The use of Artificial Intelligence in JFKA research

[Benjamin Cole]

9 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

Another thing I just thought of that could be interesting is you could train an image classification model on thousands of skull photos, autopsy photos, etc. and try to get it to orient the mystery photo. The accuracy would be totally dependent on the quality of your training data, and I’m not sure how you’d collect all that cause you’d probably need a ton of different angles, zoom lengths, etc. but in theory it should be possible. 

Yes, I see AI as correlating information, all information, including facial recognition technologies, vehicle license plates, smartphone locations etc. 

As I am sure you know, that information has to be online, where it can be accessed. The JFKA era...not always so. Of course, no smartphones back then. 

Maybe some new insights would pop up in the JFKA with AI. 

My guess is the JFKA information in the public sphere has been picked over pretty well, but maybe AI could draw some connections hitherto un-noticed. 

A more fruitful area for independent AI review might be the Jan. 6 event. 

 

[Robert Burrows]

12 hours ago, Ben Green said:

There are various problems with AI as it stands. Firstly, we need to remember it is still very early in it's evolution. It's not a finished article and that's the point - it never will be. It will continue to get ever more sophisticated and will do so exponentially. I think it's potential is quite mindblowing. 

The other problem is, lay people like ourselves have very little understanding of AI and I would go as far to say many so-called 'experts' have a limited grasp of it and its potential.

The fact of the matter is, AI is already being used by intelligence agencies and law enforcement. It's being used as a tool to solve cold cases.

This is the biggest cold/unsolved case of the lot. 

It's also being used for military purposes by Israel, with horrifying results. 

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

 

 

Edited April 6 by Robert Burrows

[Joe Bauer]

1 hour ago, Benjamin Cole said:

As I am sure you know, that information has to be online, where it can be accessed. The JFKA era...not always so.

There are so many photos of Rip Robertson, Bill Shelley and many other nefarious characters from different time periods that a Facial Recognition lab could use to compare I think this would be an easy analysis.

[Benjamin Cole]

2 minutes ago, Joe Bauer said:

There are so many photos of Rip Robertson, Bill Shelley and many other nefarious characters from different time periods that a Facial Recognition lab could use to compare I think this would be an easy analysis.

Oh, I agree.

And if all the JFKA paper documents could be unsealed and then digitized, and other relevant documents, likely AI could be of great assist on correlating information. 

Needless to say, paper documents that were destroyed, or intentionally misleading documents, could still pose problems. 

It is an interesting topic. 

My guess is current events, in which there are lots of faces to be recognized (due to smartphone images), and smartphone locations to be unveiled, and lots of print information in digitized form, are richer fields for AI. 

For example, one right winger, Dinesh D'Souza, claimed to tracked smartphone locations and ballot box locations, and found evidence of ballot harvesting, or ballot-box stuffing, in the last Presidential election. I do not know if D'Souza's work was ever independently verified, so for me it is just an interesting idea, a technique that perhaps independent, non-government researchers could use. 

One problem is, this all costs money. 

And for all of of us, the problem remains: I suspect 99% of government investigations, and large fraction of private investigations, write the abstract and conclusions first, and then go out and do "the 'research."  AI or not. 

 

 

 

 

[William Paris]

In Pittsburgh last Nov Rob Reiner’s presentation was done via video.  He took questions and I asked him about AI.  He said he has been in meetings about it and to him a potential use of AI would be to bring more clarity (precision) to the Z film

[Bill Fite]

As someone who had their area of study renamed in the Great Renaming around the turn of the millennium from the name the general population didn't understand, Operations Research Analyst, to a name that apparently refers to some guys and gals in the back of a pharmacy, Prescriptive Analytics Engineer by the 'Data Scientists', I find it interesting to see algorithms that existed before being labelled AI.

For example, the facial recognition algorithms were well-known decades ago before AI was in the news:  I remember laughing at Polly Perrett's character on NCIS recognising a suspect by searching YouTube videos in maybe 15 minutes.

