Dave Lee
My WorkBlogupdated 10 hours ago

Interesting links, noteworthy journalism and other miscellanea from around the web.

How the judge thought an AI-generated video of a manslaughter victim was an acceptable thing to bring into a courtroom I'll never know. A spectacular lack of judgment all around. 404 Media:

Wales told 404 Media that her intent with the video was to sway the judge. “Isn’t that what you want human connection to be?” she said. “Do you ever come out of a movie and say: ‘Well, that was too emotional. That was too powerful. Human connection is powerful, and trying to convey that to somebody that's never known another person, this person on the earth, to convey their lifetime of 37 years down to a two-hour sentencing event is hard to do, and I think that victims and victims' families should be afforded every opportunity.”

Her AI-Generated Video Swayed the Judge. The Court Said it Carried 'Undue Emotional Weight'404media.co‘Chris’ sentiment does not change,’ said the sister who created an AI avatar of her slain brother Christopher Pelkey to speak in court.

ProPublica gathers the data on US citizens caught up in the ICE dragnet:

The Trump administration says none of this is happening.

“DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake.” “There are no ‘indiscriminate’ stops.” Allegations of “racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.” “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force.” “ICE does not zip tie or restrain children.”

But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.

We know because we have once again done what the government hasn’t:

We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent holding a citizen during the current administration.

More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown — ProPublicaprojects.propublica.orgThe government doesn’t track how often immigration officers detain U.S. citizens. So ProPublica did. We’ve found more than 500 Americans who were held against their will during this Trump administration.

ProPublica:

It began as a casual question — and a flicker of curiosity — uttered during a meeting of ProPublica journalists who this year are reporting on publicly funded private schools. We were discussing how, in many states, basically anyone can open a private school wherever they want. No experience, no training, no curriculum required.

One of our editors jumped in and asked: What if ProPublica tried to establish a private school?

We were intrigued. We are longtime education reporters, not educators. Would that matter? Where, if anywhere, do states draw the line on who is fit to run a school — and in some cases, collect public money to fund their ventures?

We decided that testing the thesis that anyone can open a school would be valuable to our ongoing reporting, particularly at a time when we have found that private schools are growing rapidly across the country — in barns, farms, co-working spaces, people’s homes and parks. These new schools are fueled by taxpayer-funded vouchers and other programs, and our reporting has revealed states have little interest in monitoring them.

We had some inspiration to draw from: In 2015, comedian John Oliver founded a tax-exempt church to show how easy it was for televangelists to avoid paying taxes while soliciting millions of dollars.

How ProPublica Reporters Became Private School Owners in 24 Hourspropublica.orgThe reporting experiment demonstrates how easy it can be to open private schools that might then access public money. No credentials or background checks required.

A terrific lede starts off this excellent New Yorker piece on the shifting demographics of “toys.”

We might call it the Great Regression. This summer, the toy industry hit a milestone: reportedly, adult-only households accounted for the majority of toy sales in the U.S., suggesting that childless grownups are rapidly becoming the main consumer base for action figures, trading cards, plushies, and other products traditionally designed for kids. Even still, when I recently visited the F.A.O. Schwarz flagship, in Rockefeller Center, I found it mildly uncomfortable to be a grown man alone in a toy store, despite my being a member of the statistically appropriate demographic. Thankfully, I was there to meet someone: Sharon Price John, a toy-industry veteran, who helped popularize the increasingly prescient term “kid-ulting” during her time as the president and C.E.O. of Build-A-Bear. We had plans to, well, build a bear.

Why Adults Are Playing with Toysnewyorker.comAfter decades of depending on customers who had to beg their parents for pocket money—and who would eventually grow up—the toy industry has found a savior in “kid-ults.”

The WSJ sums up the recent move to make AI agents cuddlier:

The aim is to make the AI assistants now writing code, crawling the internet and booking appointments on our behalf a little more approachable, distinct and trustworthy. If the Jolly Green Giant could get kids to eat their vegetables, perhaps a sweet anthropomorphic triangle can win over AI skeptics.

Tech Companies Roll Out Cuddly Mascots to Ease AI Anxietywsj.comMeta, OpenAI and others are associating their AI agents and tools with cute characters to win over skeptics.

