/2024

Opinion | Scarlett Johansson’s Voice Isn’t the Only Thing A.I. Companies Want - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/21/opinion/thepoint#openai-scarlett-johansson

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Par Zeynep Tufekci

When OpenAI introduced its virtual assistant, Sky, last week, many gasped. It sounded just like Scarlett Johansson, who had famously played an artificial intelligence voice assistant in the movie “Her.”

On the surface, the choice made sense: Last year, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, had named it his favorite science fiction movie, even posting the single word “her” around the assistant’s debut.

OpenAI approached Johansson to be the voice for its virtual assistant, and she turned it down. The company approached her again two days before the debut of Sky, but this time, she said in a blistering statement, it didn’t even wait for her official “no” before releasing a voice that sounds so similar to hers that it even fooled her friends and family.

In response to Johansson’s scathing letter, OpenAI claimed that the voice was someone else and “was never intended to resemble hers,” but it took Sky down anyway.

The A.I. industry is built on grabbing our data — the output that humanity has collectively produced: books, art, music, blog posts, social media, videos — and using it to train their models, from which they then make money or use as they wish. For the most part, A.I. companies haven’t asked or paid the people who created the data they grab and whose actual employment and future are threatened by the models trained on it.

Politicians haven’t stepped in to ask why humanity’s collective output should be usurped and monopolized by a handful of companies. They’ve practically let the industry do what it wants for decades.

I am someone who believes in the true upside of technology, including A.I. But amid all the lofty talk about its transformational power, these companies are perpetuating an information grab, a money grab and a “break the rules and see what we can get away with” mentality that’s worked very well for them for the past few decades.

Altman, it seems, liked Johansson’s voice, so the company made a simulacrum of it. Why not?

When you’re a tech industry star, they let you do anything.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Intelligence_artificielle #OpenAI #Voice

Parts of Gaza in ‘Full-Blown Famine,’ U.N. Aid Official Says titre le New York Times, mais seulement à des endroits de Gaza qui ne dépendent pas de l’armée génocidaire sioniste précise-t-il, sans vergogne.

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▻https://twitter.com/sharifkouddous/status/1787140625906725044

Opinion | The Point: Conversations and insights about the moment. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/02/opinion/thepoint#avian-flu-cows-outbreak

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

The discovery of the country’s second human case of H5N1 avian flu, found in a Texas dairy farm worker following an outbreak among cows, is worrying and requires prompt and vigorous action.

While officials have so far said the possibility of cow-to-cow transmission “cannot be ruled out,” I think we can go further than that.

The geography of the outbreak — sick cows in Texas, Idaho, Michigan, Ohio and New Mexico — strongly suggests cows are infecting each other as they move around various farms. The most likely scenario seems to be that a new strain of H5N1 is spreading among cows, rather than the cows being individually infected by sick birds.

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Avian flu is not known to transmit well among mammals, including humans, and until now, almost all known cases of H5N1 in humans were people in extended close contact with sick birds. But a cow outbreak — something unexpected, as cows aren’t highly prone to get this — along with likely transmission between cows, means we need to quickly require testing of all dairy workers on affected farms as well as their close contacts, and sample cows in all the dairy farms around the country.

It is possible — and much easier — to contain an early outbreak when an emergent virus isn’t yet adapted to a new host and perhaps not as transmissible. If it gets out and establishes a foothold, then all bets are off. With fatality rates estimated up to 50 percent among humans, H5N1 is not something to gamble with.

Additionally, H5N1 was found in the unpasteurized milk of sick cows. Unpasteurized milk, already a bad idea, would be additionally dangerous to consume right now.

Public officials need to get on top of this quickly, and transparently, telling us the uncertainties as well as their actions.

The government needs to gear up to potentially mass-produce vaccines quickly (which we have against H5N1, though they take time to produce) and ensure early supplies for frontline and health care workers.

It’s possible that worst-case scenarios aren’t going to come true — yet. But evolution is exactly how viruses get to do things they couldn’t do before, and letting this deadly one have time to explore the landscape in a potential new host is a disastrously bad idea.

#H5N1 #Zeynep_Tufekci #contagion #Santé_publique

Opinion | Who’s to Blame for Those Kate Middleton Conspiracies? |Conversations and insights about the moment. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/26/opinion/thepoint#kate-middleton-russia-interference

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

Par Zeyneo Tufekci

Who’s to Blame for Those Kate Middleton Conspiracies?

A British government source, reportedly, told the British newspaper The Telegraph that “hostile state actors” — China, Russia and Iran — are “fueling disinformation about the Princess of Wales to destabilize the nation.” British morning shows promptly picked up the story, comparing it to election interference.

