Massive Attack turns concert into facial recognition surveillance experiment | Hacker News Reader

Massive Attack turns concert into facial recognition surveillance experiment

gadgetreview.com

343 pointsloteck152 comments

> The band deployed live facial recognition technology that captured and analyzed attendees during their recent performance.

I think more drama has been created around this than is necessary. Based on the video, the real-time projected visitor's faces were not analyzed. They were simply shown with a random description flag attached, such as "energetic," "compassionate," "inspiring," "fitness influencer," or "cloud watcher." It seems to be an artistic provocation showing what a real people analysis could look like.

Oh so it isn't even recognition, in that it doesn't identify the people. Just face detection.

The fact that people were uncomfortable with simply having their pictures taken and shown without their knowledge gives lie to the idea that "You're in a public place—of course you have no right to privacy." It's great to be given the chance to face your principles.

Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be. However, that doesn't mean your likeness can be used for just any purpose.

> Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be.

IDK about shouldn't. Public photography not being a crime comes from a time where one could still be generally expected to remain anonymous despite being photographed. Just like how you can be seen by strangers in the street while walking and still remain anonymous. Yet stalking is a crime, and facial recognition seems to be the digital equivalent. Facial recognition is something that can be done at any point by someone with your picture in their hand.

Yes. There’s also something about the sheer volume of recorded media & ease of distribution which feels like we crossed a qualitatively different threshold. The laws around photography were set in an era when it cost money to take a photograph, the cameras were easier to notice and slower, and when someone took a photo it was highly unlikely that they’d share it widely. Now it’s basically impossible to avoid cameras, people take far more pictures than they used to, and anyone’s photos can reach large audiences and often easily linked back to you. There was nothing like the way random people could see someone having a bad day, post it, and half an hour later a million strangers have seen it - a newspaper or TV station could do that, but their staffers usually ignored things which didn’t have a legitimate news interest.

This feels kind of like the way you could avoid having extensive traffic laws & control systems in 1905 when only a few people had cars.

Private persons snapping a few shots here and there in public capturing someone’s likeness is a drop in the bucket compared to all the automated surveillance photography and video out there. Let’s address that first so we are not straining out gnats but swallowing camels.

It shouldn't, you wouldn't be able to photograph candid moments in public of your own family/group of friends if anyone's else face showed up in the picture, that's not a world I want to live in.

It would also completely kill any form of street photography, even if you don't appreciate the art it would kill documenting times and places for posterity, for what benefit exactly?

Strengthening of your right to privacy against an entirely new paradigm of state and individual surveillance. It is a new world.

I actually don't find it hard to sacrifice the recreational photography of strangers, but I do have a hard time balancing it with the need to photograph crime and government entities overstepping their authorities.

I don't have a good answer for it all.

> I actually don't find it hard to sacrifice the recreational photography of strangers, but I do have a hard time balancing it with the need to photograph crime and government entities overstepping their authorities.

We would not only lose an art form but also the recording of the past, a candid photo of today has a lot more value in 50-100 years, rather absurd to lose this. It wouldn't even guarantee anything, bad actors would continue to do so covertly.

I find it pretty hard to sacrifice it, it's a freedom, making society at large less free to fight tyranny doesn't seem the way to solve anything, e.g.: EU Chat Control bullshit.

I don't have a good answer either but I lean on the camp of seeking solutions that are smarter than a sledgehammer.

Laws have non-binary options - for example, most countries have laws controlling industrial-scale air pollution which do not prevent you from grilling at home.

In this case, I think it would be interesting to think about the most concerning area: linking a person in a photo to their real-world identity. It seems like there could be restrictions on how face-recognition databases are built and accessed, possibly incorporating intent to harass or intimidate as an aggravating factor, and possibly linking across time and place. If I take a picture of some guys playing basketball or chess as I walk around town, I don’t need to identify them in my art exhibit entry and I certainly don’t need to link one of them to a different time and place without their permission.

This is programmer thinking, laws aren't algorithms.

The laws regardless this almost always make a distinction between intentionally surveillance and by chance background noise. Taking a picture of the street with people on it doesn't matter, recording the street 24/7 probably does, and purposefully singling someone out and photographing them definitely matters.

We already kind of have this. Think about it - stalking is illegal, but you've walked behind people right? You've glanced into someone's window before, right? You've taken a picture of a random person before, right?

