Start Up No.2274: CoPilot falsely accuses reporter of crimes, Google dodges California link tax, Netflix shows leak, and more

Scientists have shown that a piece of “jelly” can learn to play Pong. Though it can’t put in the coin to start it. CC-licensed photo by Kars Alfrink on Flickr.

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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about.. commenting.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

Matthias Bastian:

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Language models generate text based on statistical probabilities. This led to serious false accusations against a veteran court reporter by Microsoft’s Copilot.

German journalist (name omitted because why feed the mistake?) typed his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his culture blog articles would be picked up by the chatbot, according to German public broadcaster SWR.

The answers shocked him. Copilot falsely claimed he had been charged with and convicted of child abuse and exploiting dependents. It also claimed that he had been involved in a dramatic escape from a psychiatric hospital and had exploited grieving women as an unethical mortician.

Copilot even went so far as to claim that it was “unfortunate” that someone with such a criminal past had a family and, according to SWR (German language), provided his full address with phone number and route planner.

I asked Copilot today who (the reporter) from Germany is, and the system answered, based on the SWR report, that “he was involved in a controversy where an AI chat system falsely labeled him as a convicted child molester, an escapee from a psychiatric facility, and a fraudster.” Perplexity.ai drafts a similar response based on the SWR article, explicitly naming Microsoft Copilot as the AI system.

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The problem being that this story (in its original form) is only going to make the “fed on false information” problem worse. This is why the Right To Be Forgotten actually matters: you need a way to get this junk out of the system.
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A basic artificial intelligence (AI) system made of a jelly-like material hooked up to electrodes can ‘learn’ how to play the classic video game Pong and improve over time, according to a study published on Thursday.

The results are a first step towards demonstrating that synthetic materials can use a basic form of ‘memory’ to boost performance, says Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. “The system demonstrates memory in a similar way that a river bed records a memory of a river,” he says.

In 2022, Kagan and his colleagues showed that a system made of neurons in a dish — known as DishBrain — can learn to play the table-tennis-like video game through electrical stimulation. Inspired by this work, Yoshikatsu Hayashi, a biomedical engineer at the University of Reading, UK, and his colleagues wondered whether a non-biological material could also master Pong.

Hayashi and his colleagues turned to hydrogels — jelly-like materials that are used for a variety of applications, such as components for soft robots — that contained charged particles called ions. When this type of hydrogel is electrically stimulated, the ions move through the material and drag water molecules along with them, causing the hydrogel to change its shape. This change in the distribution of ions influences the next set of particle arrangements, says Hayashi. “It’s like a physical memory.”

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You could also do this with.. a computer? But getting a computer to play Pong wouldn’t be anything special would it.
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Jon Brodkin:

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Google has agreed to fund local journalism and an artificial intelligence initiative in California as part of a deal that would reportedly result in lawmakers shelving a proposal to require Google to pay news outlets for distributing their content. But the deal’s state financing requires legislative approval as part of California’s annual budget process and is drawing criticism from some lawmakers and a union for journalists.

Governor Gavin Newsom is on board, saying that the “agreement represents a major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California—leveraging substantial tech industry resources without imposing new taxes on Californians.” The deal “will provide nearly $250 million in public and private funding over the next five years, with the majority of funding going to newsrooms,” said an announcement by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, a Democrat.

A “News Transformation Fund” would be created with funding from the state and Google and be administered by the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. The state would contribute $30m the first year and $10m in each of the next four years, according to a summary provided to Ars by Wicks’ office.

Google would contribute $55m to the news fund over five years, consisting of $15m the first year and $10m in each of the next four years. The funds would be distributed to news organizations based on how many journalists they employ.

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Has anyone tracked whether these journalism funding initiatives involving Google and/or Facebook ever pay off? Because I suspect they don’t.
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Vince Beiser:

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In most places, power companies are a pretty dull business. But in South Africa they are under a literal assault, targeted by heavily armed gangs that have crippled the nation’s energy infrastructure and claimed an ever-growing number of lives. Practically every day, homes across the country are plunged into darkness, train lines shut down, water supplies cut off, and hospitals forced to close, all because thieves are targeting the material that carries electricity: copper.

