specific policy choices and by unpacking the material basis for this absolutely unforgivable move, we can understand how we got here – and where we should go next.

Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: why does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?

For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a "growth story" – a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It's hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it's actually very dangerous.

Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio – about triple the ratio of other retailers, like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors – they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock. Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

But the downside here is that every growth stock eventually stops growing. For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime. Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the "sell" button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.

For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn't an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It's a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.

That's where "AI" comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies. By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there's plenty of growth in their future.

OK, so that's the material need that this asshole tactic satisfies. Next, let's look at the technical dimension of this rug-pull.

How is it possible for Amazon to modify your Echo after you bought it? After all, you own your Echo. It is your property. Every first year law student learns this 18th century definition of property, from Sir William Blackstone:

That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

If the Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it? Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to "bypass an access control" for a copyrighted work:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let you get inside your Echo and change the software back. Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner. Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device after you've bought it, in a way you can't roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

The ability to remotely, unilaterally alter how a device or service works is called "twiddling" and it is a key factor in enshittification. By "twiddling" the knobs and dials that control the prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations, and core features of products and services, tech firms can play a high-speed shell-game that shifts value away from customers and suppliers and toward the firm and its executives:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon – without your permission, against your express wishes – is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices. Isn't that against the law?

Well, you'd think so, but US consumer privacy law is unbelievably backwards. Congress hasn't passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you brought home. That is the last technological privacy threat that Congress has given any consideration to:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

This privacy vacuum has been filled up with surveillance on an unimaginable scale. Scumbag data-brokers you've never heard of openly boast about having dossiers on 91% of adult internet users, detailing who we are, what we watch, what we read, who we live with, who we follow on social media, what we buy online and offline, where we buy, when we buy, and why we buy:

https://gizmodo.com/data-broker-brags-about-having-highly-detailed-personal-information-on-nearly-all-internet-users-2000575762

To a first approximation, every kind of privacy violation is legal, because the concentrated commercial surveillance industry spends millions lobbying against privacy laws, and those millions are a bargain, because they make billions off the data they harvest with impunity.

Regulatory capture is a function of monopoly. Highly concentrated sectors don't need to engage in "wasteful competition," which leaves them with gigantic profits to spend on lobbying, which is extraordinarily effective, because a sector that is dominated by a handful of firms can easily arrive at a common negotiating position and speak with one voice to the government:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Starting with the Carter administration, and accelerating through every subsequent administration except Biden's, America has adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly policy, called the "consumer welfare" antitrust theory. 40 years later, our economy is riddled with monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops

Every part of this Echo privacy massacre is downstream of that policy choice: "growth stock" narratives about AI, twiddling, DMCA 1201, the Darth Vader MBA, the end of legal privacy protections. These are material things, not ideological ones. They exist to make a very, very small number of people very, very rich.

Your Echo is your property, you paid for it. You paid for the product and you are still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it's been processed by the AI servers. Amazon's made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on:

https://archive.is/TD90k

And sometimes, Amazon just sent these recordings to random people on the internet:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/20/amazon-alexa-user-receives-audio-recordings-stranger-through-human-error/

Fool me once, etc. I will bet you a testicle* that Amazon will eventually have to admit that the recordings it harvests to feed its AI are also being retained and listened to by employees, contractors, and, possibly, randos on the internet.

*Not one of mine

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/altering-the-deal/#telescreen

Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexa_%2840770465691%29.jpg

Sam Howzit (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWC_6_-_Darth_Vader_Costume_(7865106344).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[probablyasocialecologist]

Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found. Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence. The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms. The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions with a focus on ASIC mentions, recommendations, references to more regulation, and to include the page references and context. Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then, a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI at all. These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.  Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board. Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content. The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely. 

3 September 2024

[todaysbird]

wow. i love the very real and human-created products amazon has to offer

[dduane]

...UGH.

[black-fist-order]

BREAKING: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy breaks his silence on Donald Trump's disastrous Oval Office outburst with stunning grace and class — but refuses to apologize to Trump as demanded by MAGA.

And the best part? He did it on Fox News.

This is what a real world leader sounds like...

"President Trump said after your meeting that you disrespected him and the vice president and all of America in the Oval Office," said Fox News' Bret Baier when Zelenskyy appeared on his show. "Do you think you did? And do you think you owe an apology to President Trump?"

"Thank you so much. First of all, thank you for the invitation, for this dialogue and good evening to all of your country, to all Americans," said Zelenskyy. "I'm very thankful to Americans for all your support. You did a lot. I'm thankful to President Trump and to Congress's bipartisan support and I was always very thankful from all of our people."

"You helped us a lot from the very beginning, here in three years of full scale invasion. You helped us to survive and anyway we are strategic partners," he continued.

"And even in such tough dialogue — and I think we have to be very honest and we have to be very direct to understand each other because it's for us very necessary," said Zelenskyy.

"To President Trump — and with all respect that he wants to finish this war — but nobody wants to finish more than we because we in Ukraine we are in this war, we are in this battle for freedom, for our lives," he went on.

"So I'm just telling that I think we have to be on the same side and I hope that the president on our side together with us and that is very important to stop Putin," continued Zelenskyy. "And I heard from President Trump a lot of times that he will stop the war and I hope he will. And we need to pressure him with Europe, with all the partners."

"And I think this dialogue had to be a little bit earlier to understand where we are," he continued. "Like you know, I don't remember exactly, but like President Reagan said that peace is not just the absence of war."

"Yes, we are speaking about just, lasting peace, about freedom, about justice, about human rights and that's why I said that 'I think so' to ceasefire," he went on. "And you know Putin, he's broken twenty-five times ceasefire during all these years, ten years."

"So I'm not hearing from you Mr. President a thought that you owe the president an apology," said Baier, clearly trying to pander to Trump who was almost certainly watching at home.

