Tech News: Using ChatGPT to Win the Lottery

Of course, if you read the actual story, it deflates things a little bit. The story happened in Thailand. The winner received the equivalent of fifty nine bucks. It's not exactly enough to retire on. They have gone on to TikTok to talk about what they claim has happened. But what about chat GPT giving winning numbers? Well, first, I couldn't find any verification that it actually happened. But let's

go ahead and assume the story is true. There's no reason for us to just think that it's all made up. The lottery drawn this case was of four numbers, and apparently this man used some hypothetical situations while chatting with Chad GPT and also asked the bot to analyze past numbers and then suggest four numbers to pick for the upcoming lottery. Now I don't have all the details, but I can say that for random events, you cannot predict the future based upon the past. Each event is independent

from the others. If you flip a coin and it comes up heads, and it's a normal coin with the heads and the tails, you cannot predict that the next coin flip will be heads or tails. I mean, you could try, but you can't be sure. Like there's no legitimacy to the guess. And that's because each flip is independent of all other flips. Over the long term, you should see a fifty to fifty distribution of heads versus tails, but from one flip to the next, there's no way

of predicting it. So this is assuming you're working with actual random events. So long as the lottery system is working properly, it should not matter what past numbers indicate. But if there is a bias in the system, then it would be possible that a computer could pick up on patterns that would be otherwise a little difficult to spot. It still would be a heck. Of a guess to land winning numbers based off patterns, because chances are it's not the exact same four numbers coming up over and

over again. If that were the case, then I can guarantee you someone would come in and say, okay, we need to look at what's going on here. It's far more likely that a lottery commission would notice patterns before anyone else would, and would demand a full audit of the system to make sure that things were running fair and square. Also, chad GPT only has access to information up to twenty twenty one. Anything from twenty twenty one forward isn't accessible. So if chad GPT were drawing information

from past lottery numbers, they would be very old. And to me that suggests that the lottery system would probably have been replaced or altered at some point in the years between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three, and I guess well the year, so all three of those years, and that these old patterns, if they did exist before twenty twenty one, probably shouldn't exist today. So you couldn't even if those patterns were there, you couldn't draw from

that and make a meaningful guess for today's numbers. Of course, it's possible this man was feeding the more recent lottery numbers to chat GBT manually that could be the case, but again, unless something hinky is going on with the actual lottery system, there's really nothing but coincidence connecting the chatbot's suggestions to actual winning numbers. It's not like chat GPT could analyze all the variables involved in the numbers being picked and then predict the most likely outcome. It

doesn't even know all the variables. So I would caution anyone against putting their faith in a chat bot to help them win the lottery. And I know I'm being a little bit flippant about this, but there really is a danger when folks start to treat AI as if it is magic, that somehow it does not obey physical laws or can get around hard limitations to our knowledge. That opens up the chance for fraud, chicanery, and general scumbagginess.

An organization called the Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science or AMCs, has issued an open letter saying, and I am paraphrasing here, Hey, before we do too much more work in AI and potentially create a conscious machine, we should really learn more about consciousness in general. Now, if you've been listening to tech stuff for a while, you've probably heard me talk about how human consciousness is a complicated, nuanced thing and

we don't fully understand it. And these experts are saying that we need that kind of understanding in order to have a better approach with AI, if and when it achieves consciousness. Now, for the record, right now we appear to be far from that kind of situation. Even seemingly sophisticated AI agents are when you boil it down following some conceptually simple processes. Now there's a complex system supporting these processes, but if you really boil it down, it's

all about statistical probabilities. So while an AI chat bought like chain GPT can seem to communicate like a person, it actually lacks any consciousness or motivation or intent. But there's a fear that without a more thoughtful approach, serious mistakes could be made that could cause unintended harm, whether to people or to the discipline of AI. This is in line with what some other open letters we've seen

from various experts and concerned individuals have said. And while I think it's still early to think about these things. It's actually better to think about them early than to wait until it's an active problem and then you're trying to find a solution. Tech Crunch has an article about the recent rise and reaction to deep fake audio projects

