So a crazy thing happened. In a crime thriller film called Les chambres rouges (Red Rooms, 2023) there is a scene where the hacker protagonist is attempting to purchase a snuff film in online auction. The auction happens via IRC or IRC-like chatting environment and to my surprise there's actually me @rolle and my wife @mustikkasoppa who are one of the bidders.

1) The nickname of my wife is mistakenly written as "mustikasoppa" (with one k) but if I recall correctly she has used a mistakenly written nickname in the past
2) We are both operators and on the same IRC channel as we've been for the past 17 years

This is not a coincidence. One nickname can be made up by accident but not two with these features and definitely not in a French movie. My wife's nick "mustikkasoppa" is Finnish and means "blueberry soup".

Our IRC logs are more or less public because of open source and statistics so I presume the scene has been made with chatgpt which has scraped our nicks from the Internet so that they ended up in the movie. We still chat via IRC every day together.

The era of AI... Do your background check, folks. I'm glad this wasn't a dramatized documentary film but a complete fiction. However my wife and I are real. Mixed feelings.

"Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:

On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”"

https://medium.com/illumination/ms-word-is-using-you-to-train-ai-86d6a4d87021

Microsoft and Google have admitted their emissions are soaring as they build out new data centers to power generative AI.

On #TechWontSaveUs, I spoke with Sasha Luccioni to discuss why AI is so computationally intensive and is a climate problem.

https://techwontsave.us/episode/229_generative_ai_is_a_climate_disaster_w_sasha_luccioni

No working screen reader for nine years* but, hey, you folks want some AI with that?

Let Fedora know what you think in their survey to add generative AI to the operating system:

https://fedoraproject.limequery.com/142117?lang=en

#AI #LLM #GenerativeAI #Fedora #a11y #priorities

*

The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.