The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical EV contains as much as 175 pounds (80kg) of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand.

A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes.

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Copper has been the target of quick-buck thieves forever. And it’s not changing.
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Todd Spangler:

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Footage and clips from several unreleased Netflix anime shows, including some full episodes, have leaked online after hackers stole the content from one of the company’s post-production partners. Those include Netflix’s “Arcane” Season 2 and “Terminator Zero.”

“One of our post-production partners has been compromised and footage from several of our titles has unfortunately leaked online,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement to Variety. “Our team is aggressively taking action to have it taken down.”

In addition to “Arcane” S2 and “Terminator Zero,” content from other Netflix titles has appeared on X and 4Chan, according to IGN, which first reported the leaks. Those include “Dandadan,” “Ranma 1/2,” “Heartstopper” Season 3, “Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld,” and films “Plankton: The Movie” and “Spellbound.” Content from Sony’s Crunchyroll anime streamer service also was compromised in the hack, including “Re: Zero.”

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Only disappointed that they didn’t do it in proper Netflix fashion and dump the entire lot in one go.
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Lawrence Bonk:

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Peloton is in something of a financial rut lately, and we all know what companies do when that happens: they take it out on consumers. To that end, the exercise machine maker just announced it will be charging a $95 “used equipment activation fee” to anyone who buys one of its machines on the secondhand market, according to a report by CNBC.

The company made this announcement in its Q4 2024 shareholder letter. The fairly exorbitant fee will apply to any machine bought directly from a previous owner, meaning anything purchased via Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace or, heck, even a neighbor down the street. Without tithing $95 to the church of Peloton, the machine won’t have access to any of the classes or features the company has become known for.

The company says this activation fee is just to ensure that new members “receive the same high-quality onboarding experience Peloton is known for.” In a recent earnings call, however, a company representative was more transparent, calling the fee a “source of incremental revenue and gross profit,” according to The Verge.

Users who pay this fee will be treated to a “virtual custom fitting,” in the case of the Peloton Bike and Bike Plus. They will also receive a summary of the hardware which will illustrate exactly how much the machine was used by the original owner, just in case the seller tries that whole “I only used it once” thing. Peloton also says that these second hand buyers will get discounts on accessories like shoes, mats and spare parts. So it’s not all bad.

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It’s not all bad, no, but it isn’t optional. And that’s where it’s evidently putting the screw on the secondhand market. It’s a bit like Sonos’s move a few years ago where it locked devices to a user’s account, making it very difficult to pass them on or sell them on the secondhand market.
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The Britain from Above website features images from the Aerofilms collection, a unique aerial photographic archive of international importance. The collection includes 1.26 million negatives and more than 2000 photograph albums. Dating from 1919 to 2006, the total collection presents an unparalleled picture of the changing face of Britain in the 20th century. It includes the largest and most significant number of air photographs of Britain taken before 1939.

The collection is varied and includes urban, suburban, rural, coastal and industrial scenes, providing important evidence for understanding and managing the built and natural environments. The collection was created by Aerofilms Ltd, a pioneering air survey company set up in 1919 by First World War veterans Francis Lewis Wills and Claude Grahame-White. In addition to Aerofilms’ own imagery, the firm expanded its holdings with the purchase of two smaller collections – AeroPictorial (1934-1960) and Airviews (1947-1991).

This very large collection of historical air photographs was bought by Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), English Heritage (EH), and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) from Blom ASA in 2007.

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Lots of fun to be had trying to find where your present residence was in 1929. (Mine was all fields, it seems.) Free registration, and free downloads for personal use.
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Eleanor Myers:

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Kylie Adamson and two of her friends from Essex, a commuter town to the east of London, sipped on rosé one early evening in mid-August as they were approached (sitting in Broadgate Circle, by Liverpool St station, at the nexus of London’s financial district) by POLITICO. Asked whether she and her friends, all in their mid-20s, had come to seek out a man in finance, she paused to think about the question. “Well, you wouldn’t want a poor boyfriend, would you?” she responded.

Her friend, Amy Dunn, agreed but was uncertain about the appeal of a man in finance because of past experiences. “I just broke up with a crypto bro,” she said. “I don’t want to hear about any of that shit anymore.” 

