Mitch's Blog

Ina Fried at Axios AI+: AI’s biggest danger isn’t that it can be used to make up lies — human beings are already great at lying. It’s that bad people can claim that inconvenient facts are AI-generated deepfakes.

Many people saw big crowds at Harris rallies, but Trump claims the photos and videos were manufactured by AI.

Warnings about the danger of deepfakes have helped arm the public against an expected flood of fakery.

• But they’ve also unavoidably made it possible to question the trustworthiness of any evidence you don’t like.
• The next time a recording surfaces of some private event where a politician said something damaging, it will be that much easier to deny it.

Some Jan. 6 defendants tried to argue that photos showing them attacking the U.S. Capitol were AI-generated fakes, invoking what a recent American Bar Association article calls “the deepfake defense.”

• “The growing use of AI-generated false and misleading information is exacerbating the challenge of the so-called liar’s dividend, in which widespread wariness of falsehoods on a given topic can muddy the waters to the extent that people disbelieve true statements,” a Freedom House report last year argued.

…

• A world in which nobody trusts anything is one where autocratic leaders can easily mobilize hate and invent their own realities.

The bottom line: As Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny,” puts it, “What authoritarians do is they say, ‘Look, there’s no truth at all. Sure you don’t trust me – but don’t trust them, or them, or certainly not the media. Don’t trust anybody.'”

• “And so just stay on your couch, basically … just do nothing. Affect a pose of cynicism. Be equally skeptical about everything.”

Timothy Sandefur at Discourse Magazine:

It was 50 years ago this month that American science fiction writer John Varley – who celebrates his 77th birthday today–published his first short story. It sparked a rapid rise that brought him the praise of the genre’s most prominent figures, along with multiple Hugo and Nebula awards (the science fiction equivalent of the Pulitzer). Isaac Asimov was among the many who called him the natural successor to Robert A. Heinlein.

Yet despite the immense admiration Varley has enjoyed both within the science fiction community and without (Tom Clancy called him “the best writer in America”), he has never gained the following that Asimov or Heinlein enjoyed. That’s a shame because his unique blend of imagination and realism–and his underlying belief that freedom is essential to the human personality–make him one of the finest authors ever to set his fiction in the future….

Varley moved to San Francisco as a young man, and the “hippie element” plays an important role in his fiction, “not (or not usually) in the sense of ‘tune in, turn on, drop out,’ but of rebellion, self-reliance, hard work and creativity that remain underappreciated elements of the ’60s counterculture.”

Contrary to the popular stereotype of hippies as drugged-out, unemployed hitchhikers, many members of the Woodstock generation (Varley attended Woodstock, by accident, after getting stuck in the traffic jam while driving through New York) put a heavy emphasis on manual trades, intellectual innovation and self-improvement. Many members of the counterculture weren’t anti-capitalist per se, but were committed to what historian David Farber calls “right livelihood”: that is, a life of genuineness not offered by what they called “the Establishment.”

Dash: Unlike physical machines, the institutions that make up society are never broken. They always do precisely what they were designed to do.

… when our carceral system causes innocent people to be held in torturous or even deadly conditions because they could not afford bail, we must understand that this is the system working correctly. It is doing the thing it is designed to do. When we shout about the effect that this system is having, we are not filing a bug report, we are giving a systems update, and in fact we are reporting back to those with agency over the system that it is working properly….

In my own life, I’ve found the greatest reluctance to embrace this idea, and strongest rejection of its obvious truth, comes from the politically moderate, centrist-leaning suburban folks…. “

Accepting the principle of POSIWID is “a prerequisite for optimism that actually has impact. Mindless optimism says, ‘this system is supposed to have a good output, therefore if we support it hard enough, it’ll do the right thing.’”

The app includes a DOS emulator so it can run on modern Windows, and Sawyer says it also supports Mac and Linux, according to Lia Proven at The Register.

WordStar users include Sawyer, who’s still using it, as well as Arthur C. Clarke, Anne Rice, George R. R. Martin (who still used it as of 2014), William F. Buckley Jr. and Ralph Ellison.

Sawyer’s project may be illegal — he declared WordStar to be abandonware but it may still technically be somebody’s intellectual property.

I was more of a XyWrite guy. I wonder whether there’s a version that runs on the Mac?