Government
Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI
AI workers said they distrust the models they work on because of a consistent emphasis on rapid turnaround time at the expense of quality. AI workers said they distrust the models they work on because of a consistent emphasis on rapid turnaround time at the expense of quality. K rista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence . As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk - a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output - Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking. Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read "Listen to that mooncricket sing", she almost clicked on the "no" button before deciding to check the meaning of the word "mooncricket", which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.
US Border Patrol Is Spying on Millions of American Drivers
Plus: The SEC lets SolarWinds off the hook, Microsoft stops a historic DDoS attack, and FBI documents reveal the agency spied on an immigration activist Signal group in New York City. Eight years after a researcher warned WhatsApp that it was possible to extract user phone numbers en masse from the Meta-owned app, another team of researchers found that they could still do exactly that using a similar technique. The issue stems from WhatsApp's discovery feature, which allows someone to enter a person's phone number to see if they're on the app. By doing this billions of times--which WhatsApp did not prevent--researchers from the University of Vienna uncovered what they're calling "the most extensive exposure of phone numbers" ever . Vaping is a major problem in US high schools.
The Obliging Apocalypse of "Pluribus"
The new sci-fi drama from Vince Gilligan posits an end-of-humanity scenario that everyone other than its protagonist can agree on. Even before her fellow-humans' contamination, Carol didn't seem to have much use for them. On the night that the world as we know it is destroyed, a novelist named Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn) sees cars and planes veer off course, an emergency room full of convulsing bodies, and her city, Albuquerque, on fire. The President dies under mysterious circumstances, and, more devastatingly for Carol, so does her live-in partner, Helen (Miriam Shor). Then, in less than an hour, the apocalypse cleans up after itself.