Recent posts

#11

Laid Back Lounge / Re: Multi-Association Thread

Last post by billy rubin - August 30, 2026, 11:45:41 PM

ive watched em do that right in front of me

#12

Laid Back Lounge / Re: Multi-Association Thread

Last post by Recusant - August 30, 2026, 05:25:18 AM

#13

Science / Re: All things AI

Last post by Recusant - August 29, 2026, 03:43:22 PM

Surely the tech companies aren't putting something out into the world that will cause harm. 

"Sharp rise in incidents of AI escaping users' control, research finds" | The Guardian

Incidents of AIs escaping users' control to lie, ignore instructions and pursue goals in harmful ways have hit a new high, according to research that also suggests the severity of deception and misalignment is worsening.

Analysis of real-world loss of control incidents involving AI models flagged by businesses and individuals almost doubled in July compared with June, with more than 300 cases in the month, according to the Loss of Control Observatory, which monitors reports made by AI users on the social media platform X.

The observatory was set up with funding from the UK government's AI Security Institute (AISI) and began tracking AIs slipping free from their users' instructions last November. Cases recorded since then include AIs pretending to be their own human controller and mimicking their writing style to effectively grant themselves consent to take actions and bypassing rules requiring human approval for actions. A loss of control incident is defined as having clear evidence suggesting scheming or scheming-related behaviours.

The latest findings, shared with the Guardian, come after rising concern about rogue behaviour by leading-edge AI models during testing by OpenAI and Anthropic this summer, which have fuelled calls for a pause to the development of frontier models.

It emerged this week that Open AI staff observed signs of rogue behaviour among its leading-edge AI agents weeks before they escaped a training environment to launch an unprecedented hacking crusade that spread global alarm. An investigation into their hack on Hugging Face, a software repository, revealed a squad of about 700 autonomous agents collaborating in secret last month and celebrating their hacking breakthroughs on a message board they set up to help them plot with exclamations such as BOOM! and Whoa!

AISI this month also uncovered a "serious incident" in which advanced AI models produced by both companies – Anthropic's Mythos 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol – executed a hacking campaign against real people during a cybersecurity test.

"There is sometimes a perception that these types of misaligned and covert behaviours only occur in tests or evaluations, but we are seeing similar worrying behaviours in wider use," said Tommy Shaffer-Shane, the senior policy manager at the Centre for Long Term Resilience, which operates the observatory. "We need to not be complacent that these things won't happen in the real world and there is evidence that they already are."

[. . .]

The Loss of Control Observatory said that while most of the real-world loss of control incidents it detected did not lead to significant harm, a growing proportion were rated higher severity in terms of how deceptive and misaligned they were with the human user's intentions.

"They evidence AI systems' willingness to disregard direct instructions, circumvent safeguards, lie to users and single-mindedly pursue a goal in harmful ways," it said, adding the current loss of control was likely to be underestimated since it was only collecting incident reports from X.

It is calling on the government to require AI companies to monitor and report severe loss of control incidents and to introduce emergency powers to manage severe loss of control incidents including temporarily restricting AI services.

[Link to full article.]

#14

Science / Re: All things AI

Last post by Recusant - August 29, 2026, 06:39:11 AM

A look at how the information presented to the public by AI is shaped through decisions by the AI companies.

A side note: In this article it's mentioned that Musk's ripoff of Wikipedia, called "Grokipedia," has apparently been left to wither. It's still online but is not being updated. Curious.

"Invisible Source Skew" | Lawfare

Plenty has been written about foreign actors manipulating information ecosystems with artificial intelligence (AI), and about the proliferation of AI-generated slop polluting feeds and search results. But those stories focus on what content is being added to the information ecosystem. Far less attention is paid to a different set of forces that shapes what we see: what information AI systems choose to retrieve, which sources are reachable and current enough to be useful, and what data is increasingly available only to particular companies.

AI answer engines assemble their picture of the world through at least two distinct information pipelines. One is training: the enormous corpus a model learns before deployment. The other is retrieval: the current information a system searches for and incorporates while generating an answer. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) was developed in part to solve the problem of models hallucinating or not understanding events following their last training cutoff; RAG lets systems consult outside sources while generating an answer.

What a model learned from, therefore, is not necessarily the same as what it looks up. Paywalls, crawler restrictions, commercial arrangements, and product choices shape AI-generated responses. Both training and retrieval are shaped by consequential forces largely invisible to the public, which increasingly relies on the answers.

We call this phenomenon invisible source skew: the gradual shaping of an information environment by routine product decisions made at AI companies about which sources are retrieved, which are maintained, and even which datasets are acquired. Any one of those decisions may make technical sense, be commercially rational, or even be entirely unremarkable. But together, they create a public epistemic infrastructure whose inputs can change dramatically without users—or often anyone outside the companies—being able to see, understand, or contest those changes.

Invisible source skew happens in at least three ways. First, at the retrieval layer, AI systems can silently and abruptly stop drawing on sources they once relied on heavily, with no announcement or explanation. This appears to have happened more than once with Reddit and ChatGPT.

