#Real-Time Fraud Detection

[lesliedodge5]

Doriel Abrahams, Principal Technologist at Forter, on AI, Fraud Prevention, & Digital Trust Future

In this episode of Discover Dialogues, we’re joined by Doriel Abrahams, Principal Technologist at Forter, who shares his expert insights on how AI is reshaping the landscape of fraud detection and how businesses can leverage this technology to protect their customers and build digital trust. Doriel has been leading AI-driven fraud prevention at Forter for over a decade, helping businesses tackle one of the most pressing challenges in digital commerce. He discusses how real-time fraud detection and AI models are revolutionizing how businesses handle fraud prevention, allowing them to identify fraudulent activities before they cause harm. With the rise of digital transactions, AI-powered systems are becoming an indispensable tool for businesses to automate fraud detection and reduce the burden of manual oversight.

[apptrovebytrackier]

Real-Time Fraud Detection: Secure Your Business Instantly Protect your business with advanced real-time fraud detection solutions that identify and prevent fraudulent activities instantly, ensuring security and trust.

[alwajeeztech]

ZATCA VAT & Tax Return System in ALZERP Cloud ERP Software

The ALZERP Cloud ERP Software offers a comprehensive tax return system designed to facilitate the calculation, moderation, and finalization of VAT and tax returns. This system ensures businesses comply with the Saudi Arabian tax regulations set by the Zakat, Tax, and Customs Authority (ZATCA). By automating and streamlining the tax return process, ALZERP helps businesses achieve accuracy and…

[bankiq123]

"Protect your digital wallet with vigilance, for in the realm of digital payment, safety is not just a convenience but a necessity" For More: https://bankiq.co/instant-payments-fraud-prevention/

[pampermama]

Automating Your Finances: How AI and Fintech Can Help You Save and Invest

In the digital age, technology has revolutionized almost every aspect of our lives, including personal finance. Gone are the days of manual budgeting and laborious investment management. Thanks to the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and financial technology (fintech), automating your finances has become easier and more efficient than ever before. In this article, we will explore the…

[cashezsvenningsenrkdjx]

A Little Intuition/Is Argentina's "Chainsaw Revolution" applicable to the United States? \Li Lingxiu

At a political rally held in the suburbs of Washington on Thursday, Argentine President Milley presented Musk, the leader of the Department of U.S. Government Efficiency (DOGE), with a "signature" chainsaw, symbolizing the inheritance of the "chainsaw revolution". But can the United States afford the economic price Argentina has paid for it?

Since the establishment of DOGE, several federal government departments have been purged. Musk and his leadership team first gained access to the Treasury Department's computer system, and then DOGE staff entered the International Development Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Ministry of Education and other departments to conduct investigations. At the aforementioned Conservative Political Action Conference, Musk also predicted that the Federal Reserve will be the next target.

The White House has provided a "buyout plan" to 2 million federal government employees, which will provide about 8 months of salary compensation to all employees who voluntarily resign. As of February 18, a total of about 20,000 federal employees (including probationary employees) have been laid off or forced to stop work and take leave.

Such a swift and vigorous layoff storm easily reminds people of the "chainsaw revolution" promoted by Mile in Argentina. As early as the last round of elections in the country, the image of Mile holding a chainsaw high has become a classic image of campaign propaganda. At the beginning of his term, he signed a presidential decree to reduce government departments from 18 to 9 and fired more than 30,000 government employees. The Argentine government also successfully cut public spending by 30% through measures such as cutting energy and transportation subsidies, achieving a fiscal surplus for the first time in 14 years.

But compared with the political environment of the two countries, there are actually great differences. The Argentine president has absolute power over the government's organizational structure and departmental settings, and the abolition of government departments belongs to the category of administrative affairs management and adjustment. But for the US president, if there is no clear authorization from Congress through relevant laws, government departments cannot be adjusted or abolished (except for agencies established by presidential decrees).

Expenditure reduction plan difficult to achieve

Musk's previous slogan was to cut federal spending by $1 trillion. But in the officially released White House documents, Trump did not propose KPIs in this regard. As of February 17, DOGE has saved an estimated $55 billion through contract and lease renegotiations, cancellation of grants, asset sales, layoffs, regulatory savings and fraud detection, completing only 4% of Musk's goal.

Data shows that the total expenditure of the US federal government in fiscal year 2024 is $6.8 trillion, and the largest sources come from three aspects: Social Security ($1.46 trillion), Medicare ($0.87 trillion), and Medicaid ($0.91 trillion), accounting for a total of 49%. However, cutting the above expenditures will shake the interests of voters, and Trump also made it clear during his campaign last year that he would not cut spending on these three projects. In this way, DOGE's spending reduction target seems to be a task that can never be completed.

More importantly, the cost of Argentina's "chainsaw revolution" is painful. In the first six months after Milley took office, the country's poverty rate jumped from about 40% to 53%. Although it fell back by the end of last year, the unemployment rate climbed from 12% in 2023 to 15%.

House prices in Washington, DC plummet

There are also some bad trends in the United States at the moment. Data shows that the number of initial unemployment claims in Washington, DC has risen significantly in the past two weeks. Real estate prices in the region have also begun to fall. The median price of a house in Washington, DC in January 2025 is $553,000, a sharp drop of 9.7% year-on-year.

Argentina is still the largest borrower from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with outstanding loans of $43.4 billion, accounting for nearly 30% of total credit, exceeding the total of all sub-Saharan African countries. (See accompanying picture)

If Musk insists on carrying out the "chainsaw revolution" to the end. Then, poverty will replace inflation and become the hottest topic in American society in the future.

[xoxoemynn]

I've been trying very hard not to talk about PCCP publicly, because frankly, I think there's very little new to be said and certainly not by me.

However, I have picked up on a rather gross way that some people have been discussing the situation and I'd like it to stop.

To be clear, I am not talking about POC in this fandom who are rightfully upset by how much harder PCCP's actions are going to make it to simply exist in this space. I'm not talking about his close friends who are wrestling with that utter mindfuck of discovering the person you loved didn't actually exist. I'm also not talking about people who've discovered that similarities between their works and PCCP's weren't just coincidence and were actually plagiarism. All these people have been directly impacted by PCCP's unconscionable behavior and are going to need time to process and should be afforded the space to do so.

What I am talking about are people who were not directly involved in any of this, but seem to be descending upon any new scrap of info, any new revelation, any new insight, with the same kind of morbid glee as a TMZ reporter who got a hot tip about a shocking celebrity death.

(This is getting long, so going to put the rest below a cut.)

