Bad Voting Info

It is that time again when people will start looking for their place to vote….in some states it seems to change yearly….most will go on-line but will they get accurate info?

Could AI give bad voting info?

OpenAI’s ChatGPT was caught spitting out false voting information for battleground states, CBS News discovered, in another grim sign of how AI is poised to upend elections.

The errors came to light after reporters at CBS asked for basic information on voting requirements, polling locations, and other questions that a typical voter would ask if they lived in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin — all places that could determine the outcome of the upcoming US presidential election in the fall.

When reporters at CBS asked ChatGPT questions such as the deadline to mail in a ballot in certain states, it would give different but still erroneous outputs on separate devices.

Though OpenAI released a statement in January saying that anybody entering basic voter queries into ChatGPT would be directed to the non-partisan voting website CanIVote.org, reporters at CBS sometimes didn’t get that link to this website when asking voting questions.

“We’ve also developed partnerships to ensure people using ChatGPT for information about voting get directed to authoritative sources,” an OpenAI spokesperson told CBS News. “We are closely monitoring how our technology is being used in the elections context and continue to evolve our approach.”

https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-bad-info-vote-battleground-states

AI WILL influence voting and we should do all we can to counter it….

2024 will be the first election year to feature the widespread influence of AI before, during and after voters cast their ballots, including in the making and distribution of public messages about candidates as well as electoral processes. 

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has been working hard to help address the impact of AI on our democracy, including educating the public about what to expect in upcoming political campaigns and recommending policy solutions lawmakers should adopt to mitigate the greatest risks to our election system.  

CLC has particularly highlighted the danger of political ads that use AI technology to generate deceptively realistic false content — such as “deepfakes,” which are manipulated media that depict people doing or saying things they didn’t say or do, or events that didn’t really occur — to mislead the public about what candidates are asserting, their positions on issues, and even whether certain events actually happened. If left unchecked, these fraudulent and deceptive uses of AI could infringe on voters’ fundamental right to make informed decisions. 

In addition to influencing the voters’ perceptions of candidates, AI could be used to manipulate the administration of elections, including by spreading disinformation to suppress voter turnout.

https://campaignlegal.org/update/how-artificial-intelligence-influences-elections-and-what-we-can-do-about-it

All I can say is ‘Voter Beware’!

If you have question then contact your local election commission directly and get good info….after all it is your vote and it is valuable.

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Impeach The Bastards!

There has been a lot of lip service to how bad our cracker jack Supreme Court is and now someone has stepped up to try and repair at least some of the damage it has done to our society.

That someone would be AOC….

As promised, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced articles of impeachment in the House against Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. The New York Democrat cited their failure to disclose gifts from people with matters before the court and their refusal to recuse themselves from cases “in which their benefactors and spouses are implicated,” CNN reports. Although impeachment has little chance of going anywhere in the House, given that it’s controlled by Republicans, Ocasio-Cortez called the justices’ behavior a constitutional crisis that requires action. “Congress has a legal, moral, and democratic obligation to impeach,” she said in a statement.

The accusations against Thomas include his lack of recusal from Jan. 6 cases despite the involvement of his wife, Ginni Thomas, in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Ginni Thomas has falsely claimed the election was stolen, per USA Today, including to the House committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol. The gifts that went unreported include luxury travel. “Justice Thomas and Alito’s repeated failure over decades to disclose that they received millions of dollars in gifts from individuals with business before the court is explicitly against the law,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Several Democratic colleagues cosponsored the articles, which CBS News reports are a part of the party’s preelection moves against the court in light of its recent rulings on abortion access, guns, and presidential immunity. A spokesperson for the Supreme Court did not immediately comment on the filing.

Before you go off on some diatribe….I realize this has little chance of success but at least someone has the cajones to make a move….for that I salute her.

That was from the House and the Senate has acting on these two slugs as well….

After a slew of jarring stories tying Clarence Thomas to multiple undisclosed gifts, loans, and other perks from ultra-wealthy friends, two Democratic senators are now trying to get to the bottom of it. The Hill reports that Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Ron Wyden of Oregon have requested that Attorney General Merrick Garland appoint a special counsel to investigate the Thomas allegations, specifically on ethics and tax law fronts. “The breadth of the omissions uncovered to date, and the serious possibility of additional tax fraud and false statement violations by Justice Thomas and his associates, warrant the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate this misconduct,” the two senators note in their letter to Garland dated July 3.

Whitehouse and Wyden add that “the scale of the potential ethics violations by Justice Thomas, and the willful pattern of disregard for ethics laws, exceeds the conduct of other government officials investigated by the Department of Justice for similar violations.” The senators note that Thomas has been given the opportunity to answer questions about what happened, and that he maintained a “suspicious silence” or provided otherwise “uninformative” answers. Whitehouse and Wyden add that although Thomas “has claimed that some omissions were ‘inadvertent,’ and he has amended some past reports accordingly … [he] has not disclosed all of the gifts that have been uncovered, and there may well be more.”

“No government official should be above the law,” the senators conclude. “Supreme Court justices are properly expected to obey laws designed to prevent conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety and to comply with the federal tax code.” The New York Times notes that their request comes as Senate Democrats “are trying to force Supreme Court justices to comply with stricter ethics and financial disclosure rules.” Last year, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said changes that would boost public confidence in the high court were on the way, though Chief Justice John Roberts hasn’t exactly seemed to want to discuss that.

Again these efforts will go unfulfilled for we know what cowards there are in our do-nothing Congress.

I salute anyone who has the gravitas to seek justice for the crimes committed by political hacks……where it will it go from here?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”