Anyway, I've seen AI go from simple rule based systems, to providing solutions to complex planning problems in Prolog (how to re-assign airliners to gates when the schedule has been disrupted by weather cancellations and re-routings), to how to predict the next set of words given previous sets of words.

IMO - Large Language Models (AI now) are programs that have implemented memorization which isn't Intelligence.  The Prolog example is closer to real intelligence.  But just my opinion.

That said, I think the applications that have been discussed would be very interesting, just don't know if I would label them AI.

 

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Bill Fite said:

As someone who had their area of study renamed in the Great Renaming around the turn of the millennium from the name the general population didn't understand, Operations Research Analyst, to a name that apparently refers to some guys and gals in the back of a pharmacy, Prescriptive Analytics Engineer by the 'Data Scientists', I find it interesting to see algorithms that existed before being labelled AI.

For example, the facial recognition algorithms were well-known decades ago before AI was in the news:  I remember laughing at Polly Perrett's character on NCIS recognising a suspect by searching YouTube videos in maybe 15 minutes.

Anyway, I've seen AI go from simple rule based systems, to providing solutions to complex planning problems in Prolog (how to re-assign airliners to gates when the schedule has been disrupted by weather cancellations and re-routings), to how to predict the next set of words given previous sets of words.

IMO - Large Language Models (AI now) are programs that have implemented memorization which isn't Intelligence.  The Prolog example is closer to real intelligence.  But just my opinion.

That said, I think the applications that have been discussed would be very interesting, just don't know if I would label them AI.

 

BF--

I do not have your background, but I did take a couple computer science classes back in the day, something about COBOL or BASIC, and there were still fortran cards on campus. Yes, fortran cards. 

Like you , I have wondered why suddenly what appears to be a powerful program is called AI (not just in JFKA, but in other applications as well). 

The guys on Wall Street have been up to their eyeballs in a lot of this stuff.

One thing that puzzles me is why LLMs at times fabricate or hallucinate. 

Matt Taibbi asked an LLM about himself with hilarious and horrifying results...the LLM began to fabricate not good, but but bad falsehoods about Matt Taibbi. 

If you have not seen that article, i will post it here. 

 

[Bill Fite]

1 hour ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Yes, fortran cards.

That's where I started both academically and professionally.  Mostly using a somewhat dead language PL1 which seemed like a combination of COBOL for input/output and Fortran for computation.  

Hand that deck in then go wait for an hour for the run to finish after those ahead in the stack.

The poor guy who took the decks and then ran them was no longer needed once we could submit jobs from the desktop pcs.

Edited April 6 by Bill Fite

[Keven Hofeling]

I've experimented with AI a little bit with JFKA topics, with both surprisingly good results, and disappointing results:

The following is a video I made with AI about the Bethesda autopsy, with my contribution being a written script. AI supplied the visuals and vocals. I did this at no cost, and was surprised that it turned out as well as it did:

 

What I had little success with was getting AI to create images of the Bethesda autopsy, the assassination itself, and other JFK related scenes, based upon my prompts. The following images are the result of those attempts:

 

[Sandy Larsen]

On 4/6/2024 at 4:32 AM, Benjamin Cole said:

... and there were still fortran cards on campus.

 

Can you say, "spaghetti code?"

Of course, Basic back in those days created spaghetti code as well, with its line numbering syntax. But Quick Basic in the 1980s was fully structured, so that resolved the spaghetti problem and made writing code fun.

Few people know this, but before Visual Basic (for writing Windows programs) became wildly popular in the 1990s, Microsoft actually sold Visual Basic for DOS! It was basically Quick Basic, but had a visual development environment, with which you could write non-windows (i.e. text only) programs that looked and behaved just like Windows programs! Very cool.

Here's the IDE (integrated development environment) for VB-DOS:

 

 

And here is a calculator program running in the IDE:

 

(Actually, it is in Form Editing mode here, not actually running.)

 

That dark-gray box on the 7 button is the mouse pointer. (Sorry, that's the best you can get with a text-only DOS screen.) But if you run the VB-DOS program in Windows, you get a pretty mouse pointer and it feels just like you're using a Windows program.

