Pakistan

Whispers, rumors and rulers' narrative!

Written

2 years ago

Oct 15, 2021 02:09 AM

Imran Yaqub Khan

The change of top command in Pakistan's most important intelligence agency was generally considered normal, but then those with access to the ruling circles started whispering differences and stopped the notification of the appointment of the new DG.

Imran Yaqub Khan

These whispers emerged as rumors on social media. The market for rumors on social media continued to heat up, with some key government ministers allegedly trying to "firefight". Disagreements over a minor issue eventually escalated into a week that the government spokesman had to admit.

The appointments and transfers were announced on October 6, the rumors continued for four days. On October 10, the Prime Minister addressed the main function of Ashra Rehmatul Lil Alemeen (SAW) and one of his sentences was considered the big news of the day. The Prime Minister said in the history of the world, there has hardly been a general greater than Hazrat Khalid bin Waleed (RA). He had never lost a war. Even then Hazrat Umar (RA) asked Hazrat Khalid to quit command for another. What was the context of his sentence? No one felt the need to consider it, but its meanings began to be taken in the context of rumors circulating on social media. Estimates began to be made.

After two days of silence, Federal Minister for Information Fawad Chaudhry had to come in front of the cameras and talk about these rumors. He told the media in detail that the Prime Minister and the Army chief had a long meeting, the Prime Minister and the Army Chief have close ties, the Prime Minister's Office will never take any step that would tarnish the honor of the Army or the Commander-in-Chief and Nor will the military take a step that would tarnish the image of the prime minister or the civilian setup. Legal procedure will be followed for the appointment of new DG ISI, all constitutional and legal requirements for the appointment of new DG ISI will be met.

After this statement of Fawad Chaudhry, many more explanatory statements came from various personalities, then the journalists who were also in close contact with the Prime Minister's House were fed tickers in the name of sources that the Prime Minister while talking to the cabinet members said, "The appointment of DG ISI is my prerogative. The situation in Afghanistan demands that no change be made in this post for another six months. If the army has honor, then the Prime Minister's House too. The impresison that I am a puppet PM is wrong. The PM decides the name from the list of three names."

At the same time, the Prime Minister's favorite phrase was added to the un-fed tickers that "if I am not nervous, you should not be nervous either". The emphasis was on cabinet members. Maybe no one knows what was behind it.

Although the tickers fed from the Prime Minister's House were designed to defuse the situation, these tickers don't seem to benefit the government, but rather the advisers have created a state of confrontation. As far as the press briefing of the Information Minister is concerned, he also took the same stance as that expressed by the PMBAT reporters, the only difference being that the attitude of the Information Minister and the choice of words was careful. He spoke in muffled words.

The change of government is actually a tragedy, which it is now facing. From day one, this government tried to give the impression that the relationship between the top military leadership and the government was warm and the position was the same on every issue, for which the word "one page" was used repeatedly. In the current situation, those who have filed a "one-page" writ are unable to tell the nation that if the hell broke loose over the usual transfer of a post. The manner in which the issue is being handled isn't a good omen.

One page impressors successfully run their agenda for three years. The wreckage of their every incompetence and bad governance kept falling on one page. The opposition was also in control because of one page. One page hid every weakness. Now the secret of not having a page is open, so panic is spreading. In the same panic, the PTI supporters discussed the point of civil superiority. Even those who raise this point are not well-wishers of the government. What will be the result of this shake-up? The answer lies in our political history.

Most importantly, this disagreement is by no means a question of civil superiority. The stubbornness to maintain the personality of one's choice in any position cannot be termed as civil superiority. Those who give such an impression deliberately or unknowingly pave the way for institutional conflict.

The fact that the "one-page" writ petitioners have perpetuated the impression of national institution's involvement in important decisions for their own political interests is not a formal and explicit attempt by the military to refute this impression outright. The impression was made and the impression was gaining momentum. Now if someone tried to make unnecessary noise of the civil superintendent, then the silence may not be maintained and the position of the other side will also come to the fore and the noise of the civil superior may say Don't stay It is better to be careful.

Civil supremacy is in fact an ideology and principle that has taken root in the world with the concept of democracy. First of all, we have to focus on promoting real democracy in the country. Real democracy is the civil supremacy. It isn't possible to use the slogans of "one page" when support is needed to form and run a government, and when it comes to likes and dislikes, it is civil. The upper hand should be made a crutch. All the requirements of true democracy must be met.

Due to this disagreement, the role of any key player is not immediately in jeopardy, but once the impression of "one page" disappears, opposition parties and social elements opposed to government measures will surely be encouraged. Even those cornered within the ruling coalition will be free to decide according to the new situation as those who have completed three years despite continuous bad governance have lost an important support.

