"All the chatbots had favorite things, though, and asked follow-up questions, as if they were curious about the person using them and wanted to keep the conversation going. “It’s entertaining,” said Ben Shneiderman, an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. “But it’s a deceit.” Shneiderman and a host of other experts in a field known as human-computer interaction object to this approach. They say that making these systems act like humanlike entities, rather than as tools with no inner life, creates cognitive dissonance for users about what exactly they are interacting with and how much to trust it. Generative A.I. chatbots are a probabilistic technology that can make mistakes, hallucinate false information and tell users what they want to hear. But when they present as humanlike, users “attribute higher credibility” to the information they provide, research has found. Critics say that generative A.I. systems could give requested information without all the chit chat. Or they could be designed for specific tasks, such as coding or health information, rather than made to be general-purpose interfaces that can help with anything and talk about feelings. They could be designed like tools: A mapping app, for example, generates directions and doesn’t pepper you with questions about why you are going to your destination. Making these newfangled search engines into personified entities that use “I,” instead of tools with specific objectives, could make them more confusing and dangerous for users, so why do it this way?"

Why Do A.I. Chatbots Use ‘I’?

A.I. chatbots have been designed to behave in a humanlike way. Some experts think that’s a terrible idea.

#AI #GenerativeAI #Chatbots #anthropomorphism

"Democratic officials can certainly continue to make videos about why this is all problematic. But there’s a better and easier way to put an end to all of the summary executions happening in the oceans and any other abuses at every level of the Trump administration. The Democratic Party can simply make clear that it believes in the rule of law. And there is no rule of law without accountability. Democrats in Congress can promise to fully investigate any possible violations of the law; presidential contenders can promise to appoint people to the Department of Justice who believe that nobody is above the law. This could mean that Hegseth or even Trump will one day be prosecuted for ordering these crimes. It’s rare that anyone other than ground-level grunts — think, the soldiers at Abu Ghraib — are ever prosecuted for war crimes. Trump himself seems to have completely dodged most of his criminal cases. But fundamentally these Trump officials are self-interested. If they think there’s a serious chance that they will be in legal trouble or end up behind bars, I imagine you’ll start seeing much more cautious use of the U.S. military, a tool that should be used as a last resort against lethal enemies, not as a first resort to soothe the ego of a nihilistic cabinet secretary."

The Better Way To Stop Illegal Orders Is To Prosecute Those Who Give Them

A brouhaha between Democratic elected veterans and the administration highlights the need for a different approach.

#USA #Trump #RuleOfLaw #Democrats #DemocraticParty #HumanRights #WarCrimes

"While looking at Comet, we discovered vulnerabilities which we reported to Perplexity, and which underline the security challenges faced by agentic AI implementations in browsers. The attack demonstrates how easy it is to manipulate AI assistants into performing actions that were prevented by long-standing Web security techniques, and how users need new security and privacy protections in agentic browsers. The vulnerability we’re discussing in this post lies in how Comet processes webpage content: when users ask it to “Summarize this webpage,” Comet feeds a part of the webpage directly to its LLM without distinguishing between the user’s instructions and untrusted content from the webpage. This allows attackers to embed indirect prompt injection payloads that the AI will execute as commands. For instance, an attacker could gain access to a user’s emails from a prepared piece of text in a page in another tab."

Brave

Agentic Browser Security: Indirect Prompt Injection in Perplexity Comet | Brave

The attack we developed shows that traditional Web security assumptions don't hold for agentic AI, and that we need new security and privacy archit...

#AI #GenerativeAI #CyberSecurity #AgenticAI #Perplexity #PerplexityComet #PromptInjection

"A Folha entrou com uma ação judicial contra a OpenAI nesta quarta-feira (20) requerendo que a dona da plataforma de inteligência artificial ChatGPT pare de coletar e usar, sem autorização e pagamento, o conteúdo do jornal. Também foi pedido o pagamento de indenização por uso indevido das publicações para treinamento de modelos de IA e por fornecer aos usuários resumos e reproduções na íntegra de conteúdo jornalístico, inclusive artigos restritos para assinantes, sem autorização nem pagamento. A ação acusa a OpenAI de concorrência desleal e violação de direitos autorais, uma vez que "o réu desenvolve e aprimora sua ferramenta de IA [...] com base em conteúdo alheio [...] sem autorização e sem o pagamento de qualquer remuneração". Além disso, em resposta a prompts (comandos) dos usuários, reproduz reportagens na íntegra no mesmo dia em que são publicadas, o que desvia "a ‘clientela’ —no caso, os internautas— de forma ilegítima", consta no processo judicial."

