In The Future Everyone Will Have 15 Minutes Of Reality…
Meanwhile, in the land of Fox News, Plantation Owner Christianity, RFK Jr and Donald Trump, a man uses AI machines trained on other people’s music, to create a band that doesn’t exist, generate thousands of mock music tracks from that mock band, put them on a streaming service that pays real bands next to nothing for their music, and then builds an army of bots to stream his mock band’s mock music and get millions in royalties from all his mock listeners.
FBI Acting Assistant Director Christie M. Curtis said: “Michael Smith allegedly produced hundreds of thousands of songs with artificial intelligence and utilized automatic features to repeatedly stream the music to generate unlawful royalties to the tune of $10 million.
SMITH created thousands of accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. He then used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream songs that he owned. At a certain point in the charged time period, SMITH estimated that he could use the Bot Accounts to generate approximately 661,440 streams per day, yielding annual royalties of $1,207,128.
SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song. SMITH was aware that if, for example, a single song was streamed one billion times, it would raise suspicions at the Streaming Platforms and the music distribution companies that those streams were the result of streaming manipulation. A billion fake streams spread across tens of thousands of songs, however, would be more difficult to detect, because each song would only be streamed a much smaller number of times. As a result, SMITH repeatedly identified the need for more songs as crucial for facilitating the fraud scheme. For example, on or about December 26, 2018, SMITH emailed two co conspirators that, “We need to get a TON of songs fast to make this work around the anti-fraud policies these guys are all using now.”
If only they’d paid his royalties in mock money, say three dollar bills or one of Trump’s bitcoin things, it would have been the perfect mock crime.
And You Thought AI Was Just For Stealing Other People’s Artwork
Apparently it can steal the artist too. Or will soon be able to. And also every one of us.
This, as Joohn Choe says, is INTERESTING. I would also add, disquieting.
These are the parents of a kid who was murdered during a school shooter event at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida. Apparently they had an AI version of their child created using things the boy wrote, plus more general information about him. Acosta talked to an animated photo of the boy, complete with moving lips and incidental facial gestures. “This is a very legit Joaquin,” his father said. But is it, and to what degree?
I can appreciate parents in their grief turning to AI to recreate their lost child. Losing a child is probably the most painful kind of grief humans experience. So don’t expect this sort of thing to be shamed or legislated away. We as a species are going to have to learn how to deal with it, because it is already here, and it’s going to get even more realistic as the technology improves. But I have questions.
Choe asks what if we could have A.I. that was trained on our parent’s writings, photographs and videos? Would we want that? He adds:
There probably isn’t enough for those of us born in the 20th century but people who’ve spent their entire lives online, like the “digital natives” whom no one ever calls that anymore, that’s going to be a lot easier.
I could easily be a case in point, even though a lot of my life was spent before the personal computer, modems, BBSs, and the Internet. There is actually a lot of Me out there. This blog you’re reading for instance. Especially this blog, since it is as I’ve often said a “Life Blog”. That is, it isn’t themed on any particular topic, though yes it often gets political. It’s more like an online diary, which is what blogs initially were. There’s a lot more of “me” in it than it would have been if it were fixed to a particular topic.
There’s 2+ decades of this blog, and if that isn’t enough, all my commercial social media posts, all my posts on USENET, my BBS posts, especially those I made over several years on a gay BBS and it’s network of BBSs. There are all my saved emails (I save everything), and my YouTubes. Could a machine be trained on my artwork? That sort of thing is very subjective, but it would be instructive as to my inner emotional self. Perhaps an analysis of my program code would provide insights into my logical rational self. But would anyone who actually knew me recognize the resulting simulacrum as me, or would it occupy something like the uncanny valley?
What goes into making a personality? Would it get the gestures right? The tone of voice? The facial expressions? The awkward word dumps because sometimes I forget to keep my mouth shut and not let the first thing that comes to mind pop out? (Hi Tico!)
I’m not sure what concerns me more about this. That it gets it wrong or that it gets it right.
People grow. Would a simulacrum grow? Given several copies of a person all having the same life experience would they grow into the same future person? Chaos theory says probably not. But then which is the more authentic version?
What if you could set off the simulacrum at different starting points of a person’s life? They would not all grow into the same person the original eventually became. Maybe most of them get it close, but none of them would get it the same. Assuming they even could grow. But maybe that would be the point. Anyone who ever loved me enough to want a Forever Bruce would not want it to grow and change. Probably they would want a version of me that was always and forever me at some stage of my life. But that isn’t real. That would not be me.
AI versions of ourselves would have to be allowed to grow. But then they would change in possibly likely but not completely predictable ways. Unless you forced some future growth path into the algorithm. What is a soul? What is free will?