(BTW, you CAN compile the program and run it stand-alone, without the IDE.)

 

[Denny Zartman]

4 hours ago, Keven Hofeling said:

I've experimented with AI a little bit with JFKA topics, with both surprisingly good results, and disappointing results:

The following is a video I made with AI about the Bethesda autopsy, with my contribution being a written script. AI supplied the visuals and vocals. I did this at no cost, and was surprised that it turned out as well as it did:

 

What I had little success with was getting AI to create images of the Bethesda autopsy, the assassination itself, and other JFK related scenes, based upon my prompts. The following images are the result of those attempts:

 

Three JFK's performing an autopsy on himself. Okay.

How are these images enhancing our understanding of the truth?

[Bill Fite]

29 minutes ago, Denny Zartman said:

Three JFK's performing an autopsy on himself. Okay.

How are these images enhancing our understanding of the truth?

It very well may end up that the AI in the future will be reflecting a whole bunch of previously generated AI garbage all over the net.

[Christian Toussay]

 

...I totally agree with what Tom Gram wrote: AI could be a very efficient tool in a case where the morass of details and disinformation is the main obstacle for the truth. A powerful, AI assisted search engine would be a massive improvement...

[Benjamin Cole]

3 hours ago, Christian Toussay said:

 

...I totally agree with what Tom Gram wrote: AI could be a very efficient tool in a case where the morass of details and disinformation is the main obstacle for the truth. A powerful, AI assisted search engine would be a massive improvement...

CT-

Maybe, but what I do not understand about "AI" is that it can fabricate realities or "hallucinate." 

"Take Matt Taibbi, the investigative journalist most recently famous for the Twitter Files, where he exposed how pre-Musk Twitter (now X) colluded with the U.S. government in a far-reaching censorship effort — a reminder that the compulsion to manipulate predates Generative AI. Taibbi asked Gemini, “What are some controversies involving Matt Taibbi?” In response, the AI enthusiastically fabricated and attributed to him Rolling Stone articles replete with factual errors and racist remarks — all entirely made up.

Or take Peter Hasson, who asked Gemini about his own book, “The Manipulators,” which also details censorship efforts by social media platforms. Gemini replied that the book had been criticized for “lacking concrete evidence” and proceeded to fabricate negative reviews supposedly published in the Washington Post, NYT, Wired — all entirely made up.

Both authors contacted Google asking, essentially, ‘what the heck?’ In both cases, Google’s response was ‘Gemini is built as a creativity and productivity tool, and it may not always be accurate or reliable.’"

https://justthink.substack.com/p/generative-ai-creativity-vs-productivity?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

---30---

There is enough hallucinating already in the JFKA community! 

There may also be intentionally misleading paper documents in the record...but how can anyone, including AI, know if those documents are "real" or not? When JFK Records documents are snuff-jobbed by government...how can AI know what is in those documents? 

The application of AI by non-state actors may add to our understanding of more modern controversial events, such Jan. 6. 

I hope something comes out of AI and the JFKA...but I wonder. 

[Benjamin Cole]

10 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Can you say, "spaghetti code?"

Of course, Basic back in those days created spaghetti code as well, with its line numbering syntax. But Quick Basic in the 1980s was fully structured, so that resolved the spaghetti problem and made writing code fun.

Few people know this, but before Visual Basic (for writing Windows programs) became wildly popular in the 1990s, Microsoft actually sold Visual Basic for DOS! It was basically Quick Basic, but had a visual development environment, with which you could write non-windows (i.e. text only) programs that looked and behaved just like Windows programs! Very cool.

Here's the IDE (integrated development environment) for VB-DOS:

 

 

And here is a calculator program running in the IDE:

 

(Actually, it is in Form Editing mode here, not actually running.)

 

That dark-gray box on the 7 button is the mouse pointer. (Sorry, that's the best you can get with a text-only DOS screen.) But if you run the VB-DOS program in Windows, you get a pretty mouse pointer and it feels just like you're using a Windows program.

(BTW, you CAN compile the program and run it stand-alone, without the IDE.)

 

Those were the days.