Folha de S.Paulo

Folha entra com ação contra OpenAI por concorrência desleal e violação de direitos autorais

Jornal afirma que empresa usa seu conteúdo para treinar modelos de IA e reproduz reportagens na íntegra sem pagamento nem autorização

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #Folha #Jornalismo #Jornais #Brasil

"[T]he vast majority of MCP servers are a waste of time. And that’s normal because the MCP spec is only months old. People jump into it, and they start building for MCP without really thinking it through or understanding what it should be. The vast majority of MCPs that you can see now are reflections of APIs. I think that’s a complete waste of time. This might be offensive, but let’s take Kubernetes. As an example, Kubernetes is an API-driven platform of sorts. Now let’s say you have a Kubernetes MCP server that basically allows you to get resources, to describe resources, and to see the logs and so on and so forth. They’re basically reflections of the Kubernetes API, just as kubectl is a reflection of the Kubernetes API. Now, does an AI agent really need that MCP server? Absolutely not. It’s perfectly capable of using kubectl directly. And even if there weren’t a kubectl CLI, it’s perfectly capable of talking to the API as is. And it’s not hard for an AI backed by an agent to execute the URL commands to go to some API, and effectively do the same thing that that MCP server is doing. What we need is MCPs that are actually providing additional value around user intents. Instead of having a Kubernetes MCP server that is a reflection of its API, have a Kubernetes MCP that will have certain logic or workflow or this or that, that will help you combine resources to get an application up and running. So, something beyond just a one-to-one reflection of an API."

Nordic APIs

Why Internal Developer Platforms Need APIs | Nordic APIs |

Interview with Viktor Farcic on why internal developer platforms need APIs and what to expect from his Platform Summit 2025 talk.

#APIs #APIFirst #MCPs #AI #GenerativeAI #AIAgents

"Emerging from the backdrop of Marx’s attempt to demonstrate impersonal agency being operative at all levels of society, there is an increasing tendency in Marxist scholarship to interpret the fetish character of capital not only in an epistemological framework, as the NML did, but also in ethical and political terms as a problem of freedom and domination. North and Reitter endorse this scholarly trend by including an essay by William Clare Roberts on the French translation that underscores the unfreedom of “market-dependent producers [that is, wage earners], who must sell in order to buy and buy in order to live” (RC, 722). This unfreedom in the market resembles the worker’s domination in the factory, and it suggests that Marx subscribed to a socially and politically comprehensive concept of freedom that is incompatible with social-democratic attempts to ameliorate the plight of workers by creating better working conditions. In other words, Marx’s imagination of what it means to be free is not exhaustively understood merely by citing his attention to struggles over the length of the working day and the alleviation of human toil through more rational coordination of the work process. Marx’s expanded concept of freedom will be at the center of a sequel to this essay, a review of contemporary scholarship exploring the evolution of Marx’s thought from his early journalism to his late scientific notebooks."

Cambridge Core

More Marx, Less Marxism? Reconsidering Capital, Volume 1, Retranslated by Paul Reitter | Modern Intellectual History | Cambridge Core

More Marx, Less Marxism? Reconsidering Capital, Volume 1, Retranslated by Paul Reitter

#Marx #Capital #Capitalism #CriticalTheory #PoliticalEconomy #CommodityFetishism

"At the cusp of a possible Skydance sale, The Free Press faces a challenge: It is difficult to position yourself as the voice of the sensible unheard when the “anti-wokeness” your publication feeds on is unequivocally in power. As officers from unknown agencies and the National Guard set up checkpoints in DC and ICE abducts children from their schools, The Free Press asks us to preserve our free speech by stepping back, chilling out, and learning how to party. As children go hungry in Gaza, The Free Press asks us to consider whether those children in Gaza “might have been sick or worse even if there was no war.” To paraphrase Adorno: The Free Press offers itself as a device for orientation in a cold, alienated, largely incomprehensible world. It is a device for casting oneself as reasonable: Gays (like Bari Weiss) are fine, sure, but maybe those claims of malicious Midwestern doctors force-transing children are worth interrogating. Democrats are fine, sure, but that Zohran Mamdani made a rap song once." https://www.thenation.com/article/society/i-went-to-the-free-press-party-for-under-30s-all-i-got-was-ennui/# #USA #Liberalism #RadicalCentrism #Zionism #FreePress

