Did artificial intelligence just jump the shark? Maybe so, and it came from the legal world of all places, with this report of an AI-generated victim impact statement. In an apparent first, the family of an Arizona man killed in a road rage incident in 2021 used AI to bring the victim back to life to testify during the sentencing phase of his killer’s trial. The video was created by the sister and brother-in-law of the 37-year-old victim using old photos and videos, and was quite well done, despite the normal uncanny valley stuff around lip-syncing that seems to be the fatal flaw for every deep-fake video we’ve seen so far. The victim’s beard is also strangely immobile, which we found off-putting.
In the video, the victim expresses forgiveness toward his killer and addresses his family members directly, talking about things like what he would have looked like if he’d gotten the chance to grow old. That seemed incredibly inflammatory to us, but according to Arizona law, victims and their families get to say pretty much whatever they want in their impact statements. While this appears to be legal, we wouldn’t be surprised to see it appealed, since the judge tacked an extra year onto the killer’s sentence over what the prosecution sought based on the power of the AI statement. If this tactic withstands the legal tests it’ll no doubt face, we could see an entire industry built around this concept.
Last week, we warned about the impending return of Kosmos 482, a Soviet probe that was supposed to go to Venus when it was launched in 1972. It never quite chooched, though, and ended up circling the Earth for the last 53 years. The satellite made its final orbit on Saturday morning, ending up in the drink in the Indian Ocean, far from land. Alas, the faint hope that it would have a soft landing thanks to the probe’s parachute having apparently been deployed at some point in the last five decades didn’t come to pass. That’s a bit of a disappointment to space fans, who’d love to get a peek inside this priceless bit of space memorabilia. Roscosmos says they monitored the descent, so presumably they know more or less where the debris rests. Whether it’s worth an expedition to retrieve it remains to be seen.
Are we really at the point where we have to worry about counterfeit thermal paste? Apparently, yes, judging by the effort Arctic Cooling is putting into authenticity verification of its MX brand pastes. To make sure you’re getting the real deal, boxes will come with seals that rival those found on over-the-counter medications and scratch-off QR codes that can be scanned and cross-referenced to an online authentication site. We suppose it makes sense; chip counterfeiting is a very real thing, after all, and it’s probably as easy to put a random glob of goo into a syringe as it is to laser new markings onto a chip package. And Arctic compound commands a pretty penny, so the incentive is obvious. But still, something about this just bothers us.
Another very cool astrophotography shot this week, this time a breathtaking collection of galaxies. Taken from the Near Infrared camera on the James Webb Space Telescope with help from the Hubble Space Telescope and the XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory, the image shows thousands of galaxies of all shapes and sizes, along with the background X-ray glow emitted by all the clouds of superheated dust and gas between them. The stars with the characteristic six-pointed diffraction spikes are all located within our galaxy, but everything else is a galaxy. The variety is fascinating, and the scale of the image is mind-boggling. It’s galactic eye candy!
And finally, if you’ve ever wondered about what happens when a nuclear reactor melts down, you’re in luck with this interesting animagraphic on the process. It’s not a detailed 3D render of any particular nuclear power plant and doesn’t have a specific meltdown event in mind, although it does mention both Chernobyl and Fukushima. Rather, it’s a general look at pressurized water reactors and what can go wrong when the cooling water stops flowing. It also touches on potentially safer designs with passive safety systems that rely on natural convection to keep cooling water circulating in the event of disaster, along with gravity-fed deluge systems to cool the containment vessel if things get out of hand. It’s a good overview of how reactors work and where they can go wrong. Enjoy.
It is important to note that the AI victim statement doesn’t reflect anything that the victim might have said or believed, since the victim wasn’t there to participate in its creation. Rather, it’s reflects what the sister and brother-in-law thought he might have said and believed. His grieving sister and brother-in-law, natch. Had the victim had an unfortunate flaw such as an obsession with video games or porn or gambling or twelve year old potential sex partners, even had he failed to keep such things secret from the family, I somehow doubt the AI would have been told to include them in its simulation. Which raises the whole thing from merely dishonest to more than a little ghoulish.
It’s especially unfortunate because at the moment, creating such an AI model of yourself (with a real effort at introspection and brutal honesty) is about as close as we can come to real-life uploading, at least creating some sort of presence to represent your intentions in the world after your biological body can’t do it for you any more. Several science fiction stories have taken this approach to interesting effect. But these dingbats have rendered the whole idea even more suspect at best, because anybody can represent a model as being a faithful approximation of so-and-so, when so-and-so isn’t around themselves to vouch for its provenance any more.
I wouldn’t be allowed to dress an actor up and bring them into the courthouse to make a victim statement. I’d be thrown so far out of the courtroom it isn’t even funny. This AI abuse just led to someone being sentenced unfairly and unjustly, and it’s shit.
I hope there’s an appeal and they drop this sentence down, because this is downright garbage.
Close to Hogwarts portraits of past headmasters, but not so close. Yet.
Arctic Silver doesn’t have much performance advantage over other thermal pastes, this is all purely marketing to give the product a veneer of prestige (we’re not just a thermal paste, we’re the thermal paste everyone tries to copy! Make sure you have the “real deal”!) It’ll do that job even if there isn’t a single competing product that copies their trade dress.
I only buy it because its the cheapest
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Although where it really matters you can use also very inexpensive PTM7950 it’s $5-10 from Amazon for example, and in theory never dries out as it is a phase change plastic
You can get a pound of grey goop for 1/10 the price and stick it in tubes for a tidy profit, so I can see where the Silver purveyors would be upset.
Tech Ingredients did a great scientific video on how to make amazing thermal paste: you are filling cracks, so you need a mix of smaller and smaller diameter material suspended in silicon oil. That is all. It’s not magic and the recipe isn’t hidden in Abe Lincoln’s desk drawer at the Smithsonian. The ingredients are available commercially at reasonable prices if you want to experiment with different mixtures.
Although if your goal is cooling then maybe de-lid and use liquid metal on a water block and forget the paste alltogether.
Apropos that AI statement, I already read it somewhere. Thought it was an interesting but useless gimmick…
And now is a thing?