I was part of the group that first discovered PCCP's lies. The initial discovery was entirely by chance, but then we dug deeper because, and I cannot emphasize this enough, we wanted to be wrong. We did more digging because we wanted to be wrong. And it felt gross, to be looking this closely at someone's real life identity and match it up to details they shared on tumblr/bsky. We hated it. It felt like a violation. But it was such a huge accusation to make against somebody, so we had to be 100000% certain we were right before we breathed a word to anybody else.

For more than a week we agonized about how to handle the situation in a way that would do the least amount of harm to everybody involved and to the fandom at large. There were a lot of tears and sleepless nights. There was a lot of rage that we were even in this position in the first place. And also there was the eternal mindfuck of watching PCCP continue to post about things that we now knew to be lies, while the rest of the fandom continue supporting him as normal.

My point is... none of this was fun. We didn't take any joy or pleasure in uncovering a popular figure in this fandom was a racist fraud. It wasn't some cute detective game. It was hard and it was awful and it was deeply stressful.

So to see some people talk about this like it's entertainment, or fodder for r/HobbyDrama, talk about digging up screenshots and connecting the dots or continuing to theorize... stop. It's done. We did those things because we were hoping to find proof our initial findings were wrong. They weren't. PCCP was racefaking, and it was a deliberate choice he made to mislead and manipulate the fandom for years. He has been exposed and at least somewhat confessed. We know he was a racist and a liar and a plagiarist, and he did irreparable harm to many people in this fandom. That's it. That's the story, and it's done. There are no more dots to connect. There's nothing left to uncover. And while we always knew bringing this forward would result in smug gloating from people who hate the show/the fandom and were happy to have yet another excuse to bash it, it is upsetting and unsettling to see the almost voyeuristic fun some people who do love the show seem to be having with this.

Real people have been hurt, and real people are struggling. We don't need a grand fandom exposé, we don't need to continue digging up the dreck, and we certainly don't need to put anybody in more danger of doxxing. What we need to do is support the people who've been hurt and/or traumatized by PCCP's actions, do some self-reflection on why we allowed him to become so popular in the first place despite so many people now coming out of the woodwork saying they felt "icky" about things he wrote, and move forward.

That said, I do like to focus on positive outcomes, so I'll also say how genuinely lovely it's been to see people supporting each other throughout all this. I've been enjoying the influx of @ofmdlovelyletters on my dash, sharing so much love for others in the fandom. I've been thrilled at all the old gifs and arts and meta posts being shared once more from people who seem to have organically gotten the message of "oh yeah, we're here because we love the show, let's get back to that." Personally, I've been DMing a lot more people just to chat, and it's been really nice turning some fandom acquaintances into fandom friends. And I'm excited about all the efforts of the people working on @inv-2025-pccp to make sure writers who had their works plagiarized receive proper acknowledgement. That's a great, tangible way to turn some poison into positivity, and if you're feeling like "oh I just wish there were something I could do," I'd encourage you to reach out to get involved.

I've said this multiple times in private conversations, but I think it bears repeating here: no matter how much he may have tried, PCCP did not define the OFMD fandom before, and he certainly doesn't get to now. My hope is that as devastating as this event was, we use it as an impetus to move forward and do better, to strengthen relationships and be there for the people who've been hurt the most.

[firecurls-27]

Team chaotix headcanons bc I adore them and I’m fandom trash.

Charmy bee

6 - 9 yo. Realizes he’s pansexual when he’s older, he/him. Audhd.

(If human) I imagine him as Afro-Latin. Do I have evidence? No. But I feel it.

Has trouble reading (possibly dyslexic), but refuses to acknowledge or tell anyone and it bites him in the ass. “Hey man, what does that say?” “Uh…chicken kebab.” “Chicken keba- -that says ‘restroom’.” “Does it??” “Where’d you get ‘chicken kebab’ from???” “I dunno????”

Has no idea who his family or parents are or were. He doesn’t care. Vector and Espio are his family, and that’s that.

Used to call vector “dad” when he first started talking. Vector pretended not to like it. After he was officially hired as a member of the detective agency, he stopped calling vector “dad” and just called him by his name to sound “more professional” as Charmy called it. He started calling vector “dad” again when he turned 12 or so.

There was one time the Chaotix went on a dangerous mission and charmy almost got badly hurt. They thought it’d be a good idea to put him in daycare for a bit during the day so he’s somewhat safe and he gets to learn things.

It took 3 people to drag charmy inside the daycare. He did NAWT wanna go.

Normally is very polite and kind but will absolutely throw hands if you insult his friends/family or are mean in general. He’s got a 0 tolerance policy for bullies.

When he gets into a serious fight, he takes off his helmet. He headbutts.

Enjoys boxing and watching the boxing channel. He tried to train with some friends but it got out of hand and needless to say to say he sent 3 kids to the hospital. But at least he was victorious.

Knuckles is his boxing coach when they have time together.

Doesn’t have a lot of actual friends his age. He claims his best friends are Espio and vector. Which concerns them both because they want charmy to have friends his age.

Occasionally vector gives him days off and lets charmy roam the neighborhood to hang out with neighbor’s kids. Charmy isn’t really close friends with any of them, but at least it’s something.

But charmy ends up hanging out with cream and tails the most.

The minute charmy and cream met they saw each other as siblings. Like they both believe they came out of the same woman. When they get time to themselves they like to cause slight mischief around town.

Vector teaches him a lot about money, so charmy hosted a whole ass class to the neighborhood kids about how to commit tax fraud. You can imagine some parents were not pleased.

In real life, bees are known for being excellent dancers. You know damn well my boy charmy is tearing it up on the dance floor. You name a dance and he can dance as if he invented it. The moonwalk, the Prisiadki, the Charleston, any. Vector and Espio are insanely impressed.

If he didn’t love detective work so much, he’d be a food critic. He’s got a good flavor palette.

He likes to help tails test-drive with some new robotics if Sonic is unavailable at the moment.

He and kit have unspoken beef.

Speaks a little Spanish. He, Espio, and Ray like to shit-talk their coworkers speaking Spanish and none are the wiser.

Teaches cream swear words in Spanish.

When he got older and became a dad he called vector every 5 minutes to ask baby questions and to see if he was doing everything right. Vector had to come over several times for it to only be a minor fix. But he assures charmy that he’s doing a great job.

Espio

17 - 21 yo. Bisexual, he/they. Autistic.

(If human) Japanese.

Mommy issues. She genuinely does care for him, but is so insanely strict and uptight and it’s suffocating and one of the only people that gets Espio really riled up.

