Bloody hell. There are an estimated fifty guns per person in Haiti.

Three free hostas if I spend over £50, you say? Well, if you insist…. (I learnt recently that hostas are not just edible but — by the somewhat dubious standards of obsessive self-sufficiency types — quite tasty. Not sure I’ll be trying them, although as my mum pointed out when I said this, the slugs definitely think so.)

I guess we had a wet night.

Getting a bit sleety now.

The Conversation

AI disinformation is a threat to elections − learning to spot Russian, Chinese and Iranian meddling in other countries can help the US prepare for 2024

ChatGPT and its ilk give propagandists and intelligence agents a powerful new tool for interfering in politics. The clock is ticking on learning to...

Election season will soon be in full swing in much of the democratic world. Seventy-one percent of people living in democracies will vote in a national election between now and the end of next year. […] Many of those elections matter a lot to the countries that have run social media influence operations in the past. China cares a great deal about Taiwan, Indonesia, India and many African countries. Russia cares about the U.K., Poland, Germany and the EU in general. Everyone cares about the United States. AI image, text and video generators are already beginning to inject disinformation into elections. And that’s only considering the largest players. Every U.S. national election from 2016 has brought with it an additional country attempting to influence the outcome. First it was just Russia, then Russia and China, and most recently those two plus Iran. As the financial cost of foreign influence decreases, more countries can get in on the action. Tools like ChatGPT significantly reduce the price of producing and distributing propaganda, bringing that capability within the budget of many more countries.