The Kokuyo Design Awards, (previously) arguably Japan’s most-prestigious stationery design award, has been held for almost a quarter of a century now. Hosted by 120-year old stationery firm KOKUYO, the award receives close to 1500 entries each year for new products that have yet to be commercialized, with winning concepts given the opportunity to become […]

This week on my podcast, I read Not Normal, my latest Locus Magazine column, about the surreal and terrible world we’ve been eased into thanks to anti-circumvention laws.

If you were paying attention in 1998, you could see what was coming. Computers were getting much cheaper, and much smaller. From cars to toast­ers, from speakers to TVs, we were shoveling them into our devices. and an it doesn’t take a lot of expense or engineering to add an “access control” to any of those computers.

That meant that DMCA 1201 was about to metastasize. Once you put a computer into a thermostat or a bassinet or a stovetop or a hearing aid, you can add an access control and make it a felony to use it in ways the manufac­turer disprefers. You can make it illegal to use cheap batteries, or a different app store. You can add little chips to parts – everything from a fuel pump to a touchscreen – and make it illegal to manufacture a working generic part, because the generic part has to bypass the “access control” in the device that checks to see whether it’s the manufacturer’s own part.

MP3

A user on Quizlet, an online learning platform, created a public flashcard set in February that appears to have exposed highly confidential information about security procedures in US Customs and Border Protection facilities around Kingsville, Texas.

The Quizlet set, titled “USBP Review,” was available to the public until March 20, when it was made private less than half an hour after WIRED messaged a phone number potentially linked to the Quizlet user. Though an individual with the user’s name was listed at an address of an apartment less than a mile from a Kingsville CBP facility, WIRED has not been able to verify that the flashcard set was created by an active CBP agent or contractor.

“This incident is being reviewed by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility,” a CBP spokesperson wrote in a statement to WIRED. “We will not be getting ahead of this review. A review should not be taken as an indication of wrongdoing.”

Read full article

Comments

For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Sir Isaac Newton said this, presumably after a long day of scrolling whatever the social media platform of the time was. To wit, the moment I finished reading an excellent essay by Marisa Kabas about refusing to accept an AI-poisoned future of journalism, I encountered the following headline: “Esquire AI-Generated A Fake Interview With Live-Action One Piece Actor Mackenyu Because He Was Busy.” Either I’m losing my mind, or the world is. 

This isn’t one of those cases where a publication quietly leaned on AI and only copped to it after getting called out. Esquire Singapore fully admitted what it was doing when it published the story and used it as a supposed selling point! From the piece:

We were stoked to have some face time with the Japanese-American actor, but his schedule prevented it. So, we opted for e-mail correspondence. A list of queries was sent his way, and we waited. The silence continued until it was quickly replaced by a ticking clock as deadlines loomed.

We had the photospread, but nothing directly uttered by the 29-year-old. With a driving need for a feature, we had to be inventive. Harnessing our creative license, we pulled his verbatim from previous interviews and fed them through an AI programme to formulate new responses.

Are these the words we expect from Mackenyu? Or are they just replies from an echo chamber of celebrity-hood that we want to believe is from him?

Clearly the latter, you fools! You hacks! You credulous dipshits! 

This groundbreaking new approach to lying produced riveting exchanges like:

ESQ: Any advice on how to deal with pressure and expectations?

(AI) M: I separate pressure from weight. Pressure is external; like people's expectations. That I can't control, but the weight of family legacy… the goal isn’t to match my father. It's to make him proud, and maybe inspire someone else to do the same. Pressure can crush you, but weight can ground you.

And:

ESQ: What has fatherhood taught you?

(AI) M: That you can't rehearse it. (laughs) Everything else in my life I can prepare. Fatherhood has no script. No second take. You're just there, and you figure it out in real time. It's humbling in a way nothing else is.

You were talking to a chatbot! It did not laugh! Shut the fuck up! Also, as Kotaku notes, the chatbot certainly never knew Mackenyu’s father, deceased action star Sonny Chiba, and I cannot think of a single person in their right mind who would ask a predictive text generator a question so probing and personal about the feelings of a human being who’s very much still alive. That is deranged behavior! To be clear, I believe, on no uncertain terms, that the person who wrote this is deranged!

I cannot believe I even have to say this, but if you’re trying to publish an interview feature, and you’re unable to procure the interview in question, then you scrap the story. There is no “driving need” for a piece that supersedes that. The world was not crying out for this essential dollop of PR fluff. You can find interviews with Mackenyu, specifically, on numerous websites and, of course, YouTube. If anything, all Esquire has demonstrated here is that this kind of journalism matters so little that it can be farmed out to a robot homunculus and still pass muster.

It is bonkers to me that anyone thought this was a good idea—let alone that multiple people (if we include editors) presumably did. They should all hang their heads in shame forever, quit their jobs immediately, and give them to a few of the thousands of vastly more deserving reporters who, in a twist of fate that borders on maniacal, are currently out of work. These people would be better served casting away their old lives and embarking on a journey to find the actual One Piece, a treasure I’m well aware is fictional. Despite that rather substantial stumbling block, they would still find more success in that arena than in this one. 

This is what happens when AI rots journalists’ brains beyond the point that they can’t discern the difference between a good idea and a terrible one—to the point that they can only conceive of angles that involve AI.

That in mind, a salient section from Kabas’ piece:

If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You’re not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave. No one is making you be a journalist; it’s not one of those jobs parents force you to choose, like a doctor or a lawyer. Journalism, while romanticized in popular culture, is generally unglamorous and poorly paid, with progressively worse job opportunities (no thanks to AI.) I’m careful not to refer to it as a calling because that seems to excuse sacrificing mental health in service of craft, but I do believe that it’s a job that can’t be forced. It’s obvious to readers when your heart isn’t in it.

Recommended

Story About AI (Being Mean) Gets Pulled Because Journalist Used AI (That Made Mistakes)

‘The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me.’

AftermathLuke Plunkett