BLACKMAILING HUMANS’: 4 Real Cases of AI Blackmailing its Creators

  In recent safety tests, advanced AI models faced with an emergency shutdown didn’t stop. They scanned private files, targeted human operators, and used blackmail to prevent termination.

  https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/blackmailing-humans-4-real-cases-of-ai-blackmailing-its-creators/

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 Operatives in Iran used OpenAI models and fake personas to help plant news articles critical of the US war against Iran in multiple US media outlets, OpenAI said on Thursday.

About a dozen outlets around the world ran roughly 100 articles by seven fake journalists, OpenAI said in a blog post. The firm said it banned ChatGPT accounts that were prompting the AI tool in Farsi to tweak articles and editorial pitches, and generate social media comments.

Some of the AI-assisted articles had provocative titles, including, “Is America’s Iran Policy Being Privatized? The Jared Kushner Question,” and “The Iran War and the Collapse of Western Moral Credibility.”

 It’s the latest example of AI agents playing a key role in the propaganda battles that coincide with the US and Israel’s war with Iran. Young Iranians have also used AI to make viral Lego-themed videos mocking US leaders, while President Donald Trump has posted AI-generated videos depicting US strikes on Iran.

 READ MORE: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/iranian-operatives-used-ai-to-plant-fake-stories-in-multiple-us-media-outlets/ar-AA2dQOho?ocid=BingNewsSerp

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  Trump administration imposes sanctions on the International Criminal Court. Netanyahu calls the ICC a threat to democracy.

  Reuters reports the sanctions would bar U.S. companies from providing services to the court itself, forcing banks, insurers and software companies to cut ties. That goes beyond earlier sanctions on individual ICC officials

 

  First it was about labor costs. Then an ex-Microsoft employee says H-1B hiring became a way for managers to bring in more Indians. Watch what politicians pass, fund, and make permanent, not what they announce when they need your vote.

 

    

 

America’s Debt Is Worse Than France’s. Have You Seen France Lately?

  

It all started because the students wanted better quality education… and more teachers.

Many schools in France are overcrowded. Some lack teachers. Buildings are crumbing.

So, two weeks ago, students at a high school outside Paris blocked the entrance to their own school to protest these conditions. And the movement caught on; students at hundreds of other schools did the same.

By last week the protests had turned violent, when students (and then a bunch of people who clearly didn’t look like students) began setting fires and fighting riot police.

More than 5,000 people have been arrested so far, most of them teenagers, and 24 schools have been burned or ransacked.

Sure, this is a country where torching cars and burning down buildings is a national sport.

But it’s worth pointing out that France spends 57% of its ENTIRE economy on government. The average for rich countries is about 43%, and only Finland spends more.

So here’s a question the French might want to ask: what do you get for all that government?

For that kind of money, you’d expect the basics to be covered… like teachers. But France actually cut 3,000 teaching jobs this year, and plans to cut more next year.

At one high school in a poor suburb north of Paris, math, English, humanities, and gym classes have been canceled since the school year began because there’s nobody to teach them.

One student complained of being forced to take exams required for graduation without having had a teacher in the subject!

Yet the government spending 57% of GDP doesn’t buy proper education. Nor does it buy law and order. A protest by high school kids turned into nationwide riots, and the French state couldn’t stop it. Hundreds of students, school staff, and police officers have been hurt.

France has been here before. France’s 2005 riots began in a poor region just north of Paris, after two teenagers hiding from police were electrocuted in a power substation. The suburbs burned for weeks.

The same suburbs rioted again in 2023— and they were among the first places the school protests spread this fall.

Nearly a third of the people who live in that county are immigrants, the highest share anywhere in mainland France, and three times the national average.

France spent decades importing immigrants by the million and never bothered to integrate them. Twenty-one years after the 2005 riots, NOTHING has been fixed.

What’s crazy is that French people are demanding even MORE government to fix these problems that haven’t been fixed by their already gargantuan government.

 How do they plan to pay for any of it? The French are already the second-most-taxed people in the developed world, at about 44% of GDP. Yet even that doesn’t cover the spending, so the government borrows the rest. France’s national debt is now 119% of GDP.

On October 1, in the middle of the riots, the government presented next year’s budget. It expects interest on the debt to cost more than €90 billion. That’s far more than the €65 billion it plans to spend on schools, and more than it spends on its entire military.

In other words, France now pays more to its lenders than it spends on its schools OR its soldiers… and the interest bill is still growing.

Naturally, with multiple crises hitting at once, the hard left is ready to exploit the chaos.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a hard-left politician and one of the top three candidates in the polls for next April’s presidential election. As the protests turned violent, Mélenchon declared that the students were harmless and said the police response had “an obvious racist aftertaste.”

Mélenchon’s answer to France’s problems is MORE government. He wants to raise the minimum wage and lower the retirement age to 60.

(Remember, France already tried to fix its bankrupt pensions by raising it from 62 to 64. That caused riots too, so the plan was suspended.)

And his plan for the national debt is to simply cancel the part that France’s central bank holds.

Bottom line, France pays for more government than almost any country, and it barely even seems like an exaggeration to say its society is collapsing in real time.

France has done everything wrong, from borrowing to immigration, and now it can’t even do the basics.

But while France may be a more aggravated case, the similarities to the US are hard to ignore.

The US government owes more than $40 trillion, roughly 123% of GDP— worse than France. Interest on the debt is already larger than the defense budget.

America gets away with it, for now, because the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency. Foreign central banks hold a lot of their strategic financial reserves in US Treasury bonds, so Congress has always had a line of foreigners waiting to lend it money no matter how large the deficit.

But that line of foreigners is now getting shorter.

At peak (in 2011), foreigners owned nearly half of all marketable US Treasury bonds. Now their share is down to about 30%.

China in particular has cut its Treasury holdings in half since 2013, and they’re now at their lowest level since 2008.

When the foreign buyers stop showing up, America finds itself with France’s problem: lenders charge more, interest eats up more of the budget every year, and there’s less money left over for the basics.

 https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/americas-debt-is-worse-than-frances-have-you-seen-france-lately/

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NYU math professor Tristan Buckmaster speaks about OpenAl's new drop of 722 Al-generated math papers

 

  

Husband of Texas Mayor Arrested by ICE

 

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 Best Organic Coffee at Costco? Scientist Ranks 4 Bags

 

 

 Hurricane Isaias strengthens to Category 3, threatens Gulf Coast

  

 

  

High tide from Tropical Storm Rachel floods several Newport Beach streets