It’s certainly possible that countries with a history of online conspiracy mongering played some role in amplifying the most salacious rumors about Catherine, the Princess of Wales. But it’s also undeniable that large numbers of people — and celebrities and newspapers and everything else — were intensely interested in the princess’s whereabouts.

The claim about foreign bots and the Princess of Wales is just the latest of similar claims of foreign interference or social media manipulation made without convincing public evidence. Young people are dissatisfied with President Biden’s policies over the Israel-Hamas war? Blame TikTok. Consumer sentiment soured amid high inflation and housing prices? Must be social media!

If our institutions turn foreign meddling on social media into the new “the dog ate my homework,” it will become an easy excuse to ignore public dissatisfaction with divisive policies. And how will such claims be believable when they actually involve consequential foreign meddling in elections?

There is nothing mysterious about the Kate Middleton rumors and conspiracies. She completely disappeared from view amid conflicting claims about her whereabouts. Then photo agencies conceded that the one photo the palace released of her and her children was doctored. Because the royals cultivate a headline-grabbing parasocial relationship with the public, the topic merged with the global water cooler chat online and rumors ran wild.

But there is a lesson. Kensington Palace is the latest institution to discover that lying to the public will make people suspicious. Mistrust will swirl on social media, as valid questions and bonkers conspiracies percolate.

It was true for the pandemic and for the war in Gaza. It’s true in the royals’ case, too. Western institutions should first worry about shoring up their own behavior. Then they can talk about meddling — with evidence, please.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #C_est_la_faute_aux_rezosociaux

Live Updates: Major Bridge in Baltimore Collapses After Being Struck by Cargo Ship
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/26/us/baltimore-bridge-collapse
▻https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1772515661954031616/pu/vid/avc1/1280x720/JRPn6y-rgntgs3La.mp4

The Israeli military acknowledges mistaking a bike for a weapon in a strike, but stands by the attack.
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/12/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news#the-israeli-military-acknowledges-mistaking-a-bi
Published March 12, 2024Updated March 13, 2024
▻https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1767610105686585345/pu/vid/avc1/540x540/vZfJ0pC1BFOyxJbF.mp4?tag=12

The drone footage shows two people walking down a road in Gaza, when they are suddenly blasted by an Israeli strike, their forms disappearing in the flash of an explosion.

Text appearing over the video, which was released by the Israeli military, described the scene as showing the “elimination of terrorists.” One person is labeled as holding a rocket-propelled grenade.

The person actually held a bicycle, the military acknowledged on Monday in response to questions from The New York Times, saying in a statement that it regretted the mistake in the video. The Israel Defense Forces still defended the strike, asserting that the two people were combatants, without providing its evidence.

“When the video was published, the bicycle carried by one of them was mistakenly marked as a rocket launcher,” the military said in a statement to The New York Times. “The I.D.F. regrets the marking error.”

The acknowledgment came after The Times asked the Israel Defense Forces about a Times analysis of the footage suggesting that one of the people was holding a bicycle instead of a weapon. The mistake had been first identified by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, an advocacy group that focuses on documenting and calling attention to potential human rights violations in Gaza.

The brief video clip, which the military released on March 3, shows two people walking in southern Gaza City, one with the bicycle and the other with what appears to be a white sack of flour. An annotation on the video incorrectly identifies the bicycle as an “RPG” or rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The date of the strike is unknown.

The Times analysis found that the dimensions of the object in the video were consistent with a bicycle and, at one point, the front wheel of the bike can be seen slightly turning. The handlebars of the bike are also visible. Additionally, underneath the bicycle the ground is disturbed as its tires roll forward, an effect that would not have happened had the object been a shoulder-mounted weapon.

Despite the error in identifying the bicycle as a weapon, the I.D.F. stood by its claim that the people targeted were combatants.

“During the several days leading up to the documented strike, armed terrorists used the route shown in the video in order to transfer ammunition and attack I.D.F. forces,” the statement said. “The strike took place after real-time identification of the people as armed terrorists, based on information gathered ahead of the strike.”

The statement said that the decision-making process behind the strike would be referred to military investigators who examine possible cases of misconduct by Israeli forces. Some human rights groups say that the Israeli military lacks the capacity for independent accountability and rarely penalizes soldiers for harming Palestinians. Israeli officials have defended the military’s efforts to limit harm to civilians and have opened investigations into some cases.

Mohammed Qreiqea, a researcher for Euro-Med, told The Times that, according to witnesses he spoke with, the people were returning from collecting aid. One of the people in the strike died, while the other suffered a lung puncture but survived, he said. Their families did not immediately respond to phone calls, and the Israeli military did not describe the condition of the two people targeted.

The strike was conducted on a road just a block away from Salah al-Din street, the main north-south highway in the Gaza Strip.

