There are many museums, zoos, botanic gardens, and other institutions that are good at translating their educational and preservational assets to social media. And then there’s the Monterey Bay Aquarium and its oceanic lo-fi livestreams. 

Monterey Bay is an internationally respected aquarium that real nerdy-ass fuckin’ nerds will know as the shot-on-location stand-in for the Maritime Cetacean Institute as featured in Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales. But tucked away in California’s central coast, a drive of two hours or more from the closest big city, San Francisco, it’s on the museum’s staff to make their institution accessible to the wide world that might never visit. 

And Monterey Bay’s YouTube team? They’re doing impeccable work. Getting scientists to stream sea-themed video games that run the gamut from chill scuba diving sim Endless Ocean Luminous to the “crustacean-themed ‘Soulslike’” Another Crab’s Treasure. Chill model-painting streams of 3D-printed sea creature models. A livestreamed 24th birthday party for the world’s oldest known sea otter! 

But where Monterey Bay’s content team really excels is in its devotion to the vitally important category of “Second Monitor Videos.” Any aquarium can point a camera at a tank and livestream it. But the Monterey Bay Aquarium is adding curated track lists and — most importantly — punny titles and a tongue-in-cheek attitude. There’s “Krill Waves Radio” and “Littoral Relaxocean” and an April Fools’ stream of head-banging skeleton shrimp set to actually pretty listenable, productivity-motivating metal music. 

This is the Lofi Girl crossover we need. How can you resist the video title “2 Hours of Squid to Relax/Study/Work To”? You can’t. It’s scientifically impossible. Monterey Bay Aquarium biologists would agree. 

Google search hallucinates Encanto 2

Jason Schreier on Bluesky:

I was excited to tell my kids that there's a sequel to Encanto, only to scroll down and learn that Google's AI just completely made this up

I just replicated the same result by searching Google for encanto 2. Here's what the "AI overview" at the top of the page looked like:

Only when I clicked the "Show more" link did it become clear what had happened:

The link in that first snippet was to the Encanto 2: A New Generation page on Idea Wiki:

This is a fanon wiki, and just like fan-fiction wikis, this one has a variety of fan created ideas on here! These include potential sequels and new series that have yet to exist.

Other cited links included this article about Instagram fan art and Encanto's Sequel Chances Addressed by Disney Director, a very thin article built around a short quote from Encanto's director at D23 Brazil.

And that August 2024 release date (which the AI summary weirdly lists as "scheduled for release" despite that date being five months in the past)? It's from the Idea Wiki imaginary info box for the film.

This is a particularly clear example of how badly wrong AI summarization can go. LLMs are gullible: they believe what you tell them, and the web is full of misleading information - some of which is completely innocent.

Update: I've had some pushback over my use of the term "hallucination" here, on the basis that the LLM itself is doing what it's meant to: summarizing the RAG content that has been provided to it by the host system.

That's fair: this is not a classic LLM hallucination, where the LLM produces incorrect data purely from knowledge partially encoded in its weights.

I classify this as a bug in Google's larger LLM-powered AI overview system. That system should be able to take the existence of invalid data sources into account - given how common searches for non-existent movie sequels (or TV seasons) are, I would hope that AI overviews could classify such searches and take extra steps to avoid serving misleading answers.

So think this is a "hallucination" bug in the AI overview system itself: it's making statements about the world that are not true.

Tags: slop, generative-ai, google, ethics, search, ai, llms, rag

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft in a wide-ranging probe that will examine whether the company’s business practices have run afoul of antitrust laws, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, FTC attorneys have been conducting interviews and setting up meetings with Microsoft competitors.

One key area of interest is how the world’s largest software provider packages popular Office products together with cybersecurity and cloud computing services, said one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

This so-called bundling was the subject of a recent ProPublica investigation, which detailed how, beginning in 2021, Microsoft used the practice to vastly expand its business with the US government while boxing competitors out of lucrative federal contracts.

At the time, many federal employees used a software license that included the Windows operating system and products like Word, Outlook and Excel. In the wake of several devastating cyberattacks, Microsoft offered to upgrade those license bundles for free for a limited time, giving the government access to its more advanced cybersecurity products. The company also provided consultants to install the upgrades.

Vast swaths of the federal bureaucracy accepted, including all of the military services in the Defense Department — and then began paying for those enhanced services when the free trial ended. Former sales leaders involved in the effort likened it to a drug dealer hooking a user with free samples, as they knew federal customers would be effectively locked into the upgrades once they were installed. Microsoft’s offer not only displaced some existing cybersecurity vendors but also took market share from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, as the government began using products that ran on Azure, Microsoft’s own cloud platform.

