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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2024

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  • As someone who works in the field of criminal law (in Europe, and I would be shocked if it wasn’t the same in the US) - I’m not actually very worried about this. By that I don’t mean to say it’s not a problem, though.

    The risk of evidence being tampered with or outright falsified is something that already exists, and we know how to deal with it. What AI will do is lower the barrier for technical knowledge needed to do it, making the practice more common.

    While it’s pretty easy for most AI images to be spotted by anyone with some familiarity with them, they’re only going to get better and I don’t imagine it will take very long before they’re so good the average person can’t tell.

    In my opinion this will be dealt with via two mechanisms:

    • Automated analysis of all digital evidence for signatures of AI as a standard practice. Whoever can be the first person to land contracts with police departments to provide bespoke software for quick forensic AI detection is going to make a lot of money.

    • A growth in demand for digital forensics experts who can provide evidence on whether something is AI generated. I wouldn’t expect them to be consulted on all cases with digital evidence, but for it to become standard practice where the defence raises a challenge about a specific piece of evidence during trial.

    Other than that, I don’t think the current state of affairs when it comes to doctored evidence will particularly change. As I say, it’s not a new phenomenon, so countries already have the legal and procedural framework in place to deal with it. It just needs to be adjusted where needed to accommodate AI.

    What concerns me much more than the issue you raise is the emergence of activities which are uniquely AI dependent and need legislating for. For example, how does AI generated porn of real people fit into existing legislation on sex offences? Should it be an offence? Should it be treated differently to drawing porn of someone by hand? Would this include manually created digital images without the use of AI? If it’s not decided to be illegal generally, what about when it depicts a child? Is it the generation of the image that should be regulated, or the distribution? That’s just one example. What about AI enabled fraud? That’s a whole can of worms in itself, legally speaking. These are questions that in my opinion are beyond the remit of the courts and will require direction from central governments and fresh, tailor made legislation to deal with.



  • The censorship on Tiktok is crazy. The AI based comment removal is completely arbitrary - for example, I once had a comment removed for calling a public figure a walnut. Meanwhile, the comments are absolutely packed with the most vile comments. In particular, for content relating to my country there are thousands of comments openly celebrating and glorifying the deaths of migrants and some seriously explicitly racist rhetoric. It leads to people using silly workarounds to content filters that must be trivially easy to identify automatically, but aren’t, raising the question of why bother with such extreme censorship in the first place?


  • It’s interesting to see how the mental gymnastics attempt to avoid this. I sometimes look at Tiktok and if you go to the comments on anything Russia/Ukraine related it’s very clear to see which accounts are bots/stooges and what their narrative instructions are.

    Their favourite thing to do is to equate the West and Russia. That both do the same thing, and Russia is just more honest about it. Which I can sort of at least understand to some extent from a foreign policy perspective. But these accounts will earnestly say that the West does the same. including assassinating political rivals and this sort of shit. They also equate Ukraine wanting to join NATO as equivalent to Russia invading the country.








  • My understanding is that “persons” refers to people in discrete groups, where what separates those groups is pertinent to the topic being discussed.

    For example - ‘indigenous persons’ refers collectively to indigenous people, but acknowledges that there are separate subgroups of indigenous people within that. You could equally say “indigenous people” and it would be correct but you lose that nuance by not acknowledging that there are internal divisions within the group you are referring to.

    Not saying that’s the dictionary definition, but that’s how it’s generally used in my field.


  • As an outsider looking in, I’ve seen a lot of footage of rallies and events (on both sides) that are just absolutely crazy to me. Almost dystopian. People with painted faces, all kinds of merch, hollering and shouting and cheering like it’s the X Factor or a rock concert or something. You see people being interviewed outside the events and it’s like a festival in the background. It’s really, really bizarre. We have problems with our politics here too but not like that. I can’t believe that all of those people are ACTUALLY that passionate about any policies themselves, it’s just vague culture wars nonsense with a bizarre personality contest as a proxy for it.

    As I say, I’m not trying to act superior. My country has its share of problems too, just a very different sort.





  • I worked a 4 day week for years (4*10 hours) with my old employer and it was fantastic. And I can say for sure that it didn’t affect productivity for me or my team.

    I don’t have kids but several of my colleagues did and it was a game changer for them. Especially the one whose partner worked for the same organisation, who could sync it up to save an absolute fortune on childcare (which is absurdly expensive here).

    Another colleague was a single mother and had the choice to choose which days she did each week, meaning she could do more with her child and make it to events and such. I have no doubt that that will have a long term positive impact on her son too.

    For me as a childless person I could use 2 days of annual leave to get 5 days off straight. £40 return ticket to Spain or Italy, a cheap hotel, and you can have a lovely little holiday any time of year.

    I had to leave for unrelated personal reasons but that shift pattern was glorious. No less work got done and everyone was happier. And it turns out - surprise surprise - when your staff are happy they produce better work.

    It’s such a no brainer. But I won’t get excited, because a certain generation seems to take any improvement for the younger generation as some kind of personal attack.