The Record: “…Forewarn is primarily marketed to and used by the real estate industry, and it has been penetrating that market at a rapid clip. Although some real estate agents say the financial information it returns saves time when finding clients most likely to have the budget for the houses they’re looking at, most agents… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap
“The U.S. Postal Service was sharing the postal addresses of its online customers with advertising and tech giants Meta, LinkedIn and Snap, TechCrunch has found. On Wednesday, the USPS said it addressed the issue and stopped the practice, claiming that it was “unaware” of it. TechCrunch found USPS was sharing customers’ information by way of… Continue Reading
Detect DeepFakes: How to counteract misinformation created by AI
MIT: “See for yourself how accurately you can identify AI-generated images at the DetectFakes Experiment and if you want to learn to spot deepfakes, please check out our recent paper on How to Distinguish AI-Generated Images from Authentic Photographs. You can find more of our work at publications in PNAS, a workshop at IJCAI, and pre-print on arXiv. Check out… Continue Reading
Hundreds of racist plant names will change after historic vote by botanists
Nature: “For the first time, researchers have voted to eliminate scientific names of organisms because they are offensive. Botanists decided that more than 200 plants, fungi and algae species names should no longer contain a racial slur related to the word caffra, which is used against Black people and others mostly in southern Africa. Many… Continue Reading
How to remove court records from Google: 3 effective strategies
Search Engine Land: “Legal issues can drag on for ages. That’s the simple, unfortunate truth. Worse, once a legal matter is filed in court, the case is highly likely to become visible on the web. Hundreds of websites now aggregate public court records and publish them for the world to see. The issue I commonly… Continue Reading
U.S. Treasury Shared Cloud Lexicon and Terminology
“The Shared Cloud Lexicon and Taxonomy (Lexicon) was created in response to the 2023 US Treasury cloud report, Adoption of Cloud Services in the Financial Sector. The Treasury report noted a lack of common definition for terms related to cloud services and technology, critical services, and terms associated with contract negotiation and service level agreements.… Continue Reading
ChatGPT Isn’t ‘Hallucinating—It’s Bullshitting!
Scientific American [unpaywalled]: “It’s important that we use accurate terminology when discussing how AI chatbots make up informatio. Right now artificial intelligence is everywhere. When you write a document, you’ll probably be asked whether you need your “AI assistant.” Open a PDF and you might be asked whether you want an AI to provide you… Continue Reading
The Risks of Botshit
Harvard Business Review: “Hot off the heels of OpenAI releasing their GenAI chatbot ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, Google released their own chatbot called Bard (now Gemini). During Bard’s first public demonstration, it generated a major factual error in response to a question about the discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope.… Continue Reading
Descrybe.AI On A Mission To Democratize Legal Research
Artificial Lawyer: “In this week’s AL TV Product Walk Through we take a tour of descrybe.ai a free genAI-powered legal research tool built by Richard DiBona and Kara Peterson, a husband and wife team who share an interest in technology, the law, and the democratization of information. By April 2024 they already had over 3 million… Continue Reading
Proton Mail is adding an AI writing assistant
“Introducing Proton Scribe, a private writing assistant that writes and proofreads emails for you: Most of us send emails every day. Finding the right words and tone, however, can take up a lot of time. Today we’re introducing Proton Scribe, a smart, privacy-first writing assistant built right into Proton Mail that helps you compose and… Continue Reading
UNESCO raises global alarm on the rapid degradation of soils
“UNESCO is warning that 90% of the planet’s land surface could be degraded by 2050, with major risks for biodiversity and human life. At an international conference in Agadir (Morocco), Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, appealed to the Organization’s 194 Member States to improve soil protection and rehabilitation. UNESCO is also undertaking a number of… Continue Reading
Making sense of rumors about the Trump assassination attempt
2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG This is part of an ongoing series of rapid research blog posts and rapid research analysis about the 2024 U.S. elections from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. Key Takeaways After the assassination attempt on presidential candidate Donald Trump, people converged online to make sense of available… Continue Reading