that digitally recreate an artist's voice to make new songs. Now, I've talked about how the music industry recoiled in horror when an AI generated song called Heart on My Sleeve featured the AI synthesized voices of Drake and the Weekend, and the song went viral. Studios began to scramble to see what sort of legal protection they could cling to in order to prevent an avalanche of AI impersonators releasing music that sounds like a famous artist recorded it, when

really that person had nothing to do with it. Fun fact, such legal protection doesn't really exist here in the United States. I mean, if someone were to decide they wanted to make prints sing the Hills Are Alive from the sound of music, Well, in that case, there is a copyright

issue there because that song exists under copyright. But for a brand new song, that gets way more complicated because music studios wouldn't own the rights to that song that's brand new and while I bet that wouldn't stop studios trying to use copyright strikes to take down stuff from people who had deep fakes of artists that those studios represented, arguably that approach doesn't have much legal support because there's no copyright infringement going on. Earlier this week, I mentioned

that musical artist Grimes is taking a different approach. She's welcoming fans to use AI to recreate her voice for new songs, provided they give her a fifty percent share of royalties. Other artists are doing something similar. A few of them are just saying, hey, go nuts out there, do whatever you like. But the tech Crunch article brings

up a critical point for a lot of artists. This possibility is brand new, and tons of people probably aren't even aware that it's possible, and they haven't given their consent to being copied, and that consent issue is important. It gets to the heart of one of the really

big problems with deep fakes. A deep fake can rob someone of agency, and it's become a really serious issue in cases where someone has used deep fake technology to make it seem as if a person has appeared in say an adult film, when in fact that person didn't digitally, that person is being forced to perform in an adult

film without their can. I really want to do a full episode about that issue in particular, but to do so, I feel I need to get some guests on who can give me their own first hand perspective, because otherwise it's just me sitting at a microphone saying this sounds

really bad. I think we already know it sounds really bad, but getting that firsthand perspective of what it is like, the reactions you get, the impact it can have on your life when someone else just uses technology to make it seem as if you did something you didn't do. I feel like there needs to be a deeper episode

about that. Anyway. My hope is that once the dust settles around this AI deep fake music issue, we figure out a way for people to be able to give consent to being copied if they don't mind it, or to deny consent and receive protection against unwanted copies if that's their preference, because right now we lack the framework to deal with this situation. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that China's Cyberspace Administration has now unveiled rules that set

strict boundaries for AI chatbots in China. I talked about this in a past episode, So really it's just the next stage in that development where this administration has pushed out rules that do what you would expect, that chatbots need to have socialist core values and they cannot contradict the state. Again, no big shock here. If you are familiar with China, you know that that country has a reputation for not being particularly lenient when it comes to

questioning authority. And in an earnings call yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg had a bit to say about AI as well. First, that through AI, Meta has been able to better serve content to users, and by better serve, I mean the AI helps to choose what content is served to specific users in an effort to keep them engaged longer, which really just spoils down to what do you give somebody that will keep them around, that will make them stay on the platform and see more ads and generate more

revenue for the company. We've talked in the past how Meta's various recommendation algorithms are designed with the goal of keeping people glued to their platforms, and it sounds like the AI tools are aiding in that effort, particularly on Instagram with the incorporation of reels. In addition, the company plans to integrate AI into other features, potentially into stuff like chat So it's possible we could see chatbots or elements of chatbots worked into tools like Messenger or wattsapp.

Considering how Snapchat users are currently review bombing their app for the integration of an AI chatbot, I think Meta should tread lightly here. Okay, we've got more news stories to go, but let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back a little bit more to say about that earnings call that Mark Zuckerberg had for Meta, It went really, really well for the company. Zuckerberg revealed that Meta outperformed expectations. It earned a profit of five point seven billion dollars

for the first quarter of this year. Now, part of that is undoubtedly due to the fact that Meta has cut way back on costs, particularly in the form of you know, salaries and stuff, because Meta famously laid off around twenty one thousand people starting late last year in the quest to make twenty twenty three the Year of Efficiency.

