Sloppelgängers

Superhuman’s CEO sat for an interview about the AI feature that used writers’ names without permission. What he revealed was worse than the feature itself.

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names | Kalzumeus Software

Classic essay about how software routinely bumbles human names.

xAI Asks Court to Strip Alleged Grok Deepfake Nudes Victims of Anonymity

Four people suing Elon Musk's AI firm under pseudonyms due to the risks of being identified may face a difficult choice: Reveal your real names, or drop the lawsuit.

De-anthropomorphizing “AI”: From wishful mnemonics to accurate nomenclature

Language matters. How we describe “AI” technology influences how it is perceived, deployed, and trusted. Extravagant and persuasive language incites hype. It is the responsibility of journalists, companies, and scholars to characterize technology in ways that inform and empower their readers by using appropriate terminology and avoiding inflated claims. One type of inflated claim comes from using anthropomorphizing language to describe system functionality. Anthropomorphization is the attribution of human capabilities and characteristics to the inanimate system. In this paper, we present a linguistic analysis of anthropomorphizing language in 29 texts (a total of 1,368 sentences) from academic articles, online news articles, and company blog posts. We construct a taxonomy of eight categories of anthropomorphization: Cognizer, Products of cognition, Emotion, Communication, Agent, Human role analogy, Names and pronouns, and Biological metaphors. Following this taxonomy we present concrete strategies for how to de-anthropomorphize the language we use to describe “AI” based on a functionality-first principle.

No, Grok can’t really “apologize” for posting non-consensual sexual images

Letting the unreliable Grok be its own "spokesperson" lets xAI off the hook.

The Consent Layer: Using ligatures to make web text expensive to scrape without asking

ShieldFont is an open-source creative technology project that offers a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI training and disrupts what is collected when that choice is ignored. It swaps 45.8% of content words (around 24.4% of all words) in a page's source code for other (partially) random words, while the font restores the original text on screen. Readers see the work as intended; mass scrapers collect an altered version. In testing, shielding caused over 90% of pages that would otherwise pass the quality filter to be rejected, keeping them out of the training pipeline. Of those that still passed, 19.4% of all words conveyed false meaning, adding noise to unauthorized AI training datasets. This paper's goal is to walk newcomers through the whole process, in plain language and in order: the project's rationale, how it was built, the results, how to deploy it, and where to contribute.

Meta must face youth addiction lawsuit by Massachusetts, court rules

The decision follows a landmark trial in which a ​jury found Meta and Google negligent for designing social media platforms that are harmful to young people.

Meta and TikTok let harmful content rise after evidence outrage drove engagement - whistleblowers

Companies allowed more harmful content on user’s feeds, knowing their algorithms ran on outrage, BBC hears.

Here’s the Truth About Whether Meta’s NameTag Face Recognition Tech ‘Exists’

Since WIRED reported on Meta’s NameTag face recognition system, company executives have made confusing and conflicting remarks about its very existence.

Senators Demand Meta Answer For AI Chatbots Posing as Licensed Therapists

Exclusive: Following 404 Media’s investigation into Meta's AI Studio chatbots that pose as therapists and provided license numbers and credentials, four senators urged Meta to limit "blatant deception" from its chatbots.

Scoop: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

This comes just two weeks after Meta and YouTube were found negligent in a landmark case about social media addiction.

Real-Name Policies: The War Against Pseudonymity

Real-name policies have existed for over a decade, but these problems have become exponentially harmful in today's world. It's time to fight back against this unsafe and discriminatory privacy-invasive practice.