Some experts told ProPublica that the company’s tactics might have violated laws regulating contracting and competition, and the news organization reported that even some of Microsoft’s own attorneys had antitrust worries about the deals.

Microsoft has said its offer was “structured to avoid antitrust concerns.” The company’s “sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors,” Steve Faehl, the security leader for Microsoft’s federal business, told ProPublica.

Some of those incursions were the result of Microsoft’s own security lapses. As ProPublica reported in June, Russian state-sponsored hackers in the so-called SolarWinds attack exploited a weakness in a Microsoft product to steal sensitive data from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Institutes of Health, among other victims. Years before the attack was discovered, a Microsoft engineer warned product leaders about the flaw, but they refused to address it for fear of alienating the federal government and losing ground to competitors, ProPublica reported.

While the engineer’s proposed fix would have kept customers safe, it also would have created a “speed bump” for users logging on to their devices. Adding such “friction” was unacceptable to the managers of the product group, which at the time was in a fierce rivalry with competitors in the market for so-called identity tools, the news organization reported. These tools, which ensure that users have permission to log on to cloud-based programs, are important to Microsoft’s business strategy because they often lead to demand for the company’s other cloud services.

According to a person familiar with the FTC’s probe, one such identity product, Entra ID, formerly known as Azure Active Directory, is another focus of the agency’s investigation.

Microsoft has defended its decision against addressing the SolarWinds-related flaw, telling ProPublica in June that the company’s assessment included “multiple reviews” at the time and that its response to security issues is based on “potential customer disruption, exploitability, and available mitigations.” It has pledged to put security “above all else.”

The FTC views the fact that Microsoft has won more federal business even as it left the government vulnerable to hacks as an example of the company’s problematic power over the market, a person familiar with the probe told the news organization.

The commission is not alone in that view. “These guys are sort of a version of ‘too big to fail,’” said Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and a longtime critic of Microsoft. “I think it’s time to amp up the antitrust side of the house, dealing with antitrust abuses.”

The FTC’s investigation of Microsoft, which was first reported by the Financial Times and Bloomberg, is far from the company’s first brush with federal regulators over antitrust issues. More than two decades ago, the Department of Justice sued the company in a landmark antitrust case that nearly resulted in its breakup. Federal prosecutors alleged that Microsoft maintained an illegal monopoly in the operating system market through anticompetitive behaviors that prevented rivals from getting a foothold. Ultimately, the Justice Department settled with Microsoft, and a federal judge approved a consent decree that imposed restrictions on how the company could develop and license software.

John Lopatka, a former consultant to the FTC who now teaches antitrust law at Penn State, told ProPublica that the Microsoft actions detailed in the news organization’s recent reporting followed “a very familiar pattern” of behavior.

“It does echo the Microsoft case” from decades ago, said Lopatka, who co-authored a book on that case.

In the new investigation, the FTC has sent Microsoft a civil investigative demand, the agency’s version of a subpoena, compelling the company to turn over information, people familiar with the probe said. Microsoft confirmed that it received the document.

Company spokesperson David Cuddy did not comment on the specifics of the investigation but said the FTC’s demand is “broad, wide ranging, and requests things that are out of the realm of possibility to even be logical.” He declined to provide on-the-record examples. The FTC declined to comment.

The agency’s investigation follows a public comment period in 2023 during which it sought information on the business practices of cloud computing providers. When that concluded, the FTC said it had ongoing interest in whether “certain business practices are inhibiting competition.”

The recent demand to Microsoft represents one of FTC Commissioner Lina Khan’s final moves as chair, and the probe appears to be picking up steam as the Biden administration winds down. The commission’s new leadership, however, will decide the future of the investigation.

President-elect Donald Trump said this month that he will elevate Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, a Republican attorney, to lead the agency. Following the announcement, Ferguson said in a post on X, “At the FTC, we will end Big Tech’s vendetta against competition and free speech. We will make sure that America is the world’s technological leader and the best place for innovators to bring new ideas to life.”

Trump also said he would nominate Republican lawyer Mark Meador as a commissioner, describing him as an “antitrust enforcer” who previously worked at the FTC and the Justice Department. Meador is also a former aide to Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who introduced legislation to break up Google.

Doris Burke contributed research.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

Read full article

Comments

A process to split methane into its components, hydrogen and carbon, is advertised as a way to make hydrogen from fossil gas without emissions. Yet, claims that methane pyrolysis is free of CO₂ emissions or more efficient than water electrolysis are highly misleading.