But on top of that, Zuckerberg said that Facebook had nearly three billion monthly users each month this year, and I mean, yeah, the company is performing well from that perspective, no doubt about it. Zuckerberg also didn't just talk about AI either. He said the company remains dedicated to the development of the Metaverse. Whether anyone will want it by the time it gets here remains an open question. The UK's Competition in Market's Authority or CMA, has blocked Microsoft's

planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Now, technically this move just blocks that acquisition in the UK, but since we're talking about global entities here, it becomes a challenging situation for Microsoft to move forward. It also sets a precedent while other regulators, including ones in the US and the EU, are considering this deal. The CMA's justification for blocking the deal was a concern that Microsoft could create a monopolistic

command of the cloud gaming market. Right now, there's not much of a cloud gaming market, but the thought is that it's precisely at this stage where regulators cannot allow a massive company, Microsoft being one of the world's largest, to reduce the number of potential companies in the space, or to prevent other competitors from accessing certain titles, which

would give Microsoft an unfair market advantage. In the process, Microsoft reps understandably criticize this result, with arguments ranging from you don't understand this market to the UK is going to be sorry for doing this to me. See Also, the company may appeal the CMA's decision, but uh, let's just say that rarely works out in the long run.

The CMA is not an organization known for reversing its decisions. Also, in Microsoft News and On, by default feature in the Microsoft Edge browser has been snooping on users all right. So this feature is meant to let people who follow different content creators on different platforms to aggregate their interests so that they have a single place they can go

to look for updates. So that way, instead of having to go platform to platform and check on the content creators you like to see if there's anything new, you would go to this one destination and all the new stuff would be updated there. This, by the way, is not a novel idea. I used to rely on tools that no longer exist that did this kind of stuff with news articles. It's really what RSS feeds were intended to do back in the day. But anyway, something went

wrong with a recent update to Edge see. The way this tool is supposed to work is that when you go to a page on a platform that supports this feature, and only then Edge would send the URL to Microsoft through a domain called bingapis dot com. But a redditor user with the handle hackermchacker face or mchackface. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to misidentify you, hacker mchackface. They posted that a recent update to Edge now has it where the browser sends every URL to every web page you

visit to that domain. So it's not just the creator pages that have this tool built into the page where it triggers this to happen. It's happening on any page you go to. And as I said, this feature is on by default, so using Edge means you are broadcasting every URL you go to to Microsoft, which is a gross breach of privacy. Now you can go into settings an Edge and turn this feature off, but the fact it's on by default and it's pulling everything in the

process ain't great. Microsoft reps have said that the company is aware of the problem and will quote take appropriate action to address any issue end quote. Finally, we all know that last year was a tough one for Netflix, The company revealed late last spring that it had a decline in subscribers for the first time in more than a decade, and then investor confidence dropped like a stone. Since then, Netflix has been implementing different strategies to improve revenue.

One of those, famously is cracking down on password sharing. This is something that Netflix has already implemented within certain markets like Spain, and now a few months after Netflix introduced the initiative in Spain, research firm Cantar says it estimates more than one million former Netflix customers have canceled their subscriptions there in Spain. This could change Netflix's strategy to activate this password crackdown in other markets, including here

in the United States. We are on the schedule to get Netflix's new rules this quarter now. To be clear, company reps at Netflix say they expected to see a decline in response to this password policy, But the loss of a million subscribers in Spain, which I imagine has to be a much smaller market than say the United States, where the impact will be far larger, well, I mean it looks rough for Netflix. Honestly, I don't even know

what the best approach is for the company. It expanded to the point of saturation in a lot of markets, and once you're there, it's really hard to achieve growth without doing stuff like hiking prices, but not hiking them so high that you convince folks to leave. Or you can do stuff like try to crack down on loopholes like shared passwords, but that hasn't gone well for them either.

I don't know what the right approach is. The streaming market in general is still one that is complicated and not fully understood, and a lot of companies are struggling with how to balance paying for prestige content to it attract and keep users, and to generate enough revenue to cover all the costs and make a profit on the side. It's hard. And that's it for the tech news for today, Thursday, April twenty seventh, twenty twenty three. I hope you're all well,

and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.