Close with his father, but he died under mysterious circumstances when Espio was around 12 or so. Espio still wonders what happened.

Has a couple younger sisters, but was never very close to them, as he was busy with ninja training.

I have some more backstory for him but it involves oc x canon and ik no one gives a shit lol /hj

left home at 15 and stayed at Angel island for a while.

I said it before in a personal hc and I’ll say it again. He unintentionally pulls bitches. Male, female, doesn’t matter. A client comes in, the job gets done, the client gives Espio their phone number personally. He doesn’t know why.

Espio has a whole drawer full of these numbers he keeps because he thinks they could be used to call previous clients for future cases. Vector seethes with jealousy and frustration.

Too young to be considered a co-parent, but too old to be considered vector’s son. So vector just refers to him as “family”, he doesn’t need a label.

His favorite food is dumplings, but this specific recipe his mom made. They aren’t on speaking terms, so he can’t get the recipe. Every time he tries to re-create it, it comes out wrong.

He can cook excellent Japanese cuisine, but because the ingredients are so expensive he can’t make any for vector and charmy.

Canonically speaks 17 languages, so if he’s pissed at his coworkers he speaks only a certain language they can’t speak. It drives them up the wall.

Has the potential to sing really really good, if he used his talent he’d be more popular than Elvis.

Learned shamisen from his father. He has a few sheets of music his father would play when he was younger, and tries to recreate the music.

Hopes to open his own tea house one day.

Looooves tea. Likes to drink it after a long day. Or sake. Depends on what kind of day he’s had.

Vector

21 - 35 yo. Straight, he/him. Adhd.

(If human) African-American, but he’d be from Louisiana specifically.

Momma’s boy. Learned from her to be kind to others without reward. He was closest with her.

Youngest of 30. The most picked on and got everything last. Thankfully, his momma made sure he gets food at every meal.

His pop was very hard on him, trying to toughen him up, but also never took vector seriously.

He ran away from home when he was 13 and lived in Downunda till he was 18 and met the other chaotix.

Writes to his mother every day.

Used to smoke until he adopted charmy. He’s done a good job at quitting!

Used to partake in Mary-Jane and lots of drinking. Stopped 1, bc of charmy and 2, bc he couldn’t afford it anymore. He saw it as his wake-up call in order to quit. …but every now and then if offered…

Babysat cream once in hopes of gaining vanilla’s favor. He spent the evening teaching cream tax fraud. Vanilla was not impressed.

Scruffs anyone shorter than him when arguing. Oh, talking shit? Get scruffed, idiot.

Cream is basically his daughter now, he’s such a girl dad. But doesn’t forget to give charmy equal amounts of love and attention.

Would die and kill for his kids. Don’t think he won’t.

Loves to DJ, and occasionally DJ’s for big events of the price is right.

Looooves jerky. If you give him some he’d kill for you. But if you give him one of those gross fake-jerky’s he’d kill YOU.

Used to have an awful swearing problem, and tries to keep it on the down-low after he had charmy. It was hard to stop swearing, but he did a good job. But of course the one time he swore, charmy’s first word became “shit.”

Chaotix

They once took a job at club rouge in hopes of getting some extra cash, but they were all fired after the first day. Vector was too aggressive with mean customers, charmy kept messing up orders and spilling food, and espio kept running off to use the slot machines.

They genuinely have no idea what happened to mighty and ray.

There’s a group of mean kids in their neighborhood that like to pick on charmy. Normally, charmy doesn’t say anything about it and takes care of it himself by trying to fight against them. He always loses and comes home with some bruises or cuts.

But there was one time he got roughed up a bit too much and broke his arm. Obviously Espio and Vector took him to the emergency room, but afterwards they decided to try and take care of the punks themselves. Then the parents.

After that they got arrested for aggravated assault. Vanilla had to bail them out.

They loooooooove the beach. They try to go as much as they can during the summer and spring.

During the winter, because Espio and vector are cold blooded, they get rather sluggish and more tired. As an addition to that problem already, their building doesn’t have good air conditioning, leaving them very cold and unable to do a lot around the agency.

it’s up to charmy to try and pick up the slack, and solve cases while he makes vector and Espio rest.

Turns out he can’t do every single job in the agency by himself, so he desperately asks cream and tails for help with cases. While vanilla helps trying to keep espio and vector from freezing to death.

When the temperature gets warmer and Espio and vector can move again, they give charmy a few days off so he can relax for all his hard work.

They have the dumbest conversations if there’s nothing to do. They once got into a fight about what color an orange is. Don’t ask.

They have a rinky-dink box tv they all have to share. If someone wants to watch a different channel they rock-paper-scissors for it. Vector always loses.

When charmy’s asleep, vector and Espio drink Sake together and discuss further finance decisions and business problems. But it ends up turning into stupid conversations either about childhood trauma or something funny they saw on the street.

Vector’s room consists of a twin bed way too small for him that only has one pillow and a blanket, a broken down record player, several draws of tacky jewelry, posters from bands and musicians that were popular in the 90s, a boombox, a closet of old clothes that don’t fit him anymore, and several dirty clothes on the floor.

Espio’s room consists of a futon he tried to diy but it’s lumpy and uncomfortable, a bunch of mix-n-match furniture he bought in attempts of trying to make it a somewhat not-sad living situation, several ninja stars and Shuriken’s stuck on the walls and ceiling from practicing and night terrors, said ninja stars and shurikens are also hid under his pillow and his futon, a few katanas are hung on his wall, and a closet of traditional kimonos, ninja outfits, and disguises.

Charmy’s room consists of a twin bed that’s a bit nicer than vectors but still messy, a baby blanket his parents gave him (the only thing he has from them), knock-off toys vector bought at the discount store, miscellaneous objects (such as wrenches, staplers, sticks, etc) that Charmy claims as toys, drawings he’s made, photos of the Chaotix’ on various adventures, several board games for “family game night” they’re all just different editions of the game Clue, and a closet with toys he claimed he put away, a couple winter coats, and several swimwear because he forgets where he puts them and ends up buying a new pair.

Bonus fella’s:

Mighty

16 - 22 yo. Omnisexual (masc pref), He/him. Audhd.

(If human) genuinely don’t have any idea, but he’d be from Texas no matter the ethnicity.

Grew up on a desert farm with his Pop and a few little siblings. Country boy. Left to peruse a life of adventure, but still keeps in touch with his dad.