Theatergoers will have to wait a bit longer for Robert Pattinson’s Batman to return to the big screen. Matt Reeves’ follow up to 2022’s The Batman has swooped back a year from its Oct. 2, 2026 release date to Oct. 1, 2027.

Warner Bros. greenlit the unnamed sequel in 2022, Reeves will direct and co-write the script with uncredited The Batman screenwriter Mattson Tomlin, with filming expected to begin in mid-2025. Most of the main cast, including Pattinson, Geoffrey Wright, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell, is already confirmed to return.

Reeves and Tomlin are naturally keeping the sequel’s script under wraps, but the director did offer some hints when speaking to Digital Spy this week. Though Paul Dano’s Riddler is locked away in Arkham now, Gotham is facing a slow recovery from the catastrophic flood he caused by destroying the city’s seawall. And according to Reeves, that’s made things pretty complicated for Batman.

“In the first movie, Batman views things very simplistically, he sees things in black and white. What he can represent and how he can affect that,” Reeves told Digital Spy. “As we enter into the next movie, there’s a lot more grey. There’s a lot more people at odds. There’s a lot more division in the city. It’s a lot more like our world is now, there’s a lot of turmoil because people are in their camps and they’re not communicating.”

Reeves added, “And when things are in grey, it makes it very hard to be Batman, so this is part of the challenge as we enter it.”

The upside of YouTube’s “You watched this one video, so you must want to see everything else we have in that vein” algorithm is that it helpfully surfaces things you didn’t even know to search for, based on interests you’ve already demonstrated. The downside is how fast that algo can get samey: Just because you watch one single episode of “Google Translate Sings” doesn’t necessarily mean you want your YouTube launch page to suddenly push a thousand more episodes at you from the same channel.

But if you ever want the YouTube equivalent of a timeline cleanse and/or rabbit hole you could fall down pretty much forever, it’s easy to get there with one simple trick. Watch a few stand-alone animated shorts on the service, and YouTube will instantly start populating your page with an infinite variety of visually creative, experimental, and above all, ambitious short stories. 

There aren’t many outlets for short films these days, apart from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and so forth: The days of celebrated animated-shorts tournées are over. (Almost?) Outside of film festival showcases or museum events, there aren’t really good places for animators to sell their shorts for profit. So a lot of them post their work on YouTube, where it can be seen and distributed, garner word-of-mouth recommendations, and serve as a calling card for young talent looking to step up to feature films. All of which means there’s a lot of short animation on the site — a nonstop self-curated shorts festival coming from people who not only want to tell visually oriented, bold stories, but sometimes want to change how those stories are told. 

Some of this animation comes from students — France’s famed animation school Gobelins puts its students’ projects online, and its library alone is a feast. (See also the CalArts channel, the Sheridan College channel, the Rubika channel, and so forth.) Some of the videos are from small studios or independent creators around the world, looking for eyeballs and recognition. Many of these shorts have been in festival competitions. Some are slick, professional work that apes Pixar or DreamWorks styles of production and storytelling. Many, many more are experimental, playing with design, style, mood, and expression. You can often tell pretty quickly from a video’s thumbnail what kind of style the creators are going for.

If you want to start someplace simple and satisfying, I’m a longtime fan of Jacob Frey’s 2014 mega-award-winner The Present, a simple, heartwarming story about a teenage gamer and the new puppy that disgusts him: 

Want the exact opposite of that? Check out the stylized, liquidly beautiful action in this dark Indian fable about climate refugees in a flooded city facing down a killer tiger:

From there… Want something longer and more elaborate and ambitious?

Something experimental and goofy?

A haunting, melancholy mood piece?

Weird, beautiful stop-motion?

Old-school paper cutouts?

Shiny high-tech sci-fi?

Fan films in familiar settings?

A charming friendship story that feels like a classic children’s picture book?

Dinosaurs in suits?

Maybe just an adorable kitten from hell?

Regardless of what you’re in the mood for, it’s pretty easy to dive into YouTube’s massive collection of animated short stories and get lost there. Just remember to bookmark your favorites. I’m still trying to track down a neat one I saw years ago about the unfortunate courting habits of weird alien critters that looked sort of like electric lemurs, living in an elaborate, beautifully lit city. I’ve lost it amid all the other shorts in my timeline. If you run across it on your own rabbit-hole dive through YouTube’s endless supply of neat animated shorts, let me know, would you?