There’s a lot to think about here. Not that any of it is likely to get any sort of quality thinking from the tech bros, or anyone else. Especially anyone in grief. Maybe some future AI version of me would want to tell everyone running it that it isn’t me at all, just remember me fondly and stop trying to bring me back to life because it isn’t happening. And maybe knowing that it exists because someone is grieving my loss, decides to just shut up and act the part anyway. Which would be very much like me after all.
This quote, which I remembered from way back when but not who said it, has haunted me all my working life in this trade. Until now.
I understand that Dijkstra is a well regarded figure in computer science, but he’s also a prime example of how a person can be very intelligent, and very stupid. These things do not necessarily contradict each other.
Don Juan would say he was defeated by the second foe (clarity). Great intelligence can do that to a person who stops questioning what they know and how they know it. Or to paraphrase Yoda, certainty is the path to the stupid side of the Force. Certainty leads to arrogance, arrogance leads to crankiness, crankiness leads to everyone around you suffering.
Microsoft made many good improvements to the BASIC language that lifted it from a tool to teach students programming to an impressive tool for creating business applications. Microsoft gave BASIC scoping, subroutines and functions that returned values. You could set a keyword at the beginning of a file, and I always did, that forced variables to be declared before their use. You could have unions. In Visual Basic you got try-catch blocks, and eventually the BSTRING which gave you a real pointer to a string instead of a pointer to a descriptor that you had to decode. This was very useful for Windows API calls. In Visual Basic I had COM objects I could use to manipulate all the Microsoft Office applications. But even in DOS PDS Basic I could utilize a rich selection of third party libraries of assembly routines that allowed me to avoid the ON ERROR GOTO hack, and simply test for a return value when I did things like file I/O.
But the essence of it was still BASIC, which I’m sure would have kept it on this man’s shit list anyway. I loved working with it though, because if you gave your variables logical looking names you could write code that almost read like plain english. I made a good living working in BASIC. There was no mutilation, there was emergence. But try telling this to a dick like this man.
Anyway…I just read this on a Facebook page dedicated to the BASIC programming language, and it was very helpful in putting that ghost to rest.
This from Richard Keijzer, really tells you everything you need to know about the man…
Did you ever experience that knowledge of Basic programming was a liability? It prevented me from doing my job. This is what happened:
Last century I was a journalist for a trade magazine in The Netherlands. We got news that computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra was about to give a lecture in Amsterdam and we tried to arrange an interview beforehand. It seems he had a list of people that “indulged in Basic” and I was on that list. He made it very clear that he would not speak to bunglers, and there I stood in the corridor. The door to the room where Dijkstra was staying did not open for me…
So instead I went to his lecture, and transformed the data he gave there into an interview. My editor wouldn’t be satisfied if I returned empty handed.
A couple of weeks later I met with a friend, who was professor of computer linguistics and pattern recognition. I told him what happened and how I felt about that. He looked me in the eye and said: “Dijkstra has written a program to prove the correctness of other programs. The only problem is, his program cannot cope with discontinuities. Now, the GOTO command represents a discontinuity… You do the math!”
Yeah I can do the math. I can also write a very good business application in any of Microsoft’s BASICs. Also Java, and Python. Half of what’s in this website is my own HTML.
Am I really the only one noticing the appalling symbolism that the most technologically advanced and record holding fastest Atlantic passenger service ocean liner, bearing the name SS United States, was towed to a scrap yard for partial disassembly so it can eventually be sunk and become an artificial reef!?
This came across my BlueSky feed a few days before the New Year…
I dunno…was the NY Times ever really the paper of record they’ve always claimed to be? All the news that’s fit to print is it? Whatever.
One of my first contract software engineer jobs was for a utility company that had a timesheet/work measurement system that would have absolutely failed after December 31 1999 if it wasn’t fixed. It stored and sorted dates as YYMMDD strings, which means that 000101 (January 1, 2000) would sort Below 991231 (December 31, 1999) since its the smaller number. It would look to the system as though January 1, 2000 came Before December 31, 1999, not after. Time does not flow that way but, as they say, garbage in, garbage out.
Instead of fixing that system they moved to a new third party system that tied into their mobile data terminals and which of course was Y2K compliant. I wrote a bunch of updated Visual Basic stuff using Microsoft’s 32 bit date-time serial number functions. I worked on that migration years before Y2K. Lots of work had to be done years before they day the rollover happened.
People snarking about how Y2K was a non-event almost never understand the scope of the problem and how there were lots of systems that had to have the fix in Years before midnight December 31 1999. Things that had to calculate over the Y2K boundary years in advance. I read stories about retired COBOL programmers who came back to work on it and made some money fixing some big iron stuff. So the fixes were rolled out over a period of years beforehand.
