Outright hoaxes remain rare and are often easy to spot, said Lees – nobody is falling for a toucan sighting in Siberia – but he says birders often use AI to edit and improve an image, and the algorithm can then introduce parts from different bird species to create the new image.

My phone offers an “AI enhance” option after you take a photo. Mostly it tweaks the framing and colours, but it can also do some surprising things and produce a quite different image from the original. I played with it a bit when I first got the phone, and I saw it change people’s eye colour, turn their head to face a different way, and add extra strings to musical instruments. So I don’t use it, but it sounds like the problem is mostly people using AI image enhancers like that carelessly.

They missed Canada? Canada has a bill C-34 in the works which bans social media for under-16s and just happens to require everyone to submit their ID to non-Canadian corporations.

I suspect the thoroughness of the vetting is inversely proportional to the size of the kickback to Microsoft.

Indeed. I use Linux most of the time, and MacOS a bit of the time, but the old Windows desktop is still there for the infrequent times when I need it to work on old music projects. I have it too dual-booting into Linux, so even it spends most of its time in a more sane OS.

I’ve used an LG monitor for about 5 years, and never install the manufacturer’s software unless it looks genuinely useful. When I saw the Gamers Nexus video I went to check my installed apps, and sure enough there was LG’s monitor app, installed silently without my knowledge. I used Bulk Crap Uninstaller to get rid of it.

To prevent this kind of thing in future, run gpedit.msc and enable “Prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata” under Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → System → Device Installation.

As a programmer I’ve been doing this, but only because a friend lent me a very powerful computer that I could never afford myself. That’s the problem right now: local LLM use requires a huge upfront investment in equipment that most workers can’t afford. But it does feel a lot better (and cheaper, once you have the equipment) to run the LLM on a server at home than on a server owned by some nasty tech company. If everyone could run open models locally some of the main objections would fall away.

So I disagree with the poster who said anything you can run at home isn’t worth it, but the catch is you need an absurdly expensive computer. The one I’m using would cost about 6 times what I used to pay for a powerful development PC. The model and agent I’m using can do some complex things and get decent results. But right now no affordable computer can run them. On regular affordable computers the models you can run are indeed limited.

Economic damage, environmental damage, concentration of power with multi-billionaire fascists, cultural damage due to huge quantities of slop crowding out everything else, mass unemployment and the exploitation of remaining workers, disempowerment of everyone who doesn’t have the resources to control this technology, destruction of ordinary people’s access to suitably powerful computing machinery so that we’re all forced to either rent access to AI from its corporate gatekeepers or not use it, total surveillance by the state and its favoured corporations, profiling and predictive policing, marketing, etc. That’s quite a lot to object to, and I’m sure there’s more.

Continuing that unbroken streak of bad artistic decisions towards an inevitable Star Wars Special 50th Anniversary Slop Edition reissue.

It’s from 2013, when Google released Google Glass, the first glasses containing a screen and camera. The backlash to that was exactly like the backlash today towards glasses with cameras. The techbros just hoped we had forgotten.

Almost everything just works after installing sandboxed Google Play Services. For a few apps you have to tweak a setting to turn off some of GrapheneOS’s exploit protections. But I’ve found very few that refuse to run, and nothing indispensable. If you don’t like your main profile having Play Services you can set them up under a second profile or a private area and keep the apps that use them away from your main profile.