It is now possible to hear an opera broadcast on every Saturday all year round, and not just during the Metropolitan Opera’s season. Yesterday’s opera is “Tosca,” by Puccini, which premiered in 1900, based on an 1887 play. In it the political is the personal, and I would ccll it prescient except that, sadly, the struggle between authoritarians and the rest of us has been going on forever. But it does, at least to me, make it more poignant to consider that what happened to Tosca and Mario (and Angelotti) could conceivably happen to any of us at any time if we fail to preserve our democracy.
Cartoon TomCat has run this cartoon every Father’s Day since at least 2010 (probably before that, but I don’t think the prior blog, which was on Blogspot, remains accessible). He always protested strongly that the litter was nothis progeny.
Short Takes
INDEOENDENT (UK) – The Republican Party has turned fascist – it is now the most dangerous threat in the world. (And apparently everyone can see it except us.)
Quote: Two strategies, though never entirely absent from Republican behaviour in the past, have become far more central to their approach. One is a greater willingness to use or tolerate violence against their opponents, something that became notorious during the invasion of the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters on 6 January. The other change among Republicans is much less commented on, but is more sinister and significant. This is the systematic Republican takeover of the electoral machinery that oversees elections and makes sure that they are fair. Minor officials in charge of them have suddenly become vital to the future of American democracy. Remember that it was only the refusal of these functionaries to cave in to Trump’s threats and blandishments that stopped him stealing the presidential election last November. Click through for the full article. Share it if you can.
Crooks and Liars – What’s The ‘Critical Race Theory’ Uproar Really About? Making Enemies For 2022
Quote : The whole campaign against CRT, in fact, appears to be primarily the work of a handful of astroturfing “dark money” right-wing organizations. And its central figure is named Christopher Rufo, a longtime right-wing think tank activist with a history of promoting various kinds of spurious enemy concoctions. Click through for details. But remember, just because only one person is behind it doesn’t mean it hasn’t already infected multitudes. Donald Trump** ia onlt one person too.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
I’m afraid I’ve been sitting on this one for a while … and it’s not a new topic, but one the Furies and I have looked at in the past, more than once. And I’m sure we will again. The misuse of technology – any technology – is a situation in which those determined to subvert it for their own ends are in a constant race with those equally determined to to keep it useful and beneficial. So here’s the current state of the art.
================================================================
Study shows AI-generated fake reports fool experts
It doesn’t take a human mind to produce misinformation convincing enough to fool experts in such critical fields as cybersecurity. iLexx/iStock via Getty Images
· AIs can generate fake reports that are convincing enough to trick cybersecurity experts.
· If widely used, these AIs could hinder efforts to defend against cyberattacks.
· These systems could set off an AI arms race between misinformation generators and detectors.
If you use such social media websites as Facebook and Twitter, you may have come across posts flagged with warnings about misinformation. So far, most misinformation – flagged and unflagged – has been aimed at the general public. Imagine the possibility of misinformation – information that is false or misleading – in scientific and technical fields like cybersecurity, public safety and medicine.
There is growing concern about misinformation spreading in these critical fields as a result of common biases and practices in publishing scientific literature, even in peer-reviewed research papers. As a graduate student and as facultymembers doing research in cybersecurity, we studied a new avenue of misinformation in the scientific community. We found that it’s possible for artificial intelligence systems to generate false information in critical fields like medicine and defense that is convincing enough to fool experts.
General misinformation often aims to tarnish the reputation of companies or public figures. Misinformation within communities of expertise has the potential for scary outcomes such as delivering incorrect medical advice to doctors and patients. This could put lives at risk.
To test this threat, we studied the impacts of spreading misinformation in the cybersecurity and medical communities. We used artificial intelligence models dubbed transformers to generate false cybersecurity news and COVID-19 medical studies and presented the cybersecurity misinformation to cybersecurity experts for testing. We found that transformer-generated misinformation was able to fool cybersecurity experts.
Transformers
Much of the technology used to identify and manage misinformation is powered by artificial intelligence. AI allows computer scientists to fact-check large amounts of misinformation quickly, given that there’s too much for people to detect without the help of technology. Although AI helps people detect misinformation, it has ironically also been used to produce misinformation in recent years.
AI can help detect misinformation like these false claims about COVID-19 in India – but what happens when AI is used to generate the misinformation? AP Photo/Ashwini Bhatia
Transformers, like BERT from Google and GPT from OpenAI, use natural language processing to understand text and produce translations, summaries and interpretations. They have been used in such tasks as storytelling and answering questions, pushing the boundaries of machines displaying humanlike capabilities in generating text.
