Copyright law is AI's 2024 battlefield; Axios, January 2, 2023

Megan Morrone , Axios; Copyright law is AI's 2024 battlefield

"Looming fights over copyright in AI are likely to set the new technology's course in 2024 faster than legislation or regulation.

Driving the news: The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on December 27, claiming their AI systems' "widescale copying" constitutes copyright infringement.

The big picture: After a year of lawsuits from creators protecting their works from getting gobbled up and repackaged by generative AI tools, the new year could see significant rulings that alter the progress of AI innovation. 

Why it matters: The copyright decisions coming down the pike — over both the use of copyrighted material in the development of AI systems and also the status of works that are created by or with the help of AI — are crucial to the technology's future and could determine winners and losers in the market."

‘Please regulate AI:' Artists push for U.S. copyright reforms but tech industry says not so fast; AP, November 18, 2023

MATT O’BRIEN, AP; ‘Please regulate AI:' Artists push for U.S. copyright reforms but tech industry says not so fast

"Most tech companies cite as precedent Google’s success in beating back legal challenges to its online book library. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 let stand lower court rulings that rejected authors’ claim that Google’s digitizing of millions of books and showing snippets of them to the public amounted to copyright infringement.

But that’s a flawed comparison, argued former law professor and bestselling romance author Heidi Bond, who writes under the pen name Courtney Milan. Bond said she agrees that “fair use encompasses the right to learn from books,” but Google Books obtained legitimate copies held by libraries and institutions, whereas many AI developers are scraping works of writing through “outright piracy.”

Perlmutter said this is what the Copyright Office is trying to help sort out.

“Certainly this differs in some respects from the Google situation,” Perlmutter said. “Whether it differs enough to rule out the fair use defense is the question in hand.”"

The Internet Of Things Demystified: Connect, Collect, Analyze And Act; Forbes, October 12, 2023

 Bill Geary, Forbes; The Internet Of Things Demystified: Connect, Collect, Analyze And Act

"When you get past the acronyms and buzzwords that describe the platforms that help organizations manage their operations, it all boils down to gathering information so you can make good decisions. The tech industry establishes a lot of jargon that helps differentiate one technology from another. Those terms are helpful to IT professionals but often serve to confuse everyone else. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term that creates confusion.

I prefer to describe this technology according to what it does. IoT is nothing more than connecting things, collecting information from them, analyzing it and acting upon it accordingly: connect, collect, analyze and act. By distilling the technology into a plain description, we demystify the term. We make it attainable and approachable—something that everyone can understand."

Buolamwini: Optimistic About Using Ethical AI Systems; Bloomberg, June 27, 2023

Bloomberg; Buolamwini: Optimistic About Using Ethical AI Systems

"Algorithmic Justice League founder and MIT AI Researcher Joy Buolamwini recently sat down with President Biden in a closed door meeting about AI. She joins Ed Ludlow to discuss her meeting and the rise of the AI hype, what the tech industry is getting right and wrong, and the need for AI regulation."

Keyboard warriors: Ukraine’s IT army switches to war footing; The Guardian, March 12, 2022

Mark Sweney, The Guardian; Keyboard warriors: Ukraine’s IT army switches to war footing

"And so far, the plans to maintain digital resilience have helped defy expectations about the level of disruption expected from the full-scale invasion by Russian forces...

“Not everyone is good with a gun,” says the IT Ukrainian Association’s Vasyuk. “People should be used as efficiently as they can. We are fighting with guns, with laptops, we will keep on going.”"

Solving The Tech Industry's Ethics Problem Could Start In The Classroom; NPR, May 31, 2019

Zeninjor Enwemeka, NPR; Solving The Tech Industry's Ethics Problem Could Start In The Classroom

"Ethics is something the world's largest tech companies are being forced to reckon with. Facebook has been criticized for failing to quickly remove toxic content, including the livestream of the New Zealand mosque shooting. YouTube had to disable comments on videos of minors after pedophiles flocked to its platform.

