😱 AI sees dead people

You know, that’s a great question and it’d be great if there were one concrete definition, but… there isn’t. So, we’ll just talk about how the Federal Reserve uses it.

• The consumer price index (CPI) measures the monthly change in US consumer goods and services prices.
• Core inflation excludes food and energy, as prices can be volatile (e.g., bird flu and egg prices; the war in Ukraine and energy costs)
• Supercore inflation also excludes housing data, which lags and has been more volatile since the pandemic, per Business Insider.

What the Fed looks at…

… when it talks about supercore inflation is the price of services (e.g., getting a haircut, hiring a plumber).

Service prices have increased as consumers prioritize them over goods, and as labor shortages drive higher wages, which are passed on to the consumer.

So, prepare for more hikes

Earlier this month, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that supercore inflation must be lowered to restore price stability, noting that “strong wage growth is good for workers but only if it is not eroded by inflation.”

And while the Fed can’t control bird flu, it can bump interest rates to cool off business growth, consumer spend, and the cost of labor, per The Wall Street Journal.

Thus — SVB debacle aside — experts expect the Fed to continue hiking rates until it reaches its 2% inflation target. Currently, one estimate pegs supercore inflation at 4.6% YoY.

BTW: There are critics of the Fed using supercore as a key metric, pointing out that food, energy, and housing… we need that stuff.

Despite the mediocre flying capabilities of its namesake, Chick-fil-A is ready for takeoff.

The company reportedly has a $1B plan under its wing to expand into Europe and Asia by 2026, per The Wall Street Journal.

• In the US, Chick-fil-A’s sales have quadrupled in the past decade, and it’s now the third-biggest fast-food chain by sales after McDonald’s and Starbucks.
• Despite being closed on Sundays, Chick-fil-A’s ~2.7k US locations averaged $6.3m each in 2021 revenue, ~4x that of KFC and Popeyes.

Since hatching in 1967, Chick-fil-A has tried at international expansion — in South Africa in 1996, and the UK in 2019 — to meager results and local opposition. It now has eight locations in Canada and three in Puerto Rico.

Currently, KFC runs the hen in Asia’s ~$33B fast-food chicken industry, with 39% market share. It also leads the way in Western Europe’s $6.1B market.

BTW: Last year, KFC owner Yum Brands opened a new restaurant around the world every two hours.

Can’t an ancestor just get some shut-eye? Between TikTok trends, celebrity ancestry shows, and ubiquitous DNA testing, it’s hard for a forebear to simply rest in peace nowadays.

Add this to their list of troubles: PimEyes, the controversial face-search engine that crawls the web to ostensibly help individuals monitor their online presence.

The facial scanner was found populating its database with images of the dead, per Wired, scraping digital memorials from Ancestry.com without permission.

Creepy? Yes. Ethics and privacy fiasco? Also yes.

For PimEyes’ part, they say their raising-of-the-dead was unintentional, and that they have blocked their crawlers from Ancestry and deleted the images in question.

For everyone else’s part, it’s another major “yikes” added to the tally of AI’s ethical repercussions. PimEyes has already been on the radar of privacy advocates, who worry the face scans may be used to gather sensitive personal info without consent.

Watchdogs fear the tech — good enough to ID subjects wearing sunglasses and masks, and accessible to anyone with $21 — could also be used for nefarious purposes, from stalking to identity theft.

The Wild West of post-mortem privacy

This bizarre PimEyes story highlights how few hard-drawn limits exist for facial-recognition engines — and on the privacy of the deceased in general.

More regulations seem likely. Post-mortem privacy has increasingly factored into high-profile cases, and EU policies already bar pictures of dead people when they carry a privacy interest for the living.

• Plus: Direct legal action against AI companies is on the rise. PimEyes isn’t immune.

Until the courts say otherwise, the only certainty here is PimEyes’ dominion over Haley Joel Osment as the most unsettling case of “I see dead people.”