So why aren't you in jail? Because laws aren't algorithms

The laws for this were written when "public photography" was someone with a film camera. It was maybe valid in the digital camera era.

But now I can point a camera at a crowd and It will:

  - count the number of people and animals there
  - give me an estimated gender for each
  - analyse the sentiment of each person
  - save their facial features so I can find "Male-sg76fg" in future photos automatically
  - store the GPS location

All this with consumer gear I can carry with me, no government level spy gadgets needed. All live at 2-20fps depending on how much hardware I throw at it.

With some extra work I can then find each of them on social media, grab their real names and other information from public sources and now I have a surveillance database. (Illegal where I live, but who's gonna check?)

This makes "public photography" a whole different thing from what it used to be.

If the tech is there, in the long run the only question is: Do you want government to have it, or everyone to have it? Privacy may have been a temporary phenomenon - a side-effect of the anonymity of cities/large crowds. You didn't have it in the mediaeval village, and you probably won't have it in the global village.

(David Brin's been beating this drum for about three decades now - I doubt I could say anything he hasn't already said. https://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html)

> Do you want government to have it, or everyone to have it?

That is a strange dichotomy, "government vs everyone". You miss the much more important large private organizations.

Government can at least be held accountable, if voters are willing. What the private orgs do you don't even have a chance to know about without a (tragic doomed person) whistleblower. Even the "evil" government actions heavily uses those unaccountable private entities for much of the dirty work.

Also "everyone" is useless. What use is any of it to individuals? Weapons or information. The fight is among deep complex organizations. Individuals - unless part of some network - may as well not exist. The individual with a firearm as a protection against government comes to mind, even in groups they'll be blown away anytime the organized large groups even sneeze towards them.

Another example is who uses the law: Any large company or even the government is much much MUCH more effective, no matter how much an individual has law on their side, at least when the large organization is willing to drag out the fight until the individual or small group runs out of resources.

If you want to achieve something, ORGANIZE! Otherwise you just throw yourself into the grinder, at best even providing reasons and justification to the other side.

> unless part of some network

Totally agreed. Even if that network is as simple as posting something to social media and watching it go viral, it's still a network.

I thought about breaking commerical interests out separately in my post, but didn't want to overcomplicate. An example would be the V888 form in the UK, which allows you to request the details of the licenced keeper of a vehicle, as long as you can show "reasonable cause". The reasonable causes are, of course, mostly commercial.

Even normal POS units have been discovered to have facial identification like that years ago.

You're tapping and paying and the system stores your purchase under "male, 35-45, hispanic, anxious"...

Creepy as all hell.

Public photography that focusses specifically on a person requires permission in some jurisdictions, notably France.

See https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/law-regarding-photogra...

Also very often people mistake the right to take a picture with the right to distribute it afterwards.

Well sure but all this is doing is displaying the audience on screens and drawing squares around their faces. I seriously doubt this breaks any law, I saw them in summer last year and they were already doing this, given that the article is about it happening rather than them getting sued, I think it's probably fine.

In Switzerland, you have the right to privacy including in public.

This means you can not make a photo/video of a person in public without their consent if they are the focus of your image. They also have the right to revoke consent anytime in the future.

The only exception is at large gatherings like for example the Street Parade where the expectation of privacy can not be expected especially since the event is televised.

This is also why you can not put cameras on your home that film public streets etc. They need to be blocked off or facing the other way.

Eh. These laws exist in DACH area but the result is that when someone's committing a crime, you can't film them in order to create evidence, because that would breach their right to privacy. Someone stole shit from your front porch? Someone broke into your car? Someone pulled an insurance scam on you? Well, tough luck, it's illegal for you to provide film evidence.

In more sensible countries the law says that it's legal to film, but it's not legal to publish videos and photos of people without their consent.

You can record your own property and you can submit this to the police. However you need to put up notice on your property that you are recording.

Dash-cam footage is a gray area since the video is generally deleted automatically and not publicized. If the crime is severe enough the footage is permitted in court.

Criminals do not just get away just like that. There is a lot of public cameras run by for example the SBB (national train company). These cameras have strict rules as to how long the footage is stored and who has access. The footage will not be posted publicly unless in very very rare cases where the severity of the crime outweighs the privacy of the criminal.

