This week:

3 – Artificial Intelligence isn’t always Intelligent

2 – Do you really care about workplace wellbeing?

1 – Volkswagen cars are the new Mars bars.

 

1 – Artificial Intelligence isn’t always Intelligent.

“Apple Intelligence is so bad that today it got every fact wrong [in] its AI a summary of Washington Post news alerts”

Summary: Apple has paused its AI-generated news notifications after the feature produced false headlines, including lies about the death of a suspect in a high-profile case and the arrest of a war criminal. The BBC and other press freedom groups raised concerns about the reliability of the AI-generated summaries, leading Apple to temporarily disable the feature while improvements are made.

So what? Artificial Intelligence is more than just Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and CoPilot. But these regular stories about the (crap) inaccuracies generated by LLMs are reminders that sometimes these tools are intelligent. And sometimes their semblance of intelligence is just artificial.

Source: CNN

 

2 – Do you really care about workplace wellbeing?

“50% of office workers feel stressed about cybersecurity in their job.”

Summary: A recent survey of 1,000 office workers in Ireland has thrown up some interesting statistics. Half of workers feeling stressed about cyber is one. But there are others: 36% admitted that they have “neglected to report a breach in the last 12 months”, because of embarrassment or a fear of repercussions; 29% know of someone who lost their job because of an accidental breach; And over 60% would consider leaving their job if their actions caused a security incident.

So what? If you assume that half of your staff are stressed about cybersecurity, what do you need to do to reduce this stress so they can focus on their real jobs? Clearer training and guidance so they truly understand how to do their jobs without increasing the risk of a security incident? Better support when they make an honest mistake? Other security defences to reduce the impact when such mistakes happen?

Source: BreakingNews.ie (and sent my way by my good friend Bob Quinn of The Money Advisers)

 

3 – Volkswagen cars are the new Mars bars.

“It is more than just an embarrassing misstep for a company already facing significant headwinds. It is a disgrace. “

Summary: A significant data breach at Volkswagen has exposed the location data and personal contact details of over 800,000 electric vehicle users. “For around half of those affected, including owners of the VW models ID.3 and ID.4, the data is particularly detailed. For those vehicles, it can be seen when they were switched on and precisely when and where they were switched off. ” – In other words, the data shows where they live, work, and anywhere else they park. As Der Spiegel’s article describes, this is not just intrusive for every vehicle owner, it’s dangerous for politicians and other high profile individuals. How did the breach happen? It was accidental. The data was stored on an unprotected Amazon Cloud server, meaning it was accessible to anyone with basic technical skills.

So what? If only there was a law that required companies to perform data minimisation and privacy by design. But putting that aside: Once upon a time, we were told by Mars that their chocolate bars “help you work, rest, and play“. These days, we now know Volkswagen (and many others’) vehicles help lots of people track where you work, rest, and play.

Source: Der Spiegel