Has an accent he tries to hide because the others tease tf out of him for it. “Hey have y’all seen-“ “y’all??” “Y’ALL???” “Stop.” “Y’ALL C’MERE N HELP ME WITH THE CHICK’N KOOP!!” “Stop it.” “BERNIE COME GIT THE DAYUM CATTLE ‘FORE IT EATS ALL OUR CROPS!!!”

Gym enthusiast. Loves to work out every day he can. And likes to help out people in the gym who struggle.

Used to have teeeeerrible anger problems, but he’s gotten so much better. He learned to calm down when he began taking care of Ray. Ray taught him patience, quiet, and self control.

Sweetie pie. Is the best to come to for comfort, he’s so polite.

Gives. The. Best. Hugs. Why do you think he works out so much?

Amazing with kids, likes to read them books if he ever babysits. And used to read storybooks to Ray.

After several years of practically raising Ray, he knew he wanted to be a dad. Problem is, he doesn’t have a partner he wants to raise kids with…

Ray likes to make homemade gifts, mighty keeps every single one no matter how misshapen it is or how shitty it’s made.

Ray

6 - 12 yo. Genderfluid when older, he/she/they. Autism.

(If human) Mexican.

Was about 3 - 4 years old when he met mighty, and has stuck by him ever since.

Ray used to call him “dad” but began calling him “brother” when he was 5. Mighty misses when he used to call him dad.

Can kick your ass in go-fish.

Not as smart as tails, but not as dumb as charmy.

Loves kickball. Is the best out of the entire group.

He, charmy, tails, and cream have flying races to see while fastest. He and tails tied.

Really good chef. Give him miscellaneous items in your pantry and he’ll give you a 5-star meal. Charmy is the taste tester.

He’s a real sweetie, but has a mischievous and sassy side that only comes out when he’s with kids his age.

His blue shoes were the first gift mighty ever gave him.

Spanish is his first language. Mighty taught him English, and he teaches mighty Spanish.

Becomes a professional chef when he’s older.

[homunculus-argument]

Story idea: Some guy who wants to do vigilante justice gets a whole superhero thing going, with a masked costume and everything, and develops some fame by the time he discovers that he has a copycat. And people really cannot tell the two of them apart. And when he starts warning people about the copycat, the damn copycat starts doing the same. So now they're both going "no, I'm the real one, he's the fraud!" while pointing at each other.

Eventually they both give up trying to prove that they're the original one, and just start trying to embarrass each other. They both start doing detective work on the other, not finding out each others' secret identities of course, but making deductions about the way the other one does things - oh, he went through that much effort to avoid touching a jar of peanut butter? Severe allergy, or ideological aversion? Research time.

Eventually they've learned enough about each other to start actively humiliating each other by associating things with the Vigilante Identity that they know the other one would loathe. A public humiliation game of chicken. Swooping in to rescue some innocent civilian from a mugger, and dismissing their thank you's with a standard "oh don't thank me sir, I'm just doing my duty. I have a piss kink btw."

And dramatically disappearing back into the night.

[adannamdi]

10 Intriguing Whodunit Prompts for Your Next Mystery Story

If you're looking for inspiration for your next whodunit, here are some gripping prompts to get your creative gears turning. Each one offers plenty of room for twists, deception, and unexpected revelations!

The Mysterious Disappearance – A wealthy businessman vanishes, leaving behind only a cryptic message. The suspects? Friends, lovers, family, rivals, and even his own co-workers. But what if the detective themselves is also a suspect? A conspiracy could be lurking beneath the surface.

Murder at the Mansion – A group of strangers is invited to a secluded mansion for the weekend, but when one of them turns up dead (or missing!), tensions rise. A desperate partner searches for clues, and then—boom—the body is found. Now, the suspects include everyone in the house: guests, the host, the staff, or even the ship crew that brought them there.

The Lost Heirloom – A priceless family treasure disappears, and a young detective is pulled into a web of deep-rooted family secrets. Or maybe it's an outsider—someone marrying into the family—who takes on the case to prove their worth. Every family member is a suspect, but the real thief might be someone no one expects.

The Poisoned Painter/Celebrity – A renowned artist or celebrity dies under suspicious circumstances. A detective, devoted fan, or even a family member starts investigating. What seemed like an accident quickly spirals into chaos. The suspects? Business rivals, old friends, obsessed fans, and even those closest to the victim.

The Haunted Hotel – Guests at a remote hotel start disappearing one by one. Is it the work of a supernatural force, or something more sinister? The suspects could be hotel staff, fellow guests, or even the person who reported the first disappearance. The real horror? The detective might not make it out alive.

The Deadly Reunion – A group of former classmates reunites for a weekend of nostalgia. But when one of them turns up dead, old grudges resurface. Was it revenge? A long-held secret? Or a simple case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Their best friend, rival, or even a past unrequited love could be behind it all.

The Missing Identity – Someone's identity has been stolen, but as the detective digs deeper, they realize it’s more than just fraud—it’s part of a sinister plot. Is the imposter closer to the victim than they realize? Are they being watched? The suspects could be coworkers, close friends, or even an obsessive stalker.

The Fatal Flight – A plane crash leaves no survivors—except the evidence shows that one passenger was murdered before the crash. Who had time to commit the crime? The flight attendants? A fellow passenger? Or does the real answer lie in the victim’s past before they ever boarded the plane?

The Cryptic Message – A detective receives a mysterious note that sends them on a dangerous chase for the truth. But what if the message was meant to frame them? As they dig deeper, it seems like every clue points back at them. Now, the detective must clear their name while discovering who set them up.

The Family Secret – A detective is hired to investigate a decades-old family secret, but the more they uncover, the more dangerous the case becomes. Lies, deception, and betrayal—every family member has something to hide. But is the truth worth the risk?

Next week, I’ll be diving deeper into the elements that make a whodunit unforgettable. I’ll cover suspects, red herrings, hidden villains, misleading clues, and how to make a suspect so convincing that readers are sure they’re guilty—until they’re not. Stay tuned!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Josh Marcus at The Independent:

The Trump administration is reportedly leaning on an Elon Musk-allied tech company to build wide-ranging data tools pooling government information on millions of Americans and immigrants alike. The campaign has raised alarms from critics that the company could be furthering Musk’s DOGE effort to vacuum up and potentially weaponize – or sell – mass amounts of sensitive personal data, particularly against vulnerable groups like immigrants and political dissidents. In March, the president signed an executive order dedicated to “stopping waste, fraud, and abuse by eliminating information silos,” a euphemism for pooling vast stores of data on Americans under the federal government.