As of Tuesday evening in Israel, the video with the incorrect annotation remained on the Israeli military’s website and social media accounts.

Aaron Byrd contributed video production.

— Aric Toler, Haley Willis and Neil Collier

Sana Saeed sur X :

Jesus Christ, you absolute sick ghouls @nytimes

▻https://twitter.com/SanaSaeed/status/1764036042569445603

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#génocidaires
#new_york_times
#nyt

Opinion | The Increase in Measles Cases Is Utterly Avoidable | Zeynep Tufekci. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/13/opinion/thepoint#measles-outbreak-vaccine

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

The Increase in Measles Cases Is Utterly Avoidable

The World Health Organization has reported a “staggering” increase in the number of measles cases and deaths around the world. Millions of these victims are in poor countries and war zones, where vaccination programs have faltered because of the pandemic, violence or a lack of resources. In 2022, there were an estimated nine million measles cases globally, with 136,000 deaths.

Increasingly, measles outbreaks have been taking place in wealthier countries, largely because of vaccine refusal. This is a dangerous situation — and not just for the willfully unvaccinated.

Measles is airborne, wildly contagious and deadly. While the measles vaccine is greatly protective, losing herd immunity against the disease would result in many victims, and not just those who are willfully unvaccinated.

A small percentage of fully vaccinated people will develop breakthrough measles infections if exposed to the disease. While their cases may be mild, they can transmit the disease to others. That’s how measles will spread to infants too young to be vaccinated, older people and the immunocompromised. (In the United States, babies get vaccinated against measles between 12 and 15 months of age.) Because the vaccinated can have few to no symptoms, vaccinated breakthrough cases are easy to miss — until that potentially deadly transmission.

Some Republican politicians and state legislatures have toyed with removing or weakening vaccine mandates against measles, mumps and rubella in children. The number of Republicans who believe parents should be able to forgo vaccines for their children — even if that choice increases the risk of disease to others — is now up to 42 percent. That’s more than double the number before the pandemic, when the percentages were similar between the parties.

Make no mistake: If efforts to remove these mandates succeed, there will be more outbreaks. Many unvaccinated children will die horrible deaths, while the vaccinated will be largely spared. But many babies, grandparents and immunocompromised patients will get sick and die, too.

In a sane world, our country would allocate the resources to get vaccines to those in poorer countries and conflict zones and would refuse to budge on compulsory childhood vaccines. The alternative should be unthinkable.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Vaccination

Amnesty International accuses Israeli forces of killing Palestinians in the West Bank with impunity. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/06/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news/amnesty-international-accuses-israeli-forces-of-killing-palestinians-in-the

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Amnesty International said on Monday that Israeli forces were killing Palestinians in the West Bank with “near total impunity” as the world’s attention focused on Gaza, demanding in a new report that the International Criminal Court step up its investigation into Israel’s conduct in the Israeli-occupied area.

In the West Bank, Israeli forces have used live fire to disperse Palestinian protests, attacked people trying to help the injured and carried out deadly arrest raids that have spread fear throughout Palestinian communities, Amnesty International said in its report. It said the Israeli forces’ actions added to the country’s “well-documented track record of using excessive and often lethal force to stifle dissent and enforce its system of apartheid against Palestinians.”

The human rights organization said that Israel’s use of unlawful force in the West Bank had sharply escalated since Oct. 7, when a Hamas-led attack from Gaza killed more than 1,200 people in Israel, according to Israeli authorities. Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed more than 27,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to health officials there.

The Israeli military has described its actions in the West Bank as counterterrorism efforts necessary to prevent further attacks. Israel has strongly denied prior accusations that it has committed the crime of apartheid.

Israeli military operations have raised alarms from several human rights groups, including the United Nations human rights office, which called in December for Israel to “end unlawful killings” of Palestinians in the West Bank and to immediately stop the use of “military weapons and means during law enforcement operations.”

Since Oct. 7, Israeli forces in the West Bank have killed at least 360 Palestinians and injured 4,270, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Sunday. Last year was the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank since the office began recording casualties in 2005, and about 70 percent of those killings were reported during Israeli military operations, O.C.H.A. has said.

Amnesty’s report detailed its investigations into four incidents that it said were emblematic of the recent escalation, and renewed its call for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, to take action. In 2021, the I.C.C. opened an investigation into allegations of war crimes committed by Israel and Palestinian militant groups in Israeli-occupied areas, but many Palestinian groups have criticized the pace and focus of the inquiry.

Amnesty’s director for global research and policy, Erika Guevara-Rosas, called for Mr. Khan to investigate the killings in the West Bank as possible war crimes, saying in the report that “an international justice system worth its salt must step in.”

