Category Archives: Futurism

"One of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff and I am 100 percent sure they would be mortified to know that I know this." Racy Revelations

This month, the streaming service Plex rolled out a new feature called "Discover Together" that shows people what their friends are watching and the backlash has been explosive.

"This might be the dumbest addition ever and might push me even closer to switching to another service," one commenter wrote under the official announcement.

Why? On top of adding an unsolicited social media aspect to a service that a ton of its users want to use solely as a way to stream their collection of pirated movies and ripped Blu-rays something the company tries to downplay, of course Plex's new feature is a privacy nightmare waiting to happen.

It's already led to some embarrassing disclosures. As 404Media reports, users took notice last week when Plex sent out a "week in review" email that, in some cases, piped people's porn habits straight into their friend's inboxes.

"I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff... and I am 100 percent sure they would be mortified to know that I know this," one user wrote on the Plex Forums, as quoted by 404Media.

Plex originally started as a free media server tool, effectively a way to host a personalized streaming service of sorts using your computer pieced together from downloaded movies, TV shows, and perhaps stuff that's a little more tawdry. In recent years, the company has tried to more-or-less gentrify its image, attaching its own free, ad-supported streaming service in 2019.

The "Discover Together" feature can be seen as a continuation of efforts to monetize the platform. Of course, the porn SNAFU is a pretty comical example of it going wrong, but Plex's feature also has a particularly dystopian slant, as many of its users are complaining.

Hundreds of posts have flooded its official forum with titles like "Discover Together and Week in Review emails are a MASSIVE breach of privacy and trust!" and "Plex crossed a line with 'Your week in review' emails today," per 404.

A huge grievance is that the feature is opt-out rather than opt-in, meaning that it was enabled for many users without them knowing. Plex has fired back, saying in a statement to 404 that it did provide an upfront onboarding process for every user via an email and in-app announcement. With the deluge of complaints, however, something clearly got lost in communication.

Nevertheless, many users argue that this kind of data sharing shouldn't even exist in the first place. Not only is it anti-privacy, but it potentially endangers those with, shall we say, curated movie libraries of dubious provenance.

"The fact that this data is available to you AT ALL That is just... Mind boggling, and completely against the very notion of self hosting," another user wrote, per 404. "Certain entities would LOVE to have that data... which could mean jail time for some."

More on privacy: App That Turned Androids Texts Blue Taken Down After Researchers Discover Something Horrible

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Users Horrified as Streaming Service Tells Friends and Family What ... - Futurism

Whether you like it or not, the internet has entered its AI-generated content era.

With the advent of powerful AI text generators like OpenAI's ChatGPT, the process of optimizing content to be found on Google, known as search engine optimization (SEO), has been turned upside down.

That's in large part due to these tools' ability to churn out content at much faster rates than human writers and at a fraction of the cost.

Given the biblical flood of bottom-shelf AI-generated content polluting the internet today, it's clear that everyday internet users are not going to benefit.

However, some entrepreneurs are hellbent on making a buck by repurposing existing content, laundering it through an AI algorithm, and passing it off as their own.

"We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6 million total traffic from a competitor," bragged Jake Ward, founder of a UK-based SEO content marketing agency called Content Growth, in a recent X thread.

The ruse was as straightforward as it was ethically dubious. By stealing a competitor's sitemap, a file that tells search engines like Google how a website's content is organized, Ward turned "their list of URLs into article titles" and generated "1,800 articles from those titles at scale using AI."

Ward's controversial X thread drew plenty of ire among users.

"I can't believe you are bragging about this," one user replied.

"And you're proud of this?" another user wrote. "Pumping garbage to get to the top of the trash heap? What about trying to make actually good and useful content... oh that's right, it's hard."

It certainly smacks of plagiarism, but unfortunately the law still has a lot of catching up to do. For one, actually proving that AI was used to repurpose content is far from straightforward. AI detectors simply aren't equipped to reliably distinguish between text that was generated by an algorithm and passages that were penned by a human.

Even ChatGPT maker OpenAI admitted earlier this year that educators are out of luck when it comes to checking their pupils' work for plagiarism.

The AI text generator Ward used for his "heist" called Byword, a company he cofounded himself earlier this year that brags openly on its website about an optional feature that allows customers to avoid "AI detection."

"Enabling this feature will instruct Byword to write in a way that's significantly more difficult for detectors to pick up on," the website reads. "Byword does this by varying word and sentence structure in a way that differs from other AI content generators, making Byword's content difficult to detect."

Byword is built on OpenAI's large language model GPT-4 and offers a variety of pricing tiers to its clients, which range from $5 an article to $2,499 a month for "unlimited articles" and a "dedicated server."

The goal is to reduce the amount of effort it takes to generate content and "spend less time on publishing, and more time on strategy," according to the company's website.

But whether the content it spits out can pass the smell test remains to be seen.

We tried the tool for ourselves, generating a 1,600-word blog post based on the keywords "first exoplanet discovered." Besides waxing poetic about how "advancements in astronomical research have revolutionized our understanding of the universe," the blog fails to actually mention the first exoplanet to have been discovered until about three-quarters into the text.

