News bits: If he gets re-elected in 2024; Ways AI can go wrong; About the added criminal charges

This interview conveys how insiders view what a second term would be like. In a nutshell, interviews with former DJT administration insiders say that "a second term will not be as bad as you think, it will be so much worse." (~0:55 to 2:14) Just some food for thought. 

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Scientific American writes about an interesting way that AI (artificial intelligence) can go off the rails. SciAm writes:

AI content is taking over the Internet, and text generated by “large language models” is filling hundreds of websites, including CNET and Gizmodo. But as AI developers scrape the Internet, AI-generated content may soon enter the data sets used to train new models to respond like humans. Some experts say that will inadvertently introduce errors that build up with each succeeding generation of models.

A growing body of evidence supports this idea. It suggests that a training diet of AI-generated text, even in small quantities, eventually becomes “poisonous” to the model being trained. Currently there are few obvious antidotes. “While it may not be an issue right now or in, let’s say, a few months, I believe it will become a consideration in a few years,” says Rik Sarkar, a computer scientist at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

In other words, garbage and errors that AI creates and spews into the internet can be picked up later by a subsequent iteration of AI trying to learn things from internet content. Over time AI errors build on themselves, eventually poisoning AI. Thus, an AI "prompted to write about historical English architecture, spews out gibberish about jackrabbits."

AI model collapse in later generations

Model collapse - probable events poison AI's reality

The authors of that research paper comment: "To avoid model collapse, access to genuine human-generated content is essential." This is good news, humans are not yet completely obsoleted by AI!

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His legal troubles: Everyone is reporting about the three felonies the DoJ added to the Maralagogate espionage, obstruction and sleaze incident. The felonies are one new espionage charge and two new obstruction of justice charges, summarized here.* One can imagine that DJT's legal team will howl that this is all a baseless political witch hunt and they need an added year or two to review the new charges before the trial can start next May. The DoJ has already said this should not be a grounds to further delay. I have no idea of how this will play out. 

But another source, the NYT, seems to at least imply that there's one each of espionage, obstruction of justice, and perjury. Mr. de Oliveria is new and he is accused of both obstruction and perjury.

Experts say the evidence is solid, but so what? Evidence schmevidence. What counts as real are (i) convictions upheld after all appeals, (ii) no GOP presidential pardon or a self-pardon by a 2nd term DJT in the White House, and (iii) no deal is reached that lets him off the hook with little more than a wrist slap. Everything before that is of secondary importance. 

Q: Do you think that the new words I just made up, schmevidence and Maralagogate, will make it into a dictionary as hot new words? 🤨 (that's actually important)