Group items tagged

"Both industries are at an impasse: tech insisting that enforcing copyright laws on AI is unfeasible and regressive, creatives that opting out is unworkable and unjust. It is up to government to foster a fair agreement in which both flourish. This is a pivotal moment for our cultural future. The artistic community has spoken. Now ministers must listen, take their concerns seriously and respond. We must protect our creators at all costs."

"Anthropic has an "AI policy" for job candidates that discourages the technology from being used during the application process. The company says it wants to field candidates' human communication skills. Anthropic is known for its AI innovations-but the company doesn't want job candidates using the technology."

"It is not simply that AI lacks originality; after all, so too does most human art. The problem runs far deeper: the essence of art is lost in the process of its machinic invention and, with it, the very possibility of a democratic society is put under threat. Art is a defining human endeavor, not just for those formally called "artists" but for everyone. It is not merely about arranging colors, forms, sounds or words into pleasing products. The essence of art inheres in its making: the belief that, in the act of creating art, one imbues an object with something ineffable from within one's own being. This belief, in turn, allows for another person to project their own sense of themselves onto the work and, in doing so, to commune with the artist at a level words cannot access."

"Umi is a digital wellness platform and personalized family wellness coach that integrates AI and a community of experts. By consolidating wellness data into personalized, actionable pathways for every family, Umi helps people build healthy habits and connect through wellness routines that work for everyone. And by leveraging the power of Anthropic's Claude AI model, Umi benefits from the advanced reasoning capabilities to navigate the unique challenges faced by individuals and families."

"What if we could forecast how armed factions-and the communities around them-might respond to a draft peace deal before it's signed? What if we could test, virtually, whether a public apology would calm tensions… or make things worse? That's the provocative promise behind the growing use of digital twins in peacemaking: AI-powered simulations of complex social systems, designed to help us understand conflict-and imagine pathways out of it."

"As examples, Kowolowski noted that companies wanting to protect their intellectual property or individuals sending tax returns may be happy to use traditional PGP/SMIME technology to encrypt the body of their messages, but that "a freedom fighter working on an oppressive country" would be just as concerned about the metadata."

"XKEYSCORE is a secret NSA program that indexes data slurped up from covert fiber-taps, hacked systems, and smartphones, including "full take" data and metadata. "

Wow - will any of you do as well?

"As LGBTQ Egyptians flock to apps like Grindr, Hornet, and Growlr, they face an unprecedented threat from police and blackmailers who use the same apps to find targets."

"It's a useful and insightful perspective, particularly for a time when Facebook is cowering under the pressure of conservative conspiracy theorists, while Twitter took the approach and ended up empowering oil companies by throttling climate activists."

"The Purdue researchers have created Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication (EQS-HBC) which uses low-frequency, carrier-less broadband transmission, and so keeps the signal almost entirely within the human body. That means data from pacemakers and other implantable medical devices would only be readable a handful of centimetres outside the wearer."

"Increasing numbers of implantable medical devices are now gaining internet connectivity, giving doctors the ability to monitor patients health remotely, and even update the devices to tweak a treatment plan. Unfortunately, that flexibility offers a way for hackers to hijack that hardware, and even potentially make changes to the way the devices work. While so far no attacks have been successful, proof-of-concept attacks have been available for years"

"Some have argued for much greater policing of content online, and companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have talked about hiring thousands to staff up their moderation teams.8 8. April Glaser, Want a Terrible Job? Facebook and Google May Be Hiring,Slate (Jan. 18, 2018), https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/facebook-and-google-are-building-an-army-of-content-moderators-for-2018.html (explaining that major platforms have hired or have announced plans to hire thousands, in some cases more than ten thousand, new content moderators).On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly investing in more and more sophisticated technology help, such as artificial intelligence, to try to spot contentious content earlier in the process.9 9. Tom Simonite, AI Has Started Cleaning Up Facebook, But Can It Finish?,Wired (Dec. 18, 2018), https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-started-cleaning-facebook-can-it-finish/.Others have argued that we should change Section 230 of the CDA, which gives platforms a free hand in determining how they moderate (or how they don't moderate).10 10. Gohmert Press Release, supra note 7 ("Social media companies enjoy special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, protections not shared by other media. Instead of acting like the neutral platforms they claim to be in order obtain their immunity, these companies have turned Section 230 into a license to potentially defraud and defame with impunity… Since there still appears to be no sincere effort to stop this disconcerting behavior, it is time for social media companies to be liable for any biased and unethical impropriety of their employees as any other media company. If these companies want to continue to act like a biased medium and publish their own agendas to the detriment of others, they need to be held accountable."); Eric Johnson, Silicon Valley's Self-Regulating Days "Probably Should Be" Over, Nancy Pelosi Says, Vox (Apr. 11, 2019), https:/

"After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically-now it seems that almost no one is happy. Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred.1 1. Zachary Laub, Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons, Council on Foreign Rel. (Jun. 7, 2019), https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons.Meanwhile, others feel that these platforms have become too aggressive in policing language and are systematically silencing or censoring certain viewpoints.2 2. Tony Romm, Republicans Accused Facebook, Google and Twitter of Bias. Democrats Called the Hearing 'Dumb.', Wash. Post (Jul. 17, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/17/republicans-accused-facebook-google-twitter-bias-democrats-called-hearing-dumb/?utm_term=.895b34499816.And that's not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect."

"This is because emojis - as many unfortunates have discovered (often gen X parents, but that I, a millennial in her early 30s, am increasingly, devastatingly, discovering) - do not always have clearcut meanings. This is true of all language of course - and emojis are a type of language, despite what the likes of John Humphrys et al have sneered in the past. A thumbs-up emoji, to take the example from the Canadian case, can, just as in offline life, be used sarcastically. (This was noted in the court ruling.) In some regions such as in the Middle East a thumbs-up can be offensive."

"Japan, the world's fastest-aging economy, is turning to technologies like AI, avatars, and robots to address labor shortages. Industrial robots have been deployed to automate the assembly of reinforcement bars (rebar), one of the most labor-intensive processes in the construction industry. The trucking industry is turning to self-driving trucks for deliveries, and robots for moving cargo."

"Ultimately, he suggests, each user would have their own "large language model" (LLM), the underlying technology of services such as ChatGPT, which would be trained on their own speech and behaviour patterns, to let them generate extremely personalised responses to queries and requests. Such systems could be a natural progression from AI tools that already exist today. Services such as Gmail can summarise and suggest replies to emails based on previous messages, while Microsoft Teams will transcribe and summarise video conferences, automatically generating a to-do list from the contents."