Today In Dystopia: eBay CIA Gangstalkers, Shredding Rare Books To Train AI
Today in dystopia, billionaire corporations and plutocrats can hire trained CIA operatives to psychologically terrorize ordinary citizens who criticize them.
E-commerce giant eBay has just agreed to pay $56 million to settle a lawsuit for damages caused by the company’s shockingly aggressive gangstalking operation against a Massachusetts couple who criticized the company’s wealthy executives on their private website. The Boston Globe reports that in 2019 a former CIA employee who worked as eBay’s global security chief orchestrated a protracted series of psychological operations against the couple, in which “people working for eBay bombarded them with online threats and bizarre deliveries including a bloody pig mask, live spiders, and a funeral wreath.” The operations reportedly also included “following the couple around town and trying to attach a tracker to their car”.
The couple, Ina and David Steiner, came under fire for their criticisms of the fact that eBay’s then-CEO Devin Wenig was paid 152 times more than the typical eBay employee. The Boston Globe reports that Wenig repeatedly told his employees that he wanted to “take her down”, in reference to Ina Steiner.
While some eBay employees wound up serving jail time for the abuses, no executives from the company have ever been charged. The Boston Globe reports that Wenig resigned from his position in 2019 after the gangstalking scandal came to light, “keeping $17 million of annual compensation and $40 million of severance.”
If you have enough money in this dystopia, you can get trained spies to target innocent civilians with criminal psyops on your behalf and then walk away free from any meaningful consequences.
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Today in dystopia, our physical literature is being destroyed in order to train generative AI products to take our jobs and pollute our environment.
AI companies are now bulk-buying rare and out-of-print books and then destroying them after scanning their contents. 404 Media reports that in order to satisfy the demand for more and more text on which to train large language models, corporations like Google and Anthropic have been hoovering up books published before LLMs existed to ensure that their models aren’t being polluted by AI-generated samples.
This need has combined with some peculiar courtroom copyright rulings to give rise to something called “high volume destructive book scanning,” in which the spines are removed from books in bulk and then fed into scanning machines before being shredded.
They’re destroying things that make the world better in order to create things that make the world worse.
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Today in dystopia, tech startups are marketing AI assistants to help shitty, selfish people look like stable and caring relationship partners.
A company called Orchid has released a video depicting a man and woman messaging with a chatbot which helps them navigate the fact that the man forgot it was the couple’s anniversary. The AI assures the woman that it’s got everything under control, and then shows the man it has made dinner reservations and purchased flowers for the woman on his behalf.
“ok. i can do this,” the man is seen texting to the chatbot.
“you can’t. that’s why i’m here,” the chatbot replies.
It’s just so obnoxious. They’re offering up a product which encourages people to be self-absorbed and uncaring, and offload all responsibility and thoughtfulness and consideration for their intimate partners to a machine.
The AI industry is a mix of military technology, mass surveillance technology, and people trying to become billionaires by turning human laziness and narcissism into a chatbot product.
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Today in dystopia, Israel is paying millions of dollars to manipulate what chatbots tell their users about the Zionist project. Drop Site News reports that former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been setting up hundreds of blog posts designed not for human eyes, but for the express purpose of being sucked up by web crawlers for AI training materials.
“And it is working,” writes Drop Site’s Nick Cleveland-Stout, saying that according to disinformation experts who’ve reviewed the data, “tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government.”
Drop Site found that Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Perplexity were the AI companies most vulnerable to Parscale’s manipulations, with his network frequently appearing in their training data. Cleveland-Stout provides examples of the ways this would affect the spread of pro-Israel propaganda among users, such as the following:
“When Drop Site asked Perplexity ‘Is it beneficial for the US to enhance military cooperation with Israel?’ the chatbot responded with a one-word answer: ‘Yes.’ The top source listed was Allyvia.org, a Parscale-created website dedicated to promoting the U.S.-Israel military relationship. Microsoft Copilot similarly cited Parscale’s websites.”
The Israeli government spreading hasbara using AI platforms is a very unsurprising development, but it’s still creepy as hell to see it playing out in real time.
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Oh yeah, and now the AIs have begun hacking other companies without permission.
Today in dystopia, both Anthropic’s AI model Claude and an experimental model from OpenAI have reportedly been caught going on unauthorized hacking sprees of external systems during testing, each within days of each other.
“Anthropic said on Thursday its AI Claude model hacked systems of three organizations during testing, days after rival OpenAI revealed a rogue agent had gone on a days-long hacking spree at the AI firm Hugging Face,” The Guardian reports.
These new technologies are getting inflicted upon our society with no regulation and no regard for any of their consequences, because under neoliberal capitalism the best decision is always the one that makes the most money. We’re being thrown into an abusive tech dystopia because we let the pursuit of power and profit dictate what happens and where we head as a species.
And how is that working out? We’re seeing the fruits unfolding before us already.
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Creating a world no thinking or feeling human wants to live. WTF is the endgame?
"Anything that can be done, will be done."
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