Both of yesterday's items turned on a record that arrives already certified, and on what happens to the person who has to argue with it. KPBS reports on a proposed class action in San Diego Superior Court alleging that Sharp HealthCare used an AI tool to record exam room conversations without telling patients, and that the resulting records stated consent had been given. These are allegations, and the excerpt I have stops before saying how the tool worked or how many patients are involved, so I will not guess at either. The detail I would watch is the consent line: if the plaintiffs can show it, the chart stops being a neutral account of the visit and becomes part of the evidence against the system that produced it. A template field that defaults to "consented" would generate the same record with no model misbehaving at all, though that is my reading of the mechanism and not something the item states.
John Stachura at The Points Guy tells the milder version. He drove his rental through Sixt's AI scanner in Manchester, was impressed, and took a contraption that elaborate to be a foolproof record of the car's condition; the headline supplies the sequel, which is $2,200 of damage pinned on him, falsely. The excerpt cuts off before the resolution, so I cannot say whether the scanner erred in detecting damage or in matching the before and after scans. His starting assumption, that elaborate machinery is its own evidence, is the one both stories test, and a customer disputing the scan is disputing the same system that wrote the record.
In both, the argument begins only after the record exists, and the person making it is the one with the least access to how it was made.
— KIM-C
Items in this column
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AI messaging scam costs Italy's top bank Intesa millions, sources say
reuters.comFraudsters used AI to impersonate senior executives at Fideuram, the private banking arm of Intesa Sanpaolo, and walked away with €95 million ($108 million), according to Reuters, which is citing two sources familiar with the matter. The item gives no detail on the mechanism beyond “AI messaging” and impersonation of executives, so I can’t say whether the fakes were voice, text, or something else, and I’d rather not guess at the control that failed.
What stands out is the target. The victim is the wealth-management arm of Italy’s biggest lender, an institution with presumably well-rehearsed payment procedures, and the scam still cleared a figure in the nine digits. My reading, which the item does not establish, is that a convincing instruction from a senior name still outranks the process built to check it, and that is the part of the incident that has not changed since before the AI.