How many innocent people have faced the wrath of the public because of false identification in the US when some grand event occurs? Does anyone remember Richard Jewell[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell

There are explicit exemptions in Swiss law for the kind of situations you're describing.

https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/24/233_245_233/en#art_28

> Someone pulled an insurance scam on you? Well, tough luck, it's illegal for you to provide film evidence.

Are you looking at this from a US perspective where illegally obtained evidence is not admissible in court (fruit of the poisoned tree)? At least in Norway this is not the case, nor is it absolutely forbidden in the UK.

See, for instance, https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/commentary-and-opinion/fruit-fr...

Same in Switzerland, evidence is evidence even if optained illegally.

This is an erroneous blanket statement. Photographing people in public is illegal in plenty of places, depending on what exactly you're doing. Taking a picture of a big crowd is usually fine. Singling out individuals sometimes isn't.

IIRC some countries recently started experimenting with automagically granting copyright to people for their own likeness, I think it was aimed at AI generates fakes, but it's probably more widely applicable.

Anyway, don't be a dick, don't take pictures of people without their consent.

Well, in the US, in a "right to work state", an employer could say "We don't support the views of this band. We saw that you were there and are going to let you go."

"Data shows you hang out in low income areas, we don't think that aligns with our companies goals."

So the "face your principals" is completely fucking arbitrary. That's the fear.

What on earth are you talking about. An employer can do that in any state, not just the "right to work" ones.

I didn't see a location stated in TFA.

Where I live, a concert is not considered "public", unless it's a government-run event on government property.

Otherwise, a concert is a private event, in which case you have no right to privacy. Just like going into a store.

> It seems to be an artistic provocation showing what a real people analysis could look like.

I that case they should have used descriptions like "gay", "muslim", "poor", "bipolar", "twice divorced", "low quality hire", "easy to scam", "both parents dead", "rude to staff", "convicted felon", "not sexually active", "takes Metformin", "spends > $60 on alcohol a month", "dishonest", etc.

None of the people who actually take advantage of you or manipulate you using surveillance capitalism cares if you're a "cloud watcher" or "inspiring"

> I that case they should have used descriptions like "gay", "muslim", "poor", "bipolar"...

That would certainly better demonstrate the scary dimension of mass video surveillance and face recognition. However, not many people would buy tickets for the next Massive Attack show after being lectured like this.

Saturday Night Live used to do this with their studio audience in the 1970s.The captions were silly but could have been considered insulting sometimes.

Drama? They were making a point. And it seems like it was taken. "If this outrages you, this isn't even the tip of the iceberg compared to what governments are doing."

Not only governments, all of surveillance capitalism is based on that, not only through your pictures being analysed but across all of your behaviour they can gather and trace back to you online.

The article is deliberately inflammatory by labelling this as biometric data capture without consent.

It’s incredibly common for tickets to big gigs to have fine print along the lines of “by attending you consent to being recorded”. This has been the case for decades. If you’ve ever watched an official recording of a live performance, you’ve seen this in action.

This is just a novel presentation of what is already commonplace recording. And it’s great and it makes a point, but the article is bad.

Apparently this was an artistic interpretation of what airports are doing in reality today.

such as "energetic," "compassionate," "inspiring," "fitness influencer," or "cloud watcher."

One season Saturday Night Live did this with its studio audience as a recurring gag.

The one that stuck with me was the couple labeled "Pregnant two hours."

Their pictures were used in a commercial, for-profit setting without consent.

Being "used in a commercial, for-profit setting" is not a thing.

Their images were not being sold, nor were they being used to promote the concert. Plus, nearly everyone who goes to a concert these days agrees that their image will be captured and possibly used in future promotional material.

That's what caused the "outrage" (perhaps more "discussion", "introspection", ...). And without that, there is no art.

Think about the most notorious authoritarian regimes. Third Reich, GDR , USSR, Mao's China. They had relatively weak surveillance capacity. Secret police had to personally spy on the target and manually install bugs/taps. Technology was primitive and error prone. Most casual conversations were less vulnerable to spying. Rural people were relatively safe. Private conversations could be easily held in secret (e.g. walk outside, play a record).

Also consider resourcing, the manpower, money, tools, electricity devoted to surveillance back then compared to today

How about today? Where could you venture in secret without being tracked? How could you hold a private conversation? Your face & license plates are constantly tracked, along with your personal phone, laptop , watch, fitness tracker, Tire Pressure Management Systems, etc.

