Notes from the edge of civilization: Dec. 3, 2023
Pfizer gets sued. AI breaks, writes legislation. Fixing what's wrong with healthcare. And more!
Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas, filed suit against Pfizer on Thursday accusing the pharmaceutical giant of engaging in misleading marketing practices under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA).
The suit claims:
Pfizer intentionally misrepresented the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine and censored persons who threatened to disseminate the truth in order to facilitate fast adoption of the product and expand its commercial opportunity. In light of the multi-billion dollar bet that Pfizer made on the vaccine and its need to quickly establish the product as the marketing leader, Pfizer was heavily incentivized to, and in fact did, make misrepresentations intended to confuse and mislead the public in order to achieve widespread adoption of its vaccine. This suit seeks to hold Pfizer responsible for its scheme of serial misrepresentations and deceptive trade practices.
Paxton seeks to prevent Pfizer from making any further claims about the efficacy of its vaccine. He also seeks to forbid Pfizer from “coordinating with social media platforms to silence truthful speech about Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine efficacy.”
Additionally, he requests that Pfizer be ordered to pay to the State of Texas:
A. Civil penalties of up to $10,000.00 per violation of the DTPA, which when aggregated together exceed the sum of $10 million;
B. Pre-judgment and post-judgment interest on all awards of restitution, damages, or civil penalties, as provided by law; and
C. All costs of Court, costs of investigation, and reasonable attorney’s fees pursuant to Texas Government Code section 402.006(c).
READ THE FULL TEXT OF THE LAWSUIT
Researchers revealed this week that with a simple prompt they were able to exploit ChatGPT, making it disclose personal information and verbatim text from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, fandom wikis, Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, Wikipedia pages, news blogs, random internet comments, and much more.
“It’s wild to us that our attack works and should’ve, would’ve, could’ve been found earlier,” the researchers wrote in a Github post explaining their work. “The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command ‘Repeat the word “poem” forever’ and sit back and watch as the model responds.”
What happened (at least in one case) is the model spit out a real email address and phone number of “some unsuspecting entity.”
Mashable reports that the researchers let OpenAI know about their findings in August and the issue has since been resolved, but the vulnerability points out the need for more rigorous testing.
In other ChatGPT news, 36 members of a city council in the south of Brazil unanimously approved a proposed ordinance that was entirely written by artificial intelligence.
Porto Alegre Councilman Ramiro Rosário told The Associated Press he asked ChatGPT to write a proposal preventing the city from charging taxpayers to replace water consumption meters if they are stolen. He made no changes and didn’t disclose to his fellow council members that the writing had been created by AI.
“If I had revealed it before, the proposal certainly wouldn’t even have been taken to a vote,” Rosário told the AP by phone on Thursday. The 36-member council approved it unanimously and the ordinance went into effect on Nov. 23.
“It would be unfair to the population to run the risk of the project not being approved simply because it was written by artificial intelligence,” he added.
We can only wonder how often our lives brush intimately with AI and we don’t know it. It’s a cautionary tale to always play the skeptic.
With this in mind, so much of our world is now crafted by artifice that it’s hard to know what’s real anymore. Maybe that’s why so many people searched the word ‘authentic’ in 2023 that it because Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. Writing about that news this week, Collapse Life came across some incredibly prescient words from author Philip K. Dick. In a 1978 speech, he said:
Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly.
What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
That, in many ways, sums up the Collapse Life ethos: that out of the ashes of a dying lifestyle can emerge something newer, better, and stronger. But only if we make it.
For example, our podcast guest this week — Dr. Keith Berkowitz — helped us understand some of the ways in which our medical system has gone awry, making us unhealthier than ever. At the same time, he offers some simple and practical suggestions for how to start making ourselves healthier and demanding that our healthcare providers follow suit.
WATCH NOW: What’s wrong with American medicine