Some companies have hired ethicists to help them spot some of these issues. But philosophy professor Abby Everett Jaques of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that's not enough. It's crucial for future engineers and computer scientists to understand the pitfalls of tech, she says. So she created a class at MIT called Ethics of Technology."

Anil Dash on the biases of tech; The Ezra Klein Show via Vox, January 7, 2019

Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show via Vox; Anil Dash on the biases of tech

[Kip Currier: Excellent podcast discussion of ethics and technology issues by journalist Ezra Klein and Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch and host of the tech podcast Function. 

One particularly thought-provoking, illustrative exchange about the choices humans make in designing and embedding certain values in AI algorithms and the implications of those choices (~5:15 mark):

Ezra Klein: "This feels really important to me because something I'm afraid of, as you move into a world of algorithms, is that algorithms hide the choices we make. That the algorithm says you're not viable for this mortgage. The algorithm says that this Donald Trump tweet should be at the top of everybody's feeds. And when it's the algorithm, that detachment from human beings gives it a kind of authority. It's like some gatekeeper saying this is what you should be looking at..."...

Anil Dash:  "That's right. The algorithm is availing of the fact that it's still the people at that company making the choice. And when YouTube chooses to show disturbing content as "related videos" to my 7-year old son, that is a choice that people at YouTube are making, and people at Google and Alphabet are making. And that when they say "well, the algorithm did it." It's like "well, who made the algorithm?" And you can make it not do that. And I know you could do that because, for example, if it were a copyrighted version of a Beyonce song, you'd instantly stop it from being shared. So the algorithm is a set of choices about values and what you want to invest in. And that is, to that point, technology has values is not neutral."]

"“Marc Andreessen famously said that ‘software is eating the world,’ but it’s far more accurate to say that the neoliberal values of software tycoons are eating the world,” wrote Anil Dash.

Dash’s argument caught my eye. But then, a lot of Dash’s arguments catch my eye. He’s one of the most perceptive interpreters and critics of the tech industry around these days. That’s in part because Dash is part of the world he’s describing: He’s the CEO of Glitch, the host of the excellent tech podcast Function, and a longtime developer and blogger.

In this conversation, Dash and I discuss his excellent list of the 12 things everyone should know about technology. This episode left me with an idea I didn’t have going in: What if the problem with a lot of the social technologies we use — and, lately, lament — isn’t the ethics of their creators or the revenue models they’re built on, but the sheer scale they’ve achieved? What if products like Facebook and Twitter and Google have just gotten too big and too powerful for anyone to truly understand, much less manage?"

Data Sheet—How the Tech Industry Needs to Evolve to Care More About People; Fortune, January 14, 2019

Aaron Pressman and Adam Lashinsky, Fortune; Data Sheet—How the Tech Industry Needs to Evolve to Care More About People

"Good morning from Redmond, Wash., where I’m spending the day soaking up some wisdom at Microsoft.

In preparation for my day I perused this “top 10 tech issues for 2019” post that Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote on LinkedIn, which Microsoft owns. I somehow expected this list to focus on the top commercial aspects of tech in the coming year. But that’s not what Smith, Microsoft’s top lawyer and policy executive who has written recently on the need for regulations around facial recognition, means by “issues.”

Instead, Smith is focused on the interplay between big technology companies and society. Topics like privacy, ethical artificial intelligence, protectionism, “disinformation,” and the human impacts of technology top his list.

The technology industry has been branded over the years as not caring all that much about people. Even the industry’s leading humanist, Steve Jobs, ultimately judged the success of his wares by whether they delighted customers, not if they were good for society. The industry is evolving.

I’ll share what I learn tomorrow."

Tech predictions for 2019: It gets worse before it gets better; The Washington Post, December 27, 2018

Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Washington Post; Tech predictions for 2019: It gets worse before it gets better

"2018 is a year the tech industry wishes it could forget. But 2018’s problems aren’t going anywhere.

