Month: April 2023

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This week, The Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh got hacked, leading a hacker called Doomed to gain unfettered access to his Twitter, Google, and Microsoft accounts. A journalist named Dell Cameron then tweeted to encourage the hacker to contact him, then published an interview with Doomed for Wired. Tweeting out that story—Cameron confirmed on Mastodon—ultimately got the tech policy reporter permanently suspended from Twitter for violating the social platform’s policy on distributing hacked materials.

Now, Walsh is threatening to sue “members of the media who openly solicited stolen information” from his phone, he tweeted. Announcing that The Daily Wire’s team was assisting him with legal counsel, he warned journalists like Cameron that he could afford to hire “very good lawyers.”

Walsh could not immediately be reached for comment. Cameron declined to comment. Yesterday, Wired tweeted a statement from its managing editor, Hemal Jhaveri.

Enlarge

This week, The Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh got hacked, leading a hacker called Doomed to gain unfettered access to his Twitter, Google, and Microsoft accounts. A journalist named Dell Cameron then tweeted to encourage the hacker to contact him, then published an interview with Doomed for Wired. Tweeting out that story—Cameron confirmed on Mastodon—ultimately got the tech policy reporter permanently suspended from Twitter for violating the social platform’s policy on distributing hacked materials.

Now, Walsh is threatening to sue “members of the media who openly solicited stolen information” from his phone, he tweeted. Announcing that The Daily Wire’s team was assisting him with legal counsel, he warned journalists like Cameron that he could afford to hire “very good lawyers.”

Walsh could not immediately be reached for comment. Cameron declined to comment. Yesterday, Wired tweeted a statement from its managing editor, Hemal Jhaveri.

Enlarge / A promotional image of Dialogue Boost. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon has introduced a new feature to Prime Video called Dialogue Boost. It's intended to isolate dialogue and make it louder relative to other sounds in streaming videos on the service.

Amazon describes how it works in a blog post:

Dialogue Boost analyzes the original audio in a movie or series and intelligently identifies points where dialogue may be hard to hear above background music and effects. Then, speech patterns are isolated and audio is enhanced to make the dialogue clearer. This AI-based approach delivers a targeted enhancement to portions of spoken dialogue, instead of a general amplification at the center channel in a home theater system.

Not all content will be eligible for the dialogue boost feature, though—at least not yet. Amazon says it "has initially launched on select Amazon Originals worldwide" like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Big Sick.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

From the outside, Google Bard looks like a rushed product to try to compete with ChatGPT, and some Google employees share those sentiments. A new report from Bloomberg interviews 18 current and former workers and came away with a pile of damning commentary and concerns about AI ethics teams that were "disempowered and demoralized" so Google could get Bard out the door.

According to the report, Google employees were asked to test Bard pre-release for their feedback, which was mostly ignored so Bard could launch quicker. Internal discussions viewed by Bloomberg called Bard “cringe-worthy” and “a pathological liar.” When asked how to land a plane, it gave incorrect instructions that would lead to a crash. One employee asked for scuba instructions and got an answer they said “would likely result in serious injury or death.” One employee wrapped up Bard's problems in a February post titled, “Bard is worse than useless: please do not launch.” Bard launched in March.

You could probably say many of the same things about the AI competitor Google is chasing, OpenAI's ChatGPT. Both can give biased or false information and hallucinate incorrect answers. Google is far behind ChatGPT, and the company is panicked over ChatGPT's ability to answer questions people might otherwise type into Google Search. ChatGPT's creator, OpenAI has been criticized for having a lax approach to AI safety and ethics. Now Google finds itself in a tough situation. If the company's only concern is placating the stock market and catching up to ChatGPT, it probably isn't going to be able to do that if it slows down to consider ethics issues.