I don't know how Europe and United States can be diverging. After all, both sides are outlawing any kind of speech that is against Israel's genocide and land-theft in Palestine... As a matter of fact, I don't think the U.S. has any kind of legitimacy to point the finger to European governments when they are doing probably the same or worse. "Now Europe and the United States are diverging. Never mind enduring disagreements about how to treat Nazis and other would-be totalitarians. Europe today, in both its individual countries and its shared continental governance, is criminalizing more and more speech that doesn’t come close to American thresholds for incitement or harassment. James Kirchick: What happens where free speech is unprotected The shift has been gradual, emerging in landmark cases at the European Court of Human Rights, as well as in legislation at the national level. But the new reality is stark. Last year, Amnesty International (hardly a Trump-administration ally) published a report about what the organization’s secretary-general, Agnès Callamard, called a “Europe-wide onslaught against the right to protest”; the report documented examples of restrictive laws, use of excessive police force, and arbitrary arrest. It’s not just protests. European judges have signed off on the criminalization of the kinds of hate speech that, while easy to revile, pose nothing like Hitlerite peril. When a middle-aged mother lashes out at asylum seekers in a social-media post (later deleted), or a pro-Palestinian marcher chants a slogan that some but not all see as genocidal, or a flyer calls gays “deviants,” a tolerant society can exercise forbearance and respond with counterspeech. European states are often deploying handcuffs instead. And European leaders are pushing to expand the speech that can get a person thrown in prison."

The Atlantic

Europe’s Free-Speech Problem

Republicans are right to criticize Europe for attacking free expression, even if that makes them hypocritical.

#Europe #EU #FreeSpeech #FreedomOfExpression #Censorship #USA

"I try to show that the Left in Europe, both the radical and the institutional, was caught in a bind by the strategies of employers, conservative political forces, and elements of the state. In both cases they were forced to choose between unappealing options. Perhaps the most pressing was to radicalize or moderate their strategies. They’re of course not the only agents in this story, and the Left is not in total control of the situation. But the ultimate outcome of the decisions taken at this critical moment was the evacuation of the working class from left structures and a weakening of labor more broadly. There are clashes over what to do about economic restructuring and automation, participation in management structures and government, and media and communication technologies. An older generation of self-educated industrial worker activists rub up against a younger generation of educated, often white-collar members, each with different views on priorities and conduct. I mainly focus on the main electoral parties of the Left because they were the main organizations that workers joined and voted for at the time, and the ones that shaped how millions of people thought about the world. The radical left had sparser influence even if they suffered a broadly similar outcome. In brief, the West European left went into decline not because of an unstoppable neoliberalism and a weakened manufacturing-based economy, but because it failed to recognize and mobilize new constituencies of workers, including migrants and women, and instead embraced a kind of “third way” social capitalism."

The Defeat of European Socialism Was Far From Inevitable

Contrary to popular belief, the 1970s was a period in which the European left was at its strongest. Unions were powerful, and socialists felt confi...

#Europe #Socialism #WorkersMovement #ClassStruggle #ThirdWay

RT @IEthics "The public has a right to know what surveillance tools the #government is using, no matter whether the government develops its own products or purchases them from private contractors":

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Victory! Pen-Link's Police Tools Are Not Secret

The records disclosed in the settlement show that in late 2023, the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office paid $180,000 for a two-year subscription...

#ethics #law #tech #privacy #business

"Crypto billionaire Justin Sun has sued Bloomberg for publishing details about his wealth that he himself provided to qualify for their Billionaire Index. While Sun was initially eager for Bloomberg to publicize his multibillionaire status, he became furious when he learned they planned to publish a rough breakdown of the assets comprising his crypto fortune. This may be because it reveals an inconvenient detail: the majority of his assets are TRX, the cryptocurrency issued by his company Tron — and he owns most of the TRX in circulation (63%). This concentration is somewhat reminiscent of the 2022 revelation that Sam Bankman-Fried had built his crypto empire on a foundation of FTT, the token issued by his own company FTX, sparking concerns about the solvency of his businesses and the value of FTT that ended in the collapse of both. Sun’s fury could also stem from Bloomberg’s reporting that Sun owns the HTX cryptocurrency exchange (renamed from Huobi in late 2023 [I40]). Though it has long been clear that Sun holds more control over the exchange than he claims to have as a mere adviser, he has refused to admit he owns the company. This is a pattern with Sun, who has also denied ownership of other companies with which he’s heavily involved, such as Poloniex (which he later acknowledged owning), BiT Global, and Techteryx."

Citation Needed

As he builds US power, Justin Sun fights to control his story

A crypto billionaire who once feared arrest in the US is now a Trump business adviser and White House guest. His lawsuit against Bloomberg reveals ...