Now the chances of an anti-government movement will increase, and sit-in politicians may face new sit-ins. This means that if precautions are not taken, the situation can take any turn. The exsisting state of affairs can take any turn. Under these circumstances, if the PTI had to be ousted from power, the party's narrative will be that of a "political martyr"?

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Imran Yaqub Khan

Imran Yaqub is senior journalist and analyst

Technology

X-Men ‘97 understood the power of perfect timing

X-Men ‘97 had a real chance to flourish because Disney Plus stuck to weekly releasing schedules rather than going all in on binge-watching.

Published

8 hours ago

May 17, 2024 05:00 AM

Web Desk

It was hard to get a solid read on X-Men ‘97 immediately after its debut because of how many different things it was trying to do. Even though ‘97’s premiere picked up threads from the classic ’90s cartoon, the new show’s fresh plotlines, updated music, and flashier production values all made it feel different in unexpected ways. But the show’s first season — which just came to an end with episode 10, “Tolerance Is Extinction - Part 3” — proved week after week that ‘97 had the heat and illustrated how much there is to be gained from letting shows (and the people watching them) breathe.

Because we live in a world where streamers are allergic to being truly transparent about how well their projects are performing, it’s always difficult to know when something is a proper hit in terms of being both widely watched and part of the pop-culture discourse. It’s easy for studios to tout how many hours people have generally spent watching a movie or show, but it’s far harder to quantify the degree to which a new project has reached Game of Thrones or Stranger Things-like status — especially at the outset.

Though WandaVision helped steer the MCU into its current multiversal era of diminishing returns, it was also one of the first Disney Plus shows that everyone — not just comic book fans and TV obsessives — seemed to be buzzing about. A lot of that had to do with post-Endgame hype and the covid-19 pandemic giving Marvel a somewhat captive audience. But WandaVision’s weekly release schedule also gave people time to develop a relationship with its story and become invested as they watched it evolve one episode at a time.

Very much like WandaVision, X-Men ‘97 felt a little rough around the edges in its two-episode premiere that reintroduced Charles Xavier’s team of superstudents as some of the world’s most powerful and persecuted heroes. But the exposition heaviness that plagued “To Me, My X-Men” and “Mutant Liberation Begins” quickly gave way to a winding but propulsive narrative that highlighted how Marvel’s animated mutants have always been soap opera stars first and superheroes second.

There is so much more to Marvel’s Inferno 1989 comics crossover event than what’s detailed in X-Men ‘97’s “Fire Made Flesh,” but the episode’s twisty exploration of how Jean Grey was secretly cloned brought meaty drama (and the pretext for psychic infidelity) to the series. And while Storm’s godlike feats of strength were the centerpieces of many of X-Men ‘97’s bigger action sequences, “Lifedeath - Part 2” hammered home how fascinating she is as a character in stories that frame her powers as more than weapons. Both of those episodes, and other weightier ones like “Remember It,” definitely felt like concentrated distillations of much bigger comics storylines because they were, and it’s fair to say that X-Men ‘97 stripped away some context that might have been helpful.

But the week between each episode gave viewers time to go read those old comics and ponder what was going to happen on the show next. People had a chance to catch up if they were behind and make memes when they needed to remind the world how wild the latest episode was. Social media buzz isn’t a reliable indicator of a show’s success, but the way phrases like “milky way ghetto” flooded X after “Lifedeath - Part 2” debuted spoke to how people were sticking with the show despite all its convoluted twists and turns.

That kind of organic buzz is something studios tend to want because of the way it draws people (read: potential customers) in. And while there is only so much that companies can do to shape the form and tone buzz ultimately takes, drawn-out releases are one of the biggest ways they can position series to become the kinds of events people want to talk about.

It can also lead to uncanny (positive) accidents. Marvel probably did not know that Storm would reclaim her powers right after Beyoncé dropped an album more or less about the same thing. It’s a coincidence that a real-world electromagnetic storm gave people across the world the ability to see the (typically) northern lights the same week “Tolerance Is Extinction - Part 2” featured Magneto floating down from the heavens with an asteroid in a sea of aurora. But those are the sorts of weird things that just happen sometimes, and while streamers can’t exactly rely on them, they can give their shows chances to be engaged with in a larger context rather than presenting them as things to be inhaled instantaneously.

