How Meta Brings in Millions Off Political Violence
CalMatters and The Markup used Facebook’s AI model to count the millions of dollars it makes after violent news events By Colin Lecher and Tomas Apodaca.
Category «Librarian Resources»
How foreign operations are manipulating social media to influence your views
Filippo Menczer and his colleagues study influence campaigns and design technical solutions – algorithms – to detect and counter them. State-of-the-art methods developed in our center use several indicators of this type of online activity, which researchers call inauthentic coordinated behavior. They identify clusters of social media accounts that post in a synchronized fashion, amplify the same groups of users, share identical sets of links, images or hashtags, or perform suspiciously similar sequences of actions.
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 14, 2024
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: Why digital identity should be a priority for the next president; Google, TSA Testing New “ID Pass” in Wallet, Created by Scanning Passport; Google sued over AI-driven tool for customer service call review; and Reolink’s battery-powered security camera can record for days without subscription fees; and This Tool Finds Matching Usernames Across 400 Social Media Networks.
ChatGPT is bullshit
Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. Dr. Michael Townsen Hicks, Dr. James Humphries and Dr. Joe Slater argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. They distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. They further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 17, 2024
Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Six highlights from this week: How to stop the government from deleting itself; Six ransomware gangs behind over 50% of 2024 attacks; Thousands of Corporate Secrets Were Left Exposed. This Guy Found Them All; The California Journalism Preservation Act takes a step forward; Microsoft Tweaks Fine Print To Warn Everyone Not To Take Its AI Seriously; Study finds 94% of business spreadsheets have critical errors.
AI in Banking and Finance, August 15, 2015
This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, industry white papers, academic papers and speeches on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links provided are to the primary sources, and as available, indicate links to alternate free versions. Six highlights from this post: How Conversational and Generative AI is shaking up the banking industry; IMF AI Preparedness Index; Deep Learning for Economists; Crisis Amplifier? How to Prevent AI from Worsening the Next Economic Downturn; Generative artificial intelligence and cyber security in central banking; and Financial agencies’ AI tests could get reprieve from enforcement.
When scientific citations go rogue: Uncovering ‘sneaked references’
Reading and writing articles published in academic journals and presented at conferences is a central part of being a researcher. When researchers write a scholarly article, they must cite the work of peers to provide context, detail sources of inspiration and explain differences in approaches and results. A positive citation by other researchers is a key measure of visibility for a researcher’s own work. But what happens when this citation system is manipulated? A recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology article by Lonni Besançon and Guillaume Cabanac and their team of academic sleuths – which includes information scientists, a computer scientist and a mathematician – has revealed an insidious method to artificially inflate citation counts through metadata manipulations: sneaked references.
Massive IT outage spotlights major vulnerabilities in the global information ecosystem
Professor Richard Forno highlights the fragility of our enterprise IT systems against the backdrop of the global information technology outage on July 19, 2024 that paralyzed organizations ranging from airlines to hospitals and the delivery of uniforms for the Olympic Games, representing a growing concern for cybersecurity professionals, businesses and governments.
Generative AI Resources 2024
Referencing an article in this month’s Georgetown Law Technology Review, “…traditional AI algorithms normally operate by carrying out a specific function or completing a task using a data set that contains information on how that function or task has previously been done In other words, traditional AI is able to follow a set of rules, make predictions, or utilize instructions to complete a task; but it is not creating anything new in doing so. Generative AI (GAI) has the ability to create something new, specifically new content.” Marcus P. Zillman’s new resource guide spans subject matters including law, economics, education, information technology, planning and strategic deployment and use of GAI, as well a best practices and governance.
Mortgage Brokers Sent People’s Estimated Credit, Address, and Veteran Status to Facebook
When someone applies for a mortgage, they trust a home loan lender or mortgage broker with some of the most sensitive information they have: information about their credit, their home, and the personal details of their lives. Unbeknownst to those prospective homeowners, they may also be sharing that information with Facebook. The Markup tested more than 700 websites that offer loans for people looking to purchase or refinance a home, from major online brokers to lesser-known regional lenders, and found that more than 200 of them share some amount of user data with Facebook. On their sites, these companies embedded the Meta Pixel, a small piece of tracking software that shares visitors’ information with Facebook. As users filled out mortgage applications or requested quotes for mortgage rates, the pixel tracked information about their credit, veteran status, occupation, the specific homes they wanted, and more. Experts told Colin Lecher and Ross Teixeira of The Markup that it might be against the law for mortgage lenders to feed this kind of information to Facebook.