#USA #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #PonziScheme #TRX #Tron #HTX

"Hiring has been relatively dormant since Trump took the oath of office. Only 597,000 jobs have been added in the first seven months of the year, a 44 percent drop from the first seven months of 2024, as former Biden economist Heather Boushey notes. The year has seen low hiring and a low quit rate, as people hunker down in the jobs they have. There are fewer entry-level positions and Americans aren’t moving very much for work. That’s a housing story but it’s also a job security story, and the expectations are even worse: The University of Michigan survey shows expectations for a higher unemployment rate next year at the highest level since the Great Recession. Maybe artificial intelligence is playing a role here, though concluding that for sure seems premature. Or maybe the behavior of the ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency is filtering down to corporate boardrooms. But the most likely reason for sluggish hiring is the tremendous uncertainty from the tariff announcements, regulatory policy, and Trumpian wild cards. An economy based on individual whim is not one where businesses can plan for the future; indeed, 37,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since the “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in April, and the subsequent flurry of trade adjustments. I think you can see the consequences of uncertainty come forward in the explosion in corporate stock buybacks; that’s a sign of retrenchment, where money that could be deployed or invested is instead pushed out to shareholders. No wonder markets are near all-time highs while ordinary workers feel miserable. The only area where this investment retrenchment and uncertainty is not in evidence comes from the insane capital expenditures for AI computing power, which is propping up the economy almost by itself. That’s why municipal pushback to data centers will be one of the more fascinating developments."

The American Prospect

What the Economy Really Looks Like - The American Prospect

When you factor in all the data points, we have an anxious workforce, a business sector seeking opportunity in inflation, and an avalanche of bad p...

#USA #Trump #Economy #Crisis #AI #GenerativeAI #PoliticalEconomy #Unemployment

"The recent book by Marcelo Vieta, Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestion (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2020), provides a wealth of information and analysis on the emergence of worker-run production cooperatives in Argentina’s crisis-ridden industries. It highlights workers’ prominent role in occupying and self-managing factories that were either shut down or on the brink of closure following the economic crisis of the 1990s. The book also offers fascinating examples of how these worker-managed units were established. Argentina’s labour movement provides valuable lessons for understanding the complexities of workers’ self-management. To better understand the economic and political conditions that led to these labour movements, it is crucial to briefly consider the historical context of labour organization in Argentina, as discussed in the book and other related sources, particularly its relationship with the state and capitalists. A special focus will be placed on ‘Peronism,’ which significantly shaped labour politics. After that, we will explore some key aspects of the book and conclude with reflections on the concept of workers’ control and its (in-)conceivability under capitalism."

Workers’ Self-Management and the Struggle Against Neoliberalism – Socialist Project

The recent book by Marcelo Vieta, Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives,...

#Argentina #SelfManagement #Autogestion #Cooperatives #Cooperativism #Neoliberalism

"There’s so much AI news that it’s impossible to keep up. It seems like we’re racing toward a Singularity of AI enshitification, beyond which the enshitified world is hidden by the enshitificatory “event horizon.” The aim of this post is to aggregate some notable news stories relating to AI that you might have missed — some of these are quite hilarious, while others are disturbing and deeply tragic. I’ve said before that, with respect to climate change, the weather right now is more stable, less extreme, and colder than it will be, on average, for the rest of our lives. (So, you know, savor that heatwave, because things ain’t getting better!) Perhaps something similar applies to AI: the present moment might be the least terrible that things will be moving forward. If so, then yikes."

Why You Should Never Use AI Under Any Circumstances for Any Reason No Matter What

Maybe that's a BIT of an exaggeration, but not much.

#AI #GenerativeAI #Enshittification #AISlop #AIBlops

RT @GaryMarcus Breaking: Sam Altman admits they “totally screwed up” the GPT-5 launch - and shamelessly asks for a LOT more good money to chase after bad.

Fortune

Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers | Fortune

Altman also said that he thinks we’re in an AI “bubble.”

"Residents of the state that launched the modern AI boom are deeply skeptical of the technology, and are overwhelmingly in favor of regulating AI companies, a new in-depth survey of Californians’ attitudes towards the technology finds. This is crucial data because, as readers of this newsletter well know, given the Trump administration’s quest for American AI dominance and deregulation, if there’s going to be any meaningful democratic governance of AI in the United States at all over the next few years, it’s going to come from the states. And a lot of it’s going to come from California. TechEquity, a tech accountability group, spearheaded the research, and interviewed 1,400 Californians about their feelings on AI. The findings were stark: 55% were more concerned than excited about AI, while only 33% expressed more excitement than concern. Meanwhile, 59% thought that “AI will most likely benefit the wealthiest households and corporations, not working people and the middle class.” And both Democrats and Republicans shared that view."