Of course, X-Men ‘97 had to stand on its own legs because memes alone are not enough to make shows hits. But for all of the streamlining the show did to make the comics fit into 30-minute chunks, each episode was also doing a surprisingly good job foreshadowing the deeper story about the X-Men and technopathic android Bastion (Theo James) that comes to a head in the season’s final three episodes.

Between its cameos, characters returning from the dead, and set pieces that feel like they could play on a bigger screen, each piece of “Tolerance Is Extinction” delivers on what a show like X-Men ‘97 needs for its closing act. And while the finale’s cliffhanger ending opens up all kinds of possibilities about how X-Men ‘97 could continue, part of what’s promising about the way the show closes out is how unconcerned with the larger Marvel universe it appears to be.

Ms. Marvel’s integration into the X-brand and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ X-Men cameos both felt like last-ditch plays to wow audiences with the unexpected. But there’s a different energy to the way X-Men ‘97 is finishing just ahead of Deadpool & Wolverine this summer. Though the two newer projects couldn’t be any more tonally different, they’re both examples of Marvel finally letting its mutant IP shine rather than sequestering it off to the sidelines. They’re also testaments to how the long wait for more X-Men adaptations has primed fans to see what the studio can do with the characters now that it has full control of them again.

It might be a while until we see X-Men ‘97 return for its third season (the second’s production has already wrapped for the most part), but these first 10 episodes make it pretty clear that it’ll be worth the wait.

Technology

Reddit’s deal with OpenAI will plug its posts into ‘ChatGPT and new products’

Reddit and OpenAI have signed an arrangement that makes the site’s posts available in ChatGPT and allows Reddit to build new tools using OpenAI’s models.

Published

8 hours ago

May 17, 2024 05:00 AM

Web Desk

OpenAI has signed a deal for access to real-time content from Reddit’s data API, which means it can surface discussions from the site within ChatGPT and other new products. It’s an agreement similar to the one Reddit signed with Google earlier this year that was reportedly worth $60 million.

The deal will also “enable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to Redditors and mods” and use OpenAI’s large language models to build applications. OpenAI has also signed up to become an advertising partner on Reddit.

Redditors have been vocal about how Reddit’s executives manage the platform before, and it remains to be seen how they’ll react to this announcement. More than 7,000 subreddits went dark in June 2023 after users protested Reddit’s changes to its API pricing. Recently, following news of a partnership between OpenAI and the programming messaging board Stack Overflow, people were suspended after trying to delete their posts.

No financial terms were revealed in the blog post announcing the arrangement, and neither company mentioned training data, either. That last detail is different from the deal with Google, where Reddit explicitly stated it would give Google “more efficient ways to train models.” There is, however, a disclosure mentioning that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also a shareholder in Reddit but that “This partnership was led by OpenAI’s COO and approved by its independent Board of Directors.”

“Reddit has become one of the internet’s largest open archives of authentic, relevant, and always up-to-date human conversations about anything and everything. Including it in ChatGPT upholds our belief in a connected internet, helps people find more of what they’re looking for, and helps new audiences find community on Reddit,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says.

The company has not always been friendly toward companies scraping its data to train AI models. It threatened to block Google web crawlers from accessing the site. OpenAI also reportedly told the moderators of the subreddit r/ChatGPT that they violated OpenAI’s copyright by using the ChatGPT logo as a display photo.

Technology

We gotta stop ignoring AI’s hallucination problem

Artificial intelligence is being rapidly deployed across the technological landscape in the form of GPT-4o, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, and that would be cool if the AI wasn’t so stupid.

Published

8 hours ago

May 17, 2024 05:00 AM

Web Desk

Google I/O introduced an AI assistant that can see and hear the world, while OpenAI put its version of a Her-like chatbot into an iPhone. Next week, Microsoft will be hosting Build, where it’s sure to have some version of Copilot or Cortana that understands pivot tables. Then, a few weeks after that, Apple will host its own developer conference, and if the buzz is anything to go by, it’ll be talking about artificial intelligence, too. (Unclear if Siri will be mentioned.)

AI is here! It’s no longer conceptual. It’s taking jobs, making a few new ones, and helping millions of students avoid doing their homework. According to most of the major tech companies investing in AI, we appear to be at the start of experiencing one of those rare monumental shifts in technology. Think the Industrial Revolution or the creation of the internet or personal computer. All of Silicon Valley — of Big Tech — is focused on taking large language models and other forms of artificial intelligence and moving them from the laptops of researchers into the phones and computers of average people. Ideally, they will make a lot of money in the process.

But I can’t really care about that because Meta AI thinks I have a beard.

I want to be very clear: I am a cis woman and do not have a beard. But if I type “show me a picture of Alex Cranz” into the prompt window, Meta AI inevitably returns images of very pretty dark-haired men with beards. I am only some of those things!

