Category Archives: Phil

Phil 3.24.2024

Just realized that Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is an example of a deepfake/KillerApp:

 …the false Maria unleashes chaos throughout Metropolis, driving men to murder and stirring dissent among the workers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)

Deepfake Kari Lake video shows coming chaos of AI in elections

  • They brainstormed ideas for about a week and enlisted the help of a tech-savvy friend. On Friday, Stephenson published the piece, which included three deepfake clips of Lake.

Phil 3.23.2024

Drove back from Greenville NC yesterday. Eleven hours or so. Electric cars are still not common on the long stretches between cities. I live in the Baltimore/DC region, and I’d say 1 in 20 cars that I see on the roads at this point is electric, with a big mix of manufacturers. Still mostly Teslas. On my drive, I only saw Teslas, and not very many of them. Charging infrastructure is solid. Leaving with a full charge, it required 2 SuperCharger recharges to cover the 535 miles. Probably $20 in electricity? And autopilot makes everything much nicer, though you always have to be ready for phantom braking.

Need to ping Mario, Ossi, and James about Eclipse coordination

Phil 3.21.2024

IUI 2024 Notes

Information visualization and Visual Analytics

25% confident

Applications of Language Models

Generative AI: Theory and Applications

Phil 3.20.2024

Got accepted for my talk at the 92nd MORS symposium!

IUI 2024 Notes

I had an interesting chat yesterday with Ossi about Active Measures Leading up to and since October 7. We need some time to sit down and talk. My sense is that all sides have been under prolonged external influence for a long time with the specific intent to raise the political temperature so that exactly this situation happened.

Keynote: Prof. Krzysztof Gajos (check Google Scholar for references)

  • Predictive text can manipulate the users, who wind up reflection the biases of the predictive text model. Change the organization’s model, change the bias of the organization.
  • The mere presence of an explanation increases the credibility of AI assistance, regardless of the content. Fact-like assertions increase the perceived competence of the AI. This is a dark pattern that needs to be detected.
  • Learning means that cognitive engagement occurs, but AI answers vs. cognitive forcing does not impact the amount of learning
  • Providing the material to support a decision but not a decision suggestion, worked better than any answer-based decision aids. This may be a key for complementation
  • Denial of a request is treated emotionally, not cognitively. This is another vector that needs to be recognized and adapted to. A source could be paper submission rejects.
  • Critical techical practice – question assumptions

HCAI, Bias and Fairness in AI

Lunch ride!

AI Tools, User Interfaces and Interaction

AI for Health

Dinner Banquet – fun 🙂

Had a thought for the day. For a learning assignment, have students build a context prompt that lets an LLM answer a question on the rubric correctly. Bonus points if the models is able to answer a question that is outside the domain where a raw LLM has struggled. This way you have a project that requires students learning the topic, and also exposes them to weaknesses and strengths of LLMs. Not sure if this is a good idea, but it could be worth poking at.

Phil 3.19.2024

Did my talk and demo at HAI-GAN yesterday. It went well, but I had forgotten my poster! I ad-hoc-ed on with the hotel printer and my slide deck:

Some really interesting talks:

Main conference starts today. I’ll post notes here:

  • Keynote – pathsto effective AI for diverse real people
    • Stumble forward empirracally
    • Draw from the field of education (e.g learning goals imply associated measures)
    • Add “after actin review” to your AI design – one of the things that seems to help is letting users come up with their own labels for things, which helps building abstractions that help overall understanding
    • Measure inclusiveness, and determine the why (GenderMag survey? Also SocioeconomicMag, AgeMag, InclusiveMag)
      • More inclusive designs of humans+AI ecosystem
      • Persona-based AI debugging

Got to chat with Mauro Martino about maps a bit

Sesssion 1:AI in Personalization, Recommendation and Search

Multimodal Models and Interaction

Poster session. Met a bunch of nice folks, and had a longer chat with Mauro. Need to follow up.