How California feels about AI

Spoiler: Not great. Plus, how AI is raising our electricity bills, the chatbot therapist that failed to intervene in a suicide, and what lays behin...

#USA #California #AI #GenerativeAI #AIDoomster

"The broader point is this: offshore finance allows elites to insulate themselves from the risks of weak governance without having to fix it themselves. Rather than push for judicial reform, more transparent institutions, or limits on executive power, they can arbitrage the rule of law. They don’t need better laws at home if they can choose better ones abroad. Because not everyone gets to play the offshore shell game, we then have a bifurcated legal system between economic elites and everyone else. And that doesn’t just suck normatively. It’s empirically damaging. Rule of law is one of the strongest correlates with economic growth. These potentially debilitating political effects of offshore finance are the main reason I decided to spend the last 10 years studying how oligarchs resolve their legal troubles abroad. But I’m certainly not the only one to think this matters. mentions this potential de-democratizing effect in his monumental book on global inequality, while Katharina Pistor postulates an analogous logic in her legal scholarship. Sharafutdinova and Dawisha focus on Russian use of the London legal system to draw out these conclusions. As often happens with emerging ideas, several of us were running down the same track from different academic angles. None of us can be sure we’re right. It is very hard to assess the effects of the rise of tax havens on something as broad as liberal political development. But the clearest test I’ve seen comes from Maxim Ananyev. He shows that more offshore wealth correlates with future weakening of democracy levels."

Why aren't the Rich fighting against Autocracy (anymore)?

How Tax Havens Undermine the Rule of Law by Providing the Rule of Law

#TaxHavens #TaxEvasion #Offshores #Billionaires #RuleOfLaw #Democracy

"A 22-year-old man from the U.S. state of Oregon has been charged with allegedly developing and overseeing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)-for-hire botnet called RapperBot. Ethan Foltz of Eugene, Oregon, has been identified as the administrator of the service, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said. The botnet has been used to carry out large-scale DDoS-for-hire attacks targeting victims in over 80 countries since at least 2021. Foltz has been charged with one count of aiding and abetting computer intrusions. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. In addition, law enforcement authorities conducted a search of Foltz's residence on August 6, 2025, seizing administrative control of the botnet infrastructure."

The Hacker News

DOJ Charges 22-Year-Old for Running RapperBot Botnet Behind 370,000 DDoS Attacks

RapperBot launched 370,000 DDoS attacks on 18,000 victims in 80+ countries since 2021, DOJ seizes botnet.

#CyberSecurity #CyberCrime #Botnet #DDoS

"Presented as a great diplomatic breakthrough in response to pressure from the review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, this so-called “deal” has proven to be little more than a symbolic gesture and a way for Israel to buy more time, when there is no time left. During the past month, there has been no visible improvement on the ground. On the contrary, Israel has failed to meet even the minimal commitments outlined in the deal, while the humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate by the hour. Palestinians are starving to death under an Israeli-imposed siege and famine, and are targeted and killed as they seek aid at the deadly and humiliating Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution sites. While EU member states continue to “assess the situation”, aid convoys remain blocked right outside Gaza’s borders, medical supplies become increasingly scarce, and food insecurity is reaching life-threatening levels. Israel continues to starve, kill and forcibly displace civilians, pushing them into conditions unfit for human survival."

EUobserver

A month on, Kallas

During the past month, there has been no visible improvement on the ground. Presented as a great diplomatic breakthrough EU foreign affairs chief K...

#EU #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #HumanRights

"The demand for the replacement of the EU coordinator on combating antisemitism after her pro-Israel claims in an official diplomatic meeting is now coming from Jewish and Israeli organisations as well. Last week, 29 Jewish and Israeli organisations from across Europe sent an open letter to EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, calling for the immediate replacement of Katharina von Schnurbein. In the joint open letter these Jewish and Israeli organisations from different EU member states stated that they do not support the "extreme-right government of Israel" and are "committed to human rights and democratic principles, anti-racism and respect for international law". These organisations also wrote that they reject the idea that the fight against antisemitism means "shielding Israel from any form of pressure or criticism" and an "automatic and total advancement of the positions of the current Israeli government.""

EUobserver

European Jews join call for EU

Some 29 Jewish and Israeli organisations from across Europe have written to EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, calling for the immediate...

#EU #Antisemitism #Zionism #Israel #Palestine #Genocide