Mad Cow. The AI, Privacy, and Security Weekly Update.
EP 316. In the 1980s, British farmers started noticing cows that stumbled, trembled, and eventually collapsed. The cause, researchers later showed, was a prion disease that spread through cattle feed. To save money, producers had been grinding up the remains of other cattle and feeding the result back to herbivores. The animals were eating their own kind, secondhand, and the disease circulated through the herd until the feed itself was the problem. Keep that picture in mind this week, because the AI industry is starting to look a lot like that feed lot. Machines write stories, and those stories end up in the training data for the next generation of machines. Models learn from the output of other models. Hackers use AI to decide which victims are worth robbing. Criminals steal AI access and run up bills for companies that never signed up for the job. Satellites are being built to run AI in orbit. Phone carriers keep years of records, cars sell driving habits, and ...
