Lies, Lies, and More Lies
From politicians to AI, today's news is a swamp of lie-infested stories ... or stories about lie-infested stories, but are those stories lies?
Where to start on a day with so many lies in the news. Oh, I know; let’s make it easy. I’ll start with Biden. Here we have, not outright lies on this particular day but flamboyant hypocrisy; but hypocrisy is its own deception as people pretend to believe things they really don’t live by. It’s a lie that they care.
In his speech carried in today’s news, Biden warned America about the high dangers of having billionaire oligarchs control democracy. Of course, he is only concerned now that so many of them have lined up on Trump’s side of the fence. His warning was beyond scoffable when you consider that only a very short time ago Biden gave evil billionaire George Soros a medal for directing global democracies, including our own Republic, with his money. Apparently, billionaire influence over democracy is good so long as they are Democrats. It is clearly impossible to even imagine Biden turning down the support of any billionaire coming his direction; and, while Biden may not quite be a billionaire, he’s made plenty o’ moola working the sidelines of the senate with those who are.
(See video or medal presentation here. Two billionaires got awards that day and a political millionaire or two.)
Next he talked about how dangerous it is that the billionaires are often part of the military industrial complex (MIC) that President Eisenhower warned us about. Did Biden ever see a war that he didn’t vote for? He certainly hasn’t been reluctant to make US billionaires rich with weapons contracts to replace all the weapons flowing into Ukraine. It’s not so clear that he didn’t even create a billionaire or two in Ukraine with all that has funneled that way. I mean, whatever one’s position on aiding Ukraine with weapons, we have to be honest that it does fulfill the wishes of the MIC with exactly the kind of weapon destruction they love to replenish.
And never mind that the American “oligarchy” he decries gained $1.5 trillion in wealth during his reign, some of which came from funding the factories and infrastructure used by billionaires to make computer chips, especially for the MIC.
Billionaire bailouts
OK, moving right along to other Biden billionaires, let’s go to the disingenuous concerns of the insurance industry over the fires around LA—or, at least, of the biggest CEO working in the industry, Blackrock billionaire Larry “the Fink.”
Background: Fink, a mega-billionaire more than a MAGA-billionaire, does butter his bread on both sides to make sure he owns friends everywhere in Washington, but he has particularly favored one of Biden’s top causes:
BlackRock is pouring record amounts of money into U.S. political campaigns this year as the asset-management giant faces mounting scrutiny over its size and advocacy of sustainable investing….
BlackRock is evenly distributing its contributions among both parties because Congress is narrowly divided between them and control of the House is expected to change hands after the November elections….
"They're playing the game well…."
Clearly they are not doing giving to both because they believe in one side or the other. It’s solely to curry favor with both sides so they always have plenty of plum politicians in their pockets. But Biden’s friends got plenty of buy-in.
Among House members who got the maximum $10,000 donation were members of leadership like Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic caucus chairman. The PAC also gave $7,500 to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
And control of the house (and the Senate) is always what Fink wants. Of course, they have other conventional ways of gaining control over the government:
Another BlackRock Inc. executive is joining the Biden administration, adding to the close ties between the Wall Street heavyweight and the seat of power in Washington.
Spreading that money around is what helps you get your people into those positions of power and influence.
Eric Van Nostrand, a BlackRock managing director who was head of research for sustainable investments and multi-asset strategies, is exiting to join the Treasury Department.
Especially if, as a money manager, you want to put them where all the nation’s money mismanaged!
He’s not a member of the MIC, though:
He will be a senior adviser on economic issues tied to Russia and Ukraine.
Oops. My mistake. I guess he is.
Larry Fink’s $8.5 trillion investing giant has been gaining clout in Washington as the Biden administration has stocked its ranks with ex-BlackRock executives. That means the company is now seen as one of Wall Street’s key conduits to the power center in Washington.
Certainly, no evidence of mega-billionaires controlling democracy there! That doesn’t mean it was Biden’s fault at all, though:
Shortly after winning the election in November 2020, President Biden tapped two BlackRock executives for senior roles on his economics team: Brian Deese, the former head of sustainability at BlackRock who now runs the National Economic Council, and Adewale Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary….
Mike Pyle, BlackRock’s former chief investment strategist, joined the administration to serve as Kamala Harris’s chief economic adviser and is now a key player on Russia sanctions.
Oops, I missed again. Guess it was his fault. (Of course, we all know when he says this stuff, as if he cares, that this is how he and his colleagues have played along in the game for decades.)
And, so it was that concerned Citizen Fink was in the news again today issuing a dire warning regarding those who will be hurting from lack of insurance in LA. Of course, the Fink’s Blackrock has millions in assets under management owned by several major insurance companies. If those funds dwindle, so does Blackjacks percentage of the profits for management. Still, we know his true concern has nothing to do with stemming the red river of ink under his management. He is solely concerned for the underinsured in LA. You can hear it in his words:
“When you have whole neighborhoods destroyed and you have infrastructure and schools and supermarkets destroyed — this is not a one-year fix. This is going to be five, six, seven, maybe 10 years of fixing….”