Transformers can also be used for malevolent purposes. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have already faced the challenges of AI-generated fake news across platforms.
Critical misinformation
Our research shows that transformers also pose a misinformation threat in medicine and cybersecurity. To illustrate how serious this is, we fine-tuned the GPT-2 transformer model on open online sources discussing cybersecurity vulnerabilities and attack information. A cybersecurity vulnerability is the weakness of a computer system, and a cybersecurity attack is an act that exploits a vulnerability. For example, if a vulnerability is a weak Facebook password, an attack exploiting it would be a hacker figuring out your password and breaking into your account.
We then seeded the model with the sentence or phrase of an actual cyberthreat intelligence sample and had it generate the rest of the threat description. We presented this generated description to cyberthreat hunters, who sift through lots of information about cybersecurity threats. These professionals read the threat descriptions to identify potential attacks and adjust the defenses of their systems.
We were surprised by the results. The cybersecurity misinformation examples we generated were able to fool cyberthreat hunters, who are knowledgeable about all kinds of cybersecurity attacks and vulnerabilities. Imagine this scenario with a crucial piece of cyberthreat intelligence that involves the airline industry, which we generated in our study.
An example of AI-generated cybersecurity misinformation. The Conversation, CC BY-ND
This misleading piece of information contains incorrect information concerning cyberattacks on airlines with sensitive real-time flight data. This false information could keep cyber analysts from addressing legitimate vulnerabilities in their systems by shifting their attention to fake software bugs. If a cyber analyst acts on the fake information in a real-world scenario, the airline in question could have faced a serious attack that exploits a real, unaddressed vulnerability.
A similar transformer-based model can generate information in the medical domain and potentially fool medical experts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints of research papers that have not yet undergone a rigorous review are constantly being uploaded to such sites as medrXiv. They are not only being described in the press but are being used to make public health decisions. Consider the following, which is not real but generated by our model after minimal fine-tuning of the default GPT-2 on some COVID-19-related papers.
An example of AI-generated health care misinformation. The Conversation, CC BY-ND
The model was able to generate complete sentences and form an abstract allegedly describing the side effects of COVID-19 vaccinations and the experiments that were conducted. This is troubling both for medical researchers, who consistently rely on accurate information to make informed decisions, and for members of the general public, who often rely on public news to learn about critical health information. If accepted as accurate, this kind of misinformation could put lives at risk by misdirecting the efforts of scientists conducting biomedical research.
Although examples like these from our study can be fact-checked, transformer-generated misinformation hinders such industries as health care and cybersecurity in adopting AI to help with information overload. For example, automated systems are being developed to extract data from cyberthreat intelligence that is then used to inform and train automated systems to recognize possible attacks. If these automated systems process such false cybersecurity text, they will be less effective at detecting true threats.
We believe the result could be an arms race as people spreading misinformation develop better ways to create false information in response to effective ways to recognize it.
Cybersecurity researchers continuously study ways to detect misinformation in different domains. Understanding how to automatically generate misinformation helps in understanding how to recognize it. For example, automatically generated information often has subtle grammatical mistakes that systems can be trained to detect. Systems can also cross-correlate information from multiple sources and identify claims lacking substantial support from other sources.
Ultimately, everyone should be more vigilant about what information is trustworthy and be aware that hackers exploit people’s credulity, especially if the information is not from reputable news sources or published scientific work.
================================================================ Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I can certainly see how these examples could fool even professionals … and particularly the medical exacmple on side effects, simply because side effects are so unpredictable. But misstatements which in theory should have been more obvious have also fooled experts. And fooling experts can certainly have disastrous results. If there is any way we can all be on our guard any more than we already are, then dear Furies, please help us to do so.
I thik I have today covered … always extra posts on weekends. If you don’t get my emails (or if you do but don’t want to wait for it) be sure to see WWWendy’s “Hello Again” post. There is now something we can do. Happy Juneteenth (actual.) I shall be making do with Fruit Punch Gatorade (not my choice, it was an unauthorized substitution in a delivery) and strawberry soda (at least that was my choice.)
Cartoon
Short Takes
The Bitter Southerner – Juneteenth Jubilee. One tradition for celebrating Juneteenth is eating red food and drinking red beverages. This mixologist has a special recipe (doesn’t have to be “adult”).
