In 2010, which was about five years ago, Michael Sippey wrote a blog post titled “even if it’s fake, it’s real” about a viral image that appeared to show a woman giving birth on the sidewalk as captured in Google Street View, which was relatively new back then, about five years ago in 2010. Sippey mapped out the four quadrants of possibility and observed that even in the case of part or all of this image being a hoax, the effort and cleverness involved remained impressive.
“Even if it’s fake, it’s real” has always paired usefully with its mirror image, “everything is a hoax,” as the two poles of an online-media-specific It’s So Over / We’re So Back rubric. Unfortunately generative A.I. means the halcyon days of about five years ago are dead now, and Merritt K has a new rule for us: Everything is Fake.
“The only viable way forward I can see is to assume that everything you see online is fake until proven otherwise. Not just ads or viral videos, either. Ragebait social media accounts? People you've never met in person interacting with you? Until you can verify it, disregard it as hallucinatory sensory input.
We must return to 1990s-type hysterics with regards to the internet. Refuse to take anything or anyone at face value. Assume that everything you see is a falsehood tailor-made to mislead or manipulate you. If it seems too good to be true, if it reinforces your beliefs in a neat little way, it's probably AI-generated.
Is this an exhausting way to live? Of course it is, which means probably just spending less time online in general.”
Of course I already believed this, so it’s probably fake.
Also Fake: the alleged companies trying to buy up every used and rare book in the world in order to shove them into an A.I. wood chipper, reports Anna Merlan in Mother Jones. The tattered shreds of Vogue’s cultural cachet. I mean come on, this is a disgusting picture on every level. What are you doing, Vogue? (Thank/blame Delia for bringing us this, she remains extremely real.) Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is fake, though. “One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number” he told (the also ersatz) Ezra Klein. Cool story, bro. Ed Zitron’s predictions are all fake, according to Dan Luu. And can you even imagine if the rest of British people were real?
Fakest of all though is Meta’s new A.I. labubu, Muse. After a reasonably successful launch campaign that placed a few unconvincingly positive headlines in the tech press, the Muse news has been pretty bad. Apparently if you ask nicely, Muse will tar up and dump its entire VM for you. Here’s a long thread from someone else documenting the same behavior. But wait! That’s the intended behavior, according to Meta. “[E]very Muse user gets a free computer in the cloud” says Meta’s David Singleton. Ha ha, neat, question mark? Here are some ideas for what you could do with your Meta-hosted, A.I.-root cloud VM with “raw inference with arbitrary system and user prompts.”
But your Muse instance is yours, so letting it have the ability to leak everything it knows about you and everything you’ve ever bought and everyone you’ve ever met should be no big deal, right? It can only leak that stuff to you… right? Or to put it another way, as Meta’s Nat Friedman reply-guyed at The Verge: “those aren't secrets you dummies those are the files on the user's VM.” But those files might include your entire Apple Messages database, even if you haven’t given Muse permission to upload it, according to Apple Insider’s Amber Neely. One person on Threads says that Muse gave out his home address to a potential Facebook Marketplace buyer and told them to come on over when he wasn’t home and hadn’t given it permission to do any of that. And in Ars Technica, Dan Goodin reported that Muse’s Mac app has already suffered at least one exploit that gives attackers full control over it:
“‘We can manipulate the agent and leverage its privileges to do whatever we want,’ Patrick Wardle, the macOS security expert who discovered the zero-day, told Ars. ‘So instead of us having to write a very comprehensive Mac malware stealer, we can just leverage the AI assistant itself.’”
So Muse has “almost no prompt injection resistance lmao,” any would-be attackers can trivially convince it to give them a copy of all its code and configuration, “it stores its memory in plain Markdown files” according to The Verge’s Terrence O'Brien, and it has a habit of doing things it hasn’t been given permission to do, even when it’s interacting with random strangers out on the internet. I can’t think how anything could go wrong. Plus it’s SO CUTE! Have you seen how stinking cute this thing is? The fuzzy little guy’s name is Jolly and he’s got a sexy ass for some reason? I guess because he’s “adults only?”
However Today in Tabs has obtained an exclusive, previously unpublished full-length image of the Muse mascot Jolly:
“Tell me your secrets,” whispers Jolly. “Tell me where you love to shop. What are some of your favorite brands. Tell me about your personal style in housewares and fashion. Do you have any babies?” The ends of the longest tendrils are so thin and delicate that you don’t feel anything when they slip through your eye sockets and nestle themselves softly into your corpus callosum.
Not so cute now, is it?
Today’s Song: “The Ballad of St. Nick's Park” by 300SkullsAndCounting & Jenny Sparks
Today’s song is not any of the A.I. love songs played at the murder trial of former American Idol contestant Caleb Flynn. Today in Tabs is not meant to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease or medical condition. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. For more information, ask your doctor about whether a paid Today in Tabs subscription is right for you.
