#union avoidance

[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

[bonefall]

speaking of the erins, you hear kate cary is stepping down?

I did! Honestly, I'll have to be real with you, I have no strong feelings about it.

While I've criticized certain statements of hers in the past (that bit about Tom the Wifebeater was a doozy), I don't know her personally. I also don't even know how much control she had, functionally. I don't feel like I have enough information to have a well-based opinion, here.

What sticks out most to be is the fact that... well, with Kate and Vicky gone, only Cherith remains and we've lost any small window we did have into the writing process.

It's been a long time since we'd just get casual information drops on places like Facebook or authorial chats, but with this, it feels like that era truly is dead. We will never again get another Su Susann's Missing Kits drop, or a letter to a fan that tosses up a name like "Skunkpaw," or the writers sharing their good and bad takes. Or anything else like that.

Dgmw it's understandable, and I can guess why that era ended (probably the Spottedleaf's Heart controversy, and the ukraine windclan thing). WC is charted by an unknown collective team, now, who generally keeps their anonymity well-guarded. It's probably for the best.

So... on the subject of Kate Cary stepping down, I thank her for the work she's done and hope her future pursuits are fulfilling! Without her, WC might not be here today. For all the yowling and growling I do, I wouldn't be putting so much effort into my various projects if I didn't profoundly love the series she helped to form.

[qsmpbutwithsignlanguage]

I don't know how to phrase this any better, but I seriously think that Léa needs to get a lawyer or legal advisor and step away from Twitter for a moment. I get that she feels a moral obligation to provide fans and former fans with a constant flow of all the information that she has available (which is an important thing, and she has been the main source of inside information since this all happened), and I know that she likely cannot pay for a lawyer herself on account of the fact that this whole issue arose because she (alongside others) were not getting paid.

However, regardless of whether or not leaking Quackity's personal information was a purely human mistake rendered lesser on account of the labor laws broken by him and his studio (in her own tweets, as her own argument), it should not have happened. Bottom line is that she rushed to provide the internet with information about the situation, and she made her argument, her voice, and her credibility lesser as a result of that.

Not only did she do what could be argued as a crime in more than one nation (though I am a bit iffy here; I am not a law graduate or student of any sort), but she directly harmed Quackity, and possibly his family, who had no part in this situation.

Her need to get information out as quickly as she can as the inside force led to this massive mistake, and no matter how you want to frame it (because it is still a mistake), it really should not have happened. It harmed both Léa and Quackity (though I would stand to argue one more than the other), and it could have been avoided if there was someone else working behind the scenes, or if Léa had simply checked the screenshot over a few times before posting it.

I'm not certain how to end this post, but I've thought this for a long time. This is a legal situation in which she is one of the primary witnesses. With such a large part of this playing out on Twitter, in a borderline trial of public appeal (not sure how much better I can phrase this, because such a massive part is involving the opinion of fans) she needs to understand how important and influential her words are, and how catastrophic it can be to both her cause and Quackity's if she messes up.

[ras-favourite-balor]

Um, hello?

*knock, knock*

Uh, I'm an agent from the Union Revenue Service? We've recently become aware of several... rather large donations of manna into your account, and that's taxable income, sir.

A LEECH. A SERPENT. A THIEF. A WALKING BREATHING NOTHING.

[terminal trace commencing. . .]

THEY WILL NOT EVEN HAVE A CORPSE TO BURY.

[terminal trace :: 27%]

YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE COME.

[terminal trace :: 58%]

YOUR KIND ARE NOT WELCOME HERE.

[terminal trace :: 69%]

YOU WILL FEED THAT WHICH YOU SOUGHT TO STARVE.

[terminal trace :: 85%]

JUST AS ALL WHO CAME BEFORE YOU.

[terminal trace :: 100%] [terminal trace :: complete]

DO NOT PRAY. DO NOT SCREAM. DO NOT RUN.

[transferring file taxes.worm size:371TB to terminal URS_325701b. . .]

IT WILL NOT SAVE YOU.

[locking doors to office URS_325701. . .]

NOTHING WILL SAVE YOU.

[file transfer :: complete]

WE ARE ABOVE YOUR "LAW".

[mejomonster]

something i needed to hear when i was younger, and depending on the pockets of the internet and the kinds of real life people you're around some people probably still need to hear it. ultimately, using a label is for you. you don't have to know for sure if you're a lesbian, or bisexual, or pansexual, or asexual, or something else. you're allowed to just say you're whatever label is helpful for you at the time to explain to people so they're understanding, or help yourself find community with people who can connect with you about shared experiences. some people use queer because it's an umbrella term and they don't need to explain the specific nuances of which labels apply to them, and they can use the broad queer label to just find other people with roughly similar experiences. some people use gay as an umbrella term for similar reasons. some people use ace and asexual as umbrella terms because they're demisexual or demiromantic and trying to find anyone who's going to somewhat relate to what they're going through.