The Guardian reviews Nathan Fielder's bizarro new Elizabeth Holmes documentary:

Those who were there can confirm: the hype is deserved. You Can See Everything is, somehow, more shocking, twistier, thornier and revealing than billed – a stupefying and gloriously destabilizing hall of psychological mirrors, a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime collision of director and subject.

You Can See Everything review – Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes doc is a modern masterpiece of deceittheguardian.comNo spoilers here – TV’s grand illusionist meets his match when he moves in with Theranos founder and her family

New York's common sense click-to-cancel rule goes into effect today. What will be worth watching is whether major websites, for simplicity's sake, roll-out any changes nationwide. If they do, it's given former FTC chair Lina Khan, now part of Zohran Mamdani's team, a long-awaited win on this issue.

The “Click to Cancel” rule means:

- Companies must clearly explain subscription terms to you

- Companies must clearly disclose consumers’ rights when buying or cancelling subscriptions

- Companies must provide you with a straightforward cancellation process in the same method as sign up.

- Companies cannot ask that you pay to ship them things they gave you for free.

Click to Cancel - nyc.govnyc.gov

NBC News on price manipulations by Stubhub. The ticket reselling service denied using personal data to set prices, but did say it was carrying out price "experiments." Consumers are in for a rough ride.

The big differences came from the fees StubHub added. One person was charged $72 in fees, while another was charged nearly twice as much, $134.

When the volunteers looked up the same ticket using incognito mode in Google’s Chrome web browser, a private session that doesn’t use cookies, saved logins or site storage, the price discrepancy declined to $19 between the highest- and lowest-priced ticket. When they checked on StubHub’s phone app without being logged in, almost everybody saw the same price, with the exception of just one person who would have been charged $3 more.

For the same ticket on StubHub, different prices for different peoplenbcnews.comNBC News volunteers saw eight different prices for the exact same Harry Styles ticket on StubHub. The company said it’s running random price experiments.

Jonathen Liew of The Guardian on that Manchester City ruling:

The cache of leaked emails and documents that would eventually lead to the crisis in which Manchester City are now embroiled was published by Der Spiegel in 2018, and often it was the tone of the club’s communications that was as startling as their content. Of City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a trusted adviser to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, it was said that he would “rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years” than accept a fine.

In the same tranche of documents, City lawyer Simon Cliff asserts that “Uefa doesn’t respond to anything other than aggression”, and threatens the governing body of European football – who were pursuing City over alleged financial irregularities at the time – with “the destruction of their rules and organisation”.

All of which feels like a rather extreme way of ensuring that your football club has the right to sign Jack Rodwell from Everton.

The Manchester City case shows us how the global mega-rich now expect to operate with impunity | Jonathan Liewtheguardian.comWhen transnational alliances have scarcely been weaker, the way the club was allegedly run offers a bleak vision of a world driven by brute power and wealth, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Liew

The Observer on how existing UK law meant little to tech giants, SpaceX in particular, when victims of abuse needed help.

An investigation – in collaboration with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism – shows recent attempts by police to probe SpacexAI over sexualised deepfakes generated by its chatbot Grok have been abandoned, after requests for information were ignored by the company.

The women taking on the tech giants over deepfakes and di...observer.co.ukUnder new legal rules companies like TikTok could face big fines for failing to take down illegal intimate images. Yet victims say police are still finding it difficult to act

Julie Beck reviews Gabe Bullard's new book in The Atlantic.

Bullard is not the first to notice the isolating effect of many innovations, nor is it just modern conveniences that take us away from other people. Against Convenience references a famous Kurt Vonnegut anecdote in which the author ignores his wife’s advice to keep a box of envelopes at home and goes out shopping every time he needs a single one. On the way, he meets people, he enjoys the scenery of the neighborhood, and he has “one hell of a good time.” “We are dancing animals,” Vonnegut wrote. “How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something.” But sacrifices are inevitable when we pursue convenience. Many of these exchanges are clearly worth it—I keep a box of envelopes at home—but Bullard convincingly argues that the costs of convenience, social and otherwise, have crossed a worrisome threshold in the 21st century.

Convenience Is Lonelytheatlantic.comFar too many innovations keep us from other people.