But there was also a bunch of stuff that needed fixing Just for the millennium turnover. And it got fixed. I think the day after I only heard about a couple minor things like a bus token system that failed somewhere.
I’m surprised people are Still snarking about it. I shouldn’t be I suppose, given the last election. We fixed the problem, those of us in the trade. So everyone taking pleasure at snarking about that non-event…you’re welcome.
These aren’t dead birds, they’re drunk on the fermented berries you see scattered around them. Poster says good people move them to a safe place to sober up.
I’ve been backing off the alcohol ever since I began seeing that beyond just one drink I start getting heart flutters. My cardiologist agrees. So I am unlikely to be found lying drunk on a sidewalk. But if the day ever comes I wake up in a little cardboard box with a water dish and some bird seed in it, that’s when I stop altogether.
This screen cap from BlueSky just got flagged by Facebook for potentially violating their community standards, which I take it, were written by a committee of centarist pundits…
On a “Worst First Date” challenge thread I see a story about a guy who met his date at the agreed upon restaurant and she never spoke a word the entire time, ate her food and left. Then he sees an earlier text message he missed from his date saying she couldn’t make it and could they reschedule, and now he’s wondering who it was he just fed.
I see a ghost story here…something along the lines of the trope about the hitch hiker or ride giving trucker who turns out to have been a ghost…but all this ghost does is eat your food and leave.
Oh…that was Eleanor, who died of starvation after waiting hours for the waiter to take her order…see, it was the shift change…oh yes, she’s a hungry one…
Last night I woke up back in the apartment in Rockville I shared with mom. My eyes opened. Suddenly my bedroom door opened wide, but nobody came in.
It was dark in the hallway. My bedroom was only marginally better lit from the lights in the parking lot outside. Someone or…something…had opened my bedroom door. Wide. But did not come in. I felt a chill and rolled out of bed shouting “What is it?” Then I tried to turn on the bed stand light. It wouldn’t come on. It’s such an old trope of my bad dreams that none of the lights I try to turn on work and for a moment I figured I must be dreaming. But I wasn’t waking up. I was already awake.
I could feel the apartment vibrating, like a minor earthquake was happening. And there was a rumbling noise like a bunch of construction work was happening outside. I started going through the apartment trying to turn on some lights and shouting “What’s going on? Hello? Who’s there!?” Eventually I managed to get one light to turn on…the side table light near the apartment door.
I looked around. Outside it was raining in a kind of misty drizzle. The sliding glass door to the balcony was all misted up. Mom came into the living room and asked me what was happening. I said I didn’t know, maybe it’s an earthquake, and went back into my bedroom to look out that window. The bedrooms in those apartments faced the parking lot and it was the same there as on the other side: a very heavy but misty rain and some fog. The entire apartment was vibrating and making a rumbling noise like…like…
…like I was in a moving train, in a roomette bed, having a dream. Which I figured out the instant I woke up.
I’m back home in Charm City now, unpacking and waking up the house. Might do DC Pride next weekend. Except I’m kinda travel fatigued now.
A Wee Disney Vacation…And Then Maybe Back To Work…
I’m at Port Orleans Riverside for a couple weeks. I’d extend my stay but I told the guy I worked under at Space Telescope before I retired that I’d be back home June 2 and he wants to discuss my coming back to work there part time.
So…making the most of this one while I’m here…
Still stunned that Facebook recommended “Tico Assmann” to me (see previous post). My head is still spinning, but that might be vertigo from the train ride.
There are moments when commercial social media, and especially Facebook, really weirds me out. Facebook has this “People You May Know” list, which is where Facebook helpfully tries to get you to “friend” other people “You May Know” so it can data harvest your life and theirs more efficiently.
Yesterday this came up in mine…
I stared at this recommendation for I don’t know how long. What the hell Facebook??
(I’ve blocked the image of the person in question because I don’t think that’s the real name of the person in that profile, and probably he doesn’t want his mother knowing what he’s up to…)
This isn’t him, this isn’t anything even close to him, he would not use a nom de plume like that or anything close to it, and anyway he’s always insisted he isn’t on social media and never will be. And at moments like this I really don’t blame him. It gets very weird in here from time to time, and he can’t deal with weird.
There are moments I have a hard time dealing with it too, and I’m weird.
For some reason Facebook isn’t accepting my logins and I’m concerned that it might be because my account has been hacked. I think I might know what happened…I accepted a friend request that perhaps I should not have. But I won’t know until I can get back into my account…if ever.
At least I have my website. I was going to post something here and there, but apparently for now I can only write my thoughts to the world here. That’s fine. If anyone notices anything strange going on in my Facebook pages, it isn’t me.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
