(Robo) Calling It In

Of illegal AI and incompetent AI

Author

Ate A Pi
February 09, 2024

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Hereā€™s today at a glance:

šŸ› Garden Variety Malfeasance

We discussed the Biden New Hampshire deepfake robocall a long while ago (In AI terms that means January 2024), where Biden supposedly told primary voters to not vote:

And now we have the rare Internet pleasure of closure to this mystery, with the New Hampshire Attorney General stating:

  • the perp was Texas-based Life Corporation, run by a Walter Monk

  • identified by the Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force, which is a bipartisan task force made up of 50 state attorneys general

  • the FCC tracked down the calls to Lingo Telecom of Texas, sent it a cease-and-desist to stop supporting robocalls

  • no confirmation that ElevenLabs was used to deepfake the voice.

Interestingly, Lingo Telecom has been in the illegal robocall business since at least 2003 and has gone by Americatel, BullsEyeComm, Clear Choice Communications, Excel Telecommunications, Impact Telecom, Matrix Business Technologies, Startec Global Communications, Trinsic Communications, and VarTec Telecom.

The FCC now ā€œcontinues to investigateā€œ.

All this begs the question of course of why such rampant illegality goes uncaught for literal decades, until it upsets the political powers that be, by using ā€œAIā€.

Maybe we should just brand every annoying fraudulent activity as AI, just to get the attention of relevant authorities with the power to stop it.

Attention is all you need, indeed.

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šŸ§¼ AI Written Code Not That Clean

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke in June 2023 posts a blog with the extraordinary claim that CoPilot would add $1.5 trillion to GDP:

Too good to be true?

Of course, statistics like these are often calculated the same way lost productivity due to the Super Bowl is calculated, without thought to the balancing game theory that counters the effect. And sure enough, the good people at Gitclear evaluate these claims in detail:

Code Churn in light blue

Gitclear identified code ā€œchurnā€œ:

  • percentage of code that was pushed to the repo, then

    subsequently reverted, removed, or updated within 2 weeks by the same author

  • normal churn in 2020/2021 was about 3.4%

  • increased to a projected 7.1% in 2024

In effect coders are committing more incorrect code, then coming back to correct it later

Gitclear draws the conclusion that this is AI-driven behavior, which I agree with, even though the evidence here is circumstantial at best.

šŸ—žļø Things Happen

  • A single Twitch stream of 8,000 viewers watching a stream at Full HD resolution for 8 hours, costs Twitch $4,360, according to streamer @PirateSoftware. Nvidia has already demonstrated AI tech that would compress this dramatically, but unfortunately, we must wait for everyone to have GPUs

  • Oslo, Norway licenses ChatGPT 3.5 for all 110,000 school kids. I have doubt you want to be first at this because itā€™s clear that AI leads to rapid deskilling for existing skills as we climb the ladder to find new comparative advantage. You may not want to be so far ahead of the curve that you forget what you need to know for now. Though, Oslo has only 650k people.. so thatā€™s like a good small size for an experiment.

  • Google releases Gemini Ultra as Gemini Advanced with a $20 subscription. You know Google is not serious when they let the money-chasing Google Enterprise determine the pricing instead of the glorious cash cow of consumer search. Oh well.

šŸ–¼ļø AI Artwork Of The Day

Shrek from the series Crappy Live Adaptation by u/dasilvan2000 from r/midjourney

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