Meta AI isn’t the only one to struggle with the minutiae of The Verge’s masthead. ChatGPT told me yesterday I don’t work at The Verge. Google’s Gemini didn’t know who I was (fair), but after telling me Nilay Patel was a founder of The Verge, it then apologized and corrected itself, saying he was not. (I assure you he was.)

When you ask these bots about things that actually matter they mess up, too. Meta’s 2022 launch of Galactica was so bad the company took the AI down after three days. Earlier this year, ChatGPT had a spell and started spouting absolute nonsense, but it also regularly makes up case law, leading to multiple lawyers getting into hot water with the courts.

The AI keeps screwing up because these computers are stupid. Extraordinary in their abilities and astonishing in their dimwittedness. I cannot get excited about the next turn in the AI revolution because that turn is into a place where computers cannot consistently maintain accuracy about even minor things.

I mean, they even screwed up during Google’s big AI keynote at I/O. In a commercial for Google’s new AI-ified search engine, someone asked how to fix a jammed film camera, and it suggested they “open the back door and gently remove the film.” That is the easiest way to destroy any photos you’ve already taken.

Some of these suggestions are good! Some require A VERY DARK ROOM.

Screenshot: Google

An AI’s difficult relationship with the truth is called “hallucinating.” In extremely simple terms: these machines are great at discovering patterns of information, but in their attempt to extrapolate and create, they occasionally get it wrong. They effectively “hallucinate” a new reality, and that new reality is often wrong. It’s a tricky problem, and every single person working on AI right now is aware of it.

One Google ex-researcher claimed it could be fixed within the next year (though he lamented that outcome), and Microsoft has a tool for some of its users that’s supposed to help detect them. Google’s head of Search, Liz Reid, told The Verge it’s aware of the challenge, too. “There’s a balance between creativity and factuality” with any language model, she told my colleague David Pierce. “We’re really going to skew it toward the factuality side.”

But notice how Reid said there was a balance? That’s because a lot of AI researchers don’t actually think hallucinations can be solved. A study out of the National University of Singapore suggested that hallucinations are an inevitable outcome of all large language models. Just as no person is 100 percent right all the time, neither are these computers.

And that’s probably why most of the major players in this field — the ones with real resources and financial incentive to make us all embrace AI — think you shouldn’t worry about it. During Google’s IO keynote, it added, in tiny gray font, the phrase “check responses for accuracy” to the screen below nearly every new AI tool it showed off — a helpful reminder that its tools can’t be trusted, but it also doesn’t think it’s a problem. ChatGPT operates similarly. In tiny font just below the prompt window, it says, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.”

If you squint, you can see the tiny and oblique disclosure.

Screenshot: Google

That’s not a disclaimer you want to see from tools that are supposed to change our whole lives in the very near future! And the people making these tools do not seem to care too much about fixing the problem beyond a small warning.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI who was briefly ousted for prioritizing profit over safety, went a step further and said anyone who had an issue with AI’s accuracy was naive. “If you just do the naive thing and say, ‘Never say anything that you’re not 100 percent sure about,’ you can get them all to do that. But it won’t have the magic that people like so much,” he told a crowd at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference last year.

This idea that there’s a kind of unquantifiable magic sauce in AI that will allow us to forgive its tenuous relationship with reality is brought up a lot by the people eager to hand-wave away accuracy concerns. Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and plenty of other AI developers and researchers have dismissed hallucination as a small annoyance that should be forgiven because they’re on the path to making digital beings that might make our own lives easier.

But apologies to Sam and everyone else financially incentivized to get me excited about AI. I don’t come to computers for the inaccurate magic of human consciousness. I come to them because they are very accurate when humans are not. I don’t need my computer to be my friend; I need it to get my gender right when I ask and help me not accidentally expose film when fixing a busted camera. Lawyers, I assume, would like it to get the case law right.

I understand where Sam Altman and other AI evangelists are coming from. There is a possibility in some far future to create a real digital consciousness from ones and zeroes. Right now, the development of artificial intelligence is moving at an astounding speed that puts many previous technological revolutions to shame. There is genuine magic at work in Silicon Valley right now.

But the AI thinks I have a beard. It can’t consistently figure out the simplest tasks, and yet, it’s being foisted upon us with the expectation that we celebrate the incredible mediocrity of the services these AIs provide. While I can certainly marvel at the technological innovations happening, I would like my computers not to sacrifice accuracy just so I have a digital avatar to talk to. That is not a fair exchange — it’s only an interesting one.