Bad Read

Representative Ro Khanna (D-California) read out six names that had been redacted, and then unredacted in "the Epstein Files." According to the Department of Justice, four of the names were of random people who had been in a photo lineup. According to Representative Khanna, the fault lies with the DoJ.

While it seems patently evident that the Department of Justice has been sloppy with their handling of the documents, I think that ownership of this particular screw-up belongs to Representative Khanna, simply because it had already been established that simply being named in the set of documents released, or even knowing Jeffry Epstien, is not, in and of itself, evidence of guilt. Representative Khanna blames the DoJ for not explaining why the names were in the documents earlier, but it shouldn't have been up to the DoJ to make clear what everyone already knew.

The idea that there was a smoking gun, being hidden by the Department of Justice, that would blow the lid off of a ring of powerful men who were into sex with teenaged girls, always rested on the ideas that a) Jeffrey Epstein compiled information on people who were committing crimes along with him, and b) that he pretty much exclusively surrounded himself with other people who were into sex with underage girls. That's what it takes to believe that the simple fact that one's name could be found in the documents made one a wealthy and powerful person who was engaged in the rape of minors.

Hoping that Q-Anon's (remember them?) obsession with the idea that there was an Illuminati-like ring of pedophiles running around sleeping with children would become a weapon against President Trump was a bad idea from the jump, based as it was on the conjecture that enough people could be peeled away from the Trumpist coalition on that basis to weaken him politically. Personally, I'd hoped that Democrats would give up on being anti-Trump and pro-fixing things that need fixing in the United States, but it turned out that the Democrats were more than capable of remaining single-minded for longer than I could remain irrational.

It would be nice if this blunder dialed back the strange alliance with conspiracy theorizing that seems to have become popular with the political class (it has zero chance of ending it) but I doubt that it will. Too many people have hitched their wagons to the idea that this will be straw that breaks the camel's back, apparently unaware that thus far, it's been a very resilient camel.

Pass It On

I was reading the most recent posting on Schneier on Security, when I found a weird, rambling conspiracy theory in the comments. The general thrust of it seems to be that "an American Citizen," who is never named, was unjustly imprisoned after the were attacked by "a Muslim" who is named on more than one occasion. It's a pretty clear attempt to slander a person, who was likely the actual victim of whatever crime occurred, by casting them as the perpetrator, and to slander the local law enforcement and judiciary, by claiming that they're in on the scheme. Oh, and there were allegations of antisemitism thrown in as a follow-on. Ho hum, nothing to see here.

But it seemed like the sort of thing that one might find posted, verbatim, in other places. After all, it had exactly zero to do with a proposed law to stop 3D printers in New York from making firearms parts, so it stood to reason that someone had taken their copypasta hatchet job on the road, and dropped the text into the comment sections of other weblogs. This is, after all, a way of spreading the message and getting it in front of more people.

So I found a snippet that came across as likely to be somewhat unique, and dropped it into Google, framing it within double quotes so the search engine would understand that I was looking for the exact string. I was somewhat surprised that it didn't seem to pop up anywhere. I was more surprised to see the generative automation overview synthesize the allegations and present them as "recent reports."

Names redacted, because I don't intend to help spread this inanity...

Also interesting was that it linked to a prior post on Schneier on Security, even thought the conspiratorial comment could not be found there... presumably, it had already been deleted, if not for being crazy, for being completely off-topic. But the overview states that the allegations appear on the blog. Which is technically true, I suppose, but there is a difference between a blog and its comments section, especially for public blogs like Schneier on Security, where pretty much anyone can post.

To be sure, this is an edge case and a half... I found the results that I did because I was looking to see where else the wild allegations and conspiracy had been posted, so I'd clipped directly from the text to drop into Google, which would have really narrowed the pool of possible things that the automation would find as matches.

But that doesn't mean that it's not a problem, especially given that names are not unique identifiers of people, and the fact that the automation clearly had access to a cached or archived version of previous posts. The automation simply rolls out a list of names.

And I think that this is what people are getting at when they point out that the generative automation companies are pushing to be first and best to market, and leaving the safety aspects of things until later, or to someone else. Because this isn't a problem of "A.I. slop;" this is a matter of the automation repeating random things it finds on the web. And given that web sites are seeing less traffic, as people simply take the overviews and go, it wouldn't take much for something like this to take on a life of its own, divorced from the comments section(s) in which it was first planted.

Thaw

So there's a local company that uses their street-facing sign mainly for political messaging. In the entire time I've noticed what it's said, it's pretty much never been about business. Usually, the signs have small government or simply anti-Democratic Party messages... whoever runs the place seemed to have really had it in for Governor Gregoire, back in the day. But the last couple of messages have been different, and the most recent one really stood out.

Not that there has ever been any explicitly Trumpist messaging on the sign in the past, but the obviously Republican leaning of the previous signs had given me the impression that this was someone who, if not a staunch supporter of the current administration, could likely always be counted on to direct their fire elsewhere. The fact that even this person, whoever they are, felt the need to take a stand against Immigration and Customs Enforcement speaks to the difficulty that the Republicans may have in the upcoming mid-term elections.

Of course, the chances of a Republican carrying the 1st District of Washington are don't even make it to slim. Zero seems like a much more accurate number, to be honest. But that's never stopped the owner of Chain Saws Plus from railing against the generally Left-of-Center political consensus of the area. And, given that they're still in business, there are people who don't hold that against them. So I'm fairly certain that this isn't a business decision; made as a peace offering to the more Liberal elements of the Eastside.