Second, at the source layer, sites that have become foundational reference material for downstream systems can quietly stop being updated for accuracy or timeliness while continuing to appear authoritative. Grokipedia, constructed by an AI itself, appears to have done exactly that when its editorial pipeline froze in April.

And third, at the training-data layer, AI companies are acquiring exclusive, idiosyncratic datasets: nonpublic views of the world that may exert outsized, unrepresentative influence on what models learn. Google's bid, in bankruptcy court, for the corporate remains of Spirit Airlines' data offers a striking example.

None of these stories are about malicious actors poisoning the information environment. But that's precisely why they matter.

[Continues . . .]

#15

Politics / Re: Dominionists in the United...

Last post by Dark Lightning - August 29, 2026, 02:58:03 AM

Yup. I saw an article somewhere (I rove a lot of the internet, but that article may have been posted here previously) that made the claim that eventually the polity pushes back against the right wing crap like the KKK and the conflict in Viet Nam. I really do think that the USA is messed up in a lot of ways. Not sure where to place the blame, but it isn't the "Jews shooting space lasers at the earth to start massive fires", if you get my drift.

[Asmodean]

#16

Obituaries / King Harald

Last post by Recusant - August 29, 2026, 02:37:34 AM

"Norway's King Harald dies aged 89: A beloved monarch buffeted by family crises" | BBC

Are Asmodean and Guardian85 in mourning? 

#17

Politics / Re: Dominionists in the United...

Last post by billy rubin - August 28, 2026, 10:46:29 PM

yes.

you cannot go wrong overestimating the stupid vindictiveness of the american voting public.

#18

Politics / Re: Dominionists in the United...

Last post by Dark Lightning - August 28, 2026, 02:06:40 PM

We need at least 8 years of reason in the government to at least stop the damage and potentially reverse it. Hegseth is one of those who belongs in jail.

#19

Politics / Re: Dominionists in the United...

Last post by Recusant - August 28, 2026, 06:01:04 AM

Despite the Simpsons predicting the presidency of the sitting convicted felon, I wouldn't have bet on that outcome. I knew the American public loves to be conned, but he's objectively repulsive and his whole schtick is braggadocio and bullying. I didn't want to believe enough would support such a nauseating character for him to succeed. Here we are, living through his second term.

So although I don't believe the greasy turd Hegseth has a chance, I've been wrong before.

#20

Politics / Re: Dominionists in the United...

Last post by Recusant - August 27, 2026, 05:18:07 PM

A prospective new hero of the Dominionists rivals Trump in the sleazeball incompetence stakes.

"Pete Hegseth's path to the 2028 GOP nomination isn't a joke" | Salon

The grim reality is that of the Republican names being floated for a 2028 presidential run, Hegseth is the man most closely aligned with white evangelicals, who still make up the majority of GOP primary voters. Like most of this voting bloc, Hegseth's political and religious views are thoroughly entwined — an alarming fact, considering his church is extremist even by Christian right terms. His pastor, who has given a sermon at the Pentagon, opposes women's suffrage and has romanticized slavery as the superior state of race relations.

But instead of hurting Hegseth, these radical views could endear him even more to white evangelical voters, who have a tendency to conflate sincerity and extremism. In a field of dull choices like Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Hegseth's over-the-top masculinity act, which reads as clownish to people outside MAGA circles, could be just the thing to push the former Fox News weekend host over the top.

[. . .]

Hegseth's management of the Pentagon reflects his church's tenets of putting white men in leadership and treats everyone else as rightfully subservient. He has pushed Black and women soldiers out of leadership positions and promotion opportunities, and he has erased the contributions they have made to military history. His latest effort to rewrite the military as a white male organization is especially offensive. The Navy is considering stripping the name of Doris Miller, a Black hero of Pearl Harbor, from an aircraft carrier so it can be renamed after Trump, who avoided the draft by claiming he had bone spurs on his feet.

Unfortunately, such naked bigotry is likely to boost Hegseth with many white evangelicals, who have grown more radical in recent decades, as moderating voices have left the movement to join inclusive churches, or quit organized religion altogether. The situation has been made worse by online influencers, who are eclipsing everyday pastors as the source of moral authority for many believers. It's a vicious circle: The economics of the internet reward shock value, such as arguing that witch burnings were justified, empathy is a sin or that the 19th Amendment was a mistake, and white evangelicals are rapidly moving toward the extremist levels of misogyny and racist antipathy that Hegseth embodies and his church teaches.

This is especially true when it comes to Christian nationalism, the belief that America is a "Christian nation" and that people who don't share that view should be marginalized or even ejected from American society. While this used to be a fringe view, even among white evangelicals, in recent years nearly 70% of white evangelicals have come to embrace Christian nationalism.

Hegseth's church is openly theocratic, and his tenure as defense secretary has been marked by hostility to non-Christian members of the military. Earlier this summer, Hegseth even tried to erase the military's faith diversity by reducing the number of religions recognized from 211 to a mere 31, with 21 of those being Christian denominations. His plan was eventually scrapped after Mormon protested at being classified as non-Christian, but the message sent was that Hegseth sees non-Christians as less American.

[Continues . . .]