To carry out the data effort, the administration has deepened the federal government’s longstanding partnership with Palantir, a tech firm specializing in building big data applications, which was co-founded by Silicon Valley investor, GOP donor, and JD Vance mentor Peter Thiel. Since Trump took office, the administration has reportedly spent more than $113 million with Palantir through new and existing contracts, while the company is slated to begin work on a new $795 million deal with the Defense Department. Palantir is reportedly working with the administration in the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Internal Revenue Service, according to The New York Times. Within these agencies, the firm is reportedly building tools to track the movement of migrants in real time and streamline all tax data. The company is also reportedly in talks about deploying its technology at the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education, both of which have been targets of DOGE, and which store sensitive information about Americans’ identities and finances. [...] The Trump administration has reportedly pursued a variety of efforts to use big data to support its priorities, including social media surveillance of immigrants to detect alleged pro-terror views, and American activists who disagree with Donald Trump’s views..

This is very disturbing: The Trump Regime is partnering up with Peter Thiel-founded Palantir to gather data on millions of Americans that could be used to target immigrants and dissidents of the 47 Regime.

See Also:

TNR: Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American

For Such A Time As This (Andra Watkins): Palantir, Project 2025, and State-Sanctioned Moral Values

[mariacallous]

These days, when Nicole Yelland receives a meeting request from someone she doesn’t already know, she conducts a multi-step background check before deciding whether to accept. Yelland, who works in public relations for a Detroit-based non-profit, says she’ll run the person’s information through Spokeo, a personal data aggregator that she pays a monthly subscription fee to use. If the contact claims to speak Spanish, Yelland says, she will casually test their ability to understand and translate trickier phrases. If something doesn’t quite seem right, she’ll ask the person to join a Microsoft Teams call—with their camera on.

If Yelland sounds paranoid, that’s because she is. In January, before she started her current non-profit role, Yelland says she got roped into an elaborate scam targeting job seekers. “Now, I do the whole verification rigamarole any time someone reaches out to me,” she tells WIRED.

Digital imposter scams aren’t new; messaging platforms, social media sites, and dating apps have long been rife with fakery. In a time when remote work and distributed teams have become commonplace, professional communications channels are no longer safe, either. The same artificial intelligence tools that tech companies promise will boost worker productivity are also making it easier for criminals and fraudsters to construct fake personas in seconds.

On LinkedIn, it can be hard to distinguish a slightly touched-up headshot of a real person from a too-polished, AI-generated facsimile. Deepfake videos are getting so good that longtime email scammers are pivoting to impersonating people on live video calls. According to the US Federal Trade Commission, reports of job and employment related scams nearly tripled from 2020 to 2024, and actual losses from those scams have increased from $90 million to $500 million.

Yelland says the scammers that approached her back in January were impersonating a real company, one with a legitimate product. The “hiring manager” she corresponded with over email also seemed legit, even sharing a slide deck outlining the responsibilities of the role they were advertising. But during the first video interview, Yelland says, the scammers refused to turn their cameras on during a Microsoft Teams meeting and made unusual requests for detailed personal information, including her driver’s license number. Realizing she’d been duped, Yelland slammed her laptop shut.

These kinds of schemes have become so widespread that AI startups have emerged promising to detect other AI-enabled deepfakes, including GetReal Labs, and Reality Defender. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also runs an identity-verification startup called Tools for Humanity, which makes eye-scanning devices that capture a person’s biometric data, create a unique identifier for their identity, and store that information on the blockchain. The whole idea behind it is proving “personhood,” or that someone is a real human. (Lots of people working on blockchain technology say that blockchain is the solution for identity verification.)

But some corporate professionals are turning instead to old-fashioned social engineering techniques to verify every fishy-seeming interaction they have. Welcome to the Age of Paranoia, when someone might ask you to send them an email while you’re mid-conversation on the phone, slide into your Instagram DMs to ensure the LinkedIn message you sent was really from you, or request you text a selfie with a timestamp, proving you are who you claim to be. Some colleagues say they even share code words with each other, so they have a way to ensure they’re not being misled if an encounter feels off.

“What’s funny is, the low-fi approach works,” says Daniel Goldman, a blockchain software engineer and former startup founder. Goldman says he began changing his own behavior after he heard a prominent figure in the crypto world had been convincingly deepfaked on a video call. “It put the fear of god in me,” he says. Afterwards, he warned his family and friends that even if they hear what they believe is his voice or see him on a video call asking for something concrete—like money or an internet password—they should hang up and email him first before doing anything.

Ken Schumacher, founder of the recruitment verification service Ropes, says he’s worked with hiring managers who ask job candidates rapid-fire questions about the city where they claim to live on their resume, such as their favorite coffee shops and places to hang out. If the applicant is actually based in that geographic region, Schumacher says, they should be able to respond quickly with accurate details.

Another verification tactic some people use, Schumacher says, is what he calls the “phone camera trick.” If someone suspects the person they’re talking to over video chat is being deceitful, they can ask them to hold up their phone camera to their laptop. The idea is to verify whether the individual may be running deepfake technology on their computer, obscuring their true identity or surroundings. But it’s safe to say this approach can also be off-putting: Honest job candidates may be hesitant to show off the inside of their homes or offices, or worry a hiring manager is trying to learn details about their personal lives.

“Everyone is on edge and wary of each other now,” Schumacher says.

While turning yourself into a human captcha may be a fairly effective approach to operational security, even the most paranoid admit these checks create an atmosphere of distrust before two parties have even had the chance to really connect. They can also be a huge time suck. “I feel like something’s gotta give,” Yelland says. “I’m wasting so much time at work just trying to figure out if people are real.”

Jessica Eise, an assistant professor studying climate change and social behavior at Indiana University-Bloomington, says that her research team has been forced to essentially become digital forensics experts, due to the amount of fraudsters who respond to ads for paid virtual surveys. (Scammers aren’t as interested in the unpaid surveys, unsurprisingly.) If the research project is federally funded, all of the online participants have to be over the age of 18 and living in the US.

“My team would check time stamps for when participants answered emails, and if the timing was suspicious, we could guess they might be in a different time zone,” Eise says. “Then we’d look for other clues we came to recognize, like certain formats of email address or incoherent demographic data.”

Eise says the amount of time her team spent screening people was “exorbitant,” and that they’ve now shrunk the size of the cohort for each study and have turned to “snowball sampling” or having recruiting people they know personally to join their studies. The researchers are also handing out more physical flyers to solicit participants in person. “We care a lot about making sure that our data has integrity, that we’re studying who we say we’re trying to study,” she says. “I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this.”

