Notices by Michael Veale (mikarv@someone.elses.computer)

Microsoft Research: GenAI can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving.

Microsoft: *sells GenAI aggressively into the Education 365 packages*

Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee and others, ‘The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers’ (ACM CHI 2025). https://advait.org/files/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf

Trump lets down the Rust belt already.

EU AI Office presents proposal for general purpose model training data summary template. For scraped data, nothing more detailed than top 5-10% of domain names (not URLs). Given platforms (same domain) & tiny rights holders, not sure this helps. Slides via Contexte https://www.contexte.com/actualite/medias/la-commission-sapprete-a-reveler-la-structure-du-modele-de-resume-pour-lia-et-le-droit-dauteur_215024.html

Real time bidding and the tracking infrastructure is so toxic & illegal that the firms whose apps embed this code have to pretend to be shocked when resulting data appears in a huge leak from an actor many steps away, with a history of selling to law enforcement https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

perplexity’s got $1m to burn on a trump bribe but nothing to compensate the servers they’re pounding while ignoring robots.txt and lying about their ip address range https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-13/openai-ceo-perplexity-give-1-million-to-trump-s-inaugural-fund

Hewlett Packard report that they are spotting AI-generated malware in the wild, not through complex analysis or watermarking, but because… it is weirdly well-commented. https://threatresearch.ext.hp.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/HP_Wolf_Security_Threat_Insights_Report_September_2024.pdf

Extremely valuable plug-in.

Swiss church creates virtual ‘AI Jesus’ talking booth, says 2/3 visiting have a spiritual experience.

eJesus starts off each time: "Do not disclose personal information under any circumstances, use this service at your own risk. Press the button if you accept."

https://www.dw.com/en/switzerlands-ai-jesus-answers-questions-of-faith/video-70737962

@webmink proprietary standards from the ESOs, no? (unless you want to try your hand with an access to information request and push the case law)

Delicious chaos as another DAO found to be an inadvertent general partnership in CA https://gizmodo.com/judge-rules-decentralized-autonomous-organizations-arent-so-decentralized-in-the-eyes-of-the-law-2000526564

The nature of that kind of chaos (in England & Wales): unlimited liability for the partners, much of which cannot be contracted away; liability focussing on the the more visible partners, and inability for the DAO to hold assets without contract. https://cloud-platform-e218f50a4812967ba1215eaecede923f.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/sites/30/2024/07/DAOs-scoping-paper-110724.pdf

Someone who flagged this early on in the US is Carla Reyes in a 2019 article: https://www.gwlr.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/87-Geo.-Wash.-L.-Rev.-373.pdf

Foursquare - perhaps surprisingly - release a large proportion of their geospatial place data (eg business and other Points of Interest), hoping it seems to challenge Google Maps’ proprietary data layer. https://location.foursquare.com/resources/blog/products/foursquare-open-source-places-a-new-foundational-dataset-for-the-geospatial-community/ (via @mrchrisadams)

Bluesky has data portability issues. You can download your data, in *binary format*, — a '.car' file the firm describes as 'not the most accessible' even to devs. To even get a JSON file (also q inaccessible) you... improv poorly documented code. This is uh... not legal https://docs.bsky.app/blog/repo-export

Police sacked for accessing data on Sarah Everard’s case — yet the UK government has introduced a bill to remove the EU-wide obligation to log a justification when police access data in their systems. Sound sensible?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/15/met-officers-accessed-sarah-everard-files-guilty-gross-misconduct

Meanwhile, ‘X Corp’ going full out in their new Terms of Service (active from tomorrow) trying to edge out AI scrapers by threatening to sue mass scrapers $15,000 per 1m tweets scraped — to enclose the dataset for themselves, while forcing users to license their work for the firm’s own AI training.

In response to OpenAI’s recent ‘A Student’s Guide to Writing with ChatGPT’, Arthur Perry (maître de conferénces, Jean Moulin Lyon 3) writes a line-by-line rebuttal — A Student’s Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT https://www.arthurperret.fr/blog/2024-11-14-student-guide-not-writing-with-chatgpt.html

Interesting case here as a patent is (unsuccessfully) challenged for being based on taking medical knowledge (on malaria treatment) from traditional and indigenous communities via dishonest means: https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-morality-and-patentability-of.html?m=1

Build it and they will come - the number of criminals misusing law enforcement access portals for platform data is becoming a serious concern, says FBI… https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/08/fbi-says-hackers-are-sending-fraudulent-police-data-requests-to-tech-giants-to-steal-peoples-private-information/

Apple unexpectedly drops its civil suit against #spyware vendor NSO
Group as it claims discovery against it might disclose information that would benefit… spyware vendors. https://www.securityweek.com/apple-suddenly-drops-nso-group-spyware-lawsuit/

Microsoft provides free licenses to schools during pandemic, everyone moves towards them because of free video conferencing and embeds teaching within Teams, then they change terms and start charging for previously free desktop apps and only allow useless Web apps that for anything complex are barely usable. Abusive. https://www.publictechnology.net/2024/07/19/education-and-skills/scottish-councils-face-funding-pinch-over-microsoft-licensing-changes/ See further short paper by me on big edtech lock in https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10160033/1/Veale%202022%20Schools%20EdTech.pdf

The new Tony Blair Institute report on public sector automation savings classifies the potential to automate a task based on… how much GPT-4 classifies a task as automatable.

Is this the worst method ever? It’s absurd, unserious, and any outlet reporting on this uncritically should be humiliated and ridiculed. (seen via @halcyene)