#Palestine #Cisjordanie #Amnesty_international

Opinion | Boeing Is Missing Much More Than Four Door Bolts - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/06/opinion/thepoint#boeing-door-bolts

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Cette affaire Boeing est un révbélateur de la manière dont le capitalisme néolibéral est devenu une manière de singer dans tous les domaines les pratiques du capitalisme numérique. Go fast and break things, soyez agiles, on apprend des erreurs... Une bascule radicale de la culture des ingénieurs vers les pratiques des auditeurs et des commerciaux.

There it is, the probable answer to why the exit door plug on the Boeing 737 Max Alaska Airlines flight blew out in the air. A National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report on the incident, released today, says that four bolts on the door plug were missing.

Those four bolts, which prevent the door from sliding up, are removed on purpose when mechanics have to take the door off for maintenance or inspection, as was done last September, according to the report. But somehow, when the installation was over, they weren’t there. No bolts — nothing to stop the door from sliding up and then off.

Preliminary N.T.S.B. reports like this one focus on establishing facts rather than spelling out who was at fault, which will wait for the final report. But this plane was practically new, and the Boeing chief executive, David Calhoun, has already acknowledged that it was a “quality escape” that caused the blowout.

Everything so far indicates that Boeing is a company plagued by shoddy quality control. Just yesterday, it disclosed that a supplier had found “two holes may not have been drilled exactly to our requirements” on about 50 unfinished Boeing 737 Max planes, requiring more work on the planes and delaying their delivery.

How could all this happen?

This morning, before heading to Capitol Hill to testify before the House Transportation Committee, the F.A.A. administrator Mike Whitaker stopped by CNBC to discuss everything the agency has done to try to get ahead of this: slowing Boeing production lines, revoking certain exemptions, getting more inspectors on the ground, etc.

But he also said something that really goes to the heart of the matter. Pressed by the host about the root causes, Whitaker said, “The system is designed really as an audit system, and I think that hasn’t worked well enough.”

Our airline safety system assumes that airplane manufacturers are also deeply invested in upholding safety standards, so the F.A.A. oversight focuses on identifying new problems, improving existing systems and auditing to make sure existing standards are properly upheld.

What happens if a company instead focuses more on what it could get away with in terms of cost-cutting?

That’s how we get to a world where audits alone will not have “worked well enough.” The missing bolts may have caused the door to blow out, but it’s the missing corporate ethos that we should examine to understand the root cause.

#Boeing #Zeynep_Tufekci

Conversations and insights about the moment. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/30/opinion/thepoint#tech-hearings-transparency

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Zeynep Tufekci
Feb. 1, 2024, 1:02 p.m. ETFeb. 1, 2024
Feb. 1, 2024

Zeynep Tufekci

Opinion Columnist
We Need Information, Not Apologies, From Tech Companies

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Wednesday on online child sexual exploitation, perhaps the most dramatic moment came when Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, turned around and stood up to face parents holding up photos of their children who had died by suicide after sexual abuse or extortion via a social media platform.

“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” Zuckerberg said to them.

Here, reasonable voices might intervene. An unbearable tragedy, certainly, they might say, but such tragedies have occurred before social media came along. Let’s not lose proper historical and individual context when talking about the mental health and well-being of children, they might point out.

All of that is technically correct, but fundamentally wrong. And one senator got to the heart of it.

“Platforms need to hand over more content about how the algorithms work, what the content does and what the consequences are, not at the aggregate, not at the population level, but the actual numbers of cases so we can understand the content,” said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware. He said he was sponsoring a bill with that requirement, setting new standards for disclosure and transparency, and posed the question forthrightly for Zuckerberg and the C.E.O.s of TikTok, Snap, X and Discord:

“Is there any one of you willing to say now that you support this bill?”

The answer was … silence. Crickets. Not one C.E.O. would commit. “Mr. Chairman, let the record reflect a yawning silence from the leaders of the social media platforms,” Coons noted, with resignation.

The platforms have nearly absolute immunity as an industry. Thanks to Section 230, they generally cannot be sued and held liable for tragic events even if they were facilitated by their product; they get to keep all the profits made from these products. And yet when the public asks for meaningful transparency and data — so that it’s not just an appeal to emotion that results in legislation — the public is told, basically, to pound sand.

We wouldn’t accept this from any other industry, and we should not accept it from technology companies. And that’s the most important point anyone should make until legislators start passing bipartisan bills that force meaningful transparency on these companies, which could finally allow proper accountability and reasonable oversight.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Facebook #Enfants

Thomas Friedman (et le NYT) imbattable(s) -

Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/30/opinion/thepoint

Les moyen-orientaux : des insectes et vers de terre ; les États-Unis un lion, Netanyahu un lémurien