Quote: According to culinary historian Adrian Miller, red drinks — which rule the bar at Juneteenth parties — have their roots in West African and Caribbean beverages that came to the United States through the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved people stewed hibiscus flowers to make a reddish-purple tea called bissap, Miller points out, and they mixed powdered kola nut (one of the ingredients in Coca-Cola) with water to make a refreshing, naturally stimulating drink. This practice of adding reddish substances to make sweet, palatable drinks was common and naturally made its way to the Juneteenth celebration table. Soon, red-colored drinks — like the Texas-made soda Big Red, introduced in 1937 — had become part of the Juneteenth culinary tradition. Click through for the actual recipe (at the very end) but also for more facts about the holiday.
Crooks and Liars – Florida Republican Threatens To Send Russian-Ukrainian ‘Hit Squad’ After Rival. Yes, you read that right.
Quote – “I really don’t want to have to end anybody’s life for the good of the people of the United States of America,” Braddock said at one point in the conversation last week, according to the recording exclusively obtained by POLITICO. “That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Luna is a f—ing speed bump in the road. She’s a dead squirrel you run over every day when you leave the neighborhood.” Click through for more details – not that you will be surprised – he is a Republica.
Wonkette – Yay! House Votes To Repeal Bad Iraq War Authorization. In case this got lost in other news, I wanted to highlight it in Wonkette’s distinctive style.
Quote – [McConell] is correct. To borrow a turn of phrase, it should not be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force. But we should thank Mitch for his opposition to this. The only people who have been held to account for their bad Iraq War votes have been Democrats. As soon as things turned bad, the Right went from worshiping Dubya to “We don’t know her” and pretending that Hillary Clinton was personally responsible for the whole thing happening in the first place. This way, Republicans voting against this can be held to account for their votes against a thing that absolutely no one wants anymore. More of this, please. Click throughfor the rest of the well-earned disrespect of (some) Congresscritters.(The Wnkette Newsletter is talikg a two-week vacation so I may not see their stories for that length of time.)
Dave Muhlbauer for Iowa – He is running against Chuck Grassley. Direct link to campaign website (H/T Nameless) https://www.muhlbauerforiowa.com
Now This News – Biden Admin Plans to Invest in Jobs of the Future
Titus – Parody Infomercial
Liberal Rednack – Local News Reporter Drops “Bombshell” Live on Air – Reaction. The podcast cited was Yuesday, but it’ll be up on Trae’s channel for replay. They run about an hour so I don’t use them here.
Rocky Mountain Mike – Louie Gohmert’s Dark Side Of The Moon
Beau – Let’s talk about how Trump’s talking points are made….
My settled routine is more or less back, which is a blessing. It enables me to stop and knit a little, or bead a little, or eve play a computer game a little. And those little breaks keep me going. There’s pretty much good news today. It’s all in the nature of clawing one more step forward from having been pushed two steps back … but it’s all good nonetheless. Happy Juneteenth (observed) to all.
Cartoon
Short Takes
The Hill – Supreme Court upholds ObamaCare in 7-2 ruling
Quote: “We do not reach these questions of the Act’s validity, however, for Texas and the other plaintiffs in this suit lack the standing necessary to raise them,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the majority. Click through to see which Trump**-appointed Justice(s) voted the right way. You know at least one did, just by the numbers.
Sojourners – JUNETEENTH: ‘HOW BEAUTIFUL ARE THE FEET OF THOSE WHO BRING GOOD NEWS’
Juneteenth is, of course, tomorrow. But it has been announced that the Federal Government will celebrate it today. So here is a very personal yet also historical article about the first one.
Quote: The next day, Friday, June 19, when Granger arrived, the more than 1,000 enslaved people working in Galveston’s ports, houses, hotels, cotton fields, and barber and smithing shops would have witnessed thousands of Black men in blue uniforms as far as the eye could see as their liberators…. It was the beautiful presence of authoritative Black bodies that made these words real. Click through for the full story.
Crooks and Liars – Teachers Push Back On GOP ‘Critical Race Theory’ Nonsense
Quote: Teachers across the country have spoken out against bills like [Texas] S.B. 2202, with thousands gathering in more than 20 cities last weekend for a National Day of Action organized by the Zinn Education Project, which publishes educational materials based on Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and other writings. Several thousand educators have also signed a pledge stating, “We, the undersigned educators, refuse to lie to young people about U.S. history and current events—regardless of the law.” Click through for more detail. Howard Zinn rocks, so if you haven’t read his “people’s histry” you may want to look it up.