Instead, this seems like someone who's actually willing to come out and be critical of "their" side in all of this. And while I doubt that would translate into a vote to re-elect Representative DelBene, it does seem like one fewer vote for any GOP challenger(s). (Not that I'd expect any Republican candidates to make it out of the primary, absent a large, and fractured, group of Democratic candidates.)

Reliance on low-propensity voters has shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans, even if President Trump doesn't seem to be aware of the fact. If the Republicans can't count on people who have defined themselves in terms of negative partisanship against the Democrats to turn out, the President's concern that another impeachment is headed his way may turn out to be correct.

Degenerated

A connection of mine made a post on LinkedIn about the use of generative automation in the gaming industry, and how that's become basically cover for bad management.

Someone who saw the post took offense, not at the post itself, or its theme, but at the fact that it struck them as having been artificially generated. (I decided to drop the text into a few "GPT Detector" sites, by the way, and even my favorite false positive generator came back with a "0% GPT" score.)

Pointing out the patterns in writing that one believes that LLMs have been trained (intentionally or not) to favor is a different task than pointing out patterns in writing that are unique to LLMs. I think that there is a tendency to become caught up in the idea of "the flaw of averages," the idea that the "average" of a group of people, even a large group, won't actually match any given individual in that group. Applied to detecting LLMs and GPT-created text, it presumes that some artifacts of the training data that come out in generated text are unique to generated text; observe enough people and you'll see something like a given phrasing or sentence structure come out of the data, but the precise phrasing or structure exist nowhere in the data.

Which is reasonable, but to actually validate that for any given piece of text, one would need an in-depth understanding of the training data. To claim, for instance, that only generative automation uses emojis to mark bulleted lists is to make a pretty sweeping claim about quite a lot of human social media posting; one that's effectively impossible to empirically support. And I have it on pretty good authority that ChatGPT didn't invent the m-dash.

Big picture, I understand the feeling that generative automation is equivalent to "low-effort." I've seen my share of generated artwork, and come away with the impression that the person felt a need to have some sort of illustration, but not anything worth investing significant time, effort or money into, and so it felt perfunctory... the Social Media Gods say that text with pictures gets more Engagement, so here's a picture: please Engage now.

But I'm not sure that angry call-outs do anything productive. (Not that there's anything wrong with simply venting on the Internet, mind you.) People can snipe at one another for a supposed unwillingness to treat online posting with the respect that it deserves, but in the end, that sort of feeds the very Engagement beast that sits at the heart of the problem. And because spending the time to write posts oneself is the norm, there's little drive to step up and comment on that fact. It's not much different from the reasons why rage-bait outperforms more positive postings: the "Must. Denounce. Now." impulse feeds into the incentive structure of social media more broadly. (Which, of course, makes them an attractive mode on online interaction themselves.)

What makes things on social media go away isn't vitriol, it's apathy. (Another sentence structure supposedly coined by LLMs, by the way.)

It's likely overstating things to claim that the use of generative automation in social media is reaching the level of a moral panic, but I suspect that the number of people who feel actively slighted by it is growing. And sensitivity to slights can produce the perverse habit of seeking them out, in order to respond to them. Which, in turn, can lead to one's slight detector is perfectly calibrated.

For my part, I've come to realize that I don't naturally analyze text for signs of automation. I think that I'm okay with lacking the skill to do so; I'm unconvinced that learning to do it well enough to be accurate is time well spent.

Mirror Image

The question that the widespread adoption of generative automation by business will raise is not "What will be the effects on productivity?" Rather, I think it will be, "What will be the effects on demand, especially demand for human labor?" I can imagine a worst-case scenario in which automation, especially autonomous automation, creates a world in which access to raw materials becomes paramount. If doesn't matter, for instance, if people own a robot that can cook for them if they have nothing of value to trade for food.

I suspect, as with so many other things, that these sorts of problems will not crop up unexpectedly so much as it will turn out that people were expecting "someone else" to take care of the problem, preferably in a manner that wouldn't cost them anything. And when it turns out that "someone else" was actually "no one else," emergency measures, none of them really to anyone's liking, will wind up being enacted.

What strikes me as a slowly building panic over the disruptions to the job market in the technology sector, both current and expected in the future, speaks to this. While it's not hard to find techno-optimists who will loudly proclaim that "genuine human interaction" will suddenly become highly valuable in a highly automated society, they tend to be short on explanations as to how a large segment of the current workforce will come to be employed this way. And the people who see not only their jobs going away, but their future prospects for supporting themselves, remain unconvinced.

Cultivating new lines of work that would be expensive to impossible for even genuine "artificial general intelligence" to carry out would seem to be a priority, but such cultivation will, in the short term at least, be unprofitable... which is why no-one's currently turning their resources to it; the expected return on that investment is pretty much non-existent. And while there are people who will look to government to solve the problem, the resources are going to have to come from somewhere, and decades of nurturing a distrust of government efficacy and a dislike of taxation are likely to result in quite a bit of time spent in looking for someone to extract the resources from who have resources to take, yet lack the political voice to block their taking.

In the end, finding a social solution has to be more important to the majority of people than searching for personal ones. But stereotypical American individualism, to say nothing of social division, actively works against that. The saying that "Whenever you say, 'Someone should do something,' remember that Someone stands in front of you whenever you look in the mirror," applies here as much as to anything else, however. And if I don't think that "someone else" will start working on the problem, perhaps I should start educating myself on what that work entails.