Peter's Quasi-Daily Blah-g

Is it a little ironic that someone who plays other people professionally is leading the charge in protecting people’s identities in the age of artificial intelligence? Sure, but it’s not like anyone else is doing anything about it.

On Tuesday, multi-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett announced the release of the Human Consent Registry, a new tool designed to help people control their likeness and how it can be used by AI systems.

The tool, which is being released by Blanchett’s non-profit RSL Media, allows people in the United States and the European Union to create a record of themselves that can be used to dictate how their identity can be interacted with by AI. “Your identity is your intellectual property, and every person should have a clear way to say what is, and is not, allowed to be used by AI systems,” the organization said in a press release.

How the registry works

Upon creating an account, users will be presented with a form that asks them for biographical information like name and profession, as well as ways to mark their identity like a website or social media account. They then choose an “AI use consent” level, which is set up like a stoplight: Prohibited (red light), Permitted with Terms (yellow), or Permitted (green). Once completed, the person will have a Human Consent ID, which AI systems are able to check before including any part of a person’s likeness in their training data.

“Your identity is your IP in the age of AI, and every person deserves the right to decide how AI can or cannot use it,” Blanchett said. “RSL Media’s free Human Consent Registry gives everyone a voice and a way to take action on AI permissions, helping to preserve and protect trust across the evolving AI landscape.”

According to RSL Media, this first tool will cover name, image, likeness, voice, movement and other signature or personal attributes for those who register through its platform. The organization plans to follow up the Human Consent Registry with similar simple registries for “Work,” “Characters,” and “Marks.”

Now, it should be noted that there does not appear to be any sort of enforcement method in place for making AI firms actually comply with this at this time, and you are turning over a lot of personal data to a third-party, so uploader beware. That said, it does build on the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard, which has become a popular open protocol that was designed to establish AI usage rights and licensing terms for content. RSL has become a popular option for digital publishers, and with this new effort, RSL Media aims to extend that approach to human likeness.

In a recent interview, Valve says that when buying PC memory from the few big companies that produce the stuff globally, it basically has no choice but to take the price offered each month because to try to negotiate would likely lead to the DRAM makers cutting them off completely.

Valve’s Steam Machine is in the process of launching. But while the mini-PC running SteamOS seems like a cool evolution of the Steam Deck idea, the $1,000+ price tag is hard for many to swallow. A big reason why Valve has to charge $1,050 for the base version of the Steam Machine is that the small collection of companies that produce DRAM, which is an important part of most computers, phones, and consoles, are greatly limiting what folks who aren’t affiliated with AI hyperscalers can even purchase and are changing prices monthly. Valve can’t even get a contract with any of the DRAM makers, the company claimed during a recent interview with Gamers Nexus.

“Look, there’s no contracts,” said a Valve employee. “There’s nothing. Like, those guys…they are…they give us a price every month or something and they say ‘You can buy that many’ and it’s yes or no. And if we say no, then they never talk to us again.”

Because of the limited supply and pricing options, some Steam Machines will ship with one stick of 16GB RAM while others will ship with two sticks of 8GB RAM, which isn’t ideal, though Valve explained that in their testing, it didn’t cause any noticeable differences in performance.

This situation, which some online suggest sounds a lot like an organized crime ring extorting victims, makes it hard for Valve and other tech companies to build up stock or accurately budget months or even years in advance. But DRAM makers like Micron and Samsung seemingly don’t care, because all of these companies have become laser-focused on producing and providing PC memory to AI hyperscalers and datacenters, as those clients are buying massive amounts, months in advance, and that’s just a much more profitable business plan. Some of the DRAM makers are just straight-up done making consumer memory products entirely.

Keep in mind, many of these same DRAM makers were once caught up in one of the largest illegal business cartels ever discovered by the U.S. government over 25 years ago. Just a fun fact to store in your brain.

As pointed out by Gamers Nexus, even a company like Gskill, which is focused almost entirely on making RAM for consumers, is struggling to buy the parts it needs because it’s not a big enough player in the space anymore compared to OpenAI. So it’s not shocking that Valve can’t negotiate for better rates or more DRAM.

And this situation shows no signs of getting better as companies continue to invest heavily in AI and datacenters. So be prepared to pay more and more for computers and consoles for the foreseeable future. And don’t count on DRAM makers in China saving us all from this horrible situation.

Polymarket, the crypto-fueled prediction market that lets users bet on everything from Hollow Knight: Silksong’s chances of winning Game of the Year to Iran’s chances of getting nuked by the United States, has been paying “mostly college-age creators” to create fake videos of themselves winning huge, six-figure sums on the platform and artificially making said videos go viral by using a “social-media army” to advertise them, according to a new report.

As detailed in the Wall Street Journal’s report, more than 1,100 fake videos, alongside “instructional materials and interviews with creators” who have worked with Polymarket, were reviewed during its investigation.

The videos featuring creators winning massive sums on ridiculous bets were reportedly fabricated using a dummy version of Polymarket’s website, allowing the platform to fake the winnings without having to actually pay out any money. WSJ also notes that the creators Polymarket used to promote said fake bets on platforms such as X updated their bios on social media to include the phrase “@polymarket partner” after being contacted by its journalists.

According to the report, 118 of the faked videos reviewed featured creators winning. The combined winnings faked by said creators totaled almost $900,000. WSJ notes that those who legitimately bet on the same outcomes as the ones featured in Polymarket’s videos would have actually been denied their winnings, and that real-world bets on the outcomes featured in the 118 videos would have resulted not in massive winnings but in losses of “more than $166,000.” (One such video showed a creator winning $100,000 on a bet that President Trump would say the word “McDonald’s” in public that month.) Creators of the faked videos were apparently paid somewhere around “$2,000 to $3,000 a month” for their work.

In a statement provided to Ars Technica, Polymarket did not address the Wall Street Journal’s findings, but stated it was conducting a “comprehensive audit” of its promotional material: “We are part of a rapidly growing industry and are constantly evaluating ways to improve how we’re engaging and earning the trust of our audience. As part of that commitment, we are conducting a comprehensive audit of active promotional content to ensure it complies with our standards, as well as applicable regulatory and legal disclosure requirements.”