Phil 3.17.2024

No idea what to make of this:

  • Red Dragon 1949.com is the premiere global web location for all updated information focused on the People’s Republic of China. Our intent is to develop a mutual cooperation and understanding of how the Internet and connected systems can be used by a nation state as a military weapon system.

Dammit

Phil 3.16.2024

Chores

  • Drop off truck
  • Haircut
  • Slide backup
  • Laundry
  • Get gas for mower
  • Weed
  • Mow lawn
  • Clean house
  • Pack!
  • Note!
  • Trash

Kind of an interesting take on a way that white hat AI could work. Something like AI-generated annotations for all the manipulations we are being exposed to and the way that it is supposed to make you feel. And a knob that replaces the manipulative text with neutral text (possibly with whitelist fact checks):

Phil 3.15.2024

Yikes: Human-caused climate change fuels hottest February on record, all-time high ocean warming

  • “It’s looking like the entirety of the Southern Hemisphere is probably going to bleach this year,” said ecologist Derek Manzello, the coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch which serves as the global monitoring authority on coral bleaching risk.

Chores

  • Call dentist
  • Get gas for mower
  • Get Hotel
  • Clean house
  • Change pedals on Brompton and inflate tires

SBIRs

  • Slides for standup and stories
  • More content on AI attack vectors: Propaganda is dangerous, but not because it is persuasive
    • mobilisation and coordination (encourage and recruit people to your cause who already agree with you, and/or let’s them find each other)
    • signalling permission (shows the government won’t punish certain actions which might normally be illegal)
    • crowding out dissent (degrades the public conversation, changes the topic, or absorbs everyone’s energy in discussions which are ultimately distracting).
    • sowing distrust, confusion, animosity (hinders coordinated action against the propagandist).
    • helps make dissent less visible (e.g. by signalling what will be punished)
    • loyalty test or status display (some propaganda is so patently untrue that repeating it is a strong sign that you are willing to humiliate yourself in service to those in power).

Phil 3.14.2024

Happy Pi Day!

Hotels!

A Practical Guide for OSINT Investigators to Combat Disinformation and Fake Reviews Driven by AI (ChatGPT)

  • The internet is being flooded with disinformation and fake reviews, generated by users of AI tools such as ChatGPT, with malicious intent. In this report based on firsthand research, ShadowDragon® outlines how to identify AI generated materials online that are intentionally spreading false information or even intended to incite violence.

SBIRs

  • 9:00 standup
  • 9:30 some proposal thing? Prep and followup.
  • Send in poster and other HAI GEN stuff
  • Slides for standup and stories

GPT Agents

  • Some very promising venues from the IEEE. These are “magazines,” not journals or proceedings, which might mean something arcane?
  • IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
    • The following topics describe the scope of IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (IEEE SSIT) and of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine: Health and safety implications of technology, Engineering ethics and professional responsibility, Engineering education in social implications of technology, History of electrotechnology, Technical expertise and public policy, Social issues related to energy, Social issues related to information technology, Social issues related to telecommunications, Systems analysis in public policy decisions, Economic issues related to technology, Peace technology, and Environmental implications of technology. Beyond these specific topics, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine is concerned with the broad area of the social implications of technology, especially electrotechnology.
  • IEEE Security & Privacy
    • IEEE Security & Privacy is the premier magazine of the IEEE Computer and Reliability Societies for informing their members about recent and forthcoming advances in information technology pertaining to security, privacy, and dependability. The magazine seeks creative and novel perspectives on industry practices, research directions, and policy and regulatory matters.  In addition to feature articles, special and themed issues, columns, and departments, experts from our community of interest provide insightful commentary on current issues and paradigm shifts via virtual roundtables and podcasts. 

Phil 3.13.2024

Electric Sheep on the Pastures of Disinformation and Targeted Phishing Campaigns: The Security Implications of ChatGPT

  • This article explores the potential for the criminal abuse and hybrid-warfare weaponization of ChatGPT technology. The focus is placed on the opportunities for the possible utilization of such tools by malign actors who engage in the orchestration and running of targeted phishing campaigns or who design, produce and propagate disinformation. The author raises the question about the ethical, moral and legal implications of similar technologies and opens the discussion on the responsibility of technology developers for the abuse of their products and on the topic of the IT industry governance.

