YourNetworkIsHaunted

AI Overturns Centuries of Forensic Fingerprinting Practice?

Published in Science... Advances

Probably a fair bit to sneer at in the actual study that I'm missing, and the article I first found it in is peak AI Hype. (Big Forensics is trying to keep you from knowing the Truth as found by an undergrad with a GPU) But the part that I found most concerning is that even the whole paper doesn't appear to break down their 77% accuracy index and provide the specific result ratios that go into it. In a field where each false positive represents a step on the road to innocent people being convicted of major crimes I would really like to know that number specifically.

Looks like that is indeed the post. I have a number of complaints, but the most significant one is actually in the early part of the narrative where they just assume "companies start to integrate AI" with little detail on how this is done, what kind of value it creates over their competitors, whether it's profitable for anyone, etc. I'm admittedly trusting David Gerard's and Ed Zitron's overall financial analysis here, but at present it seems like the trajectory is moving in the opposite direction, with the AI industry as a whole looking likely to flame out as they burn through their ability to raise capital without ever actually finding a net return on that investment. At which point all the rest of it is sci-fi nonsense. Like, if you want to tell me a story about how we get from here to The Culture (or I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream), those are the details that need to be filled in. How do the intermediate steps actually work. Otherwise it's the same story we've been reading since the 70s.

I thought you had to wait at least a few generations to start inventing bullshit evo-psych-adjacent explanations for stuff.

Also this joke was funny when XKCD did it in the alt text 16 years ago. Jesus how has it been 16 years what the hell

Neither, actually. They were testing it by asking how many "T"s appeared in "Llama Four" and it kept saying "2" so they decided to roll with it.

I also legitimately can't tell the degree to which they don't understand they're LARPing a dystopia versus how much they completely understand that and that's why it's gonna be so awesome for them once they make fetch happen.

A massive domestic infrastructure project with little actual demand? In China of all places? I don't believe it

It's almost like the tech industry relies on a great deal of general stability, education, and other aspects of society that are broadly considered the responsibility of the state. I think there's a stock line here about libertarians and cats?

If he got into specifics people might think "Damn, I've never had that kind of experience with working-class New Yorkers. What gives?" and he might have to consider let alone admit that he was an asshole to someone.

Given the apparent state of the art for autogenerated captions (and by extension the initial challenge of speech recognition) being firmly in the "good enough" range I would not trust the chain of speech recognition -> translation -> text-to-speech. That's a lot of room for errors to chain, multiply, and obscure themselves through GIGO even if the latter two steps did work as expected.

So the primary doctrine is basically tech bros rewriting standard millenarian christianity from mythic fantasy into science fiction. But it seems like the founder wants to be a silicon valley influencer more than he wants to be a proper cult leader, meaning that some of the people who take this shit seriously have accumulated absurd amounts of money and power and occasionally the more deranged subgroups will spin off into a proper cult with everything that entails -- including, now, being involved in multiple homicides!

That's like a solid centiMoR, which is conveniently the share of HPMoR in which anything actually happens.

Jesus, fine, I'll watch it already, God.