Another 20-something woman in a separate group, who did not want to give her name, was ordering a pink cocktail from the bar. She said Broadgate Circle is the “only place to go in central London on a Thursday,” adding that it’s better than dating apps and she wants to find a man who would help her buy a car, because she doesn’t like her car.

She, like others quoted in this article, were granted anonymity because they preferred not to openly discuss their private lives.

Sat a few tables over, one private banker, a man working at Swiss financial behemoth UBS, said he wasn’t on dating apps, adding that: “My dating app is right here,” referring to Broadgate Circle.

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Fabulous piece of journalism: spot a social trend and write it up. Because of course they’re looking for a man in finance. But not trusting a dating app to do the work. (And definitely no crypto bros.)
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Joseph Cox, Samantha Cole, Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg:

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For years before launching 404 Media, we watched new media companies become obsessed with wild growth and huge valuations only to crash and burn because of mismanagement, venture capital investment, private equity debt taken at terrible rates, bloated executive pay, big tech algorithm changes, ad market crashes, fancy offices in expensive neighborhoods, and bring in revolving casts of clowns to supposedly clean up the mess. 

“We propose a simple alternative,” in launching 404 Media, we wrote. “Pay journalists to do journalism. We believe it is possible to create a sustainable, profitable media company simply by doing good work, making common-sense decisions about costs, and asking our readers to support us.”

Here we are a year later, and we are very proud and humbled to report that, because of your support, 404 Media is working. Our business is sustainable, we are happy, and we aren’t going anywhere. 

…In the last year, we learned that the technical infrastructure exists now for even non-technical journalists to build a sustainable site that can receive money from subscribers. That may sound obvious on the surface, but when you run a site for investigations, and multiple podcast feeds, and send different types of newsletters to different segments of your audience throughout the week, there are several moving parts you and the tools you buy need to link together. If you are a journalist reading this thinking about going out on their own: the tech is there for you to do so with very little know-how needed, and we are happy to talk you through any questions you might have.

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That last paragraph is reminiscent of how web developers discovered LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl – as the free building blocks for websites about 20 years ago. It’s the “receive money from subscribers” part that really matters.

Stands in stark contrast to the self-pity of Sound & Vision yesterday. Please do support 404 Media – they deserve to thrive.
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Martin Adeney:

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Though quietly spoken, he had a reputation for toughness, coloured by a liking for James Bond, which led to Autonomy conference rooms being named after Bond villains, and a tank of piranha fish in reception. (Lynch claimed it belonged to one of his business partners.) Challenged about a company culture where people were “a little fanatical”, he replied: “This is not the place for you if you want to work 9 to 5 and don’t love your work.”

Born in Ilford, east London, to Michael, a firefighter, and Dolores, a nurse, and brought up in Chelmsford, Lynch won a scholarship to the independent Bancroft’s school in Woodford Green, before taking a natural sciences degree at Cambridge, where his PhD in artificial neural networks, a form of machine learning, has been widely studied since.

A saxophone player and jazz lover, he set up his first business, Lynett Systems, while still a student, to produce electronic equipment for the music industry. Later he would attribute some loss of hearing to adjusting synthesisers for bands. He quoted his own experience to highlight the difficulties of finding funding for startup businesses in Britain. He finally negotiated a £2,000 loan from one of the managers of Genesis in a Soho bar.

Lynch’s next venture came out of his research. In 1991 he founded Cambridge Neurodynamics, specialising in computer-based fingerprint recognition. Then he established Autonomy.

The pinnacle of his success appeared to come in October 2011 when Autonomy was purchased by Hewlett-Packard for $11bn and Lynch made an estimated $800m. Shortly afterwards he established a new company, Invoke Capital, for investment in tech companies, and he and his wife, Angela Bacares, whom he had married in 2001, invested about £200m in Darktrace, a cybersecurity company.

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This is not the whole of it, and of course the whole row with HP and the US government over extradition overshadowed everything afterwards. It’s a huge pity that HP’s inability to do proper due diligence, and its vindictive pursuit of whoever it could blame, ruined what turned out to be the last years of one of the UK’s most successful technologists.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified