Feb. 16, 2024 ❧ Navalny reported dead, Science journal publishes AI-generated nonsense, San Francisco vs. self-driving cars, and Cops vs. acorns
Plus: Surveillance of women at Planned Parenthood, Iain Banks' birthday, Argentina may recriminalize abortion, Indonesia's new war criminal president, and tree kangaroos
You can’t spell NEW ORLEANS without NEWS!
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
JOURNAL PUBLISHES A.I. GENERATED RAT DIAGRAM
[CONTENT WARNING: GIANT RAT PENIS]
A “peer-reviewed” scientific journal has published an artificially generated diagram of a rat with…questionable physical characteristics and several other figures that turned out to be completely fabricated gobbledygook. The paper, which focuses on spermitological stem cells in male mammals, was published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Cell Development and Biology and authored by Hong Hui Hospital and Jiaotong University in China. The first diagram in the study is a sight to behold, depicting a dissected rat with three normal-sized testicles, one giant testicle, and a penis twice the size of its body.
If you look more closely at the text labels on the diagram, it becomes immediately clear that this is an AI-generated fabrication, as many of the words are outright gibberish: The dissected penis is labeled as “dissilced.” The stem cells in a petri dish are labeled as “stemm cells” with the two Ms connected, while the cells themselves appear to be getting scooped out like ice cream with a big spoon. The image in the top-right corner depicts an “iollotte sserotgomar cell” (We are not biologists, but that doesn’t sound real). The rat’s thigh is labeled “testtomcels” (also not real), and its chest is labeled “diƨlocttal stem ells.” In case you were unaware of what animal you were looking at, the rat is also labeled with the word “rat.”
Sure enough, Midjourney, a widely used AI program, is credited for the images in the study. While this well-endowed rat immediately sticks out, every figure in the study contains hilarious nonsense, but still looks vaguely science-esque to the layperson, especially if they only glance at it.
How could something like this happen in a peer-reviewed journal? The peer reviewer, based at Northwestern University, told Vice that he is only responsible for reviewing the “scientific aspects” of the paper and that the responsibility for vetting the images lies with the journal. According to the Frontiers website, AI-generated images are allowed, but they must be checked for accuracy by the author. That does not appear to have happened.
As funny as this entire incident is, the implications of it are quite disturbing. Frontiers is the third most cited publisher of scientific articles and was cited more than 7.2 million times by the end of 2023. And yet, somehow, the nonsense in this article wasn’t flagged until social media users caught onto it. One wonders if anyone would have noticed at all if there were not a comedically large rodent penis to tip them off. It begs the question of how many other less obvious examples of AI-generated fraud have managed to slip past the gatekeepers without any detection. Some journals have attempted to guard against this possibility: Nature, for instance, completely bans the use of generative AI in its papers. That seems like a good idea for more journals to adopt, but also one that will only hold up so long, as AI-generation tech only grows more and more convincing. Science blogger Elisabeth Bik writes:
“The paper is actually a sad example of how scientific journals, editors, and peer reviewers can be naive – or possibly even in the loop – in terms of accepting and publishing AI-generated crap. These figures are clearly not scientifically correct, but if such botched illustrations can pass peer review so easily, more realistic-looking AI-generated figures have likely already infiltrated the scientific literature. Generative AI will do serious harm to the quality, trustworthiness, and value of scientific papers.”
FIGHTING BACK
SAN FRANCISCO GETS FIRED UP ABOUT SELF-DRIVING CARS
In a scene like something from a cyberpunk novel, an angry crowd surrounded a Waymo self-driving car in San Francisco this week, smashed its windows in, and set it on fire. Nobody was in the robo-car at the time, and it seems no humans were hurt, but the vehicle itself was almost completely destroyed—as the blog Car Scoops jokes, there “used to be Way Mo of it.” In a press release, San Francisco Mayor London Breed was quick to condemn the arson as an “unacceptable act that has no place in our city.” But that’s not the whole story.
You see, there have been several incidents involving Waymo cars, and self-driving vehicles more generally, that make it perfectly understandable why people would be angry to see one in their neighborhood. Just a week before the vandalism, a bicyclist in San Francisco was hit and injured by a Waymo robo-taxi in the Potrero Hill neighborhood, which The Verge describes as a “flat, well-lit area.” Last October, a self-driving taxi from the GM subsidiary Cruise struck a San Francisco pedestrian and dragged them more than 20 feet, a fact the company initially omitted from its summary of the incident. And in May, a Waymo car ran over and killed a small dog—once again, in San Francisco. It certainly doesn’t seem like the technology is ready to be used on public streets, to say the least. Apart from the cases where self-driving cars have hit people and animals, there are also 55 recorded incidents where they’ve interfered with first responders. And even if the cars worked perfectly, the implicit goal of companies like Waymo and Cruise is to put human taxi drivers out of a job, which wouldn’t exactly be a positive development.
Of course, arson isn’t a good thing, and we don’t recommend that anyone commit it. But at the same time, human life is more important than property, and self-driving car companies have been recklessly putting people’s lives at risk. Protestors against automated cars have been using more peaceful methods, too: recently, an activist collective called Safe Street Rebel discovered that you can immobilize the cars by slapping a big orange traffic cone on their hoods, in front of the cameras they use to navigate. But so far, their “conings” haven’t translated into policy change. If municipal leaders like Mayor Breed insist on allowing dangerous experimental vehicles to roam their streets, and don’t listen when protestors raise their objections, can they really be surprised when people take matters into their own hands?
AROUND THE STATES
❧ A Florida cop got scared by a falling acorn and opened fire on his own car. The cop in question—a sheriff’s deputy named Jesse Hernandez—apparently mistook the sound of the nut hitting the roof of his patrol car for a gunshot, and unleashed what we might euphemistically call an “officer-involved ballistic-type situation.” In the bodycam video from the incident, we can hear Hernandez yell “shots fired!”, drop to the ground and roll, and then proceed to empty the magazine of his service pistol into his own car, firing around 15 shots in the general direction of the sound.
This alone would be pretty ridiculous, but the story gets worse: there was an unarmed, handcuffed Black man sitting in the car at the time, who Hernandez apparently assumed was shooting at him. His name was Marquis Jackson, and he’d been arrested earlier in the day. Miraculously, Jackson survived Hernandez’s hail of bullets, but posted on Facebook that he’s been “damaged for life” by the traumatic experience. Meanwhile, the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s investigative report gives us this amazing passage:
[Investigator Michael Hogan] showed the frames where the acorn first comes into frame, and the subsequent frames where the acorn can be seen bouncing off the roof of his patrol vehicle.
Deputy Hernandez asked, “Acorn?”
Investigator Hogan answered, “Acorn.”
Of course, it’s not exactly news that the U.S. police are twitchy and paranoid. In 2016, Harper’s Magazine published a long list of innocuous items they’ve mistaken for guns over the years, including wallets, phones, sunglasses, a sandwich, and even a pair of underwear. Now we can add “acorns” to the inventory. Many of those past cases ended with the police shooting someone, and a lot of the victims were Black men like Marquis Jackson. There are several reasons for this. It’s partly a consequence of the ridiculous training a lot of cops go through, which emphasizes a so-called “warrior mentality” and teaches police to see everyone around them as potential enemies. It’s partly just plain old racism. And it’s partly the blurred line between police and the military—according to The Washington Post, Jesse Hernandez “didn’t have any prior law enforcement experience,” but was in the Army Special Forces for 10 years before becoming a deputy. Taken together, these factors make police more of a danger to the wider community than they are protectors of it. They need to be disarmed and demilitarized, and abolition should be the long-term goal.
❧ An anti-abortion group is using cell phone data to track people who visit Planned Parenthood clinics across the country. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) released a statement this week revealing that a Midwest-based group known as the Veritas Society had used a data broker known as Near Intelligence to target visitors at more than 600 Planned Parenthood locations in 48 states with anti-abortion ads and propaganda. The group’s activities had previously been reported on by The Wall Street Journal, last year, which said the tracking technology has been in use since 2019. The Journal reported:
The campaign used a common digital-advertising technology called geofencing to extract the unique device identifiers of phones carried into Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, the people said. It then used those device IDs to target those people on popular social-networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat with antiabortion messaging…
When users clicked on the targeted ads, they were directed to a site registered to Veritas Society that gave them two options: “I want to undo the abortion pill” or “I am thinking about the abortion pill.” That site could track users who answered and target ads to them as they moved around the web.
The revelation comes as Congress is currently considering a bill that would require the government to obtain warrants before using commercially available data like this. Right now, all they have to do is buy it. This is a major concern in the post-Roe era, especially, as it means that the data could be used by prosecutors in states with abortion bans to target people who attend reproductive health clinics.
⚜ LONG READ: A lot of coverage of right-wing book-banning efforts has focused on school libraries. But public libraries are also under threat. In Common Dreams, Rebecca Gordon writes:
Contemporary book-banning efforts extend beyond school libraries, where reasonable people might differ (a little!) about what books should be available to children, to public libraries, where book banners seek to keep even adults from reading whatever we choose. EveryLibrary, an anti-censorship organization, keeps a running total of active “legislation of concern” in state legislatures that relates to controlling libraries and librarians. They maintain a continually updated list of such bills (the number of active ones changed just as I was exploring their online list). As of today, they highlight 93 pieces of legislation moving through legislatures in 24 states as varied as Idaho and Rhode Island.
In 2024, they are focusing on a number of key issues, including “bills that would criminalize libraries, education, and museums (and/or the employees therein) by removing long-standing defense from prosecution exemptions under obscenity laws and/or expose librarians to civil penalties.” In addition to protecting libraries and their employees from criminal prosecution for stocking the “wrong” books, they are focusing on potential legislation that could restrict the freedom of libraries to develop their collections as they wish, as well as bills that would defund or close public libraries altogether. Sadly, as those 93 active bills indicate, in all too many states, libraries are desperately under attack.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, IAIN M. BANKS!
Scotland’s most famous science fiction writer and socialist political activist was born on this day in 1954. Banks is best known for his novels about the Culture, a futuristic post-capitalist society that travels the universe in sentient starships. Bizarrely, the books are favorites for both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who seem to have fixated on the starships and missed the whole “post-capitalist” part. Despite his billionaire fans, Banks’ politics were staunchly left-wing throughout his life; in 2004, he cut up his British passport in protest against Tony Blair’s complicity in the invasion of Iraq, and he started boycotting the state of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians in 2010, refusing to allow his books to be translated or published there. On what would have been his 70th birthday, why not check out ‘Consider Phlebas’ or ‘The Player of Games’ from your local library? (You know, while you still have one.)
“I suppose you could call it communist or socialist; the state has to a large extent withered away. They don't have money, everything is free, and you work because it's a hobby, because you enjoy it. This is either ludicrous pie-in-the-sky nonsense, or a really prescient piece of forward thinking on my part, although I don't expect to be around to be told I was wrong.” — Banks on the Culture
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Despite calling its leaders “war criminals” moments before, Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) still voted to give Israel $14 billion in military aid. Amid debate over a foreign aid package that would provide military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan and humanitarian aid to Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, Van Hollen gave a rousing speech on the Senate floor excoriating Israel’s leaders for the “humanitarian disaster” they have imposed on Gaza and the many instances of dehumanizing language used to describe Gazan civilians. Citing Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid entering the strip (which Van Hollen witnessed himself when he visited Gaza), he said:
“Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food. In addition to the horror of that news, one other thing is true: That is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.”
Van Hollen also called out the Netanyahu government’s refusal to negotiate to bring home Israeli hostages held in Gaza and for launching an assault on Rafah, the last safe place remaining in the strip which is currently packed with 1.3 million people. As The Intercept’s Ryan Grim writes:
“The senator’s speech pulsed with moral clarity — until it petered out into a stumbling rationale for his forthcoming yes vote. He acknowledged that the aid money wouldn’t be worth anything to the Palestinians if Netanyahu wouldn’t let it in, and he pleaded with Biden to pressure Netanyahu to do so. But if even this level of moral clarity from somebody like Van Hollen isn’t matched with any action, it’s hard to see why those pleas will be heard this time.”
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has reportedly died in prison. A cause of death has yet to be announced, but Russian prison officials say Navalny “felt unwell after a walk” and “almost immediately [lost] consciousness,” after which they were unable to revive him. He’d been in various state-run prisons since 2021 when he was arrested on a variety of charges related to alleged political extremism. Some of these had a grain of truth to them, as Navalny was known for inflammatory videos where he called Muslim immigrants to Russia “flies and cockroaches,” and even “shot” an actor wearing a keffiyeh. Others, though, were seen as political retaliation for Navalny’s opposition to Vladimir Putin, especially after he unsuccessfully ran for the Russian presidency in 2018. Navalny is now the second prominent Putin critic to die under suspicious circumstances in recent months, the first being Wagner Group mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin last August. Already, top U.S. officials are treating his death as an assassination, with Kamala Harris saying this morning that “Russia is responsible” for the “further sign of Putin’s brutality.” They may well be correct, since Navalny had already survived one assassination attempt, via a military nerve poison, in 2020. We should be careful about the rhetoric coming out of Washington, though, since there is a prominent faction of “Russia hawks” within the Democratic party—Kamala Harris among them— who are actively looking for an excuse to escalate conflict with that country. Unless we want to compound Navalny’s death with thousands more, war with Russia must be avoided at all costs.
❧ The new President of Indonesia is a war criminal from the Suharto regime. For the unfamiliar, Suharto—like many Indonesians, he had just one name—was the military dictator of Indonesia from 1968 to 1998. Similar to Augusto Pinochet in Chile, he came to power after the Indonesian communist movement was destroyed in a ruthless, bloodstained coup, backed secretly by the U.S. intelligence services. The full history can be found in Vincent Bevins’ book The Jakarta Method, but the part that concerns us today is the role of one man: Prabowo Subianto, who was elected President of Indonesia this week.
As Peter Symonds writes for the World Socialist Web Site, Prabowo was Suharto’s son-in-law, and “served mainly in the notorious Kopassus special forces that were responsible for the bloody repression of political opposition to the dictatorship.” In recent headlines about the election, the BBC describes him as “tainted,” and Le Monde remarks on his “shady past,” but these are polite euphemisms. By any reasonable definition, Prabowo is a war criminal. Among other atrocities, he was instrumental in Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, and ran so-called “counter-insurgency operations” there for several years afterward. In particular, Le Monde reports that “Prabowo's men executed a group of guerrilla fighters and their families, including women and children” near the village of Karaubalo in 1983, and quotes the testimony given by a survivor to the United Nations:
“I heard the moans of two babies, aged 1 or 2 years, a boy and a girl, who had [also] escaped the gunfire. A soldier slit their throats with a knife before going to smoke a cigarette.”
For 20 years, Prabowo was banned from entering the United States on account of his human rights record, something the Trump administration—against the warnings of Amnesty International—reversed in 2020. More notably, the Biden administration has abided by Trump’s policy toward the Indonesian leader, allowing him to share a chummy photo-op with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in 2022. Austin even told Prabowo that it’s “great to see you again and great to be back in Jakarta” when he visited Indonesia last year. But it isn’t great. Like several other world leaders, Prabowo has no business holding any form of power. He belongs in dock at the Hague, and the United States’ uncritical embrace of him is just another sign of how little it really cares about democracy or human rights anywhere in the world.
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❧ A bill has been proposed in Argentina to re-criminalize abortion. After a three-decade struggle led by the nation’s feminist movement, abortion was made legal through 14 weeks back in 2020. The new law would imprison women who seek abortions for up to four years. Argentina’s president Javier Milei claims not to support the bill at this time—right now, he is too busy gutting the welfare state and union rights. But despite what you may expect of a self-described “libertarian,” Milei is firmly against the right to abortion and campaigned on re-criminalizing it. When abortion was illegal in Argentina, they still happened very frequently—they were just unsafe and unregulated. In the year after abortion was decriminalized, the number of maternal mortality incidents related to abortion dropped by 40 percent, according to data from the Argentine Health Ministry. While this law may not pass, Milei ran on holding a public referendum to roll back abortion rights. However, a majority of Argentinians, 56 percent, favor keeping abortion legal as it currently is. As Camilla Reuterswärd and Cora Fernandez Anderson of the European Consortium for Political Research explain:
The feminist movement’s growing strength suggests Milei might be underestimating it as a political force. Any attempt to repeal the abortion law will trigger strong mobilisation.
PAST AFFAIRS
Shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs, Briahna Joy Gray made the libertarian case for abortion:
“It’s time, as a country, that we really nail down the difference between positive freedoms and negative freedoms. Freedom to versus freedom from. Freedom from state action? That’s what I want. And what you should be fighting to protect—the right to make medical decisions without the police banging down your door to arrest you, your wife, your daughter, or your physician…
…Roe meant more freedom of choice for more people. Women who did not want to seek abortions, or who find the practice immoral for religious reasons, could decline abortions after Roe…After those cases were decided, Americans could make their own choices: freedom of association. Medical freedom. This is what is at stake.”
KANGAROO FACT OF THE WEEK
Many species of kangaroos live in trees!
There are ten tree-dwelling species of kangaroo recognized by biologists today, which live throughout Australia and Papua New Guinea. They don’t hop quite as much as their land-dwelling cousins, but they are excellent climbers—able to scale the equivalent of a ten-story building. They don’t look like kangroos at first glance, appearing more like chubby possums (with whom they share a close lineage). But their hop gives them away.
Tree kangaroos are critically endangered as a result of habitat loss. But you can donate to conservation groups like the Tenkile Conservation Alliance, which allows you to sponsor a tree kangaroo for $20 a month to provide them with the food and care they need.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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