DataKnightmare (English Version)

As an end-of season treat, a bunch of questions that we'll meet again, as good as new, after the break. Good summer from Dataknightmare!

TL; DR: there is no "AI", only bullshit generators, and therein lies the rub. what the Italian Garante really decided (no, it did NOT block chatGPT, that was openAI's strong-arming choice), refutation of the most common objections and a few opinions as a bonus.

Generative AI may be all the rage right now, but it's just a marketing name. A more appropriate name? Bullshit generators.

"Dear EU, please change the GDPR because it does not suit our business models. XOXO, the US"

Lonmgtermism is a Nazi cult disguised as fashionable scientism for the megarich. Merry Christmas!

DataKnightmare is back. And, following on the german DSK investigation report, has his own opinion on the age-old question: are there alternatives to Office365?

First it was Project Maven, then Google Duplex, and now the Selfish Ledger. Google has become the Church of the Algojerks, and it is now clear that Silicon Valley is pursuing a fundamentally Leninist project.

Do you, like me, have the impression that things are somehow accelerating? As if we were on a car careening downhill with no brakes --and no driver either? Seems to me, the brazenness with which Silicon Valley is churning out its "solutions" (often to nobody's problems) is fast reaching its slobness. Am I overreacting? Facebook wants our nude pics in advance, to better protect us against revenge porn; the industry (industry!) of workplace surveillance is out of control; and Google preemptively censors us if an algorithm decides one of *our* Google Docs may be violating the law. How do you call all this? John Naughton on the Guardian very Britishly wrote of a half-educated digital elite. I call it the attack of the algojerks.

The DataKnightmare has issues with the ongoing deification of disruption stars. Will our future really have the intellectually unencumbered face of a Mark Zuckerberg? Are Uber, AirBnB, Google really all that innovation is about? Are these kings of disruption really the gods of our times. No. We are already witnessing their twilight of these gods and of their childish, simplistic worldview. The future is still ours to dream --and build.

You thought the DeepMind/Royal Free NHS case was bad? Well, Italy has promised IBM the sum total of its 60 million citizens' health data for Watson health to train on. With no oversight, no guarantees, no financial return, and no defined goals. Welcome to the mother of all datagrabs.

The Equifax breach, 143 million citizens' worth of credit rating data? Or Facebook having Nazis as a targetable demographics? Or the system an Italian party uses for its internal polls and elections, Rousseau, breachable with a trivial SQL injection? The data industry is a circus where the contest is between the "merely" incompetent and the criminally so. But we're not spectators. We are the prize.

Can AI really guess if you are gay? So far, it's a bullshit claim. Nonetheless, some are making it. They claim to be warning us, but with their bad science and their questionable ethics, they lend credibility to the practices they claim to fear. Welcome to a world where the algorithmic is political