It was the year we came to grips with how little we can trust Facebook and how much we’re addicted to our screens. It was the year that online hate and misinformation became an unavoidable reality and Google, Microsoft and Amazon faced revolts from their own employees over ethical lapses. It was the year Apple became the first trillion-dollar company — and then lost a quarter of that when we yawned at its new iPhones.

Even YouTube’s “Rewind 2018” video is already the most-disliked video in history.

When my Post colleagues and I looked into a crystal ball to make this list of nine intentionally provocative headlines we might see in 2019, it was hard to see past the problems we’re bringing with us into the new year.

New technologies like 5G networks, alternative transportation and artificial intelligence promise to change our lives. But even these carry lots of caveats in the near term.

I’m still optimistic technology can make our world better. So here’s a glass half-full of hope for the new year: 2019 is tech’s chance to make it right."

It’s Almost 2019. Do You Know Where Your Photos Are?; The New York Times, November 29, 2018

John Herrman, The New York Times; It’s Almost 2019. Do You Know Where Your Photos Are?

"Jason Scott is a founder of Archive Team, a loose network of archivists and programmers that creates tools for extracting data from services that are at risk of disappearing. Flickr has given users options to export everything from the site; the Archive Team is working on alternatives, just in case.

“The sad thing about the tech industry is they built everything on subsidized lies: ‘This is going to cost you nothing and you’re going to get amazing things,’” Mr. Scott said. It’s not as easy to imagine a future without Google as it might have been to imagine a future without Zing, or even Yahoo. But it shouldn’t be hard.

“It’s 100 percent like Flickr,” Mr. Scott said. “Tech companies are still selling a lot of very neophyte people a lot of problematic lies about things that matter a lot to them.”"

The technology industry needs a set of professional ethics; Baltimore Sun, March 8, 2018

Adil E. Shamoo. Baltimore Sun; The technology industry needs a set of professional ethics

"In a wider view, using an ethical framework in scientific enterprise disperses ethical principles throughout society; patients and consumers adopt these ethical standards and come to expect and even extend these standards to other endeavors.

But we have failed to develop an ethical framework when it comes to technology or to understand the impact new media would have on our behavior and societal relationships.

We need to examine the current landscape of ethics within the rapidly expanding technology sector. Just as scientific research has added requirements for classes in ethics in research, the tech sector must develop widespread ethical educational efforts. The lack of firm ethical principles allowed a serious disruption to our 2016 political election and is changing the brains of social media users and rapidly changing the workplace and our economy. What has become commonplace has become acceptable. Robots replace humans in jobs; testing of consumer behavior without consent is unquestioned; acceptability of facial and voice recognition is rarely challenged even though misuse and privacy issues are frightening; and vitriolic, divisive missives are the norm on social media."

WTF is GDPR?; TechCrunch, January 20, 2018

Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch; WTF is GDPR?

"The EC’s theory is that consumer trust is essential to fostering growth in the digital economy. And it thinks trust can be won by giving users of digital services more information and greater control over how their data is used. Which is — frankly speaking — a pretty refreshing idea when you consider the clandestine data brokering that pervades the tech industry. Mass surveillance isn’t just something governments do.

The General Data Protection Regulation (aka GDPR) was agreed after more than three years of negotiations between the EU’s various institutions.

It’s set to apply across the 28-Member State bloc as of May 25, 2018. That means EU countries are busy transposing it into national law via their own legislative updates (such as the UK’s new Data Protection Bill — yes, despite the fact the country is currently in the process of (br)exiting the EU, the government has nonetheless committed to implementing the regulation because it needs to keep EU-UK data flowing freely in the post-brexit future. Which gives an early indication of the pulling power of GDPR.

Meanwhile businesses operating in the EU are being bombarded with ads from a freshly energized cottage industry of ‘privacy consultants’ offering to help them get ready for the new regs — in exchange for a service fee. It’s definitely a good time to be a law firm specializing in data protection."