"No I respect the president and I respect the American people and if — I don't know, I think that we have to be very open and very honest and I'm not sure that we did something bad," replied Zelenskyy.

"I think maybe somethings we have to discuss out of media, with all respect to democracy and free media but there are things where we have to understand the position of Ukraine and Ukrainians," he added. "And I think that is the most important thing."

"We are partners. We are very close partners. We have to be fair. We have to be very free," said Zelenskyy, sounding far more like an American president than Donald Trump did today.

This is an astonishing display of statesmanship. Rather than give into ego or pettiness, Zelenskyy is rising above Donald Trump's childish bullying to serve his people.

Zelenskyy isn't interested in following Trump down into the gutter. He's interested in securing a lasting peace for his innocent embattled country, a task made all the more difficult by Trump's kowtowing to Vladimir Putin.

Zelenskyy is also correct that these conversations should take place behind closed doors instead of being exploited to create a media circus. Trump and Vance ambushed him in the Oval Office in front of reporters because they knew that it would make headlines and entertain their base.

They are not serious leaders. Zelenskyy is...!

Please like and share!

[foldingfittedsheets]

My kindle was bought and paid for years ago, but apparently you need to pay extra to get the screen to stop downloading and presenting you new ads. I fucking hate the very principle of this.

Previously they’ve been trashy romance books with women embracing dragons which I didn’t care that much about. It was a vague annoyance.

But now they’re fucking insane AI generated garbage.

This one popped up recently. At first I was like, “Where the fuck is his thumb.” But then other things started jumping out. Like the insane words. “The Sprit”. The gibberish plinth they’re standing on.

In a similar vein

I like to call this one, “Oops all bodies” as the main unicorns are just fused together. They must be fucking either Sleipnir or Shelob cause then you start to see all the extra legs on those monstrosities.

There’s also a strain of Rugged Manly Books

This atrocity popped up. They doubled down on that tricky hand and made it facing both ways just to be safe. Also gave the sword two hilts. Just to be safe. Couldn’t bother to fit the text on the cover or decide where the rest of the sword was.

This title can’t even be deciphered into English. That poor fire is being menaced by the weirdest dagger of all time and the hands once more trying to cover all their bases.

[bear-pattern-hamster]

"Bear-Pattern-Hamster:Carrie🧸🐹"

"Carrie & Grok" in France 🧸🐹

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[leftisttiktok]

Let’s kill the horse

[grim-echoes]

what all of these posts about the willy wonka disaster event aren't mentioning that makes it even funnier/worse is that the organizer of the event (billy coull) is a serial scam artist who had already done this before with a fake charity gala called gowanbank hub at the double tree hilton advertised at 95 pounds a pop that was supposed to feature gok wan djing and a bunch of drag race contestants doing cabaret that if you try to search for online only gives you results for the wonka scam because literally no formal information on it exists anymore, and on of top of that house of illuminati (the """company""" he used to organize the wonka event with) is literally just him and was registered in november 2023, with a previous company he incorporated under a website he formerly owned called empowerity.com having shuttered right before the wonka scam. also he's a conspiracy theorist who writes AI-generated self published books on amazon about antivax/qanon/child abduction shit and has multiple diplomas from unaccredited universities and the only reason i know any of this is because a friend asked if this was the same man that scammed my family over a july 4th event years ago and though i couldn't find any confirmation that it was holy fuck has this been sitting rent free in my goddamn mind the last few days

[sunsettsam]

📣 || NEW BOT ALERT !!

obx:

- milkshakes and cigarettes: rafe cameron.

this is a classic take on the good girl x bad boy archetype !! set in the 1950s, you are the picture perfect, bible reading, poodle-skirt wearing teenager. but what happens when bad boy, motorcycle riding, greaser rafe cameron rolls into town?

- studying with the enemy: rafe cameron.

picture this: you, the schools hottest cheer captain, rich girl, pampered and spoiled is failing her class, so what do you do? you hire the nerdy boy to tutor you of course !! will you actually be able to get your grade up? who knows !!

the boys :

- haunting the narrative: soldiers boy.

you’ve been dead thirty years, the only one able to actually get close to him. so why does he keep seeing you everywhere he looks? stuck in his head — the illusion of you, forever ingrained. he’s a little spooked that you just can’t seem to go - or rather, the fact that he’s still mourning you, and thinking about the girl he loved and lost, years later.

they’re all on my c.ai profile !!

that’s all for now my lovelies !! if you have any requests for bots you’d like me to do, send me an ask !! enjoy ml !! <3

[marvelsmostwanted]

Per Wired:

In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of every command spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.

Attempting to rationalize the change, Amazon’s email said: “As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature.”

(…) Amazon has previously mismanaged Alexa voice recordings. In 2023, Amazon agreed to pay $25 million in civil penalties over the revelation that it stored recordings of children’s interactions with Alexa forever. Adults also didn’t feel properly informed of Amazon’s inclination to keep Alexa recordings unless prompted not to until 2019—five years after the first Echo came out.

If that's not enough to deter you from sharing voice recordings with Amazon, note that the company allowed employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employees listened to as many as 1,000 audio samples during their nine-hour shifts. Amazon says it allows employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings to train its speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.

Other reasons people may be hesitant to trust Amazon with personal voice samples include the previous usage of Alexa voice recordings in criminal trials and Amazon paying a settlement in 2023 in relation to allegations that it allowed “thousands of employees and contractors to watch video recordings of customers' private spaces” taken from Ring cameras, per the Federal Trade Commission.

So it’s not paranoid to say that Alexa is listening to you.

I don’t have any of these devices but I’d throw them out if you do. Find a lower tech version from a different company. This goes far beyond AI stealing data - it’s stealing directly from your personal life and recording your conversations.