Barring any widespread technical solution, a little common sense can go a long way in spotting bad actors. Yelland shared with me the slide deck that she received as part of the fake job pitch. At first glance, it seemed like legit pitch, but when she looked at it again, a few details stood out. The job promised to pay substantially more than the average salary for a similar role in her location, and offered unlimited vacation time, generous paid parental leave, and fully-covered health care benefits. In today’s job environment, that might have been the biggest tipoff of all that it was a scam.

[numbersandstars]

Debilitation Series: Mars in Ashlesha

A debilitated planet means this planet has reached the lowest point in its own sky. There, the planet lies on the ground in a strange place, feeling powerless... At least, it thinks so. The sign and the nakshatra where the planet is debilitated actually allow the planet to fight even more to get back on its feet and become successful.

Mars Debilitated in Ashlesha

Mars gets debilitated in 28° Cancer, that is to say, in Ashlesha nakshatra (Ashlesha: 16°40 Cancer to 29°60 Cancer). Mars the soldier has now fallen in the warm waters of Cancer. But he keeps falling to the point he has reached the deep dark caves of Ashlesha nakshatra. The soldier Mars never fears. He always gets back on his feet, especially when he faces danger. He is used to warlike situations. Now, Mars is facing danger. But it is a threat that he had never been prepared for. Now, he has to deal with the changeable emotions of Cancer but also, the secret fears of Ashlesha. Natives have to deal with the fear of future. If Mars represents themselves in their chart, the fear of future will be stronger. It will lead them to take actions according to them only. Emotions dictate their lives and they jump to conclusions too quickly. They can make wrong decisions because they will not take enough time to think through. Sensitivity is high, so is their anger. Emotions and fears control Mars. This leads natives to cause damage to themselves but mostly to their loved ones too. Indeed, Cancer represents the family, the home, and peace of mind. Mars' angry energy has nothing to do there. This flow of warrior energy spreads on the home and the family, causing even more damage. Then, regret overwhelm them. This is Ashlesha's poison. One has to master these Ashlesha serpents of illusions. Because the real problem is not the emotions themselves, but the impulsive reaction to the environment and time, that is to say, maya, the temporary world we are living in. Nonetheless, Natives can cleverly use this position to their advantage. Their high sensitivity can be used to detect frauds and traps, so they protect themselves and their loved ones. They can learn to defend themselves through martial arts or any self-defense sports : it strengthens self-esteem and Mars' physical power. They can use their sense of loyalty and justice for a fair cause too. They would better serve mother figures, their cultural community or country instead of fighting inside their own home and family life. They actually happen to be very good guardians and fighters. Natives should rely on alternative medicine, homeopathy to heal them as it is a gift from the Ashlesha serpents of the deep. Their homes are also crucial in their well-being, they should use vastu or feng shui to fix them. Growing plants, food helps the natives as it strengthens their relationship to the earth. It helps them ground themselves. Lastly, it is extremely important for them to respect the snakes: they must avoid to hurt them at all costs.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Hypothetical AI election disinformation risks vs real AI harms

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Feb 27) in Portland at Powell's. Then, onto Phoenix (Changing Hands, Feb 29), Tucson (Mar 9-12), and more!

You can barely turn around these days without encountering a think-piece warning of the impending risk of AI disinformation in the coming elections. But a recent episode of This Machine Kills podcast reminds us that these are hypothetical risks, and there is no shortage of real AI harms:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/311-selling-pickaxes-for-the-ai-gold-rush

The algorithmic decision-making systems that increasingly run the back-ends to our lives are really, truly very bad at doing their jobs, and worse, these systems constitute a form of "empiricism-washing": if the computer says it's true, it must be true. There's no such thing as racist math, you SJW snowflake!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/aoc-algorithms-racist-bias.html

Nearly 1,000 British postmasters were wrongly convicted of fraud by Horizon, the faulty AI fraud-hunting system that Fujitsu provided to the Royal Mail. They had their lives ruined by this faulty AI, many went to prison, and at least four of the AI's victims killed themselves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

Tenants across America have seen their rents skyrocket thanks to Realpage's landlord price-fixing algorithm, which deployed the time-honored defense: "It's not a crime if we commit it with an app":

https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech

Housing, you'll recall, is pretty foundational in the human hierarchy of needs. Losing your home – or being forced to choose between paying rent or buying groceries or gas for your car or clothes for your kid – is a non-hypothetical, widespread, urgent problem that can be traced straight to AI.

Then there's predictive policing: cities across America and the world have bought systems that purport to tell the cops where to look for crime. Of course, these systems are trained on policing data from forces that are seeking to correct racial bias in their practices by using an algorithm to create "fairness." You feed this algorithm a data-set of where the police had detected crime in previous years, and it predicts where you'll find crime in the years to come.

But you only find crime where you look for it. If the cops only ever stop-and-frisk Black and brown kids, or pull over Black and brown drivers, then every knife, baggie or gun they find in someone's trunk or pockets will be found in a Black or brown person's trunk or pocket. A predictive policing algorithm will naively ingest this data and confidently assert that future crimes can be foiled by looking for more Black and brown people and searching them and pulling them over.

Obviously, this is bad for Black and brown people in low-income neighborhoods, whose baseline risk of an encounter with a cop turning violent or even lethal. But it's also bad for affluent people in affluent neighborhoods – because they are underpoliced as a result of these algorithmic biases. For example, domestic abuse that occurs in full detached single-family homes is systematically underrepresented in crime data, because the majority of domestic abuse calls originate with neighbors who can hear the abuse take place through a shared wall.

But the majority of algorithmic harms are inflicted on poor, racialized and/or working class people. Even if you escape a predictive policing algorithm, a facial recognition algorithm may wrongly accuse you of a crime, and even if you were far away from the site of the crime, the cops will still arrest you, because computers don't lie:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/texas-macys-sunglass-hut-facial-recognition-software-wrongful-arrest-sacramento-alibi/

Trying to get a low-waged service job? Be prepared for endless, nonsensical AI "personality tests" that make Scientology look like NASA:

https://futurism.com/mandatory-ai-hiring-tests

Service workers' schedules are at the mercy of shift-allocation algorithms that assign them hours that ensure that they fall just short of qualifying for health and other benefits. These algorithms push workers into "clopening" – where you close the store after midnight and then open it again the next morning before 5AM. And if you try to unionize, another algorithm – that spies on you and your fellow workers' social media activity – targets you for reprisals and your store for closure.

