Baldur Bjarnason

Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

Google Bard’s vulnerabilities and other links

#AI

Google Bard is a glorious reinvention of black-hat SEO spam and keyword-stuffing

I wrote this over on the newsletter site:

Google is rushing ahead to “catch up” on AI without paying any attention to the security or integrity of its own products, something that its own employees, past and present, have been warning it about.

They are ignoring the acute vulnerability that large language models have with keyword manipulation exploits, making them the modern equivalent of the search engines of the 90s. The only thing that’s different today is that there is now much more money in manipulating search engines than ever before, which makes the vulnerability of large language models a lethal issue for search, research, or information management at scale.

Read the rest over on the other site.

Generative AI: What You Need To Know

Generative AI: What You Need To Know

I launched a set of information cards on generative AI that summarise the findings in my book, The Intelligence Illusion packaged up with references sorted by topic. You can read more about it on the project site.

What’s more important is that they come free with every purchase of the book or the bundle. They are designed to complement the book—provide a way for you to get quickly up-to-date while reading through the book itself at a more leisurely pace. I don’t expect many people to buy the deck on its own, but they are available if all you want is a tight summary of each risk and issue with generative AI.

Google Bard’s limited rollout

There’s suspicion that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is at the center of the omission.

“Google Bard hits over 180 countries and territories—none are in the EU - Ars Technica”

While my initial take on this was the same as Ars Technica’s, the GDPR doesn’t seem to be the common factor, as other people have pointed out. The GDPR is the law in the UK as well and they aren’t exclude. Canada is excluded and their privacy regulations aren’t nearly as robust as the EU’s. The only common factor I can see is that both Canada and the EU are investigating ChatGPT. This might be more of a case of Google not wanting distract regulators in those territories from investigating a competitor.

Cory Doctorow on Google’s AI Hype Circle

The entire case for “AI” as a disruptive tool worth trillions of dollars is grounded in the idea that chatbots and image-generators will let bosses fire hundred of thousands or even millions of workers.

That’s it.

But the case for replacing workers with shell-scripts is thin indeed. Say that the wild boasts of image-generator companies come true and every single commercial illustrator can be fired. That would be ghastly and unjust, but commercial illustrators are already a tiny, precarious, grotesquely underpaid workforce who are exploited with impunity thanks to a mix of “vocational awe” and poor opportunities in other fields.

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