Not letting the facts interfere with a good headline

'Well don't say I didn't warn you', as Stephen Hawking might have said. What he actually said was this:

“Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it,” ...

“Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization. It brings dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It could bring great disruption to our economy.”   

         Source 

Last week Apple put their foot in it, in a mistake that, while essentially trivial, had  huge implications for journalism. This extract from a  BBC report of the (ridiculous) event ends 'Apple has made no comment.' But that doesn't mean they did nothing. In my search for traces of the story I was often stymied by 404 errors, and I suspect there has been an attempt at a web-wide clean-up attenpt, thankfully resisted by the BBC

 A major journalism body has urged Apple to scrap  its new generative AI feature after it created a misleading headline about a high-profile killing in the United States.

The BBC made a complaint to the US tech giant after Apple Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications, falsely created a headline about murder suspect Luigi Mangione.

The AI-powered summary falsely made it appear that BBC News had published an article claiming Mangione, the man accused of the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

Now, the group Reporters Without Borders has called on Apple to remove the technology. Apple has made no comment.

Screen grab of AI's Grossest Hour
(not its finest)

The BBC was not alone:

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said this week that Apple's AI kerfuffle, which generated a false summary as "Luigi Mangione shoots himself," is further evidence that artificial intelligence cannot reliably produce information for the public. Apple Intelligence, which launched in the UK on December 11, needed less than 48 hours to make the very public mistake. 

"This accident highlights the inability of AI systems to systematically publish quality information, even when it is based on journalistic sources," RSF said. "The probabilistic way in which AI systems operate automatically disqualifies them as a reliable technology for news media that can be used in solutions aimed at the general public."

Because it isn't reliably accurate, RSF said AI shouldn't be allowed to be used for such purposes, and asked Apple to pull the feature from its operating systems. 

Source

But an expert speaking last week on BBC News did not fully agree that 'AI shouldn't be allowed to be used for such purposes'. She said that there should always be a human being 'in the loop...

<tangent>
She really did say that, I'm afraid. 'Which loop?' I remember thinking at the time. When there are several people sharing information, and a boss says 'Keep me in the loop', that makes sense. It's still gross managerese, it's still a lamentable cliché, but at least it makes sense. In this case, though, an AI engine is exposed to thousands of reports and millions of possible summaries, and regurgitates a patent lie. Where's the loop in that?
</tangent>

... '

The Byte  reported the mistake thus:

"I can see the pressure [HD: on? for? to get?] getting to the market first, but I am surprised that Apple put their name on such [a....

<tangent>
With acute regret I have to concede that the speaker may have meant to omit the article – he was, after all, a 'professor in media policy' (whatever that is).
</tangent>

...?] demonstrably half-baked product [HD's emphasis; I just applaud the phrase]," Petros Iosifidis, a professor in media policy at City University in London, told the BBC. "Yes, potential advantages are there — but the technology is not there yet and there is a real danger of spreading disinformation."

However, this danger is one that's fundamental of [HD:sic...

<tangent> 
'Oh dear', as my grandson might say. This bit of writing really leaves a lot to be despaired. Meanwhile back at that article...
</tangent> 

...generative AI, and not just Apple's flavor of it. AI models routinely hallucinate and make up facts. They have no understanding of language, but instead use statistical predictions to generate cogent-sounding text based on the human writing they've ingested  

 And finally..

 On 22 March 2025 my choir  is joining forces with Bracknell Choral Society. for a performance of The Dream of Gerontius:

<autobiographical-note>
The first time I sang this extraordinary piece my mother (whom saints preserve [and they better had]) was in the audience.
</autobiographical-note>

You've got just over a month (as from publication date) to snap up the Earlybird deal.

b

Unspeakable

My latest discovery in the podiverse is Unspeakable. I first became aware of this last February when the BBC aired (unexplained initially, I think – at least, the announcer didn't say that the next edition would be in more than eight months). On that occasion  MrsK and I reached for the Off button as soon as we heard that it was 'a new gameshow presented by Phil Wang', though she beat me to it (a measure of her antipathy – I'm more tolerant of self-satisfied not-very-funny comedians).