The generated blog also features a hallmark structure of SEO-friendly headers and subheaders that unnecessarily break up the blog's flow and seemingly solely exist to game Google's algorithm,rather than guide the reader.

A separate request to generate an article on the keywords "melting eggs" a prompt that has already led to plenty of hilarity on Google's own AI-based search led to a familiar word salad.

The 1,800-word blog titled "The Art of Melting Eggs: A Culinary Delight" goes into excruciating and nonsensical detail on how to best melt eggs for a "luxurious breakfast."

"Unlike traditional methods of cooking eggs, melting eggs are cooked over very low heat for an extended period of time," the blog reads. It even invites the user to dream of "waking up on a lazy Sunday morning" and treating themselves to some molten eggs.

A 1,500-word blog on "investing in Tesla" made zero mentions of CEO Elon Musk. Given his many outbursts that have sent the EV maker's valuation on a rollercoaster ride, that seems like a pretty glaring omission.

We've come across plenty of instances of high profile publishers using text generators with less-than-stellar results. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed landed in hot water after being caught publishing entire AI-generated articles featuring awkward language and copy-and-pasted phrases.

Other less careful content farms simply forgot to delete the five-word phrase "as an AI language model," which ChatGPT often uses in its answers.

Some companies are taking the trend to its logical conclusion by mocking up entirely AI-generated writers masquerading as humans. Most recently, Futurism found that Sports Illustrated was publishing allegedly AI-generated articles by authors who were themselves entirely AI-generated.

But with his "heist," Ward isn't even putting on any pretenses, and is treating content creation as nothing more than a numbers game.

His experiment paints a dire picture of the current online media landscape, with companies racing to find new ways of having their content rank on Google search results, slavering at display ad revenue or affiliate sales.

Given Ward's success at least judging by his own metrics laundering existing content through AI generators isn't just effective, but is incredibly easy to do.

Whether any human who may come across the content at some point actually benefits from all of this seems entirely beside the point.

In other words, this isn't content aimed at human readers it's a deceitful ploy to trick search engines into wasting people's time.

More on AI content: Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

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Guy Brags About "Stealing" Millions of Pageviews by Rewriting ... - Futurism

Top Gun

The first-ever transatlantic commercial flight running on 100 percent used cooking oil and other plant-based materials went off without a hiccup on Tuesday, according to USA Today but sadly, it flew under the moniker Flight100 and not the more fitting French Fry Express.

No matter Virgin Atlantic's Boeing 787 flew not just from London to New York but also into the history books with its use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in a demonstration that shows it's possible,at least in principle, that aviation could one day be a carbon-neutral industry.

Currently, rules limit the use of SAF to 50 percent on commercial flights. To make Tuesday's journey happen, Virgin Atlantic needed approval from American and British regulators plus months of testing and checking for any safety concerns.

"This flight is super important because its showing us that we can go all the way," said sustainable aviation expert Alastair Blanshard to USA Today.

Making flying carbon neutral is crucial because while aviation makes up just 2 percent of global carbon emissions, the industry is growing more compared to other transportation modes and the prospect of making the sector better for the environment is challenging.

SAF looks promising to aviation experts, but the production of these fuels is nowhere near the scale that aviation needs in order to be carbon zero, according to experts interviewed by USA Today. And the clock is ticking as global warming increases and coming regulations are coming to the fore. For example, the United Kingdom is planning regulation that mandates airlines fly with 10 percent SAF by 2030.

"Right now, SAF production is really scarce, said the Virgin Atlantic chief customer and operating officer Corneel Koster to the news outlet. "It needs to scale up about 150 times, is what we calculated, to be able to hit the 10percent mandate by 2030."

More on airplanes: Pilots Testing Electric Airplane Say It's Weirdly Quiet

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Boeing 787 Flies Across Ocean Powered by Used Cooking Oil - Futurism

Well, this is awkward. Susie Q

Following a very chaotic two weeks, we're still none the wiser as to exactly why OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was sacked. Among theories circulating online,though, was news of a secretive and powerful new AI model at the company, dubbed Q*and pronounced "Q star," which insiders may have wanted to keep from the public until the tech was more fully understood.

And though the name may raise some eyebrows given its secretive nature and the prominence of the deranged "QAnon" conspiracy theory, which is often shortened to just "Q" to be clear, the two obviously have no actual relationship OpenAI may have just been beaten to the punch when it comes to that particular branding opportunity.

Why? Because Amazon's cloud computing division just announced a new AI chatbot aimed at businesses called Amazon Q.

"We think Q has the potential to become a work companion for millions and millions of people in their work life," Adam Selipsky, the chief executive of Amazon Web Services, told the New York Times.

The latest tool isn't meant to take on the likes of OpenAI's ChatGPT, and will compete with Microsoft's AI developer assistant called Copilot instead.

With its announcement, Amazon is also trying to leave behind the perception that the company has been struggling to keep up in a rapidly changing AI industry landscape.