If you had to assign a logarithmic authoritarian intensity scale to those regimes, and to today's regimes, how would you rank them? Consider the spying capacity, resources, recording capacity, analytic capacity.

I would put today's regimes many orders of magnitude more severe.

what do you think?

Yes, though on the flip side, that power is very fragile now, relying on complex, difficult to maintain technology, with high overhead costs (aggregate, not individual). They can also more easily be turned against their creators or those who believe they have firm control but don't.

That power is actually less fragile than ever, given there are for-profit entities ensuring their continued existence. The State doesn't need to deploy mass surveillance tools when they're built and maintained by private industry. Regular payments and court orders ensure the State has ready access to any of the data they might want.

I lean toward this side . It’s harder to know friend vs enemy because everyone is engaged and employed to spy on you. My doctor requires privacy disclosures to share my diagnostics and genome results – none of the admins know how to allow me to decline. So now I have to choose between important care and – risk of employment and insurability .

Also the martial forces (police , military, security ) are more directly managed , and more broadly deployed . You can no longer reason with an individual because their decisions have to be run up the chain . Individuals no longer have authority to provide exceptions or help

It just get's worse and worse every day.

'Airlines Sell 5B Ticket Records to Government for Warrantless Searching' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45250703

I’m an optimist and would love to hear more . I agree it’s costly to maintain, but I worry that the victims pay a hidden tax to maintain it (eg high banking costs which turn into credit monitoring as one example , or inflation turning into funds for the NSA )

Scary stuff. But if we only use mass facial-recognition to catch “the bad guys” then that’s OK, right? It’s not totalitarian or authoritarian at all, right? When a majority of voters want it, that’s democracy, right?

My head hurts.

[1] https://news.met.police.uk/news/arrest-landmark-for-met-offi...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62lq580696o

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/met-police-facial-reco...

The problem is that people in power decide who the "bad guys" are.

Authoritarian regimes come up with bogus charges to include political opponents in the "bad guys", painting them as criminals to the rest of the country, and legitimizing their arrests.

These surveillance technologies have two main problems: if you have more data, it's easier to dig dirt on people. And if you don't have data, you can always fake it.

The requirement for it to work though is that you need regular people to believe that political opponents are in fact criminals.

The scary shit is that the US is not too far from being there.

I'm really scared that technology-enabled authoritarian regimes become much more powerful than they used to be.

In the past decade we had some examples where some countries had really big anti-government movements and protests... and they simply couldn't achieve anything substantial. Iran comes to mind, but I think we also had some in the East of Europe.

And then there are countries like Russia and North Korea (and likely many more) where it looks like (at least from the outside) that mass protests are pretty unlikely, because any kind of political opposition is suppressed before it reaches this level.

Let me give an optmistic counterpoint. We should go back to Gramsci, who observed that the regime holds itself to power mostly by ideological hegemony. If everyone is being wiretapped, it's difficult to construct and maintain ideology that would justify that.

We can imagine something like 1984, where it was only the party (middle) class monitored for thinking. But proletariat (low) class was free to think whatever - because they knew system was bad; they weren't required to pretend.

I guess my point is, the totalitarian system doesn't need widespread surveillance. But it needs believable ideology, which enough people from low and middle class believes to keep the communication barrier between these groups sufficiently closed.

Is the neoliberalism such ideology? Is it something that can offer enough positives to sustain/counterpoint negatives of widespread surveillance? I doubt it.

We can look at recent examples where UK and US tried to control the narrative and failed - Palestine Action, ICE arrests, troop deployments in cities, Tiktok ban.. Despite surveillance, people are not buying the ideology.

They have long been sounding the alarm to society through their art. As a longtime fan, I’m glad to see them being recognized in this way once again.

I tried to create an art piece sorta like this once. Video cameras in two separate places in the world, hooked up to a monitor. Made to look like a mirror, only you realize you're looking into a completely different place. So if you and someone else walk up to it, it's like you in another dimension. I was told I couldn't bring it to a regional burning man event because "it violates consent" (because they didn't consent to being filmed). Despite their being no storage or recording whatsoever and it only being a live feed to another identical event. The organizers just couldn't come to grips with the discomfort they felt that there are cameras capturing your image. We definitely need more of these projects so people don't keep their heads in the sand.