There are four sorts of contributor to Unspeakable:

• Phil Wang, who I suspect may be an acquired taste (though if so I've no interest in acquiring it)
• Susie Dent
• A panel of comics
• The audience (audience participation seems to be de rigueur nowadays)

Each of the panel champions a new word to express a thing or feeling unexpressed in English; they each suggest also a word they could do without. The only contributor who is reliably worth listening to is Susie Dent, though some of the others have their moments. In an early edition (it's been running for over a month, and I didn't make a note of the precise reference...

<inline-ps>
Found it, here. She also pointed that the first 'harlot' was a man
</inline-ps>

...) she explained something that has been puzzling me for years.

<brain-teaser time-served-in-idle-speculation="40-50 years">
Why does bimbo have a masculine ending (-o not -a) when it refers (NB: today) to a sort of woman?

Bimbo is an affectionate diminutive of a word that already has the diminutive suffix -ino: bambino (a haby boy....

<erm-not-sure>
Italian is one of my sketchier language 'conquests' (border skirmish is more like it) and for all I know the one word may serve for any baby.

<aha-but...>
But just this week I heard, on the news, an Italian woman to her bambina. Which points to bambino not being confusingly unisex.
</aha-but...>

The name 'Bambi' looks to me like a back-formation from bambino, coined perhaps by a first- or second-generation Italian-speaking immigrant to the US....

<tangent type="side-swipe, silly">
(If so, what would be the title of an Italian translation of Bambi? Babe? [I warned you it was silly.])

 <meta-tangent type="more-serious">
(But the "first- or second-generation Italian-speaking immigrant to the US" idea doesn't work, as the Disney fim is based on a book by an Austrian, whose only link to Italy that comes immediately to hand (well, to browser, actually) is that in the same year as publishing Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde [the book the film is based on] he also published Der Hund von Florenz [a novel set partly in Florence] – which at least suggests that he may have spoken Italian].

</meta-tangent>

 </tangent>

</erm-not-sure> 

The modern English 'bimbo' refers to a less than intelligent wonan, so why isn't it bimba? 
</brain-teaser>

Susie Dent explained that the original bimbo was male. (I'm paraphrasing there. I doubt if she would have said 'original', as the etymolgy is confused and uncertain, Etymonline suggests that the word started life in the early nineteenth century, referring to a drink.)

But by the end of that century it referred (mostly) to a person:

From 1860-1910, Bimbo as a proper name is frequent: It is the name or part of the name of several race horses, dogs, and monkeys, a circus elephant (perhaps echoing jumbo), and a jester character in a play. It is in the title of a three-act musical farce ("Bimbo of Bombay"), and the name of a popular "knockabout clown"/actor in England and several other stage clowns. Also it appears as a genuine surname, and "The Bimbos" were a popular brother-sister comedy acrobatics team in vaudeville.

A separate bimbo seems to have entered American English c. 1900, via immigration....

By 1919 it began to be used generally of a stupid or ineffectual man, a usage Damon Runyon traced to Philadelphia prize-fight slang.... The word ...turn[s] up in Philadelphia papers' accounts of prizefights (e.g. "Fitzsimmons Is No Bimbo," Evening Public Ledger, May 25, 1920). The male word bimbo continues to appear as a derogatory term for a thug or bully through the 1940s ....

By 1920 the female word with a sense of "floozie" had developed, perhaps boosted by "My Little Bimbo Down on Bamboo Isle," a popular 1920 song in which the singer (imploring the audience not to alert his wife) tells of his shipwreck "on a Fiji-eeji Isle" and his "bimbo down on that bamboo isle... she's got the other bimbos beat a mile."

This Google Ngram shows how 'Bimbo' as a name (the red line) had a clear lead until about 1980, when 'bimbo' (without an initial capital, represented  by the green line) starts to ramp  up steeply, until by 2006 it is in the lead.

L'Envoi

(And I wonder if some wag at Google  decided that the Trumpian – ALL CAPS – version should be represented by an orange line.)

That's enough. This has already been long overdue.

b

Update: 2024.12.18.16:05 – Added <inline-ps />