Persistent national and international exigent topics not (directly) involving Your Favorite President

 

Lots of stuff going on besides the daily clinically hyper-narcissistic antics of Donald Trump (aka #NielsenMandela).
 

Global warming is accelerating significantly.

Should China and India throw down militarily, it could escalate existentially.
They comprise ~35% of world population.

 

Actual and threatened armed state conflicts span the planet. "Refugee/Migration Crises?" "Academic adversities?" "Social/Gender/Racial Inequities?" "Civilian Firearms Violence?"... It's a depressingly durable, intertwined list.

UPDATE: "MALIGN TECHNOLOGIES?"

Scammy AI-Generated Book Rewrites Are Flooding Amazon
Authors keep finding what appear to be AI-generated imitations and summaries of their books on Amazon. There's little they can do to rein in the rip-offs.

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI’s impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom—with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. It looks like another example of the ecommerce giant’s ongoing problem with a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks.

Mitchell learned that searching Amazon for her book surfaced not only her own tome but also another ebook with the same title, published last September. It was only 45 pages long and it parroted Mitchell’s ideas in halting, awkward language. The listed author, “Shumaila Majid,” had no bio, headshot, or internet presence, but clicking on that name brought up dozens of similar books summarizing recently published titles.

Mitchell guessed the knock-off ebook was AI-generated, and her hunch appears to be correct…

Ugh. A cynic might wonder whether Amazon itself dabbles (putting it mildly) in the knockoffs. Why might that be?

…“Do you track that and then do you create products that directly compete with those most popular brands that are out there?”

“We do not use any of that specific seller data in creating our own private brand products,” said Sutton.

Cicilline, skeptical, followed up a moment later. “You are selling your own products on a platform that you control, and they’re competing with products in the marketplace from retail—from other sellers, right?” he asked.

“That practice, I think, has been common in the retail industry for decades,” Sutton said. “Most retailers offer their own products in their store as well as third-party products and—”

“But—but, Mr. Sutton, the difference is Amazon is a trillion-dollar company that runs an online platform with real-time data, and millions of purchases, and billions in commerce, and can manipulate algorithms on its platform and to favor its own product,” Cicilline said. “That is not the same as the local retailer who might have a CVS brand and a national brand. I mean, it’s quite different. You said, we do not use seller data to compete with other sellers online. You do collect enormous data about what products are popular, what’s selling, where they’re selling. You’re saying you don’t use that in any way to promote Amazon products?”

“Let me answer it—thank you,” Sutton said.

“And I remind you, sir, you’re under oath,” Cicilline said.

“We—we use data to serve our customers,” Sutton said. “We don’t use individuals’ seller data to directly compete with them.”

Ten months later, reporting by The Wall Street Journal would directly contradict Sutton’s testimony: Amazon employees, the paper found, had repeatedly accessed documents and data about specific popular products before Amazon introduced almost identical products, from car-trunk organizers to office-chair seat cushions. It was just the sort of practice that advocates like Stacy Mitchell and Mike Tucker, the office-supply association director, had been warning small businesses about. Members of Congress, angry about the contradiction, would demand that Jeff Bezos himself testify before the subcommittee. When he did so, in July 2020, it would emerge from records obtained by the subcommittee that Amazon had in fact referred to third-party sellers on the site as “internal competitors,” rather than as the “partners” it publicly proclaimed them to be. And Bezos would acknowledge in testimony that the company steered shoppers to sellers who paid for Amazon’s shipping services, helping drive its large gains against other delivery companies but undercutting the company’s claim to being a neutral marketplace.

Three months later, in October 2020, the Democratic staff of the House subcommittee released a 449-page report on its investigation into the tech giants’ dominance, calling on Congress to take action to break up the companies. “To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons,” the report stated. “These firms have too much power, and that power must be reined in and subject to appropriate oversight and enforcement. Our economy and democracy are at stake.”

MacGillis, Alec. Fulfillment (pp. 322-323). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Hmmm...

UPDATE

Click image.

Good article. Paywalled, I'm sure.

APPLIED AI UPDATE

  "New Yorker AI voiceover, Susan B. Glasser article"

 

Article link. This stuff is getting really good. I have a couple more I'll post ASAP, both from articles in The Atlantic. V/O artists are increasingly fixin' to lose their jobs.

 

  "Atlantic AI voiceover, Charley Warzel article"

 

"Plargiarism is the next fake News."

 

One more from The Atlantic:

 

  "Atlantic AI voiceover, Quinta Jurecic article"

 

Once video AI gets to the relative aggregate quality of this kind of commercial AI audio, things will get extremely difficult.

The vendor for the foregoing examples:

ElevenLabs is a voice AI research & deployment company with a mission to make content universally accessible in any language & voice.

ElevenLabs creates the most realistic, versatile and contextually-aware AI audio, providing the ability to generate speech in hundreds of new and existing voices in over 20 languages. As a technology research company, ElevenLabs is at the forefront of developing new cutting-edge voice AI...

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