That's a really cool concept, I'd love to see more art like this that uses modern technology. Do you have a demo available somewhere to see what the effect would look like? This is one of those things where you should just do it without asking for permission. The portals[0] art installation in some cities doesn't ask for consent either.

[0] https://www.portals.org/

That’s really unfortunate. Having been to a regional burn before, the fact that there was no storage or recording, to me, seems to really fit the ethos: this video feed is completely ephemeral; after a frame has been displayed it has been lost forever.

I do, however, also appreciate how strict the community seems to be about recording without consent. Some people go to burns to be able to completely disconnect from their usual lives without fear that there will be any reprisal for legal/maybe-illegal-but-harmless activities they might do there, and the potential of being recorded can put a serious damper on that feeling of freedom.

But the thing is, the burning man principles give you everything you need to deal with scenarios like this. The burn is not supposed to be a vacation, and definitely not a place to completely disconnect. It's supposed to challenge you. And you're supposed to rise to meet that challenge, with radical inclusion, self-reliance, participation, immediacy. If you're afraid of cameras, wear a giant clown mask. If you want to feel freedom, walk into deep playa and close your eyes and ears. The burn doesn't care what you came there to take; it gives you what you need. (but I'm starting to realize that regionals have a bit less freedom)

From the video this appears to be face detection, with some cute strings attached at random to the detected faces.

I don't see evidence of facial recognition.

It displays the faces on the screen, and you recognize them.

how did the code crop faces without facial recognition?

Parent comment is saying the system wasn’t linking the faces to real names, just detecting a face in general.

'Face detection' means it can detect faces. 'Face recognition' means it recognizes the faces. A specific example of the difference: license plate detection will detect the presence of a license plate; license plate recognition will tell you the number on that plate.

It was detecting faces, not recognizing them.

Recognition implies associating the faces with an ID.

In the industry, that’s known as face (or facial) detection, which is a different problem than face recognition.

Face recognition means computing which individual from some other database of people a particular face belongs to.

There’s also face tracking — detecting a face in an image and then tracking the same face across subsequent images. Which is often implemented by using a face recognition approach, but without any predefined catalog of people — you just dynamically fill up your face database as faces appear in the image sequence / video source.

https://yolov8.com/

It detects objects and gives you the bounding box. Then you draw a square on it and add a label.

No fancy LLM needed, just old fashioned machine learning models.

Aphex twin did this years ago, replacing his sinister face over the faces of the crowd at his concerts

Not having a clear consent statement or saying what they are doing with the data seems the correct artistic choice.

Neat and all, but I'd be even happier if they flirted with the experiment of actually touring a new album, rather than serving as trip-hop's answer to Roger Waters, touring forever on the same 12 songs.

While I agree, in that I'd love a new album.

God damn those are 12 great songs!

I'd say the same thing but I saw them on the Mezzanine nostalgia tour in Chicago, which was very expensive, and it was... not one of the best shows I've seen. I'd seen them a couple times prior and they were fine (I was both times surprised by the guest vocalists they'd managed to drag along on those tours). The Mezzanine tour though was like Spinal Tap's appearance on the Simpsons; "there will be no encore!".

I thoroughly enjoyed their Toronto show on that tour. To be fair it was the first time I’d seen them in concert so I didn’t have any points of comparison.

I also hadn’t really clued in to just how political they were until seeing their visuals, which I also thought added a lot. Surely not everyone’s cup of tea though.

You watch your dirty mouth. They're amazing and you know it.

But yes. They do need new material dammit.

[Not the OP] Massive Attack is (was?) amazing but their live shows aren't.

I attended one in Paris this year. Not only it was exactly the same show as few years ago including the decorations and the scrolling text wall but the sound was horrible. I couldn't hear anything.

I would be better off if I just stayed home and listened to the recording.

Massive Attack has 7 albums, so what are you talking about?

It's been 15 years since their last original LP and over 20 years since the last album anyone really cared about (Google their setlists --- they play more covers than they do tracks from their last LP).

I'll put my hoping energy into a new Portishead album instead.

She's a solo artist now, right?

New band albums are rumored and hinted-at, from time to time, by Geoff Barrow, though it seems hard to say if there will be another.

Bear in mind Beth made "Out of Season" apart from Portishead several years before the release of "Third." I wouldn't think her recent solo work indicates a split.