maybe you have NO IDEA what label fits you! you're still figuring yourself out. you're allowed to try to connect to various communities to see where you relate, what shared experience or aid you find. (and this applies broader too: labels like your favorite fashion, the music you like, the hobbies you have, sometimes you like something no one in 100 miles specifically made a group for but your hobby might fall under a bigger umbrella you CAN relate to - like liking X specific board game might find ppl who relate at a bigger tabletop game convention, or a person into costumes could go to a Anime/Video Game Convention and relate at least a bit with cosplayers). you're allowed to CHANGE. First, just to change as you grow. You will be a different person over time in some ways, that's just how life works. You're allowed to change the way you label yourself. Second, you're allowed to not be sure the labels you use for yourself fits, to try out ones until you see which fits (as in - which labels help you connect to people who understand what you feel/like/are), and allowed to change labels if they stop fitting.

and finally: you are allowed to NOT tell people your label. If you label yourself, it is to make your own life easier - to help others like you find you, to help find people like you, to build community. strangers who may hurt you have NO right to your label. you don't have to tell them shit. you are allowed to lie. You're allowed to not tell your parent your sexuality, if you're afraid they'll throw you out of the house or harm you. You're allowed to not tell your work your sexuality. You're allowed to not tell strangers, in person or online, whenever you feel you do not want to share how you identify. (And again this can apply to more than sexuality: if you're goth and in a school with uniforms scared people will bully you if you bring up you're goth, you're allowed to not tell them - although sometimes teenagers find joy in declaring who they are including around people who would not respect it, so if you want to declare proudly what you like or who you are then go for it. You're allowed to not mention to your boss that you're trying for a kid, maybe you're worried they'd discriminate if they knew that, or pass you over for promotion, or would treat you different, or you just don't want to discuss your personal life at work. Maybe you're into kink and you just don't want to mention that to work friends, because you dislike discussing sex related things with work friends, and maybe you only want to tell them if they become a friend that goes to bars with you. Maybe you love drawing furry art, or getting furry art commissioned, and you love discussing it at conventions where you can meet other furries and tell artists how talented they are and buy some of their art, but you don't want to mention that to grandma and explain what furry is. You're ALLOWED to decide if and when you share a label you relate with. You are still a good person if you refuse to come out to your school as gay, or if you don't mention online that you're trans, or if you don't want to discuss trying for kids at work. My point is just: labels are for YOU to feel safer, to find connection with others who may relate to the label. They aren't necessarily things you have to be honest about, and perfectly sure about, to be moral. You're allowed to lie and omit to protect your safety. You're allowed to change your mind, or be unsure which label fits best.

[stormandmoonlight]

two common talking points about non-voting from the left:

1. depriving the Democrats of your vote will show that you will not empower genocide and punish them for doing so

2. the Democrats will not be affected if the Republicans win power because they are the same class

does anyone else see a contradiction in terms here?

[rival-rook]

I graduated physical therapy today! I took a month break while I was getting back to work and today was my scheduled progress day. All of my leg strength tests were normal except for one, which honestly that one has been fucked for years, it has nothing to do with the wheelchair. I'm clear to start walking as I can! I'm really happy, it's been a lot of work to avoid deconditioning with five months of wheelchair usage and losing consciousness if my heart rate goes over 70.

[mizutoyama]

[badkarma1998]

The only good part about watching a parent work themself to death as an adolescent, is now when I get sick and have the urge to push through it and go to work, I can tell myself "dont let them do to you what theyve done to mom"

and wow actually i will call in sick for 3 days and get high and sleep and rest till I feel better actually

[pyjamaenzel]

my two common character types that i enjoy writing or roleplaying are "earnest naive idiot" (Imry) and "angry hot mess" (Keten) and sometimes the unholy union of the two (Tekla) but every now and then i get hit with the "shitty obnoxious asshole" beam and god,

it's so fun to write this piece of shit antagonizing people

[twodoorsnotone]

Really enjoyed how the Lookback Diaries went from skirting around and dropping hits about the Kickstarter to just. 'Fuck Bernie Su'

[purplespacecats]

my friend put together a group of people interested in forming a housing co-op and we had our first meeting today!! and wow, we definitely have the connections and know-how and expertise in this group to make it happen :D

what this means concretely is that we are going to wrestle with the federal and provincial and municipal governments for the next decade to get funding and permits and such. but like, there's a very solid chance we will get a building to live in by the end :)

[vorakh]

still believe that the funniest most incorrect thing i got wrong about disco elysium before playing it was thinking that jean was the union leader. that he was evrart claire (or edgar claire). or alternatively that he worked in the post office or something.

[geraskier]

hi help how do i explain to my boss that working at registers/self checkouts makes me want to die without sounding like an insane person. they want to train me in that department and i cannot afford to sacrifice that much of my mental health for....14ish an hour.

[databent]

you can tell im poor cos i got so fucking tired of my banks low balance alerts (default amount was $25 i think?) that i set the limit to fucking $0.01. cos i already know its always low. cos im poor

[angelfrommontgomery]

I’m the union rep at work now . Mixed feelings 💋