Fink added that the government will need to get involved with homeowners' insurance as consumers reckon with the devastation.
'Homeowners' insurance is becoming a larger and larger component of home ownership,' he said.
His company handles $11.6 trillion on behalf of retail and institutional clients and oversaw $700 billion of insurance companies’ cash as of the end of the third quarter.
God forbid it should fall on all his client insurance companies to pay those bills. Tax payers will need to bail them out. To sell his heartfelt message of bailouts for billionaires (who either own the homes in Pacific Palisades or own the companies that still insured them, the Fink added a personal touch: (These guys are nothing if they are not salesmen.)
For Fink, a Los Angeles native, the fires have taken on a personal significance. He described the blazes as, 'horrible to watch'.
'I used to hike the Santa Monica mountains all the time; it was one of my pleasures growing up, looking for snakes and reptiles as a kid, walking through the chaparral,' he said.
'I was there during the great Bel Air fires, but we've never seen destruction like this.'
The anger of homeowners in Los Angeles is growing as they face an insurance crisis as companies could struggle to cover the staggering costs of the wildfires.
Tens of thousands of displaced LA residents have lost everything but the clothes they were wearing and a few select personal items, leaving insurance companies on the hook for colossal payouts.
Of course, the Fink wants to put as much of that cost as he can on the government (meaning, really, you) so that he can hold onto as much of his client’s money as he can under his management. Meanwhile, that homeowner rage is particularly being focused on State Farm because it had the wisdom to pull out of the Pacific Palisades fire pit, recognizing it as a highly risky place to do business because of constant wildfires around LA, the abundant tinder, and insufficient fire-fighting capacity in Pacific Palisades, plus the massive prices of real estate that would be wiped out if a fire did blow through.
Owners of million-dollar plus homes all chose to risk living in an area we’ve been told relentlessly is subject to hugely destructive fires “because of climate change.” Many of them are the ones that are preaching that message out of Holywood to the rest of us; yet they are the ones who choose to live there, and they are the ones who chose not to spend a few billion dollars putting in a world-class fire-fighting system that could pump water from the ocean and who even voted in a mayor who chose to defund the fire department, rather than defund as many refugee and homeless programs and illicit drug-provision programs as would be necessary to balance the budget.
The homeowners complaining about State Farm act as if the company is a charity that should do business in Pacific Palisades just to help them save money correcting the problem. State Farm should do business where it is concerned it could lose enough money to cripple the company because of the risk. Now companies that stayed are so crippled Fink has become their professional billionaire beggar.
I do feel sorry for them, as the loss is terrible, and I do mourn the loss of such beautiful and often historic buildings. I think it is truly sad, but they have no right to shoulder their losses off onto State Farm for being smart enough to get out of there, which possibly saved State Farm’s continuing customers in other regions from now taking a premium hit or even from seeing their insurance company go insolvent because of the scale of the losses. Many of those who live there are millionaires and a good number are even those billionaires Biden is warning us about who hold fancy dinners there to fundraisers for Democrats.
It is, of course, those financial losses by the insurance companies that foolishly stayed in the game that are Fink’s true concern if truth were ever told.
Artificial artifice
Finally we have artificially intelligent liars that are taking the world by storm, contaminating the pool of human knowledge known as the internet with pond scum that then floats its way into all kinds of writing with the writers unaware (sometimes probably even my own, though I do my best with the time I have as a one-man show to avoid it).
Today, just to test how that was working, I did an internet search for my own name, and the first article that came up was a conglomeration of information pulled from many sources, so apparently an AI compendium, since no human could have sat there and written all of that of every name out there someone might Google. It contained, at least, as many errors about me as truths, even in the parts where it was clear I was the “David Haggith” it was referencing based on other facts stated in the same paragraph.
I did this because Apple was in the news today because of what a liar its artificial intelligence is. I’ve always known Siri isn’t the hottest chip off the ol’ block because when I ask her for the closest pizzeria to where I live, she regularly sends me to the other side of the nation. In fact, I’ve stopped using her for the most part because she goes to the wrong information most of the time. She’s the dumbest personal assistant I can imagine, even though she is quite polite about it and has an attractive voice. So, I’ve mostly pulled a Trump and fired her.
This matters because Apple’s claim to me yesterday when it wanted me to sign up for its AI upgrade was that it would hugely improve Siri’s performance, and clearly she could use a good intelligence audit and a little on-the-job training. Yet, today’s news about how Apple’s new AI is every bit as dumb as Siri or just outright dishonest doesn’t give me hope that having AI as her own personal assistant would make Siri and less confused:
The title was “Apple's AI Is Constantly Butchering Huge News Stories Sent to Millions of Users.”
