In this case however, Janelle Shane is actually quite well aware of how different types of AI works. She writes about them, how they work and their various limitations.

Her blog is just focused on cases of them acting oddly, or not how you would expect , or just “funny”.

If you have an unutilized asset, there’s pressure to get rid of it for the cost savings.
If you sell your asset at a loss, it looks bad for you and the company. Same for paying cancelation fees.

If you legitimately think that you’re going to need that space in the future, for example because you think that we’ll find an equilibrium between “everyone work from office” and where we are now, and that we’re trending towards an organic level of office need/desire higher than we’re at now, you might see selling now as the first step to needing to buy again later, likely for higher than you sold for. So you try to “mandate” the equilibrium that you expect so you’re not in a position to have to explain why you’re holding onto a dead and losing value property.

Executives spend a lot of time talking to people and having meetings. The job selects for people who thrive on and value face to face communication. Naturally, they overestimate how much that social aspect of the job is true for everyone else, so they estimate that the equilibrium will have a lot more office time than other people would.
To make it worse, the more power you have to influence that decision, the more likely you are to have a similar bias.

This isn’t an excuse of course, since you can overcome that bias simply by telling teams to discuss what their ideal working arrangement would be, and then running a survey. Now you have data, and you can use it to try to scale offices to what you actually want.

I mean, they’re also “making you” pick up your items off the shelf, just like the gas station “makes you” pump your own gas.

That’s sorta the point of it.
I can recreate the phrase “apple pie” in any number of styles and fonts using my hands and a writing tool. Would you say that I “contain” the phrase “apple pie”? Where is the letter ‘p’ in my brain?

Specifically, the AI contains the relationship between sets of words, and sets of relationships between lines, contrasts and colors.
From there, it knows how to take a set of words, and make an image that proportionally replicates those line pattern and color relationships.

You can probably replicate the Getty images watermark close enough for it to be recognizable, but you don’t contain a copy of it in the sense that people typically mean.
Likewise, because you can recognize the artist who produced a piece, you contain an awareness of that same relationship between color, contrast and line that the AI does. I could show you a Picasso you were unfamiliar with, and you’d likely know it was him based on the style.
You’ve been “trained” on his works, so you have internalized many of the key markers of his style. That doesn’t mean you “contain” his works.

Keep in mind that a lot of the “bad” of today is just people noticing the bad that’s been there all along.

People still make fun colorful content, and we make more of that now than we did in the 90s.
It’s just that the hateful angry people didn’t have Internet access then, and they do now.

It wasn’t considered okay to talk about a lot of problems at the time, and it is now.

The Internet of the 90s is incompatible with billions of people using it.
Once you make Internet access less something that only a small group of relatively privileged people have access to, and less are interested in, and something that a more representative sample of the world can use and want to use, you find out that people more often prioritize sex, cats, banal updates on their friends and family, gossip, and to get it in a easy to absorb package.

So, a lot of the replies are highlighting how this is “nightmare fuel”.
I’ll try to provide insight into the “not nightmare” parts.

The proposal is for how to share this information between parties, and they call out that they’re specifically envisioning it being between the operating system and the website. This makes it browser agnostic in principle.

Most security exploits happen either because the users computer is compromised, or a sensitive resource, like a bank, can’t tell if they’re actually talking to the user.
This provides a mechanism where the website can tell that the computer it’s talking to is actually the one running the website, and not just some intermediate, and it can also tell if the end computer is compromised without having access to the computer directly.

The people who are claiming that this provides a mechanism for user tracking or leaks your browsing history to arrestors are perhaps overreacting a bit.

I work in the software security sector, specifically with device management systems that are intended to ensure that websites are only accessed by machines managed by the company, and that they meet the configuration guidelines of the company for a computer accessing their secure resources.

This is basically a generalization of already existing functionality built into Mac, windows, Android and iPhones.

Could this be used for no good? Sure. Probably will be.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate uses for something like this and the authors are openly evil.
This is a draft of a proposal, under discussion before preliminary conversations happen with the browser community.