... New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) has been quietly deploying an algorithmic tool to categorize families as “high risk". Using a grab-bag of factors like neighborhood and mother’s age, this AI tool can put families under intensified scrutiny without proper justification and oversight.

ACS knocking on your door is a nightmare for any parent, with the risk that any mistakes can break up your family and have your children sent to the foster care system. Putting a family under such scrutiny shouldn’t be taken lightly and shouldn’t be a testing ground for automated decision-making by the government.

This “AI” tool, developed internally by ACS’s Office of Research Analytics, scores families for “risk” using 279 variables and subjects those deemed highest-risk to intensified scrutiny. The lack of transparency, accountability, or due process protections demonstrates that ACS has learned nothing from the failures of similar products in the realm of child services.

The algorithm operates in complete secrecy and the harms from this opaque “AI theater” are not theoretical. The 279 variables are derived only from cases back in 2013 and 2014 where children were seriously harmed. However, it is unclear how many cases were analyzed, what, if any, kind of auditing and testing was conducted, and whether including of data from other years would have altered the scoring.

What we do know is disturbing: Black families in NYC face ACS investigations at seven times the rate of white families and ACS staff has admitted that the agency is more punitive towards Black families, with parents and advocates calling its practices “predatory.” It is likely that the algorithm effectively automates and amplifies this discrimination...

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/202379

The robotaxi company Waymo has suspended service in some parts of Los Angeles after some of its vehicles were summoned and then vandalized by protesters angry with ongoing raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Five of Waymo's autonomous Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles were summoned downtown to the site of anti-ICE protests, at which point they were vandalized with slashed tires and spray-painted messages. Three were set on fire.

The Los Angeles Police Department warned people to avoid the area due to risks from toxic gases given off by burning EVs. And Waymo told Ars that it is "in touch with law enforcement" regarding the matter.

The protesters in Los Angeles were outraged after ICE, using brutal tactics, began detaining people in raids across the city. Thousands of Angelenos took to the streets over the weekend to confront the masked federal enforcers and, in some cases, forced them away.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31121462

OC below by @[email protected]

What called my attention is that assessments of AI are becoming polarized and somewhat a matter of belief.

Some people firmly believe LLMs are helpful. But programming is a logical task and LLMs can't think - only generate statistically plausible patterns.

The author of the article explains that this creates the same psychological hazards like astrology or tarot cards, psychological traps that have been exploited by psychics for centuries - and even very intelligent people can fall prey to these.

Finally what should cause alarm is that on top that LLMs can't think, but people behave as if they do, there is no objective scientifically sound examination whether AI models can create any working software faster. Given that there are multi-billion dollar investments, and there was more than enough time to carry through controlled experiments, this should raise loud alarm bells.

Link to the challenge result announcement.

https://krita.org/en/posts/2025/monthly-update-27/?pk_kwd=KritaMonthlyUpdate-Edition27

Krita hosts these painting events monthly then gives the award to their best pick.

Here is the link to the winner, by Mythmaker.

https://krita.org/images/posts/2025/mu27_mouse_sage-mythmaker.jpeg

Anyway, out of curiosity, I ran it through https://wasitai.com/. This is what it tells me.

We are quite confident that this image, or significant part of it, was created by AI.

I recently heard mention of the author and book on a Paris Marx podcast, either System Crash or Tech Won't Save Us. This interview was brought to my attention by someone I know to be somewhat neutral about ai, so I'm excited to find an ai critic reaching a broader audience. I thought interview was great, too.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/31107320

[OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman brags about ChatGPT-4.5's improved "emotional intelligence," which he says makes users feel like they're "talking to a thoughtful person." Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, argued last year that the next generation of artificial intelligence will be "smarter than a Nobel Prize winner." Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google's DeepMind, said the goal is to create "models that are able to understand the world around us." These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not "understand" anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another.

OP: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/09/062257/ai-is-not-intelligent-the-atlantic-criticizes-scam-underlying-the-ai-industry

Primary source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/artificial-intelligence-is-not-intelligent/ar-AA1GcZBz

Secondary source: https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780063418561

Summary:

I downvoted pro-AI comments in a post in leftymemes community. It was LLM generated polandball comic (Which is objectively pathetic as fuck) that showed up on my feed, blocked couple of users who I thought were unhinged, and have blocked the whole instance on my client after realizing how rabid these morons are.

I didn't go looking for AI posts like a vigilante.

One user in question got miffed for being downvoted and banned me from places they moderate.

Source (Via Xcancel)

Source (Bluesky)

Duolingo really is speedrunning dystopia rn.

It's impossible, i got this instance to just see lemmy from my own instance, but no, it was slow as hell the whole week, i got new pods, put postgres on a different pod, pictrs on another, etc.

But it was slow as hell. I didn't know what it was until a few hours before now. 500 GETs in a MINUTE by ClaudeBot and GPTBot, wth is this? why? I blocked the user agents, etc, using a blocking extension on NGINX and now it works.

WHY? So google can say that you should eat glass?

Life is now hell, if before at least someone could upload a website, now even that is painfull.

Sorry for the rant.