Tag: news

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…and sometimes, unreality is intentional and benign.

Today, Ars Technica posted an article with a header image featuring a keyboard modified to add an “Ars Subscribe” button. But the keyboard looked weird: the visible keys looked like this:

OPGU↵
LS.,
OC/[Ars Subscribe]

The extra letters, especially the two O keys, immediately drew accusations of AI slop generation.

And yet the image was credited to Aurich Lawson / Getty.

I figured Lawson had grabbed a stock image without noticing it was slop and then added the Subscribe button. So I did some reverse image searches. And it turned out that the apparent source photo was uploaded to iStockPhoto in 2016 (Getty owns iStock now), long before the advent of modern “AI” image generation.

That left the question of why the 2016 image had weird keys, though.

Then @lw replied on Mastodon that it matches a Turkish keyboard layout with the diacritics missing. I looked back at my search results and noticed another image that looked the same, only with the extra keys blanked out. The same account uploaded this one in 2018, and this time iStock had tagged it as having been uploaded from Turkey.

So, mystery (mostly) solved! It’s a real keyboard layout. Almost certainly a real photo, deliberately edited by hand to remove the extra markings. Why? Probably the original uploader figured it would be less distracting to a global audience. Who could have predicted that a decade later it would end up looking more suspicious because of it?

The discussion picked up in the article’s comment thread, where narteb found an even older version from 2014, still with the missing diacritics, but with a different action button and a darker (presumably original) skin tone on the finger.

A Proxy for Quality

It’s no surprise that readers were so quick to assume the photo was flat-out generated slop based on the apparent mismatch (not counting the obviously intentional subscribe button). “AI”-generated images have flooded the zone, and while there used to be some obvious tells — badly drawn hands, for instance — they’re getting to be a lot subtler.

Now we all second-guess everything we see, because to do otherwise would leave us open to being manipulated by falsehoods. And it’s not just knowing whether the image shows something real, but to know whether the image represents real human intention. The *ahem* key aspect of this image is the big red subscribe button, which is obviously not real, but it’s intentionally not real.

No one was under any illusion that the photo was an actual, unmodified keyboard. But when people assumed it was generated slop, they also assumed that was an indicator of laziness. When you see an article accompanied by an obviously junk image, you wonder, what else did they skimp on? Did they generate the article too? Did they research it properly? Did they fact-check it? This particular article was just a “here’s our new forum” announcement, but what about the other stuff that they publish?

Trust

Earlier this year, Ars retracted an article that contained fabricated, LLM-generated quotes. They fired the reporter and spent time developing an AI usage policy. This kind of thing burns trust, and trust is a news publication’s most important asset.

And it doesn’t even have to be a real mistake, or a real bias, to do damage. Conservatives spent decades painting NPR and PBS as some sort of bizarre “Marxist” strawman parody of what they actually broadcast, forcing them to dig out of a hole with large parts of their potential audience, until they’d lost enough trust that it became politically expedient to defund the networks.

Gut reactions and snap decisions have a purpose. But they’re still only heuristics. When we have time, it’s good to second-guess our impressions. Sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re right. But we have to look at those impressions clearly, not just spend the effort justifying the conclusion we’ve already reached. That’s something the human brain is also really good at, and when we’re cherry-picking evidence for the wrong conclusion, that makes things even worse.

I saw at least one commenter on the thread following up and insisting it couldn’t possibly be a Turkish keyboard, because those would have the diacritics on them, and this one doesn’t. It reminded me of the character in Mystery Men rejecting the idea that the Clark Kent expy couldn’t possibly be the Superman expy on the basis that he wears glasses, and not-Superman clearly has better eyesight than that.

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The practice of recycling old news articles still throws me off at times. For instance: here are two recent LA Times articles using big disasters as springboards to talk about possible giant earthquake scenarios in California. They start out talking about the Houston flooding from Harvey and yesterday’s quake in Mexico, then segue into Los Angeles disaster planning. By the end, they’ve segued into the same text. I was reading today’s and thinking, “I just read this, recently.” A ten-second search turned up the older article.

