Month: July 2023

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Bungie hitting Comer with nearly half a million dollars of damages for harassing their employee. (credit: Bungie)

A Washington state judge has issued a $489,000 default judgment against a West Virginia man who sustained an extended and targeted harassment campaign against a Destiny 2 community manager. Beyond the direct victory for Bungie and its employee, though, the case sets a new legal precedent for companies seeking to recover expenses related to similar harassment of their staffers.

The judge's order, as shared by paralegal Kathryn Tewson (who worked on the case), details what Tewson calls "sociopathic conduct" by one Jesse James Comer, who became "incensed" after an unidentified Bungie community manager promoted fan art by a black artist. Comer then proceeded with a campaign of what the court describes as "carpet bombing" the community manager with texts and "hideous, bigoted voicemails," including multiple requests "to create options in its game in which only persons of color would be killed."

The harassment extended to Comer sending "a virtually inedible, odiferous pizza" to the target's address, a "pizza-shaped threat" that caused the manager and their family to "legitimately fear... for their safety, as someone clearly was targeting them and knew where they lived."

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of James Madison writing the US Constitution using AI. (credit: Midjourney / Benj Edwards)

If you feed America's most important legal document—the US Constitution—into a tool designed to detect text written by AI models like ChatGPT, it will tell you that the document was almost certainly written by AI. But unless James Madison was a time traveler, that can't be the case. Why do AI writing detection tools give false positives? We spoke to several experts—and the creator of AI writing detector GPTZero—to find out.

Among news stories of overzealous professors flunking an entire class due to the suspicion of AI writing tool use and kids falsely accused of using ChatGPT, generative AI has education in a tizzy. Some think it represents an existential crisis. Teachers relying on educational methods developed over the past century have been scrambling for ways to keep the status quo—the tradition of relying on the essay as a tool to gauge student mastery of a topic.

As tempting as it is to rely on AI tools to detect AI-generated writing, evidence so far has shown that they are not reliable. Due to false positives, AI writing detectors such as GPTZero, ZeroGPT, and OpenAI's Text Classifier cannot be trusted to detect text composed by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

Enlarge / File photo of a hotfire test of a Blue Origin BE-4 engine. (credit: Blue Origin)

Welcome to Edition 6.02 of the Rocket Report! I'm on my third week at Ars, and the space beat is as busy as ever. Going forward, Eric and I will alternate work on the Rocket Report every other week. SpaceX broke its own booster reuse record this week, and a Chinese company made history with the first methane-fueled rocket to achieve orbit. Back on Earth, Blue Origin blew up an engine that was supposed to fly on ULA's second Vulcan rocket.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Zhuque-2 rocket makes history. A commercial Chinese firm named LandSpace launched its Zhuque-2 rocket July 11 (US time) and made history as the first company to send a methane-fueled launcher into orbit, beating a bevy of US vehicles to the milestone, Ars reports. In its current form, the Zhuque-2 rocket can loft a payload of up to 1.5 metric tons into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit.