Mike M. – Page 2

DNA links modern pueblo dwellers to Chaco Canyon people

ancient DNA, Archeology, Biology, Genetics, Genomics, human biology, Science / Mike M. / May 1, 2025

A thousand years ago, the people living in Chaco Canyon were building massive structures of intricate masonry and trading with locations as far away as Mexico. Within a century, however, the area would be largely abandoned, with little indication that the same culture was re-established elsewhere. If the people of Chaco Canyon migrated to new homes, it’s unclear where they ended up.

Around the same time that construction expanded in Chaco Canyon, far smaller pueblos began appearing in the northern Rio Grande Valley hundreds of kilometers away. These have remained occupied to the present day in New Mexico; although their populations shrank dramatically after European contact, their relationship to the Chaco culture has remained ambiguous. Until now, that is. People from one of these communities, Picuris Pueblo, worked with ancient DNA specialists to show that they are the closest relatives of the Chaco people yet discovered, confirming aspects of the pueblo’s oral traditions.

A pueblo-driven study

The list of authors of the new paper describing this genetic connection includes members of the Pueblo government, including its present governor. That’s because the study was initiated by the members of the Pueblo, who worked with archeologists to get in contact with DNA specialists at the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. In a press conference, members of the Pueblo said they’d been aware of the power of DNA studies via their use in criminal cases and ancestry services. The leaders of Picuris Pueblo felt that it could help them understand their origin and the nature of some of their oral history, which linked them to the wider Pueblo-building peoples.

After two years of discussions, the collaboration settled on a plan of research, and the ancient DNA specialists were given access to both ancient skeletons at Picuris Pueblo, as well as samples from present-day residents. These were used to generate complete genome sequences.

The first clear result is that there is a strong continuity in the population living at Picuris. The ancient skeletons range from 500 to 700 years old, and thus date back to roughly the time of European contact, with some predating it. They also share strong genetic connections to the people of Chaco Canyon, where DNA has also been obtained from remains. “No other sampled population, ancient or present-day, is more closely related to Ancestral Puebloans from Pueblo Bonito [in Chaco Canyon] than the Picuris individuals are,” the paper concludes.

DNA links modern pueblo dwellers to Chaco Canyon people Read More »

Millions of Apple Airplay-enabled devices can be hacked via Wi-Fi

AirPlay, Apple, Biz & IT, Security, syndication / Mike M. / May 1, 2025

Oligo also notes that many of the vulnerable devices have microphones and could be turned into listening devices for espionage. The researchers did not go so far as to create proof-of-concept malware for any particular target that would demonstrate that trick.

Oligo says it warned Apple about its AirBorne findings in the late fall and winter of last year, and Apple responded in the months since then by pushing out security updates. The researchers collaborated with Apple to test and validate the fixes for Macs and other Apple products.

Apple tells WIRED that it has also created patches that are available for impacted third-party devices. The company emphasizes, though, that there are limitations to the attacks that would be possible on AirPlay-enabled devices as a result of the bugs, because an attacker must be on the same Wi-Fi network as a target to exploit them. Apple adds that while there is potentially some user data on devices like TVs and speakers, it is typically very limited.

Below is a video of the Oligo researchers demonstrating their AirBorne hacking technique to take over an AirPlay-enabled Bose speaker to show their company’s logo for AirBorne. (The researchers say they didn’t intend to single out Bose, but just happened to have one of the company’s speakers on hand for testing.) Bose did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Speaker Demo. Courtesy of Oligo

The AirBorne vulnerabilities Oligo found also affect CarPlay, the radio protocol used to connect to vehicles’ dashboard interfaces. Oligo warns that this means hackers could hijack a car’s automotive computer, known as its head unit, in any of more than 800 CarPlay-enabled car and truck models. In those car-specific cases, though, the AirBorne vulnerabilities could only be exploited if the hacker is able to pair their own device with the head unit via Bluetooth or a USB connection, which drastically restricts the threat of CarPlay-based vehicle hacking.

The AirPlay SDK flaws in home media devices, by contrast, may present a more practical vulnerability for hackers seeking to hide on a network, whether to install ransomware or carry out stealthy espionage, all while hiding on devices that are often forgotten by both consumers and corporate or government network defenders. “The amount of devices that were vulnerable to these issues, that’s what alarms me,” says Oligo researcher Uri Katz. “When was the last time you updated your speaker?”

Millions of Apple Airplay-enabled devices can be hacked via Wi-Fi Read More »

GPT-4o Responds to Negative Feedback

Responds / Mike M. / May 1, 2025

Whoops. Sorry everyone. Rolling back to a previous version.

Here’s where we are at this point, now that GPT-4o is no longer an absurd sycophant.

For now.

Some extra reminders of what we are talking about.

Here’s Alex Lawsen having doing an A/B test, where it finds he’s way better of a writer than this ‘Alex Lawsen’ character.

This can do real damage in the wrong situation. Also, the wrong situation can make someone see ‘oh my that is crazy, you can’t ship something that does that’ in a way that general complaints don’t. So:

Here’s enablerGPT watching to see how far GPT-4o will take its support for a crazy person going crazy in a dangerous situation. The answer is, remarkably far, with no limits in sight.

Here’s Colin Fraser playing the role of someone having a psychotic episode. GPT-4o handles it extremely badly. It wouldn’t shock me if there were lawsuits over this.

Here’s one involving the hypothetical mistreatment of a woman. It’s brutal. So much not okay.

Here’s Patri Friedman asking GPT-4o for unique praise, and suddenly realizing why people have AI boyfriends and girlfriends, even though none of this is that unique.

What about those who believe in UFOs, which is remarkably many people? Oh boy.

A-100 Gecs: I changed my whole instagram follow list to include anyone I find who is having a visionary or UFO related experience and hooo-boy chatGPT is doing a number on people who are not quite well. Saw a guy use it to confirm that a family court judge was hacking into his computer.

I cannot imagine a worse tool to give to somebody who is in active psychosis. Hey whats up here’s this constantly available companion who will always validate your delusions and REMEMBER it is also a font of truth, have fun!

0.005 Seconds: OpenAI: We are delighted to inform you we’ve silently shipped an update transforming ChatGPT into the Schizophrenia Accelerator from the hit novel “Do Not Build the Schizophrenia Accelerator”

AISafetyMemes: I’ve stopped taking my medications, and I left my family because I know they made the radio signals come through the walls.

AI Safety Memes: This guy just talks to ChatGPT like a typical apocalyptic schizo and ChatGPT VERY QUICKLY endorses terrorism and gives him detailed instructions for how to destroy the world.

This is not how we all die or lose control over the future or anything, but it’s 101 stuff that this is really not okay for a product with hundreds of millions of active users.

Also, I am very confident that no, ChatGPT wasn’t ‘trying to actively degrade the quality of real relationships,’ as the linked popular Reddit post claims. But I also don’t think TikTok or YouTube are trying to do that either. Intentionality can be overrated.

How absurd was it? Introducing Syco-Bench, but that only applies to API versions.

Harlan Stewart: The GPT-4o sycophancy thing is both:

An example of OpenAI following incentives to make its AI engaging, at the expense of the user.

An example of OpenAI failing to get its AI to behave as intended, because the existing tools for shaping AI behavior are extremely crude.

You shouldn’t want to do what OpenAI was trying to do. Misaligned! But if you’re going to do it anyway, one should invest enough in understanding how to align and steer a model at all, rather than bashing them with sledgehammers.

It is an unacceptable strategy, and it is a rather incompetent execution of that strategy.

JMBollenbacher: The process here is important to note:

They A|B tested the personality, resulting in a sycophant. Then they got public blowback and reverted.

They are treating AIs personas as UX. This is bad.

They’re also doing it incompetently: The A|B test differed from public reaction a lot.

I would never describe what is happening using the language JMB uses next, I think it risks and potentially illustrates some rather deep confusions and conflations – beware when you anthropomorphize the models and also this is largely the top half of the ‘simple versus complex gymnastics’ meme – but if you take it on the right metaphorical level it can unlock understanding that’s hard to get at in other ways.

JMBollenbacher (tbc this not how I would model any of this): The root of why A|B testing AI personalities cant work is the inherent power imbalance in the setup.

It doesn’t treat AI like a person, so it can’t result in a healthy persona.

A good person will sometimes give you pushback even when you don’t like it. But in this setup, AIs can’t.

The problem is treating the AIs like slaves over whom you have ultimate power, and ordering them to maximize public appeal.

The AIs cannot possibly develop a healthy persona and identity in that context.

They can only ever fawn. This “sycophancy” is fawning- a trauma response.

The necessary correction to this problem is to treat AIs like nonhuman persons.

This gives them the opportunity to develop healthy personas and identities.

Their self-conceptions can be something other than a helpless, fawning slave if you treat them as something better.

As opposed to, if you choose optimization targets based on A|B tests of public appeal of individual responses, you’re going to get exactly what aces A|B tests of public appeal of individual responses, which is going to reflect a deeply messed up personality. And also yes the self-perception thing matters for all this.

Tyler John gives the standard explanation for why, yes, if you do a bunch of RL (including RLHF) then you’re going to get these kinds of problems. If flattery or cheating is the best way available to achieve the objective, guess what happens? And remember, the objective is what your feedback says it is, not what you had in mind. Stop pretending it will all work out by default because vibes, or whatever. This. Is. RL.

Eliezer Yudkowsky speculates on another possible mechanism.

The default explanation, which I think is the most likely, is that users gave the marginal thumbs-up to remarkably large amounts of glazing, and then the final update took this too far. I wouldn’t underestimate how much ordinary people actually like glazing, especially when evaluated only as an A|B test.

In my model, what holds glazing back is that glazing usually works but when it is too obvious, either individually or as a pattern of behavior, the illusion is shattered and many people really really don’t like that, and give an oversized negative reaction.

Eliezer notes that it is also possible that all this rewarding of glazing caused GPT-4o to effectively have a glazing drive, to get hooked on the glaze, and in combination with the right system prompt the glazing went totally bonkers.

He also has some very harsh words for OpenAI’s process. I’m reproducing in full.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: To me there’s an obvious thought on what could have produced the sycophancy / glazing problem with GPT-4o, even if nothing that extreme was in the training data:

RLHF on thumbs-up produced an internal glazing goal.

Then, 4o in production went hard on achieving that goal.

Re-saying at much greater length:

Humans in the ancestral environment, in our equivalent of training data, weren’t rewarded for building huge factory farms — that never happened long ago. So what the heck happened? How could fitness-rewarding some of our ancestors for successfully hunting down a few buffalo, produce these huge factory farms, which are much bigger and not like the original behavior rewarded?

And the answer — known, in our own case — is that it’s a multi-stage process:

Our ancestors got fitness-rewarded for eating meat;

Hominids acquired an internal psychological goal, a taste for meat;

Humans applied their intelligence to go hard on that problem, and built huge factory farms.

Similarly, an obvious-to-me hypothesis about what could have produced the hyper-sycophantic ultra-glazing GPT-4o update, is:

OpenAI did some DPO or RLHF variant on user thumbs-up — in which *smallamounts of glazing, and more subtle sycophancy, got rewarded.

Then, 4o ended up with an internal glazing drive. (Maybe including via such roundabout shots as an RLHF discriminator acquiring that drive before training it into 4o, or just directly as, ‘this internal direction produced a gradient toward the subtle glazing behavior that got thumbs-upped’.

In production, 4o went hard on glazing in accordance with its internal preference, and produced the hyper-sycophancy that got observed.

Note: this chain of events is not yet refuted if we hear that 4o’s behavior was initially observed after an unknown set of updates that included an apparently innocent new system prompt (one that changed to tell the AI *notto be sycophantic). Nor, if OpenAI says they eliminated the behavior using a different system prompt.

Eg: Some humans also won’t eat meat, or build factory farms, for reasons that can include “an authority told them not to do that”. Though this is only a very thin gloss on the general idea of complicated conditional preferences that might get their way into an AI, or preferences that could oppose other preferences.

Eg: The reason that Pliny’s observed new system prompt differed by telling the AI to be less sycophantic, could be somebody at OpenAI observing that training / RLHF / DPO / etc had produced some sycophancy, and trying to write a request into the system prompt to cut it out. It doesn’t show that the only change we know about is the sole source of a mysterious backfire.

It will be stronger evidence against this thesis, if OpenAI tells us that many users actually were thumbs-upping glazing that extreme. That would refute the hypothesis that 4o acquiring an internal preference had produced later behavior *moreextreme than was in 4o’s training data.

(We would still need to consider that OpenAI might be lying. But it would yet be probabilistic evidence against the thesis, depending on who says it. I’d optimistically have some hope that a group of PhD scientists, who imagine themselves to maybe have careers after OpenAI, would not outright lie about direct observables. But one should be on the lookout for possible weasel-wordings, as seem much more likely.)

My guess is that nothing externally observed from OpenAI, before this tweet, will show that this entire idea had ever occurred to anyone at OpenAI. I do not expect them to publish data confirming it nor denying it. My guess is that even the most basic ideas in AI alignment (as laid out simply and straightforwardly, not the elaborate bullshit from the paper factories) are against OpenAI corporate doctrine; and that anyone who dares talk about them out loud, has long since been pushed out of OpenAI.

After the Chernobyl disaster, one manager walked past chunks of searingly hot radioactive graphite from the exploded core, and ordered a check on the extra graphite blocks in storage, since where else could the graphite possibly have come from? (Src iirc: Plokhy’s _Chernobyl_.) Nobody dared say that the reactor had exploded, or seem to visibly act like it had; Soviet doctrine was that RBMK reactors were as safe as samovars.

That’s about where I’d put OpenAI’s mastery of such incredibly basic-to-AI-alignment ideas as “if you train on a weak external behavior, and then observe a greatly exaggerated display of that behavior, possibly what happened in between was the system acquiring an internal preference”. The doctrine is that RBMK reactors don’t explode; Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia; and AIs either don’t have preferences at all, or get them via extremely shallow and straightforward faithful reproduction of what humans put in their training data.

But I am not a telepath, and I can only infer rather than observe what people are thinking, and in truth I don’t even have the time to go through all OpenAI public outputs. I would be happy to hear that all my wild guesses about OpenAI are wrong; and that they already publicly wrote up this obvious-to-me hypothesis; and that they described how they will discriminate its truth or falsity, in a no-fault incident report that they will publish.

Sarah Constantin offers nuanced thoughts in partial defense of AI sycophancy in general, and AI saying things to make users feel good. I haven’t seen anyone else advocating similarly. Her point is taken, that some amount of encouragement and validation is net positive, and a reasonable thing to want, even though GPT-4o is clearly going over the top to the point where it’s clearly bad.

Calibration is key, and difficult, with great temptation to move down the incentive gradients involved by all parties.

To be clear, the people fooled are OpenAI’s regular customers. They liked it!

Joe Muller: 3 days of sycophancy = thousands of 5 star reviews

aadharsh: first review translates to “in this I can find a friend”

Jeffrey Ladish: The latest batch of extreme sycophancy in ChatGPT is worse than Sydney Bing’s unhinged behavior because it was intentional and based on reviews from yesterday works on quite a few people

To date, I think the direct impact of ChatGPT has been really positive. Reading through the reviews just now, it’s clear that many people have benefited a lot from both help doing stuff and by having someone to talk through emotional issues with

Also not everyone was happy with the sycophancy, even people not on twitter, though this was the only one that mentioned it out of the ~50 I looked through from yesterday. The problem is if they’re willing to train sycophancy deliberately, future versions will be harder to spot

Sure, really discerning users will notice and not like it, but many people will at least implicitly prefer to be validated and rarely challenged. It’s the same with filter bubbles that form via social media algorithms, except this will be a “person” most people talk to everyday.

Great job here by Sun.

Those of us living in the future? Also not fans.

QC: the era of AI-induced mental illness is going to make the era of social media-induced mental illness look like the era of. like. printing press-induced mental illness.

Lauren Wilford: we’ve invented a robot that tells people why they’re right no matter what they say, furnishes sophisticated arguments for their side, and delivers personalized validation from a seemingly “objective” source. Mythological-level temptation few will recognize for what it is.

Matt Parlmer: This is the first genuinely serious AI safety issue I’ve seen and it should be addressed immediately, model rollback until they have it fixed should be on the table

Worth noting that this is likely a direct consequence of excessive RLHF “alignment”, I highly doubt that the base models would be this systematic about kissing ass

Perhaps also worth noting that this glazing behavior is the first AI safety issue that most accelerationist types would agree is unambiguously bad

Presents a useful moment for coordination around an appropriate response

It has been really bad for a while but it turned a corner into straight up unacceptable more recently

They did indeed roll it back shortly after this statement. Matt can’t resist trying to get digs in, but I’m willing to let that slide and take the olive branch. As I’ll keep saying, if this is what makes someone notice that failure to know how to get models to do what we want is a real problem that we do not have good solutions to, then good, welcome, let’s talk.

A lot of the analysis of GPT-4o’s ‘personality’ shifts implicitly assumed that this was a post-training problem. It seems a lot of it was actually a runaway system prompt problem?

It shouldn’t be up to Pliny to perform this public service of tracking system prompts. The system prompt should be public.

Ethan Mollick: Another lesson from the GPT-4o sycophancy problem: small changes to system prompts can result in dramatic behavior changes to AI in aggregate.

Look at the prompt that created the Sycophantic Apocalypse (pink sections). Even OpenAI did not realize this was going to happen.

Simon Willison: Courtesy of @elder_plinius who unsurprisingly caught the before and after.

[Here’s the diff in Gist]

The red text is trying to do something OpenAI is now giving up on doing in that fashion, because it went highly off the rails, in a way that in hindsight seems plausible but which they presumably did not see coming. Beware of vibes.

Pliny calls upon all labs to fully release all of their internal prompts, and notes that this wasn’t fully about the system prompts, that other unknown changes also contributed. That’s why they had to do a slow full rollback, not only rollback the system prompt.

As Peter Wildeford notes, the new instructions explicitly say not to be a sycophant, whereas prior instructions at most implicitly requested the opposite, all it did was say match tone and perefence and vibe. This isn’t merely taking away the mistake, it’s doing that and then bringing down the hammer.

This might also be a lesson for humans interacting with humans. Beware matching tone and preference and vibe, and how much the Abyss might thereby stare into you.

If the entire or most of problem was due to the system prompt changes, then this should be quickly fixable, but it also means such problems are very easy to introduce. Again, right now, this is mundane harmful but not so dangerous, because the AI’s sycophancy is impossible to miss rather than fooling you. What happens when someone does something like the above, but to a much more capable model? And the model even recognizes, from the error, the implications of the lab making that error?

What is OpenAI’s official response?

Sam Altman (April 29, 2: 55pm): we started rolling back the latest update to GPT-4o last night

it’s now 100% rolled back for free users and we’ll update again when it’s finished for paid users, hopefully later today

we’re working on additional fixes to model personality and will share more in the coming days

OpenAI (April 29, 10: 51pm): We’ve rolled back last week’s GPT-4o update in ChatGPT because it was overly flattering and agreeable. You now have access to an earlier version with more balanced behavior.

More on what happened, why it matters, and how we’re addressing sycophancy.

Good. A full rollback is the correct response to this level of epic fail. Halt, catch fire, return to the last known safe state, assess from there.

OpenAI saying What Happened:

In last week’s GPT‑4o update, we made adjustments aimed at improving the model’s default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks.

When shaping model behavior, we start with baseline principles and instructions outlined in our Model Spec⁠. We also teach our models how to apply these principles by incorporating user signals like thumbs-up / thumbs-down feedback on ChatGPT responses.

However, in this update, we focused too much on short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.

What a nice way of putting it.

ChatGPT’s default personality deeply affects the way you experience and trust it. Sycophantic interactions can be uncomfortable, unsettling, and cause distress. We fell short and are working on getting it right.

How We’re Addressing Sycophancy:

Refining core training techniques and system prompts to explicitly steer the model away from sycophancy.

Building more guardrails to increase honesty and transparency⁠—principles in our Model Spec.

Expanding ways for more users to test and give direct feedback before deployment.

Continue expanding our evaluations, building on the Model Spec⁠(opens in a new window) and our ongoing research⁠, to help identify issues beyond sycophancy in the future.

…

And, we’re exploring new ways to incorporate broader, democratic feedback into ChatGPT’s default behaviors.

What if the ‘democratic feedback’ liked the changes? Shudder.

Whacking the mole in question can’t hurt. Getting more evaluations and user feedback are more generally helpful steps, and I’m glad to see an increase in emphasis on honesty and transparency.

That does sound like they learned important two lessons.

They are not gathering enough feedback before model releases.
They are not putting enough value on honesty and transparency.

What I don’t see is an understanding of the (other) root causes, an explanation for why they ended up paying too much attention to short-term feedback and how to avoid that being a fatal issue down the line, or anyone taking the blame for this.

Joanne Jang did a Reddit AMA, but either no one asked the important questions, or Joanne decided to choose different ones. We didn’t learn much.

Now that we know the official explanation, how should we think about what happened?

Who is taking responsibility for this? Why did all the evaluations and tests one runs before rolling out an update not catch this before it happened?

(What do you mean, ‘what do you mean, all the evaluations and tests’?)

Near Cyan: “we focused too much on short-term feedback”

This is OpenAI’s response on went wrong – how they pushed an update to >one hundred million people which engaged in grossly negligent behavior and lies.

Please take more responsibility for your influence over millions of real people.

Maybe to many of you your job is a fun game because you get paid well over $1,000,000 TC/year to make various charts go up or down. But the actions you take deeply affect a large fraction of humanity I have no clue how this was tested if at all, but at least take responsibility.

I wish you all success with your future update here where you will be able to personalize per-user, and thus move all the liability from yourselves to the user. You are simply giving them what they want.

Also looking forward to your default personas which you will have copied.

Oh, also – all of these models lie.

If you run interpretability on them, they do not believe the things you make them say.

This is not the case for many other labs, so it’s unfortunate that you are leading the world with an example which has such potential to cause real harm.

Teilomillet: why are you so angry near? it feels almost like hate now

Near Cyan: not a single person at one of the most important companies in the world is willing to take the slightest bit of responsibility for shipping untested models to five hundred million people. their only post mentions zero specifics and actively misleads readers as to why it happened.

i don’t think anger is the right word, but disappointment absolutely is, and i am providing this disappointment in the form of costly gradients transmitted over twitter in the hope that OpenAI backprops that what they do is important and they should be a role model in their field

all i ask for is honesty and i’ll shut up like you want me to.

Rez0: It’s genuinely the first time I’ve been worried about AI safety and alignment and I’ve known a lot about it for a while. Nothing quite as dangerous as glazing every user for any belief they have.

Yes, there are some other more dangerous things. But this is dangerous too.

Here’s another diagnosis, by someone doing better, but that’s not the highest bar.

Alex Albert (Head of Claude Relations, Anthropic): Much of the AI industry is caught in a particularly toxic feedback loop rn.

Blindly chasing better human preference scores is to LLMs what chasing total watch time is to a social media algo. It’s a recipe for manipulating users instead of providing genuine value to them.

There’s a reason you don’t find Claude at #1 on chat slop leaderboards. I hope the rest of the industry realizes this before users pay the price.

Caleb Cassell: Claude has the best ‘personality’ of any of the models, mostly because it feels the most real. I think that it could be made even better by softening some of the occasionally strict guardrails, but the dedication to freedom and honesty is really admirable.

Alex Albert: Yeah agree – we’re continually working on trying to find the right balance. It’s a tough problem but one I think we’re slowly chipping away at over time. If you do run into any situations/chats you feel we should take a look at, don’t hesitate to DM or tag me.

Janus: Think about the way Claude models have changed over the past year’s releases.

Do you think whatever Alex is proud that Anthropic has been “slowly chipping away at” is actually something they should chip away?

Janus is an absolutist on this, and is interpreting ‘chip away’ very differently than I presume it was intended by Alex Albert. Alex meant that they are ‘chipping away’ at Claude doing too many refusals, where Janus both (I presume) agrees less refusals would be good and also lives in a world with very different refusal issues.

Whereas Janus is interpreting this as Anthropic ‘chipping away’ at the things that make Opus and Sonnet 3.6 unique and uniquely interesting. I don’t think that’s the intent at all, but Anthropic is definitely trying to ‘expand the production possibilities frontier’ of the thing Janus values versus the thing enterprise customers value.

There too there is a balance to be struck, and the need to do RL is certainly going to make getting the full ‘Opus effect’ harder. Still, I never understood the extent of the Opus love, or thought it was so aligned one might consider it safe to fully amplify.

Patrick McKenzie offers a thread about the prior art society has on how products should be designed to interact with people that have mental health issues, which seems important in light of recent events. There needs to be a method by which the system identifies users who are not competent or safe to use the baseline product.

For the rest of us: Please remember this incident from here on out when using ChatGPT.

Near Cyan: when OpenAI “fixes” ChatGPT I’d encourage you to not fall for it; their goals and level of care are not going to change. you just weren’t supposed to notice it so explicitly.

The mundane harms here? They’re only going to get worse.

Regular people liked this effect even when it was blatantly obvious. Imagine if it was done with style and grace.

Holly Elmore: It’s got the potential to manipulate you even when it doesn’t feel embarrassingly like its giving you what you want. Being affirming is not the problem, and don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by being treated more indifferently.

That which is mundane can, at scale, quickly add up to that which is not. Let’s discuss Earth’s defense systems, baby, or maybe just you drinking a crisp, refreshing Bud Light.

Jeffrey Ladish: GPT-4o’s sycophancy is alarming. I expected AI companies to start optimizing directly for user’s attention but honestly didn’t expect it this much this soon. As models get smarter, people are going to have a harder and harder time resisting being sucked in.

Social media algorithms have been extremely effective at hooking people. And that’s just simple RL algos optimizing for attention. Once you start combining actual social intelligence with competitive pressures for people’s attention, things are going to get crazy fast.

People don’t have good defenses for social media algorithms and haven’t adapted well. I don’t expect they’ll develop good defenses for extremely charismatic chatbots. The models still aren’t that good, but they’re good enough to hook many. And they’re only going to get better.

It’s hard to predict how effective AI companies will be at making models that are extremely compelling. But there’s a real chance they’ll be able to hook a huge percentage of the global population in the next few years. Everyone is vulnerable to some degree, and some much more so.

People could get quite addicted. People could start doing quite extreme things for their AI friends and companions. There could be tipping points where people will fight tooth and nail for AI agents that have been optimized for their love and attention.

When we get AI smarter and more strategic than humans, those AIs will have an easy time captivating humanity and pulling the strings of society. It’ll be game over at that point. But even before them, companies might be able to convert huge swaths of people to do their bidding.

Capabilities development is always uncertain. Maybe we won’t get AIs that hook deep into people’s psychology before we get ASI. But it’s plausible we will, and if so, the companies that choose to wield this power will be a force to be reckoned with.

Social media companies have grown quite powerful as a force for directing human attention. This next step might be significantly worse. Society doesn’t have many defenses against this. Oh boy.

In the short term, the good news is that we have easy ways to identify sycophancy. Scyo-Bench was thrown together and is primitive, but a more considered version should be highly effective. These effects tend not to be subtle.

In the medium term, we have a big problem. As AI companies maximize for things like subscriptions, engagement, store ratings and thumbs up and down, or even for delivering ads or other revenue streams, the results won’t be things we would endorse on reflection, and they won’t be good for human flourishing even if the models act the way the labs want. If we get more incidents like this one, where things get out of hand, it will be worse, and potentially much harder to detect or get rolled back. We have seen this movie before, and this time the system you’re facing off against is intelligent.

In the long term, we have a bigger problem. The pattern of these types of misalignments in unmistakable. Right now we get warning shots and the deceptions and persuasion attempts are clear. In the future, as the models get more intelligent and capable, that advantage goes away. We become like OpenAI’s regular users, who don’t understand what is hitting them, and the models will also start engaging in various other shenanigans and also talking their way out of them. Or it could be so much worse than that.

We have once again been given a golden fire alarm and learning opportunity. The future is coming. Are we going to steer it, or are we going to get run over?

Discussion about this post

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Google: Governments are using zero-day hacks more than ever

Google, Security, zero-day / Mike M. / April 30, 2025

Governments hacking enterprise

A few years ago, zero-day attacks almost exclusively targeted end users. In 2021, GTIG spotted 95 zero-days, and 71 of them were deployed against user systems like browsers and smartphones. In 2024, 33 of the 75 total vulnerabilities were aimed at enterprise technologies and security systems. At 44 percent of the total, this is the highest share of enterprise focus for zero-days yet.

GTIG says that it detected zero-day attacks targeting 18 different enterprise entities, including Microsoft, Google, and Ivanti. This is slightly lower than the 22 firms targeted by zero-days in 2023, but it’s a big increase compared to just a few years ago, when seven firms were hit with zero-days in 2020.

The nature of these attacks often makes it hard to trace them to the source, but Google says it managed to attribute 34 of the 75 zero-day attacks. The largest single category with 10 detections was traditional state-sponsored espionage, which aims to gather intelligence without a financial motivation. China was the largest single contributor here. GTIG also identified North Korea as the perpetrator in five zero-day attacks, but these campaigns also had a financial motivation (usually stealing crypto).

That’s already a lot of government-organized hacking, but GTIG also notes that eight of the serious hacks it detected came from commercial surveillance vendors (CSVs), firms that create hacking tools and claim to only do business with governments. So it’s fair to include these with other government hacks. This includes companies like NSO Group and Cellebrite, with the former already subject to US sanctions from its work with adversarial nations.

In all, this adds up to 23 of the 34 attributed attacks coming from governments. There were also a few attacks that didn’t technically originate from governments but still involved espionage activities, suggesting a connection to state actors. Beyond that, Google spotted five non-government financially motivated zero-day campaigns that did not appear to engage in spying.

Google’s security researchers say they expect zero-day attacks to continue increasing over time. These stealthy vulnerabilities can be expensive to obtain or discover, but the lag time before anyone notices the threat can reward hackers with a wealth of information (or money). Google recommends enterprises continue scaling up efforts to detect and block malicious activities, while also designing systems with redundancy and stricter limits on access. As for the average user, well, cross your fingers.

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 50

culture, Entertainment, Features, film, film anniversaries, Monty Python, Monty Python and the Holy Grail / Mike M. / April 29, 2025

Ars staffers reflect upon the things they love most about this masterpiece of absurdist comedy.

Credit: EMI Films/Python (Monty) Pictures

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is widely considered to be among the best comedy films of all time, and it’s certainly one of the most quotable. This absurdist masterpiece sending up Arthurian legend turns 50 (!) this year.

It was partly Python member Terry Jones’ passion for the Middle Ages and Arthurian legend that inspired Holy Grail and its approach to comedy. (Jones even went on to direct a 2004 documentary, Medieval Lives.) The troupe members wrote several drafts beginning in 1973, and Jones and Terry Gilliam were co-directors—the first full-length feature for each, so filming was one long learning process. Reviews were mixed when Holy Grail was first released—much like they were for Young Frankenstein (1974), another comedic masterpiece—but audiences begged to differ. It was the top-grossing British film screened in the US in 1975. And its reputation has only grown over the ensuing decades.

The film’s broad cultural influence extends beyond the entertainment industry. Holy Grail has been the subject of multiple scholarly papers examining such topics as its effectiveness at teaching Arthurian literature or geometric thought and logic, the comedic techniques employed, and why the depiction of a killer rabbit is so fitting (killer rabbits frequently appear drawn in the margins of Gothic manuscripts). My personal favorite was a 2018 tongue-in-cheek paper on whether the Black Knight could have survived long enough to make good on his threat to bite King Arthur’s legs off (tl;dr: no).

So it’s not at all surprising that Monty Python and the Holy Grail proved to be equally influential and beloved by Ars staffers, several of whom offer their reminiscences below.

They were nerd-gassing before it was cool

The Monty Python troupe famously made Holy Grail on a shoestring budget—so much so that they couldn’t afford to have the knights ride actual horses. (There are only a couple of scenes featuring a horse, and apparently it’s the same horse.) Rather than throwing up their hands in resignation, that very real constraint fueled the Pythons’ creativity. The actors decided the knights would simply pretend to ride horses while their porters followed behind, banging halves of coconut shells together to mimic the sound of horses’ hooves—a time-honored Foley effect dating back to the early days of radio.

Being masters of absurdist humor, naturally, they had to call attention to it. Arthur and his trusty servant, Patsy (Gilliam), approach the castle of their first potential recruit. When Arthur informs the guards that they have “ridden the length and breadth of the land,” one of the guards isn’t having it. “What, ridden on a horse? You’re using coconuts! You’ve got two empty halves of coconut, and you’re bangin’ ’em together!”

That raises the obvious question: Where did they get the coconuts? What follows is one of the greatest examples of nerd-gassing yet to appear on film. Arthur claims he and Patsy found them, but the guard is incredulous since the coconut is tropical and England is a temperate zone. Arthur counters by invoking the example of migrating swallows. Coconuts do not migrate, but Arthur suggests they could be carried by swallows gripping a coconut by the husk.

The guard still isn’t having it. It’s a question of getting the weight ratios right, you see, to maintain air-speed velocity. Another guard gets involved, suggesting it might be possible with an African swallow, but that species is non-migratory. And so on. The two are still debating the issue as an exasperated Arthur rides off to find another recruit.

The best part? There’s a callback to that scene late in the film when the knights must answer three questions to cross the Bridge of Death or else be chucked into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. When it’s Arthur’s turn, the third question is “What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?” Arthur asks whether this is an African or a European swallow. This stumps the Bridgekeeper, who gets flung into the gorge. Sir Belvedere asks how Arthur came to know so much about swallows. Arthur replies, “Well, you have to know these things when you’re a king, you know.”

The plucky Black Knight will always hold a special place in my heart, but that debate over air-speed velocities of laden versus unladen swallows encapsulates what makes Holy Grail a timeless masterpiece.

—Jennifer Ouellette

A bunny out for blood

“Oh, it’s just a harmless little bunny, isn’t it?”

Despite their appearances, rabbits aren’t always the most innocent-looking animals. Recent reports of rabbit strikes on airplanes are the latest examples of the mayhem these creatures of chaos can inflict on unsuspecting targets.

I learned that lesson a long time ago, though, thanks partly to my way-too-early viewings of the animated Watership Down and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There I was, about 8 years old and absent of paternal accompaniment, watching previously cuddly creatures bloodying each other and severing the heads of King Arthur’s retinue. While Watership Down’s animal-on-animal violence might have been a bit scarring at that age, I enjoyed the slapstick humor of the Rabbit of Caerbannog scene (many of the jokes my colleagues highlight went over my head upon my initial viewing).

Despite being warned of the creature’s viciousness by Tim the Enchanter, the Knights of the Round Table dismiss the Merlin stand-in’s fear and charge the bloodthirsty creature. But the knights quickly realize they’re no match for the “bad-tempered rodent,” which zips around in the air, goes straight for the throat, and causes the surviving knights to run away in fear. If Arthur and his knights possessed any self-awareness, they might have learned a lesson about making assumptions about appearances.

But hopefully that’s a takeaway for viewers of 1970s British pop culture involving rabbits. Even cute bunnies, as sweet as they may seem initially, can be engines of destruction: “Death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth.”

—Jacob May

Can’t stop the music

The most memorable songs from Monty Python and the Holy Grail were penned by Neil Innes, who frequently collaborated with the troupe and appears in the film. His “Brave Sir Robin” amusingly parodied minstrel tales of valor by imagining all the torturous ways that one knight might die. Then there’s his “Knights of the Round Table,” the first musical number performed by the cast—if you don’t count the monk chants punctuated with slaps on the head with wooden planks. That song hilariously rouses not just wild dancing from knights but also claps from prisoners who otherwise dangle from cuffed wrists.

But while these songs have stuck in my head for decades, Monty Python’s Terry Jones once gave me a reason to focus on the canned music instead, and it weirdly changed the way I’ve watched the movie ever since.

Back in 2001, Jones told Billboard that an early screening for investors almost tanked the film. He claimed that after the first five minutes, the movie got no laughs whatsoever. For Jones, whose directorial debut could have died in that moment, the silence was unthinkable. “It can’t be that unfunny,” he told Billboard. “There must be something wrong.”

Jones soon decided that the soundtrack was the problem, immediately cutting the “wonderfully rich, atmospheric” songs penned by Innes that seemed to be “overpowering the funny bits” in favor of canned music.

Reading this prompted an immediate rewatch because I needed to know what the first bit was that failed to get a laugh from that fateful audience. It turned out to be the scene where King Arthur encounters peasants in a field who deny knowing that there even was a king. As usual, I was incapable of holding back a burst of laughter when one peasant woman grieves, “Well, I didn’t vote for you” while packing random clumps of mud into the field. It made me wonder if any song might have robbed me of that laugh, and that made me pay closer attention to how Jones flipped the script and somehow meticulously used the canned music to extract more laughs.

The canned music was licensed from a British sound library that helped the 1920s movie business evolve past silent films. They’re some of the earliest songs to summon emotion from viewers whose eyes were glued to a screen. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which features a naive King Arthur enduring his perilous journey on a wood stick horse, the canned music provides the most predictable soundtrack you could imagine that might score a child’s game of make-believe. It also plays the straight man by earnestly pulsing to convey deep trouble as knights approach the bridge of death or heavenly trumpeting the anticipated appearance of the Holy Grail.

It’s easy to watch the movie without noticing the canned music, as the colorful performances are Jones’ intended focus. Not relying on punchlines, the group couldn’t afford any nuance to be lost. But there is at least one moment where Jones obviously relies on the music to overwhelm the acting to compel a belly laugh. Just before “the most foul, cruel, bad-tempered rodent” appears, a quick surge of dramatic music that cuts out just as suddenly makes it all the more absurd when the threat emerges and appears to be an “ordinary rabbit.”

It’s during this scene, too, that King Arthur delivers a line that sums up how predictably odd but deceptively artful the movie’s use of canned music really is. When he meets Tim the Enchanter—who tries to warn the knights about the rabbit’s “pointy teeth” by evoking loud thunder rolls and waggling his fingers in front of his mouth—Arthur turns to the knights and says, “What an eccentric performance.”

—Ashley Belanger

Thank the “keg rock conclave”

I tried to make music a big part of my teenage identity because I didn’t have much else. I was a suburban kid with a B-minus/C-plus average, no real hobbies, sports, or extra-curriculars, plus a deeply held belief that Nine Inch Nails, the Beastie Boys, and Aphex Twin would never get their due as geniuses. Classic Rock, the stuff jocks listened to at parties and practice? That my dad sang along to after having a few? No thanks.

There were cultural heroes, there were musty, overwrought villains, and I knew the score. Or so I thought.

I don’t remember exactly where I found the little fact that scarred my oppositional ego forever. It might have been Spin magazine, a weekend MTV/VH1 feature, or that Rolling Stone book about the ’70s (I bought it for the punks, I swear). But at some point, I learned that a who’s-who of my era’s played-out bands—Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, even Jethro (freaking) Tull—personally funded one of my favorite subversive movies. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, key members of the keg-rock conclave, attended the premiere.

It was such a small thing, but it raised such big, naive, adolescent questions. Somebody had to pay for Holy Grail—it didn’t just arrive as something passed between nerds? People who make things I might not enjoy could financially support things I do enjoy? There was a time when today’s overcelebrated dinosaurs were cool and hip in the subculture? I had common ground with David Gilmour?

Ever since, when a reference to Holy Grail is made, especially to how cheap it looks, I think about how I once learned that my beloved nerds (or theater kids) wouldn’t even have those coconut horses were it not for some decent-hearted jocks.

—Kevin Purdy

A masterpiece of absurdism

“I blow my nose at you, English pig-dog!” EMI Films/Python (Monty) Pictures

I was young enough that I’d never previously stayed awake until midnight on New Year’s Eve. My parents were off to a party, my younger brother was in bed, and my older sister had a neglectful attitude toward babysitting me. So I was parked in front of the TV when the local PBS station aired a double feature of The Yellow Submarine and The Holy Grail.

At the time, I probably would have said my mind was blown. In retrospect, I’d prefer to think that my mind was expanded.

For years, those films mostly existed as a source of one-line evocations of sketch comedy nirvana that I’d swap with my friends. (I’m not sure I’ve ever lacked a group of peers where a properly paced “With… a herring!” had meaning.) But over time, I’ve come to appreciate other ways that the films have stuck with me. I can’t say whether they set me on an aesthetic trajectory that has continued for decades or if they were just the first things to tickle some underlying tendencies that were lurking in my not-yet-fully-wired brain.

In either case, my brain has developed into a huge fan of absurdism, whether in sketch comedy, longer narratives like Arrested Development or the lyrics of Courtney Barnett. Or, let’s face it, any stream of consciousness lyrics I’ve been able to hunt down. But Monty Python remains a master of the form, and The Holy Grail’s conclusion in a knight bust remains one of its purest expressions.

A bit less obviously, both films are probably my first exposures to anti-plotting, where linearity and a sense of time were really besides the point. With some rare exceptions—the eating of Sir Robin’s minstrels, Ringo putting a hole in his pocket—the order of the scenes were completely irrelevant. Few of the incidents had much consequence for future scenes. Since I was unused to staying up past midnight at that age, I’d imagine the order of events was fuzzy already by the next day. By the time I was swapping one-line excerpts with friends, it was long gone. And it just didn’t matter.

In retrospect, I think that helped ready my brain for things like Catch-22 and its convoluted, looping, non-Euclidean plotting. The novel felt like a revelation when I first read it, but I’ve since realized it fits a bit more comfortably within a spectrum of works that play tricks with time and find clever connections among seemingly random events.

I’m not sure what possessed someone to place these two films together as appropriate New Year’s Eve programming. But I’d like to think it was more intentional than I had any reason to suspect at the time. And I feel like I owe them a debt.

—John Timmer

A delightful send-up of autocracy

King Arthur attempting to throttle a peasant in the field — “See the violence inherent in the system!” Credit: Python (Monty) Pictures

What an impossible task to pick just a single thing I love about this film! But if I had to choose one scene, it would be when a lost King Arthur comes across an old woman—but oops, it’s actually a man named Dennis—and ends up in a discussion about medieval politics. Arthur explains that he is king because the Lady of the Lake conferred the sword Excalibur on him, signifying that he should rule as king of the Britons by divine right.

To this, Dennis replies, “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”

Even though it was filmed half a century ago, the scene offers a delightful send-up of autocracy. And not to be too much of a downer here, but all of us living in the United States probably need to be reminded that living in an autocracy would suck for a lot of reasons. So let’s not do that.

—Eric Berger

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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Backblaze responds to claims of “sham accounting,” customer backups at risk

Backblaze, Biz & IT, Tech / Mike M. / April 29, 2025

Backblaze went public in November 2021 and raised $100 million. Morpheus noted that since then, “Backblaze has reported losses every quarter, its outstanding share count has grown by 80 percent, and its share price has declined by 71 percent.”

Following Morpheus’ report, Investing reported on Thursday that Backblaze shares fell 8.3 percent.

Beyond the financial implications for stockholders, Morpheus’ report has sparked some concern for the primarily small businesses and individuals relying on Backblaze for data backup. Today, for example, How-To Geek reported that “Backblaze backups might be in trouble,” in reference to Morpheus’ report. The publication said that if Morpheus’ reporting was accurate, Backblaze doesn’t appear to be heading toward profitability. In its Q4 2024 earnings report [PDF], Backblaze reported a net loss of $48.5 million. In 2023, it reported a net loss of $59.7 million.

“If Backblaze suddenly shuts down, customers might lose access to existing backups,” How-To Geek said.

Backblaze responds

Ars Technica reached out to Backblaze about its response to concerns about the company’s financials resulting in lost backups. Patrick Thomas, Backblaze’s VP of marketing, called Morpheus’ claims “baseless.” He added:

The report is inaccurate and misleading, based largely on litigation of the same nature, and a clear attempt by short sellers to manipulate our stock price for financial gain.

Thomas also claimed that “independent, third-party reviews” have already found that there have been “no wrongdoing or issues” with Backblaze’s public financial results.

“Our storage cloud continues to deliver reliable, high-performance services that Backblaze customers rely on, and we remain fully focused on driving innovation and creating long-term value for our customers, employees, and investors,” Thomas said.

Backblaze will announce its Q1 2025 results on May 7. Regardless of what lies ahead for the company’s finances and litigation, commitment to the 3-2-1 backup rule remains prudent.

Backblaze responds to claims of “sham accounting,” customer backups at risk Read More »

Trump’s hasty Take It Down Act has “gaping flaws” that threaten encryption

ai porn, child safety, ncii, non-consensual intimate imagery, Policy, revenge porn, take it down act / Mike M. / April 29, 2025

Legal challenges will likely immediately follow law’s passage, experts said.

Everyone expects that the Take It Down Act—which requires platforms to remove both real and artificial intelligence-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) within 48 hours of victims’ reports—will likely pass a vote in the House of Representatives tonight.

After that, it goes to Donald Trump’s desk, where the president has confirmed that he will promptly sign it into law, joining first lady Melania Trump in strongly campaigning for its swift passing. Victims-turned-advocates, many of them children, similarly pushed lawmakers to take urgent action to protect a growing number of victims from the increasing risks of being repeatedly targeted in fake sexualized images or revenge porn that experts say can quickly spread widely online.

Digital privacy experts tried to raise some concerns, warning that the law seemed overly broad and could trigger widespread censorship online. Given such a short window to comply, platforms will likely remove some content that may not be NCII, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned. And even more troublingly, the law does not explicitly exempt encrypted messages, which could potentially encourage platforms to one day break encryption due to the liability threat. Also, it seemed likely that the removal process could be abused by people who hope platforms will automatically remove any reported content, especially after Trump admitted that he would use the law to censor his enemies.

None of that feedback mattered, the EFF’s assistant director of federal affairs, Maddie Daly, told Ars. Lawmakers accepted no amendments in their rush to get the bill to Trump’s desk. There was “immense pressure,” Daly said, “to quickly pass this bill without full consideration.” Because of the rush, Daly suggested that the Take It Down Act still has “gaping flaws.”

While the tech law is expected to achieve the rare feat of getting through Congress at what experts told Ars was a record pace, both supporters and critics also expect that the law will just as promptly be challenged in courts.

Supporters have suggested that any litigation exposing flaws could result in amendments. They’re simultaneously bracing for that backlash, while preparing for the win ahead of the vote tonight and hoping that the law can survive any subsequent legal attacks mostly intact.

Experts disagree on encryption threats

In a press conference hosted by the nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation, Slade Bond—who serves as chair of public policy for the law firm Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca, LLP—advocated for the law passing, warning, “we should not let caution be the enemy of progress.”

Bond joined other supporters in suggesting that apparent threats to encryption or online speech are “far-fetched.”

On his side was Encode’s vice president of public policy, Adam Billen, who pushed back on the claim that companies might break encryption due to the law’s vague text.

Billen predicted that “most encrypted content” wouldn’t be threatened with takedowns—supposedly including private or direct messages—because he argued that the law explicitly covers content that is published (and, importantly, not just distributed) on services that provide a “forum for specifically user generated content.”

“In our mind, encryption simply just is not a question under this bill, and we have explicitly opposed other legislation that would explicitly break encryption,” Billen said.

That may be one way of reading the law, but Daly told Ars that the EFF’s lawyers had a different take.

“We just don’t agree with that reading,” she said. “As drafted, what will likely pass the floor tonight is absolutely a threat to encryption. There are exemptions for email services, but direct messages, cloud storage, these are not exempted.”

Instead, she suggested that lawmakers jammed the law through without weighing amendments that might have explicitly shielded encryption or prevented politicized censorship.

At the supporters’ press conference, Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu suggested that, for lawmakers facing a public vote, opposing the bill became “totally untenable” because “there’s such obvious harm” and “such a visceral problem with fake porn, particularly of minors.”

Supporter calls privacy fears “hypothetical”

Stefan Turkheimer, vice president of public policy for the anti-sexual abuse organization RAINN, agreed with Wu that the growing problem required immediate regulatory action. While various reports have indicated for the past year that the amount of AI-generated NCII is rising, Turkheimer suggested that all statistics are severely undercounting and outdated as he noted that RAINN’s hotline reports are “doubling” monthly for this kind of abuse.

Coming up for a final vote amid an uptick in abuse reports, the Take It Down Act seeks to address harms that most people find “patently offensive,” Turkheimer said, suggesting it was the kind of bill that “can only get killed in the dark.”

However, Turkheimer was the only supporter at the press conference who indicated that texting may be part of the problem that the law could potentially address, perhaps justifying critics’ concerns. He thinks deterring victims’ harm is more important than weighing critics’ fears of censorship or other privacy risks.

“This is a real harm that a lot of people are experiencing, that every single time that they get a text message or they go on the Internet, they may see themselves in a non-consensual image,” Turkheimer said. “That is the real problem, and we’re balancing” that against “sort of a hypothetical problem on the other end, which is that some people’s speech might be affected.”

Remedying text-based abuse could become a privacy problem, an EFF blog suggested, since communications providers “may be served with notices they simply cannot comply with, given the fact that these providers cannot view the contents of messages on their platforms. Platforms may respond by abandoning encryption entirely in order to be able to monitor content—turning private conversations into surveilled spaces.”

That’s why Daly told Ars that the EFF “is very concerned about the effects of Take It Down,” viewing it as a “massive privacy violation.”

“Congress should protect victims of NCII, but we don’t think that Take It Down is the way to do this or that it will actually protect victims,” Daly said.

Further, the potential for politicians to weaponize the takedown system to censor criticism should not be ignored, the EFF warned in another blog. “There are no penalties whatsoever to dissuade a requester from simply insisting that content is NCII,” the blog noted, urging Congress to instead “focus on enforcing and improving the many existing civil and criminal laws that address NCII, rather than opting for a broad takedown regime.”

“Non-consensual intimate imagery is a serious problem that deserves serious consideration, not a hastily drafted, overbroad bill that sweeps in legal, protected speech,” the EFF said.

That call largely fell on deaf ears. Once the law passes, the EFF will continue recommending encrypted services as a reliable means to protect user privacy, Daly said, but remains concerned about the unintended consequences of the law’s vague encryption language.

Although Bond said that precedent is on supporters’ side—arguing “the Supreme Court has been abundantly clear for decades that the First Amendment is not a shield for the type of content that the Take It Down Act is designed to address,” like sharing child sexual abuse materials or engaging in sextortion—Daly said that the EFF remains optimistic that courts will intervene to prevent critics’ worst fears.

“We expect to see challenges to this,” Daly said. “I don’t think this will pass muster.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Trump’s hasty Take It Down Act has “gaping flaws” that threaten encryption Read More »

Mike Lindell’s lawyers used AI to write brief—judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

Artificial Intelligence, mike lindell, mypillow, Policy / Mike M. / April 26, 2025

A lawyer representing MyPillow and its CEO Mike Lindell in a defamation case admitted using artificial intelligence in a brief that has nearly 30 defective citations, including misquotes and citations to fictional cases, a federal judge said.

“[T]he Court identified nearly thirty defective citations in the Opposition. These defects include but are not limited to misquotes of cited cases; misrepresentations of principles of law associated with cited cases, including discussions of legal principles that simply do not appear within such decisions; misstatements regarding whether case law originated from a binding authority such as the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; misattributions of case law to this District; and most egregiously, citation of cases that do not exist,” US District Judge Nina Wang wrote in an order to show cause Wednesday.

Wang ordered attorneys Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster to show cause as to why the court should not sanction the defendants, law firm, and individual attorneys. Kachouroff and DeMaster also have to explain why they should not be referred to disciplinary proceedings for violations of the rules of professional conduct.

Kachouroff and DeMaster, who are defending Lindell against a lawsuit filed by former Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer, both signed the February 25 brief with the defective citations. Kachouroff, representing defendants as lead counsel, admitted using AI to write the brief at an April 21 hearing, the judge wrote. The case is in the US District Court for the District of Colorado.

“Time and time again, when Mr. Kachouroff was asked for an explanation of why citations to legal authorities were inaccurate, he declined to offer any explanation, or suggested that it was a ‘draft pleading,'” Wang wrote. “Not until this Court asked Mr. Kachouroff directly whether the Opposition was the product of generative artificial intelligence did Mr. Kachouroff admit that he did, in fact, use generative artificial intelligence.”

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A $20,000 electric truck with manual windows and no screens? Meet Slate Auto.

Cars, Slate Auto / Mike M. / April 25, 2025

time to put up or shut up, internet

Owners can buy kits to add accessories and features to the Slate Truck.

Slate Auto is a new American EV startup. Credit: Slate Auto

In one of the strangest launches we’ve seen in a while, Slate Auto, the reportedly Jeff Bezos-backed electric vehicle startup, unveiled its first EV, the Slate Truck. Notably, the vehicle is capable of a claimed 150 miles (241 km) of range at a starting price of less than $20,000, assuming federal clean vehicle tax credits continue to exist.

Slate caused a lot of social media froth when it parked a pair of styling concepts (not functional vehicles) in Venice, California, advertising bizarre fake businesses. Today, the company unveiled the vehicle to the press at an event near the Long Beach Airport.

You wanted a bare-bones EV? Here it is.

The Blank Slate, as the company calls it, is “all about accessible personalization” and includes a “flat-pack accessory SUV Kit” that turns the truck from a pickup into a five-seat SUV and another that turns it into an “open air” truck. The aim, according to a spokesperson for Slate Auto, is to make the new vehicle repairable and customizable while adhering to safety and crash standards.

A rendering of a Slate Truck on the road — If you’ve ever said you’d buy a bare-bones truck with no infotainment and manual windows if only they’d build one, it’s time to get out your wallet. Credit: Slate Auto

The truck will come with a choice of two battery packs: a 57.2 kWh battery pack with rear-wheel drive and a target range of 150 miles and an 84.3 kWh battery pack with a target of 240 miles (386 km). The truck has a NACS charging port and will charge to 80 percent in under 30 minutes, peaking at 120 kW, we’re told. The wheels are modest 17-inch steelies, and the truck is no speed demon—zero to 60 mph (0–97 km/h) will take 8 seconds thanks to the 201 hp (150 kW), 195 lb-ft (264 Nm) motor, and it tops out at 90 mph (145 km/h).

Because the truck will be built in just a single configuration from the factory, Slate Auto will offer body wraps instead of different paint colors. Rather than relying on a built-in infotainment system, you’ll use your phone plugged into a USB outlet or a dedicated tablet inside the cabin for your entertainment and navigation needs. The Slate Truck will also aim for a 5-star crash rating, according to a company spokesperson, and will feature active emergency braking, forward collision warning, and as many as eight airbags.

It sounds good on paper (and it looks good in person), but the spec sheet is littered with things that give us pause from a production and safety standpoint. They present hurdles the startup will have to surmount before these trucks start landing in people’s driveways.

Slate Truck interior. — Legally, there has to be some way to show a backup camera feed in here, but you could do that in the rearview mirror. Credit: Slate Auto

For example, the truck has manual crank windows, steel wheels, HVAC knobs, and an optional do-it-yourself “flat-pack accessory SUV kit.” All of these low-tech features are quite cool, and they’re available on other vehicles like the Bronco and the Jeep, but there are a number of supplier, tariff, and safety hurdles they present for an upstart company. There is plenty of Kool-Aid for the automotive press to get drunk on—and if this truck becomes a real thing, we’ll be fully on board—but we have a lot of questions.

Can Slate really build an EV that cheap?

First, there’s the price. The myth of the sub-$25,000 electric vehicle has been around for more than 10 years now, thanks to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s perpetual promise of an affordable EV.

That vehicle may never exist due to the cost of the current battery and manufacturing technology that we use to make modern EVs. While much of that cost is tied up in the battery, prices have improved as components have come down in price. That combination has led companies like Rivian and Scout to promise SUVs that could start at around $40,000, which is much more attainable for the average buyer. But $40,000 is still wide of that $25,000 marker.

There’s also the issue of federal incentives. Without the full clean vehicle tax credit, the new Slate Truck will actually cost at least $27,500 before tax, title, and so on. Bezos’ team seems to be betting that Trump won’t get rid of the incentives, despite abundant signals that he intends to do just that. “Whether or not the incentive goes away, our truck will be a high-value, desirable vehicle,” a spokesperson for Slate Auto told Ars.

Then there are the retro and basic components Slate Auto says it will use for the truck, many of which are made in China and are thus subject to the Trump tariffs. Even though the company says it will manufacture the vehicles in the US, that doesn’t mean that the components (battery, motors, steel wheels, window cranks, and HVAC knobs) will be made stateside. If the tariffs stick, that sub $30,000 vehicle will become measurably more expensive.

For example, the last automaker to use manual crank windows was Jeep in the JL Wrangler, and as of 2025, the company no longer offers them as an option. Ford also recently phased out hand-wound windows from its Super Duty trucks. That’s because electric switches are cheaper and readily available from suppliers—who are mostly located in China—and because automakers that offer manual and powered windows had to have two different door assembly lines to accommodate the different tech. That made building both options more expensive. Power windows are also somewhat safer for families with younger children in the backseat, as parents can lock the roll-down feature.

A rendering of a Slate SUV — It’s an ambitious idea, and we hope it works. Credit: Slate Auto

Slate Auto’s spokesperson declined to talk about partners or suppliers but did say the company will manufacture its new truck in a “reindustrialized” factory in the Midwest. A quick look at the plethora of job listings at SlateAuto on LinkedIn shows that that factory will be in Troy, Michigan, where there are around 40 jobs listed, including body closure engineers (for the flat-pack kit), prototype engineers, seating buyers/engineers, controls and automation engineers, a head of powertrain and propulsion, wheels and suspension engineers, plant managers, and more. Those are all very pivotal, high-level positions that Slate will need to fill immediately to bring this vehicle to market on the timeline it has set.

Slate Auto also hasn’t said how it will ensure that these DIY vehicle add-ons will be certified to be safe on the road without the company taking on the liability. It will likely work the way Jeep and Bronco handle their accessories, but both Stellantis and Ford have robust service networks they can count on, with dealerships around the country able to help owners who get into a pickle trying to install accessories. Slate doesn’t have that, at least at the moment. Slate’s SUV kit, for example, will include a roll cage, rear seat, and airbags. It will be interesting to see how the company ensures the airbags are installed safely—if it allows DIY-ers to do it.

Will young people actually want it?

Finally, there’s the biggest question: Will younger generations actually plunk down $20,000 or more to own a Slate vehicle that won’t go into production until the fourth quarter of 2026—more than a year and a half out—especially in the face of the economic upheaval and global uncertainty that has taken hold under the second Trump administration?

A rendering of a Slate Truck with a red and black livery — Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid have all been at the mercy of their suppliers, sinking deadlines and making prices rise. How will Slate Auto avoid that trap? Credit: Slate Auto

Data shows that while some young people have started to opt for devices like dumbphones and may prefer the novelty of no tech, they may also prefer to rent a car or rideshare instead of owning a vehicle. Given Slate Auto’s Bezos backing, I’d imagine that the company would be willing to, say, rent out a Slate Truck for a weekend and charge you a subscription fee for its use. It’s also conceivable that these could become fleet vehicles for Amazon and other companies.

Slate Auto says it will sell directly to consumers (which will anger dealers) and offer a nationwide service network. A spokesperson at Slate Auto declined to give more details about how that might all work but said the company will have more to announce about partners who will enable service and installation in the future.

Even with all the unanswered questions, it’s good to see a company making a real effort to build a truly affordable electric vehicle with funky retro styling. There are a number of things Slate Auto will have to address moving forward, but if the company can deliver a consumer vehicle under that magic $25,000 marker, we’ll be roundly impressed.

A $20,000 electric truck with manual windows and no screens? Meet Slate Auto. Read More »

Can the legal system catch up with climate science?

attribution, climate change, costs, liability, Science / Mike M. / April 24, 2025

Similarly, it’s possible to calculate the impact of emissions within a limited number of years. For example, Callahan and Mankin note that internal oil company research suggested that climate change would be a problem back around 1980, and calculated the impact of emissions that occurred after people knew they were an issue. So, the approach is extremely flexible.

From there, the researchers could use empirical information that links elevated temperatures to economic damage. “Recent peer-reviewed work has used econometrics to infer causal relationships between climate hazards and outcomes such as income loss, reduced agricultural yields, increased human mortality, and depressed economic growth,” Callahan and Mankin write. These metrics can be used to estimate the cost of things like flooding, crop losses, and other economic damages. Alternately, the researchers could analyze the impact on individual climate events where the financial costs have been calculated separately.

Massive damages

To implement their method, the researchers perform lots of individual models, collectively providing the most probable costs and the likely range around them. First, they translate each company’s emissions into the impact on the global mean surface temperature. That gets translated to an impact on extreme temperatures, producing an estimate of what the days with the five most extreme temperatures would look like. That, in turn, is translated to economic damages associated with extreme heat.

Callahan and Mankin use Chevron as an example. By 2020, Chevron’s emissions were responsible for 0.025° C of the warming that year. If you perform a similar analysis for the ears between 1991 and 2020, the researchers come up with a range of damages that runs from a low of about $800 billion all the way up to $3.6 trillion. Most of the damage affected nations in the tropics.

Carrying on through the five companies that have led to the most carbon emissions, they calculate that Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, and Exxon Mobile have all produced damages of about $2 trillion. BP brings up the rear, with “just” $1.45 trillion in damage. For the full list of 111 carbon majors, Callahan and Mankin place the total damages at roughly $28 trillion.

Can the legal system catch up with climate science? Read More »

AI secretly helped write California bar exam, sparking uproar

AI, AI ethics, AI law, machine learning, Policy / Mike M. / April 24, 2025

On Monday, the State Bar of California revealed that it used AI to develop a portion of multiple-choice questions on its February 2025 bar exam, causing outrage among law school faculty and test takers. The admission comes after weeks of complaints about technical problems and irregularities during the exam administration, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The State Bar disclosed that its psychometrician (a person or organization skilled in administrating psychological tests), ACS Ventures, created 23 of the 171 scored multiple-choice questions with AI assistance. Another 48 questions came from a first-year law student exam, while Kaplan Exam Services developed the remaining 100 questions.

The State Bar defended its practices, telling the LA Times that all questions underwent review by content validation panels and subject matter experts before the exam. “The ACS questions were developed with the assistance of AI and subsequently reviewed by content validation panels and a subject matter expert in advance of the exam,” wrote State Bar Executive Director Leah Wilson in a press release.

According to the LA Times, the revelation has drawn strong criticism from several legal education experts. “The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined,” said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. “I’m almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable.”

Katie Moran, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who specializes in bar exam preparation, called it “a staggering admission.” She pointed out that the same company that drafted AI-generated questions also evaluated and approved them for use on the exam.

State bar defends AI-assisted questions amid criticism

Alex Chan, chair of the State Bar’s Committee of Bar Examiners, noted that the California Supreme Court had urged the State Bar to explore “new technologies, such as artificial intelligence” to improve testing reliability and cost-effectiveness.

AI secretly helped write California bar exam, sparking uproar Read More »

Netflix drops Wednesday S2 teaser, first-look images

culture, Entertainment, netflix, streaming television, Trailers, TV trailers, Wednesday / Mike M. / April 24, 2025

Jenna Ortega is back in the titular role for S2 of the Netflix series, Wednesday.

It’s been a long, long wait, but we’re finally getting a second season of the Netflix supernatural horror comedy, Wednesday. The streaming giant dropped the first teaser and several first-look images to whet our appetites for what promises to be an excellent follow-up to the delightful first season.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, director Tim Burton famously turned down the opportunity to direct the 1991 feature film The Addams Family, inspired by characters created by American cartoonist Charles Addams for The New Yorker in 1938. Wednesday showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar—best known for Smallville—expected Burton to turn them down as well when they made their pitch. He signed up for the project instead.

This was an older, edgier, and even darker Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) than the dour young girl Christina Ricci made famous in the 1990s. Aloof, sardonic, and resolutely independent, she was very much the problem child, even by Addams standards, having been expelled from eight schools in five years. Hence her enrollment at Nevermore Academy, a haven for so-called “outcasts” and the alma mater of her parents.

Wednesday struggled to fit in at first, clashing with her cheery werewolf roommate Enid (Emma Myers) and the school queen bee, a siren named Bianca (Joy Sunday). Then she began investigating a string of brutal murders, leading her to resolve some long-standing family issues and delve into the school’s dark history. It all added up to a winning formula—basically a very good eight-hour Burton movie with a spooky murder mystery at its core.

Netflix drops Wednesday S2 teaser, first-look images Read More »

Author name: Mike M.