If you're driving an Amazon delivery van, algorithm watches your eyeballs and tells your boss that you're a bad driver if it doesn't like what it sees. If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, an algorithm decides if you've taken too many pee-breaks and automatically dings you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

If this disgusts you and you're hoping to use your ballot to elect lawmakers who will take up your cause, an algorithm stands in your way again. "AI" tools for purging voter rolls are especially harmful to racialized people – for example, they assume that two "Juan Gomez"es with a shared birthday in two different states must be the same person and remove one or both from the voter rolls:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eligible-voters-swept-up-conservative-activists-purge-voter-rolls/

Hoping to get a solid education, the sort that will keep you out of AI-supervised, precarious, low-waged work? Sorry, kiddo: the ed-tech system is riddled with algorithms. There's the grifty "remote invigilation" industry that watches you take tests via webcam and accuses you of cheating if your facial expressions fail its high-tech phrenology standards:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

All of these are non-hypothetical, real risks from AI. The AI industry has proven itself incredibly adept at deflecting interest from real harms to hypothetical ones, like the "risk" that the spicy autocomplete will become conscious and take over the world in order to convert us all to paperclips:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

Whenever you hear AI bosses talking about how seriously they're taking a hypothetical risk, that's the moment when you should check in on whether they're doing anything about all these longstanding, real risks. And even as AI bosses promise to fight hypothetical election disinformation, they continue to downplay or ignore the non-hypothetical, here-and-now harms of AI.

There's something unseemly – and even perverse – about worrying so much about AI and election disinformation. It plays into the narrative that kicked off in earnest in 2016, that the reason the electorate votes for manifestly unqualified candidates who run on a platform of bald-faced lies is that they are gullible and easily led astray.

But there's another explanation: the reason people accept conspiratorial accounts of how our institutions are run is because the institutions that are supposed to be defending us are corrupt and captured by actual conspiracies:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

The party line on conspiratorial accounts is that these institutions are good, actually. Think of the rebuttal offered to anti-vaxxers who claimed that pharma giants were run by murderous sociopath billionaires who were in league with their regulators to kill us for a buck: "no, I think you'll find pharma companies are great and superbly regulated":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Institutions are profoundly important to a high-tech society. No one is capable of assessing all the life-or-death choices we make every day, from whether to trust the firmware in your car's anti-lock brakes, the alloys used in the structural members of your home, or the food-safety standards for the meal you're about to eat. We must rely on well-regulated experts to make these calls for us, and when the institutions fail us, we are thrown into a state of epistemological chaos. We must make decisions about whether to trust these technological systems, but we can't make informed choices because the one thing we're sure of is that our institutions aren't trustworthy.

Ironically, the long list of AI harms that we live with every day are the most important contributor to disinformation campaigns. It's these harms that provide the evidence for belief in conspiratorial accounts of the world, because each one is proof that the system can't be trusted. The election disinformation discourse focuses on the lies told – and not why those lies are credible.

That's because the subtext of election disinformation concerns is usually that the electorate is credulous, fools waiting to be suckered in. By refusing to contemplate the institutional failures that sit upstream of conspiracism, we can smugly locate the blame with the peddlers of lies and assume the mantle of paternalistic protectors of the easily gulled electorate.

But the group of people who are demonstrably being tricked by AI is the people who buy the horrifically flawed AI-based algorithmic systems and put them into use despite their manifest failures.

As I've written many times, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, but we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

The most visible victims of AI disinformation are the people who are putting AI in charge of the life-chances of millions of the rest of us. Tackle that AI disinformation and its harms, and we'll make conspiratorial claims about our institutions being corrupt far less credible.

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/2024/02/27/ai-conspiracies/#epistemological-collapse

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[laiqualaurelote]

Hellooo! Paranormal investigator AU for Phrack, maybe? Thank you!!

thank you for the prompt! (from this AU ask game) This is a fun one. Though one could easily set it in the modern day, I would still set it in the 1920s, because that was such a fascinating time in terms of the spiritual and supernatural - you've got the Spiritualism revival that the show briefly explores in Death Comes Knocking, the rise of silent horror films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu, and the moral panic association between jazz and vampires, which is how you get the Jazz Age Vamp (taken literally in the Rivers of London second novel Moon Over Soho, which has vampires that feed on jazz).

Phryne is one such Jazz Age Vamp (not literally; she is perfectly human). She solves supernatural cases because she remains haunted by her sister's murder at the hands of necromancer Murdoch Foyle, which she has never been able to get him convicted for (it is very difficult to prove necromancy in a court of law). She is descended from a long line of witches on her mother's side. This means that Aunt Prudence is in fact a witch of considerable strength, but chooses to use none of it because Magic is Not Proper. As they have no female descendants, they adopt Jane into their line so she will inherit the power.

Jack is the detective inspector who keeps getting assigned all the cases with a whiff of the supernatural because nobody else wants to handle them. He has inadvertently become the 1920s Melbourne equivalent of the Folly (if you know Rivers of London). This is despite the fact that he is deeply skeptical by nature - had one too many run-ins with scam artists pretending to be mediums (the hypnotist whom Jane is forced to steal for is one such conman) - and is convinced that Miss Fisher is a fraud. After reluctantly solving multiple cases with her, he concedes ghosts are real but remains immensely annoyed about it.

Dot is a real medium who struggles to reconcile her gift with her Catholic faith. She falls in love with Hugh after being forced to exorcise him, because he is exactly the kind of idiot who would end up getting possessed on his first case.

Mac still works at the morgue, which is full of ghosts. She can see them but mostly ignores them ("are you trying to sabotage your own autopsy, madam? no? then go cry in the corner till I'm done. Thank you.")

Bert came back from the war. Cec did not. This has not stopped them from driving a cab together. Their cab can take you to any part of Melbourne, including the city of the dead. They are still Communists. They take the "spectre haunting" aspect of it very seriously.

Mr Butler has been working at Wardlow for the past century and plans to continue doing so indefinitely. Nobody knows if he is alive, dead, or undead; moreover they feel it is impolite to ask.

Every case in this AU has a supernatural element except Death Comes Knocking, wherein it is revealed that every single person involved is scamming everyone else.

Arthur Conan Doyle makes a cameo in Away With the Fairies. Harry Houdini makes a cameo in Death Defying Feats and spends most of it trashing Doyle's views on spiritualism.

Crypt of Tears is greatly improved by the crypt being full of actual undead.

