AliasAKA

Yes but isn’t this article just about installing a custom launcher on a Google device? Presumably this does not solve data harvesting by Google, which would make this solution, while effective for app launching, probably worse than using an Apple TV device.

Sort of. What they want is no responsibility “wow we didn’t tell it to do that explicitly!” And to convince the public and government officials that “AI is actually really dangerous, so please ban all the foreign competitors on grounds of national security (totally unrelated to our potential lack of earnings and their ability to offer 98% the product for 1% the cost).”

So still most likely publicity stunt. A reproducible one, done only by the largest domestic ones precisely because they are not worried about the question of who is culpable if a law is broken, because they didn’t tell it explicitly to do it and also they still have a couple piles of circular cash they can use on bribes, which may be their only path to keeping the grift train going. They’re in no way in danger of being held accountable here, they do worse things everyday, and their concern is making money, full stop. They will lie cheat and steal their way through circular finance deals, bribes, extortions, anticompetitive behavior, marketing stunts, propaganda, and backroom deals as much as they can to accomplish that goal. When you understand their actions through that lens, well, things like this make sense.

Arguably though, people have constantly been asking for ways to connect and share information with people near and far. Town criers, sign boards, books and letters — the internet is arguably just an extension of these long pursued human interests, things humans have been asking for.

AI doesn’t match in the same way. I guess some people do want sycophants, right or wrong. But I think most people want truth, and want the environment to not be plundered.

It can be “easy” depending on your definition of easy. For the average person, no, not easy. For a tech person, maybe, depending on their interests and proficiencies. Easiest is likely using a firewall on the router blocking all outbound and inbound WAN connections (for the MAC address associated with the device, assuming it doesn’t try to rotate MAC addresses or hop on any open WiFi networks around you). Some devices will straight refuse to work if you do this, however. So you have to do research and be careful about which products you buy.

If you want a vacuum, see the valetudo link I posted in another comment. It has some options for this that you can load local only custom firmware (and integrate it with home assistant).

You can have local control over such things, and IOT devices should be locked down to only ever access via LAN anyways.

https://valetudo.cloud/

Don’t buy IOT devices you can’t control. If it’s not usable via valetudo or is offline capable don’t get it. Tell your friends and family the same. Own your technology, limit your attack surfaces.

I think nekokoneko above has it right, trying to misattribute blame to the user. Basically, he wants to blame the user for using the service, instead of fixing the service so it doesn’t produce heinously horrible things on request. It shouldn’t work, but who knows with the amount of money he has and the lack of money on the other side. The goal is to establish a small precedent, though if someone sues xAI for making a product that makes this kind of refuse, I doubt such a precedent would hold much water.

No, because when they do the training and actual updates to the model weights, they are very likely heavily favoring their internal renditions of preferred response to certain queries. So even if they included such things from online scraping, they’d essentially wipe the sentiment with internal overrides (most likely, LLM models are very big, you could absolutely get it to say almost anything verbatim it’s seen in the training data if you tried).

It’s a hard problem, but there is likely a way with cryptography and upload to server that would be verifiable. Honestly this may be the only legitimate use of blockchain.

I think it’s more likely that we’ll need some cryptographic verification at time of recording to be valid, or a physical medium like film to be present. So perhaps film cameras or discs (non rewritable) have a resurgence.