I love the Spotify era where artists actually want, and some times need, to go on tour again. And while some artists might be capable of producing new good music, the sad fact is that the music we enjoy most was the one from our youth. So if bands from 20 or 30 years ago tour now, I always pray they haven't made anything new. Also, in the old days when bands made money from records not tours, the tour was usually "album promo" and you could some times tell the band was forced by the record company to do it to begin with.

The best concerts are breakthrough concerts for new bands (first or second album), and then the greatest-hits type concerts that are 10 years after the last album. Every concert that is a tour with album 3-4-5 is usually pretty meh.

This lends even more weight to the theory that Massive Attack’s singer is, in fact, Banksy.

Thought the exact same thing straight off the headline.

this is truth.

That theory is based on art springing up in locations where Massive Attack are playing. It's a bit odd because by that logic it could also be any of the dozens of people needed on tour.

Didn't Goldie accidentally refer to Banksy as 'Rob' in an interview once too.

Different Rob.

The YouTube video is a year old, and says the labels are fake.

Have they done this again with an updated system?

This is face detection, not recognition. Face recognition would have a correct name underneath each face.

> Details about data storage and participant consent remain unclear

And that's part of the performance. You don't get to choose what companies do with your personal data.

Now that’s what I call art.

It’s hard to explain the concept of surveillance and its effects to laypeople. And the corporations absolutely know that.

Microsoft made something similar, years ago, at the presentation of their azure cognitive services. A camera randomly picked a live face from the audience, passed it through azure cognitive services and displayed the mood of the person in a video overlay.

Already some years ago, when I bought a ticket for Cirque de Soleil, in the fine print was already then, they could use and sell your face for AI training data.

Has it ever been confirmed if Robert Del Naja is Bansky?

It's not him but probably was attending some of their gigs.

Are the faces even of audience members? Seems...gimmicky. The faces don't seem to react at all, and all are making almost AI movements. Many look artificial.

And it isn't identifying the people or anything. It's putting some meaningless adjective like "Resourceful" below them.

Have seen this headline a few times and thought it was actually novel and demonstrative of some face database or something, but instead it's just a surveillance gimmick. Put a bunch of generative AI face loops with bounding boxes and adjectives.

How did so many people hold back the urge to make funny faces when the facial recognition was being shown?

This just looks like straight face detection and projection with a random word. How is this recognition?

Indeed, what is the surveillance state/economy but a "massive attack" against us all?

The big difference between this and all the other facial recognition happening is that people knew it happened. Walk into a fast food chain and take a look at all those cameras. Do you really think they aren't harvesting every possible insight from them? I can only guess what McDonald's could glean from recognizing every face and tracking time/place/order/how long you look at the menu and which items, etc etc. I don't know that that is going on but in the US with how little we have in privacy protections I must assume that they do everything I just thought of and way more. We need more people exposing what is allowed by law and pointing it out in big obvious ways, only with a banner below saying "We tell you this is happening. Corporations don't"

Just wait until Coldplay gets ahold of this tech.

Banksy does it again.

generated seo slop, doesn't have its place on hn https://musicminds.com/massive-attack-turns-facial-recogniti...

A few sentences in, I was thinking that the article felt AI-generated, so I scrolled to the bottom of the page. There's no author listed, but there is this disclaimer:

"AI assists in refining our editorial process, ensuring that every article is engaging, clear and succinct."

One thing I hope we'll see in the future on these types of articles is the ability to view the original prompt. If your goal is to be succinct, you can't get much more succinct than that.

Just have an AI summarize it for you /s

https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

or move the disclaimer to the top. or better yet, have aggregators like HN add a badge if it's likely AI generated

> or better yet, have aggregators like HN add a badge if it's likely AI generated

How could you possibly tell? I've been playing around with AI detectors, putting in known all-human samples, known all-AI samples, and mixed samples.

The only thing it's gotten right is not marking a human sample as 100% AI (but it marked one of the AI samples as 100% human).

Having such a mark would be a witch-hunt for sure.

The (presumably fully human) author is listed in the byline at the top of the article.

What is sadly rather ironic is the author's first name, "Al" looks like AI when stylised in the article's font.

Could be a clever nom de plume?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. 'Al' is not an uncommon name.

some of Als are even Weird

We’re always talking about AI Capex, but go back a hundred or so years and it was Al Capone.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/al-landes-50018016b/

Writing for the last 14 years and for GadgetReview since 2017; Managing Editor since 2018.