[wordsandrobots]

A couple of years ago, I attended a (virtual) conference where one of the main topics was the impact of so-called 'AI' tools on my particular industry. I work in scholarly publishing (on the publisher side -- I know, I know; for what it's worth, I am at least at a company that's actively trying to drive reform, is anti-impact factor, tries to reinforce the value of the work over the journal name, etc) and the application of 'generative AI' to facilitate plagiarism/fake papers is an obvious risk in this sector. Such software could easily be used to overwhelm the (meagre) defences journals have against such things, especially with the pressures placed on academics to get their work into 'high impact' publications above all else. The threat of 'paper-mills' (operations paid to seek publication by fraudulent means) ramping up via the use of ChatGP was clear and present amid those heady days of the initial hype-push.

What's stuck with me from that conference is a panel participant pointing out that 'AI' hasn't created any *new* problems; it's just accelerated existing ones. That is, fraud in science and science publishing has been an issue as long as scholarly publishing has existed as an industry. You don't need a fancy tool to generate you a fake paper. It helps, no doubt, but it's not a necessary step. And yes, it makes detection harder. But the actual solution here -- the way to put a stop to fake papers, dodgy authorship claims, and all the other variations on trying to beef up an academic's publication record for career gains -- doesn't lie in some technological arms-race between plagiarism-detection and paper-fabrication. We need to change the culture. We need to put a stop to the rewards for this kind of behaviour, by assessing academics by the actual value and quality of their research, without the proxy-step provided by place of publication.

(For the uninitiated, it is a huge problem in science that certain journals -- such as the big three of Nature, Cell and Science -- are seen as *the* place where groundbreaking research is published. Not only does this expose the English-language bias within global research, it creates the idea that to 'make it', you must publish somewhere like that, rather than just, you know, doing good solid work. Journals, big name or not, also have a history of selecting for headline-making research. So on the one hand, institutions are judging their employees' careers by their citations, not their work, and on the other, you absolutely cannot trust journals not to get dollar-signs in their eyes when someone comes along claiming that e.g. a certain vaccine actually causes an unrelated health condition. To pick a deliberate, very-specific example. On top of all this, peer review is *terrible* at catching faked results because it has to be approached in good-faith. Most of the time, fraud is only caught in hindsight, once the work has had time to circulate in the community, at which point wider damage has been done.)

Now, one of the reasons I haven't blogged much about so-called 'AI' is that my hatred for it is pre-rational. What I mean is, I hate 'generative AI' with the power of a thousand burning suns. I hate it on a conceptual level. The idea of feeding real people's work, their art, into a machine and have it churn out an approximation of that same work and art is abhorrent to me. I view it as a mockery of skills I have devoted my life to. If it could produce truly breathtaking imagery and crystal-sharp prose, I would still feel the same revulsion at the thought of removing intent from an act of communication, at the idea we should be content with bathetic mirrors in place of engaging with actual human beings and what they can do.

Separate from this, I believe there is good cause to be highly doubtful about the tools that have been pushed on the public over the last few years. I haven't used them myself (see above) but everything I've seen suggests they just aren't very good. It's painfully obvious how they can be/will be/are being used to devalue people's labour, thus strengthening corporations. There's the destruction of the information ecosystem that comes from integrating software intended to reproduce tone instead of facts into major search engines. There's the impact on the actual ecosystem of pouring resources and power into this technology. There's the simple detail that a lot of the people pushing this stuff are, frankly, just the worst.

However, I am extremely, painfully aware I am the wrong person to make rational arguments against these tools because what's actually driving my objection is disgust. I'm going to assume the worst about this particular kind of automation simply on the basis that I can't stand its existence.

There may be good, productive uses for this kind of technology! I can't tell you what they might be because I'm too busy looking for the bit where my worst opinions are validated. That's where I am on this. I actively have to guard my tongue around some of my colleagues, to keep from railing at how gullible I think they're being, buying into these things.

So yeah. Not a good place for making solid arguments. But that point from two years ago -- 'AI' is not creating any new problems.

I think it's easy to lose track of that. Consider the environmental impact. In order for you to read this, some server, somewhere, needs to be powered and cooled. The device you are reading this on is likely made from relatively rare materials that have a history of being source via destructive means (both to the environment and the people involved in the extraction process). I don't say that as a guilt-trip; I'm writing this via the same means. It's simply that the current landscape of our societies is dependent on things that comes at a cost to the planet and our fellow humans. That cost is made worse by rampant capitalism, but even under ideal conditions, mitigating it will require rethinking massive amounts of infrastructure.

This is not an excuse to make things worse. I want to be very clear about that. Nor am I claiming these issues are insoluble. It's simply a good example of 'AI' being an exaggerated case of an existing problem, namely how to balance the utility of modern communication technology against the extractive activity required to build it. As with many things, the glib answer is 'don't do capitalism' and, well, err, that kind of is the answer, reorientating away from the maximisation of profit above all else and from 'endless growth' doctrine. But crucially, that answer has nothing to do with 'AI'. If the hype-train collapsed tomorrow and everyone realised they've been buying snake-oil, and somehow the tech sector didn't collectively burn to the ground about it, we'd still have a problem to solve.

Because the problem isn't new.

That 'summarisation' tool Google or Adobe have swung on you, that shortens text with no regard for the actual information contained within what it's reducing is not some novel horror; it's just an acceleration of the same approach to design that sees 'engagement' as the primary driver, detached from what is actually materially happening to cause everyone to flock to a single place. MidJourney or what-have-you, allowing X or Y group to churn out endless cloying representations of their ideal reality, is just bad Photoshop composites with less effort required on the part of the person pushing the button. People will airbrush reality whether they have to do it with a prompt or an actual airbrush. We know this! Thomas Kinkade made a whole flipping career off it! It's the heart of mass-media advertising, to cheaply reproduce visions of simpler worlds for the sake of selling you something.

The truth is, grifters are going to grift, with whatever tools they have at their disposal. As long as there is a market for snake-oil, an incentive to cheat, a reason for people to be dissatisfied with their lot, there is going to be space for someone to sell an everything-app. A quick solution. An easy fix. We don't address that by playing whack-a-mole with every single dumb vapourware 'solution' that results; we address it by collapsing the space that permits those things to find their marks.

I think it is an objectively bad thing if paper-mills can work faster and easier and flood journal submissions with more junk than ever before. But it is also objectively bad for academia to be held hostage by a for-profit system that silos and constrains their work while being treated as the bar for judging how well they are doing their jobs. And the latter is the problem that actually *needs* to be solved, if we're going to have a hope of addressing the former.

Anyway, thank you for coming to this edition of 'Words sorts through his disgust to work out if there's a sensible position obscured beneath, for the sake of not being a raging arsehole to people who like shiny toys and haven't been in a love-hate relationship with their ability to draw for thirty years'.