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"ow, legal redress is all very well, but it's usually beyond the resources of working artists. And lawsuits are almost always retrospective, after the damage has been done. It's sometimes better, as in rugby, to "get your retaliation in first". Which is why the most interesting news of the week was that a team of researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a tool to enable artists to fight back against permissionless appropriation of their work by corporations. Appropriately, it's called Nightshade and it "lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways" - dogs become cats, cars become cows, and who knows what else? (Boris Johnson becoming piglet, with added grease perhaps?) It's a new kind of magic. And the good news is that corporations might find it black. Or even deadly."

"Some experts see platforms like Appen as a new form of data colonialism, says Saiph Savage, director of the Civic AI lab at Northeastern University. "Workers in Latin America are labeling images, and those labeled images are going to feed into AI that will be used in the Global North," she says. "While it might be creating new types of jobs, it's not completely clear how fulfilling these types of jobs are for the workers in the region." Due to the ever moving goal posts of AI, workers are in a constant race against the technology, says Schmidt. "One workforce is trained to three-dimensionally place bounding boxes around cars very precisely, and suddenly it's about figuring out if a large language model has given an appropriate answer," he says, regarding the industry's shift from self-driving cars to chatbots. Thus, niche labeling skills have a "very short half-life." "From the clients' perspective, the invisibility of the workers in microtasking is not a bug but a feature," says Schmidt. Economically, because the tasks are so small, it's more feasible to deal with contractors as a crowd instead of individuals. This creates an industry of irregular labor with no face-to-face resolution for disputes if, say, a client deems their answers inaccurate or wages are withheld. The workers WIRED spoke to say it's not low fees but the way platforms pay them that's the key issue. "I don't like the uncertainty of not knowing when an assignment will come out, as it forces us to be near the computer all day long," says Fuentes, who would like to see additional compensation for time spent waiting in front of her screen. Mutmain, 18, from Pakistan, who asked not to use his surname, echoes this. He says he joined Appen at 15, using a family member's ID, and works from 8 am to 6 pm, and another shift from 2 am to 6 am. "I need to stick to these platforms at all times, so that I don't lose work," he says, but he struggles to earn more than $50

"Waymo and Cruise are now allowed to launch paid 24/7, fully autonomous driverless car services in San Francisco, state regulators decided Thursday. Why it matters: This is the final approval in both companies' quests to launch their full-fledged services throughout San Francisco."

"Most AI programs function like a "black box." "We know exactly what a model does but not why it has now specifically recognized that a picture shows a cat," said computer scientist Kristian Kersting of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany to the German-language newspaper Handelsblatt. That dilemma prompted Kersting-along with computer scientists Patrick Schramowski of the Technical University of Darmstadt and Björn Deiseroth, Mayukh Deb and Samuel Weinbach, all at the Heidelberg, Germany-based AI company Aleph Alpha-to introduce an algorithm called AtMan earlier this year. AtMan allows large AI systems such as ChatGPT, Dall-E and Midjourney to finally explain their outputs."

"As with most items and products that are re-engineered with the Internet of Things (IoT), they become even more powerful and useful in our daily lives. With the Internet of Things becoming an integral part of many industries, let's explore how this technology is changing the design and function of modern vehicles."

This discrepancy has made it relatively easy to connect an anonymous line of data to a specific person: if a private detective is searching for someone in New York City and knows the subject is male, is 30 to 35 years old and has diabetes, the sleuth would not be able to deduce the man's name-but could likely do so quite easily if he or she also knows the target's birthday, number of children, zip code, employer and car model.

"And some provinces are using some creepy Big Brother technology to do it. In Surat Thani, the province that contains the tourism hotspot islands of Koh Samui, Koh Phangan, and Koh Tao, the immigration office is employing new technology. Officers have equipped Smart Patrol Cars that is using advanced facial recognition to check foreigners quickly. Immigration officers are patrolling in WiFi-enabled Cars, usually a BMW, to crack down on foreigners who have overstayed."

"Nor are car owners the only consumers learning that software can be tricksy in a way hardware cannot. In 2017, Apple admitted that its software was slowing down the performance of older iPhones. It said that the design was aimed at saving battery life, but critics said it was an example of "planned obsolescence" - artificially shortening the life of a device to make buyers upgrade sooner. In 2009, Amazon provided a perfect metaphor for the potentially dystopian implications of the subscription economy when, without warning, it revoked copies of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four from all its Kindle e-readers."

"It was a trick as audacious as it was ingenious. When police or regulators opened the Uber app, they would see exactly what the public saw: dozens of cars crawling around the city, waiting to be summoned. But there was one crucial difference: these cars were fake. Uber had built a dummy version of its own app, a secret tool known as Greyball, designed to throw regulators off the scent and help its unlicensed cab drivers evade the law."

"Some of those rules have had unintended consequences: a law meant to prevent piracy also prevents you from fixing your own car, using generic printer ink, or adapting your e-reader for your visual impairment. And a law meant to encourage innovation is routinely abused to remove critical commentary and new creativity."

""I would reverse the permanent ban," Musk said on Tuesday, speaking via video link at a car industry conference organised by the Financial Times. "I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," he said. "I think that was a mistake. It alienated the country and did not result in Donald Trump not having a voice."

"Elon Musk wants Tesla to be seen as "much more than an electric car company." On Thursday's Tesla AI Day, the CEO described Tesla as a company with "deep AI activity in hardware on the inference level and on the training level" that can be used down the line for applications beyond self-driving cars, including a humanoid robot that Tesla is apparently building."

"U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION purchased technology that vacuums up reams of personal information stored inside cars, according to a federal contract reviewed by The Intercept, illustrating the serious risks in connecting your vehicle and your smartphone."

"CAR MAKERS CAN DESIGN CUSTOM WAKE WORDS AND RECORD UNIQUE VOICES FOR THEIR ASSISTANTS"

"The internet and its progeny, like smart car dashboards and buzzing smartphones, are built to make it seem like they can help us multitask, but our brains just aren't cut out for it. "It leads us to try to engage in multiple information-demanding activities simultaneously, and that is what our brains just do not do very well. They weren't evolved for that very type of demand," said Gazzaley, who also wrote The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World."

"Whereas most machine learning algorithms can't hone their skills beyond an initial training period, the researchers say the new approach, called a liquid neural network, has a kind of built-in "neuroplasticity." That is, as it goes about its work-say, in the future, maybe driving a car or directing a robot-it can learn from experience and adjust its connections on the fly."

"Will Knight wrote. "Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey… . The car didn't follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it. "Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it's also a bit unsettling, since it isn't completely clear how the car makes its decisions…. What if one day it did something unexpected-crashed into a tree, or sat at a green light? As things stand now, it might be difficult to find out why." "

"The IJOP is a massive database combining personal data scooped from automated online monitoring and information manually entered into a bespoke app by officials. It includes information ranging from people's physical characteristics to the colour of their car and their personal preference of using the front or back door to enter their house, as well as software they use online and their regular contacts."

"WILL HACKERS LAUNCH NUCLEAR WEAPONS?"

""Although manufacturers of new vehicles have built-in safeguards to prevent drivers from taking advantage of the new safety systems in vehicles, those systems are just that - supplemental safety systems," RCMP superintendent Gary Graham said in the statement. "They are not self-driving systems. They still come with the responsibility of driving.""