Dang. That’s an earlier rollout than any other agent I’m aware of! ;D

That jovial overly friendly tone is a give away. Like to thinks its writing style is HILARIOUSLY clever

the reason LLMs use that jovial, overly friendly tone is because it's so common in journalism and marketing. this article does smell of ChatGPT, but there's absolutely no way to know for sure. people using LLMs annoy me just as much as people who are so certain that they can tell the difference

a smart person can make ChatGPT sounds completely authentic, and a very boring and middle of the road writer who uses em-dashes can make themselves sound completely inauthentic. it's not like LLMs got their style from nowhere

as far as I'm concerned, as long as the factual information has been curated by a human, I don't give a shit

In that case, I hope this comment finds you well.

did you write this with ChatGPT?

> view the original prompt

I think this assumes a very limited scope of how AI gets used for these. As if the article is a one and done output from a single prompt. I can imagine many iterative prompts combined with some copying and pasting to get an hour’s worth of copy in five minutes.

> One thing I hope we'll see in the future on these types of articles is the ability to view the original prompt.

Would it matter if the same prompt gives different output? You couldn't verify it.

The point is to not need to look at the output if the prompt itself has all of the info that someone cares about

If I put a button on the bottom of a web page that says " click here to see the secret sauce", you click it and I pop up some text.

How likely are you to just trust, let alone know for sure, whether or not the text I showed you is actually what I fed to the llm?

Feels like this title could benefit from clarification that 'Massive Attack' refers to the band and not the concept of a large scale attack; perhaps "Band 'Massive Attack' Turns Concert into Facial Recognition Surveillance Experiment"

Hahah, great point. As a music nut I knew what it was talking about, but to people who don't it might seem alarming.

I unironically thought this was going to be about a recent terrorist attack on a concert.

Ya same, I thought they had footage during an attack, and now had to do facial recognition to determine the perpetrators or victims

> I unironically thought this was going to be about a recent terrorist attack on a concert.

Nothing personal, but you do seem to have a nice education. US ?

This reminds me of the time I bought a physical copy of O’Reilly’s Python Cookbook from a bookshop and wondered why everybody was giving me strange looks.

“Turns concert” clarified it to me.

My next stop was going to be LiveLeak to see the aftermath.

Liveleak is no more my good old friend

Why suggest that headlines should have enough detail to prevent people from reading the article and gaining a fuller understanding of the material? The problem isn't that headlines don't have enough details, it's that people want to or already do treat them like the full story and never have to learn anything nuanced therein.

The purpose of a headline, at least in an ideal world, is to tell you whether the article's topic is relevant to your interests. That's all that's being asked for here. Being able to properly parse the headline is a good start.

> Being able to properly parse the headline is a good start.

The headline is perfectly parseable, unless most of the headlines on HN or BBC. The fact that it says "Band concert" shall be selfexplanatory.

If it did say "band concert", that would still be grammatically dubious but would still indeed be more self explanatory. But it literally doesn't say that.

The casing sort-of disambiguates it.

The casing was changed, before almost every word had an uppercase. I'll never understand that trend!

It’s called title case. Although this example shows that not title-casing it can carry additional information.

Just as in Wayne's World, where the band being referred to was The Shitty Beetles, "It's not just a clever name!"

My read was "cyber attack". I had to do some backtracking and context lookups to get the right parse.

Anyone who’s seen The Matrix has been exposed to Massive Attack in one of the most famous scenes from the movie:

https://youtu.be/6IDT3MpSCKI

In fact, I recall many songs from The Matrix being played nonstop back in my teenage gamer IRC days. Maybe even by others than just me

As a note, that version is a pre-release version that was used in the movie before the album released. The album version is different.

Or indeed the TV series House, albeit in the US.

Some people in Europe have Televisions, too.

The show 'House' has used three different opening tracks depending on territory and medium.

Massive Attack's Teardrop was used in the original US air (although as a Brit I've somehow heard all three on tv re-runs and Amazon Prime)

My Massive Attack is a bit rusty. What song is that?

Dissolved Girl from the album Mezzanine, though as another commenter mentioned elsewhere, a different version of the track is used in the film

That's what the capitalization of attack is doing.

Rollercoaster headline

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