Apple has come under intense scrutiny for rolling out an underbaked AI-powered feature that summarizes breaking news — while often butchering it beyond recognition.
For over a month, roughly as long as the feature has been available to iPhone users, publishers have found that it consistently generates false information and pushes it to millions of users.
Must be Siri’s inbred brother. Glad I refused Apple’s offer yesterday. But they’re on it:
Despite broadcasting a barrage of fabrications for weeks, Apple has yet to meaningfully address the problem.
Oops. I missed again.
"This is my periodic rant that Apple Intelligence is so bad that today it got every fact wrong in its AI a summary of Washington Post news alerts," the newspaper's tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler wrote in a post on Bluesky this week.
Well, come on! You can’t get everything right.
Fowler appended a screenshot of an alert, which claimed that Pete Hegseth, who's been facing a confrontational confirmation hearing for the role of defense secretary this week, had been fired by his former employer, Fox News — which is false and not what the WaPo's syndication of an Associated Press story actually said.
OK, but we’re used to fake news facts about Trump being outright lies.
The AI alert also claimed that Florida senator Marco Rubio had been sworn in as secretary of state, which is also false as of the time of writing.
So, it was prognosticating—testing its mettle as a prophet.
"It's wildly irresponsible that Apple doesn't turn off summaries for news apps until it gets a bit better at this AI thing," Fowler added.
Well, you only do that if you’re concerned about the truth.
AI models are still coming up with all sorts of "hallucinated" lies, a problem experts believe could be intrinsic to the tech.
Well, of course. Who did it learn from? The internet—the fount of all truth?
Google gets boggled
Apple’s biggest competition in the search field isn’t any better. Says another writer here on Substack today regarding that competitors new application of AI:
Google search has become “unusable”—so say dozens if not hundreds of videos and articles highlighting how the search engine is now riddled with results preferential to Google’s paid spam—services, useless products, and other dross. Not to mention the results are riddled with AI slop, making it nearly impossible to fish out needed info from the sea of turds:
Many have taken to using a “before:2023” hack in search queries to bypass the slop singularity, or slopularity now befouling every search.
Of course, this stuff will populate the internet of all things so voracious and quickly that soon your wifi fridge will start lying to you. Truth will be lost because who uses carefully copy-edited books these days? So the profusion of lies throughout the internet will become the facts that the next generation of AI gets educated on. And so on and so on.
Real people with good intentions will inadvertently quote them as they research with Google and other AI platforms, and it will become harder and harder to sort out fact from AI lying because of how intermeshed it will quickly all become, and it will come with the authenticity stamp of once-venerable news agencies that have played loose with the truth recently, too, quoting always unnamed sources and single sources that get picked up by other news publishers and reported as facts. Careless with truth already, they’ll easily pick up stories with parts and pieces of AI factoids and use the info in their own stories, even if without any intention to deceive.
It’s all a big rock tumbler or cement mixer … or garbage grinder.
The story also highlights a stark power imbalance, with news organizations powerless to determine how Apple represents their work to its vast number of users.
"News organizations have vigorously complained to Apple about this, but we have no power over what iOS does to the accurate and expertly crafted alerts we send out," Fowler wrote in a followup….
Facebook losing face by adding fake faces
In another story today, I read how Facebook is incorporating numerous AI agents, dressed up as human members with photos of their faces and human histories and interests and names to pose as human posters. Why they would want to make it even more into Fakebook, I don’t know.
You’d think that would be the very kind of thing they would be trying hard to keep others from doing to trash up their site. I would think their advertisers would be particularly upset, unless they had hoped the advertisers would never find out they’re pumping up their number of users with bots of their own.
The unreality beast beneath it all
Or maybe it’s something far more sinister:
The Kissinger/Eric Schmidt book on AI basically states that the real promise of AI, from their perspective, is as a tool of perception manipulation - that eventually people will not be able to interpret or perceive reality without the help of an AI via cognitive diminishment and learned helplessness.
But, then, why would people trust AI when they already know that AI is exactly the thing that is distorting reality everywhere it posts with outright lies or “hallucinations?” I guess because they’re people, and people are not always that bright.
There is a deep truth in that statement, though, that I’ve been worried about: with so much of our research coming from the internet—even that which goes into books—and getting inevitably sucked up by websites (even those like my own that want to do their best to avoid all lies)—we could very soon become a generation that has almost no grasp on the truth and nowhere to go to find those lesser truths that are about our daily events. (I can’t even remember the last time I went to library to do research.)
Speaking of conspiracy theories, they are not all false; so, here is one worth considering, given how things appear to be going:
Please, please realize that we are in a war against the elites over human perception and that social media is a major battleground in that war. Hold onto your critical thinking and skepticism and never surrender it.