But as far as its abbreviated name is concerned, it's unlikely Amazon was trying to step on OpenAI's toes. Selipsky told the NYT that Q is a play on the word "question" and a nod to the fictional "Star Trek" character of the same name.

Now that Amazon has beaten OpenAI to the market with a "Q"-branded product, it remains to be seen whether Altman's venture will have to refresh its marketing materials.

Besides, Q* doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

More on Q*: OpenAI's Chaos Linked to Super Powerful New AI It Secretly Built

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Amazon Launches Chatbot With Almost Same Name as OpenAI's ... - Futurism

Bad news for sturgeons. Ersatz Eggs

Sorry, Europeans: your delectable and pricey caviar comes with a huge caveat. According to new research, half of it is illegal and in fact may not even be caviar at all.

As detailed in a new study published in the journal Current Biology, a team of researchers examined nearly 150 samples of commercial caviar and sturgeon meat from four European nations Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine near some of the last remaining wild populations of the fish species.

To begin with, they found that some of the fish eggs contained zero traces of sturgeon which as any gastronome will eagerly tell you, means that they don't technically count as caviar, but as merely roe.

More pressingly, however, is their legality. Sturgeon are critically endangered, and thus only caviar coming from farmed sturgeon is allowed to be sold internationally. But the staggering proportion of illegal samples identified by the researchers suggests that efforts to protect wild species of the fish are falling deeply short.

"Our results indicate an ongoing demand for wild sturgeon products, which is alarming, since these products endanger wild sturgeon populations," the researchers wrote in the study.

Found only in the Danube River and the Black Sea, just four species of caviar-producing sturgeon remain in Europe, and all of them have been protected by the Convention on International Trade In Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) since 1998.

In spite of that formal protection, though, an analysis of the samples' DNA and isotope patterns revealed that an alarming 21 percent of the caviar came from wild sturgeons which is very fishy and very illegal.

Before proceeding, a salve for the wounded caviar connoisseur: just three samples still a notable two percent, mind you turned out to be total fakes coming from catfish and perch rather than sturgeon.

Still, 29 percent of these products violated CITES regulations by labeling the caviar with incorrect information on its species and country of origin, while a total 32 percent constituted outright "consumer deception" in most cases meaning that they were marketed as being "wild" when they actually came from a fish farm.

According to the researchers, it's sort of an open secret over there that these "wild" products, fake or not, get sold with little pushback. That such a demand exists should give lawmakers and conservationists considerable pause. And, as the researchers note, European regulators can't cry foul and shift the blame to foreign poaching, because the illegal fishing is happening right at home.

"Although poaching and illegal wildlife trade are often considered a problem in developing countries, these findings bear evidence that a high ratio of poached sturgeon products originates from EU and accession candidate states," the researchers wrote. "The control of caviar and sturgeon trade in the EU and candidate member states urgently needs improvement to ensure that Danube sturgeon populations will have a future."

More on fishing: People Are "Fishing" by Just Throwing Dynamite in the Water

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Scientists Test "Caviar," Alarmed by What They Find - Futurism

Why would you need to protect bulletproof metal? Dark Mode

Despite arguing that its brand-new Cybertruck's stainless steel body panels don't need any paint for protection, Tesla is now offering customers a "self-healing" coat of "premium color paint films" to fully black out their vehicle, as seen on the company's website.

The result is a matte-black, polygonal wedge of metal on four wheels that makes it stand out even more on public streets, for better or for worse.

Tesla claims the coating "protects against scratches" and is "more environmentally friendly than traditional vinyl wraps."

But there's one little problem: the privilege will cost a whopping $6,500, putting the cost of a blacked-out, top-trim Cybertruck well over $100,000. Sure, the truck technically starts at $60,990 for a much less powerful single-motor variant but it won't be available until 2025, according to the company, if it ever sees the light of day.

That's not to mention the company's insistence on making the Cybertruck bulletproof. Why cover a stainless steel armor with a flimsy coat of paint if it's designed to withstand the bullets of an unloading Tommy Gun?

The film comes in two finishes: Satin Black and Satin White. The white, in particular, looks like a substantial departure from the truck's naked stainless steel look.

It's an interesting change of heart, considering Tesla CEO Elon Musk previously said in 2021 that "Tesla Cybertruck can come in any color as long as its nothing."

We got our first glimpse at a matte black Cybertruck a couple of weeks ago, when Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen was spotted driving around Southern California. The fit and finish of his truck, however, left plenty to be desired.

As Electrek points out, Tesla already offers similar wraps for its Model 3 and Y, which are made out of more expensive PPF film compared to a more conventional vinyl material. PPF is often used to protect paint and tends to last longer.

If customers want to save $1,500 and retain the stainless steel look of their Cybertrucks, they can opt for a "satin clear paint film," which may not protect their vehicle from bullet holes but at least it might make it slightly less of a fingerprint magnet.

More on the Cybertruck: Tesla Fans Furious at Disastrous Cybertruck Reveal

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Aha! There's an All-Black Cybertruck - Futurism