Home battery visit – and shelving!

SBIRs

  • Editing pass through white paper – done. Aaron thinks we should add some JSC and MDA. Done, unless LM provides additional info
  • Prep slides – cut down to 16 slides. I have to see if that will fit in 10 minutes.
  • Pick up poster

Phil 3.12.2024

This is brilliant. and it cuts to the heart of the coming pancake printer economy: How Will The Golden Age Of “Making It Worse” End?

SBIRs

  • 2:30 AI Ethics?
  • Today is pretty much working on the white paper. Still no response from Matt about our questions
  • Finished the synthetic logs and VRL sections
  • Getting information on the mission planner. Got enough to put something together
  • DONE! First draft at least. Waiting for more info. But I think it’s ok even if LM doesn’t respond

Phil 3.11.2024

Saw Dune Part 2 on Saturday. Good, but not as good as part 1. I have some thoughts about how the Dune universe lays out the conflict between hierarchical rule (the Emperor and the Harkonnens) and egalitarian communities (The Fremen). I draw on the work by Goodall, de Wall, Boehm, and Scott for this and it hangs together pretty well. Interestingly, I’ve been rubber ducking this with Gemini and that’s been quite helpful.

SBIRs

  • The ICC tolls came in, so I submitted my travel expenses for the NIST talk
  • Today is pretty much working on the white paper. Still no response from Matt about our questions
    • Finished the intro
    • Finished the synthetic logs section

Phil 3.9.2024

Well that certainly explains the sense of warmer, snowless winters:

The big snow of 2010 here in Baltimore:

The big snow of 2024 here in Baltimore. We had no snow in 2022 and 2023:

LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard

  • LMSYS Chatbot Arena is a crowdsourced open platform for LLM evals. We’ve collected over 300,000 human preference votes to rank LLMs with the Elo ranking system.

Phil 3.8.2024

New (tubeless!) wheels for the fixee! For those unfamiliar, Cannondale Aluminum means “harsh ride.” Bigger, lower-pressure tires really help with that

SBIRs

  • Filling out expenses for the NIST talk. EZ pass has no record of me on the ICC? Going to wait a bit for that to burble to the surface.

GPT Agents

  • Finish poster!

Phil 3.7.2024

A good example of Bostrom Pollution (https://bsky.app/profile/justicar.xyz/post/3kn4eim4f622c)

This is what I’ve been calling The Pancake Printer Economy, which I’ve been dreading since seeing this:

Lying Blindly: Bypassing ChatGPT’s Safeguards to Generate Hard-to-Detect Disinformation Claims at Scale

  • As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more proficient, their misuse in large-scale viral disinformation campaigns is a growing concern. This study explores the capability of ChatGPT to generate unconditioned claims about the war in Ukraine, an event beyond its knowledge cutoff, and evaluates whether such claims can be differentiated by human readers and automated tools from human-written ones. We compare war-related claims from ClaimReview, authored by IFCN-registered fact-checkers, and similar short-form content generated by ChatGPT. We demonstrate that ChatGPT can produce realistic, target-specific disinformation cheaply, fast, and at scale, and that these claims cannot be reliably distinguished by humans or existing automated tools.

SBIRs

  • Work on the white paper
  • 9:00 Standup
  • 10:00 SimAccel code review
  • 11:30 SST dataset tagup
  • 3:30 USNA

GPT Agents

  • Working on the poster, and expanding the discussion section in the KA paper to talk about White Hat AI, since that went over well at NIST
  • 2:00 Meeting with Shimei to go over SIGCHI reviews. I do want to discuss the idea of the construction of White Hat AI’s that take an understanding of individual and group psychology to detect dangerous manipulation from AI. And human actors, since this will soon get to the point that human and AI manipulation will be indistinguishable. Also, we need to do this in a way that respects agency for the individuals, with controls and opt-out/in approaches. There could easily be a “bias knob” that could be built to