It’s not plagiarism. It’s the same reporter at the same newspaper. It’s basically the equivalent of stock footage, and it’s hardly the only example. It’s probably not even a new practice, just a lot easier to find now that everything’s online and searchable.

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This Is True is a weekly newsletter rounding up weird news from around the world, summarized with witty comments by Randy Cassingham. It’s usually funny, sometimes sad, sometimes infuriating — but it always makes you think.

I’ve been a subscriber for years, and highly recommend it. One of the things I like about it is that he makes more effort to verify the stories than the typical “odd news” wire service that simply repeats something printed in a distant newspaper without realizing that it’s the local equivalent of the National Enquirer or Weekly World News. (Did anyone ever actually verify that Wii Fit nymphomaniac story last month? As near as I could tell every single article used the same tabloid as a source.)

Check out today’s sample story for an idea of what to expect.

Cassingham also links to interesting news items on Twitter and on Facebook, though not the same articles

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Waaay back in the dark ages of the Web (somewhere between 1994 and 1997) I discovered a weekly email newsletter called “This Is True.” It collected strange-but-true news stories from around the world, summarizing each in a short paragraph with a witty one-liner at the end. I subscribed to the free edition, and later to the full version, which had about twice as many stories. I even picked up a few of the books collecting past stories (at a con, I think, but I can’t remember which con).

Eventually I got too busy to read them, and the back-issues piled up unread, and I decided to let my subscription lapse. But earlier this year, I decided to re-up with the shorter, free version, and it’s still as good as ever.

This week’s issue included a disappointing story: even though they practice — in fact, probably helped originate — responsible list management, Yahoo is blocking them as spammers. Why? Because people are signing up for the list, then deciding they don’t want it anymore, and instead of unsubscribing, hitting the “Report as Spam” button. Yahoo has apparently taken those spam reports at face value, and blocked everyone’s copy of the newsletter.

Clearly, some people are unclear on what “spam” means. It’s not just “mail I don’t want.” It’s “mass mail I don’t want and didn’t ask for.”

That, and I’m sure some people don’t realize that their reports are being used to train everyone’s filters. I remember a co-worker explaining a few years ago that he’d trained Gmail to send the SourceForge newsletters (or something similar) straight into his spam folder. I commented that they might be using that data to train their sitewide filters, and he said something like, “I hope not.”

Using user feedback to train sitewide or network-wide (such as Cloudmark, or Akismet) filters is a powerful technique. Some people will catch the leading edge of a spam attack, and that data can be used to protect others as the attack continues. Some will check their mail sooner, and that data can be used to re-filter messages that have been received, but not yet viewed.

Unfortunately, it also can give a lot of power to people who are either unclear on the criteria being used or have an axe to grind, unless you include measures to (a) contain the impact or (b) keep track of each reporter’s reliability. I know Cloudmark factors in the reporter’s reputation, for instance. And I suspect that AOL does, at least in some cases, limit measures such as blocking to specific recipients, but I can’t be certain.

Anyway, to summarize:

  • Use the Report Spam button responsibly.  If you actually subscribed to it, it isn’t spam unless they refuse to remove you from the list.
  • Check out This is True.  You may laugh, you may groan, you may think, or you may get pissed off at the world — or all of the above.  It’s certainly worth a look.

(I really should have finished writing this yesterday, before someone submitted the original story to Slashdot. Posting about it to get the word out seems kind of redundant now. Heck, now that I think about it, I should have submitted the original to Slashdot. Oh, well.

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I was listening to the news this morning, and I caught a reference to “Convicted Lobbyist Jack Abramoff.” It occurred to me that the phrasing is a bit odd. It makes it sound like he was convicted of being a lobbyist, which, last I heard, was still legal.

I suppose “Convicted corrupt lobbyist” sounds too unwieldy… and there are people who might consider it redundant!

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