Even those who try to preserve skepticism are guided by their own political biases and preferred conspiracies, as we all are to some extent, to where many only find whatever fits what they already believe (because that is the way everything seems to be drifting quickly now), and AI will build on it with fabrications that feed it. So, it will be hard for any of us who try to be skeptical to sort out how much we’re being fed designed info some AI has figured out we’ll be receptive to by our reading habits that demonstrate what we’re inclined to believe.
“For that to happen, online reality must become so insane that real people can no longer distinguish real from fake in the virtual realm.
I don’t think we’re far away from that. We all have things we have long believed and hold as true, but it will be all the new information coming in that is full of “hallucinations” and lies artfully designed to tuck into our personal fabric of ideas in ways that AI deducts you and I are readily inclined to believe. It’s the old “the best lies come wrapped in truth.”
About Face
The article used for these references comes from Dark Futura here on Substack and contains some clear examples of how these Fakebook members appear. They even say things in their profiles like “proud, black, queer mama … and truth teller.” Of course, it’s possible the article on Dark Futura is an AI deep fake. How would I know? I mean, if true (and I think it is), Facebook is using AI to create its own spam—the kind they spent a fortune trying to take down not that long ago.
Twitter/X, I’m sure suffers the same troubles. If Elon isn’t doing it, others are doing it to create spam accounts all over the place.
Even if the stuff about Fakebook is the actual fake, and Deep Futura just got conned by the clickbait (not that I’m suggesting that’s the case), how long will it be before AI with its massive speed has social media sites filled with such distortions? Presumably, it already does.
One source of the info claims to be an archived article from the Financial Times. An article by the title does appear on FT.com, if you go to their site and do a search, as I did, but I don’t have a subscription to be able to read it. But that’s just exactly the conundrum I’m saying we will be facing everywhere, and it’s already starting to become apparent. Who knows how much iceberg lies beneath the sea compared to what is already apparent?
Meta is betting that characters generated by artificial intelligence will fill its social media platforms in the next few years as it looks to the fast-developing technology to drive engagement with its 3bn users.
The Silicon Valley group is rolling out a range of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook, as it battles with rival tech groups to attract and retain a younger audience.
“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta.
Are those “3bn users” half AI fakes?
In short: the more ‘interactions’—meaning, clicks and page views, et cetera—they can get you to have, the more opportunities for ad placements.
How will advertisers know whether or not half the clicks that are claimed are from other AI accounts? Soon, how will they know that any of the users clicking aren’t AIs? Maybe all the humans will go away, and the whole site will be AI-created Fakebook users. Then what’s the point? They’re destroying any last vestiges of trust in their site if there ever were any foolish enough to really trust what gets posted there.
Even your phone’s camera is using AI now when you enhance resolution of a photo. It adds add minute details that weren’t there from other pictures of the same recognized item found in that vast internet library of all things in order to sharpen the photo.
One guy even notes that, having Used Meta AI to sharpen up a selfie, his image got harvested without his knowledge, and Intagram is now using it and modifying his pose, clothing, etc. to create ads targeting him.
So, if you thought the old dating sites and online foreign fiancé-to-be catalogs were full of fakes, wait to you wade through them now. The images and everything else will be made up from scratch to look exactly like what some AI thinks you fantasize about based on the thousands of bits of data that get filtered out of so much of what you write and post and visit online.
Again, read the article or all kinds of examples on the site I just referenced, though I couldn’t possibly tell you how many are real and how many are, themselves, AI fakes. I’m not suggesting that is truly the case, and I wouldn’t publish any of these examples if I had reason to think it is, but maybe the whole article or the whole site is AI fakery. How would I know? But that’s the point.
After all, even the author writes,
my own writing once scanned as “AI generated” according to one baffled user—afterwards I learned these “AI detectors” were very flawed.
Of course, isn’t that exactly what you’d expect a fake AI author to say when accused of being fake AI? You seen the conundrum here. Maybe some AI’s plan is to create sites with articles like this to make us all go nuts with a feeling of disorientation. How do you know I’m not an AI? I hate to say it, but with fakes being so good now, how do you?
There is this assurance:
Compared to some of its competitors, Substack appears to have a relatively low amount of AI-generated writing. For example, two other AI-detection companies recently found that close to 40 percent of content on the blogging platform Medium was generated using artificial intelligence tools. But a large portion of the suspected AI-generated content on Medium had little engagement or readership, while the AI writing on Substack is being published by powerhouse accounts.
But how do you know they don’t simply have the best AI to create the best lies?
This all gets woven again and again into the fabric of information we once called “the worldwide web.”
Oh what a web we weave when we practice to deceive. Man’s biggest accomplishment of knowledge-sharing and dissemination is now his worst accomplishment.
(Articles quoted above are highlighted in the list of headlines below.)