The Dubious Ethics of “the World’s Most Ethical Companies”; The Nation, March 14, 2024

JESS MCALLEN , The Nation; The Dubious Ethics of “the World’s Most Ethical Companies”

"Ethisphere, a for-profit institution started in 2006, which describes itself as a tool to “accelerate ethical business,” has expanded significantly since its creation. In addition to producing its yearly list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies, Ethisphere hosts a podcast (Ethicast), a newsletter (“Ethisphere Insights”), and runs the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance, which allows members to access a “concierge” service where business executives can ponder ethical quandaries (“How do I measure and assess third-party risk?”) There is also a Global Ethics Summit, which occurs in tandem with the honoree gala. “It becomes evermore necessary to have a discussion about ethics,” the 2024 summit agenda reads, “and how we can maintain morality in our world.” Both nonprofits and for-profit companies can apply, with the exception of NGOs, government agencies, and nonprofit colleges and universities...

Some of this year’s honorees include...

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) was awarded for the sixth time, despite being ordered to pay the federal government $8.5 million last year in a lawsuit over falsely billing federal programs, as well as jeopardizing patient health. In January of this year, a nurse filed a lawsuit against the hospital for the UPMC’s unfair business practices."

Rep. Ken Buck says he will not serve out rest of term, narrowing GOP majority; The Washington Post, March 14, 2024

Amy B Wang

 and 

Patrick Svitek

, The Washington Post; Rep. Ken Buck says he will not serve out rest of term, narrowing GOP majority

"“Our nation is on a collision course with reality, and a steadfast commitment to truth, even uncomfortable truths, is the only way forward,” Buck said then. “Too many Republican leaders are lying to America.”

Buck also cited Republicans’ downplaying the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, in which a pro-Trump mob sought to stop the certification of Biden’s electoral win, as well as the GOP’s claims that the ensuing prosecutions amounted to a weaponization of the justice system.

“These insidious narratives breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans’ confidence in the rule of law,” Buck said. “It is impossible for the Republican Party to confront our problems and offer a course correction for the future while being obsessively fixated on retribution and vengeance for contrived injustices of the past.”"

Florida settles lawsuit after challenge to ‘don’t say gay’ law; Associated Press via The Guardian, March 11, 2024

Associated Press via The Guardian ; Florida settles lawsuit after challenge to ‘don’t say gay’ law

"Under the terms of the settlement, the Florida board of education will send instructions to every school district saying the Florida law does not prohibit discussing LGBTQ+ people, nor prevent anti-bullying rules on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or disallow Gay-Straight Alliance groups. The settlement also spells out that the law is neutral – meaning what applies to LGBTQ+ people also applies to heterosexual people – and that it doesn’t apply to library books not being used for instruction in the classroom.

The law also doesn’t apply to books with incidental references to LGBTQ+ characters or same-sex couples, “as they are not instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity any more than a math problem asking students to add bushels of apples is instruction on apple farming”, according to the settlement.

“What this settlement does, is, it re-establishes the fundamental principal, that I hope all Americans agree with, which is every kid in this country is entitled to an education at a public school where they feel safe, their dignity is respected and where their families and parents are welcomed,” Roberta Kaplan, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an interview."

The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore; The Washington Post, November 11, 2023

Ruby Cramer, The Washington Post; The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore

"When she had decided to become a librarian almost 10 years ago, it was for a simple reason: She loved to read. Now she watched as the work she did at a high school in Central Florida became part of a national debate. There were fights going on over democracy and fascism. There were parents and school board members arguing on social media and in meetings. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wasn’t just passing laws but using them to run for president. To Tania, the pure act of reading was becoming more and more political, and as a result, she had to spend much of her time reviewing the books on her shelves — not to suggest one to a student but to ask herself whether the content was too mature for the teenagers at her school. Then she had moved on to the books in each teacher’s classroom, because as of this year, the state considered those books to be part of the library, too.

All of this took time. The librarian’s job was expanding even as she felt it was shrinking to a series of rote tasks: She would copy a book’s ISBN number into a peer-review database. She would decide whether to mark it with the thumb-size red sticker, provided to her by the district, that read “M” for “mature.” If a book wasn’t listed in a database, she would review it by hand, and then she would start again with the next book. In those hours, the job became a series of keystrokes, and she began to feel more like a censor than a librarian...

Somewhere else in the school, interviews were going on for her replacement. Three candidates were coming in. The principal had asked Tania to send him interview questions. She emailed her district supervisor for ideas and received a document in her inbox, the list of questions they kept on file.

“What do you see as the role of the librarian in the school setting?”

“What kind of library attracts students, staff and parents?"

Nothing about the laws, nothing about reviewing books, nothing about book bans at all. Tania scrolled through the questions and added one more. “What is your stance on Censorship?” she wrote, though she had no way of knowing whether it would be asked, or how the next librarian might answer."

Princess Catherine Apologizes, Saying She Edited Image; The New York Times, March 11, 2024

 Mark Landler, The New York Times; Princess Catherine Apologizes, Saying She Edited Image

"Catherine, the Princess of Wales, apologized on Monday for doctoring a photo of her with her three children, which was recalled by several news agencies on Sunday after they determined the image had been manipulated.

The decision to recall the photo reignited a storm of speculation about Catherine, who has not been seen in public since she had abdominal surgery nearly two months ago. In her statement, the 42-year-old princess chalked up the alteration to a photographer’s innocent desire to retouch the image

“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” Catherine wrote in a post on social media. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”

The photo, which marked Mother’s Day in Britain, depicted a smiling Catherine surrounded by her children, George, Charlotte and Louis. Hours after Kensington Palace released the photo, The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse issued advisories urging news organizations to remove the image."

The robots are coming. And that’s a good thing.; MIT Technology Review, March 5, 2024

 

• Daniela Rusarchive page
•  and Gregory Monearchive page

, MIT Technology Review; The robots are coming. And that’s a good thing.

"In this excerpt from the new book, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, CSAIL Director Daniela Rus explores how robots can extend the reach of human capabilities...

These examples of how we can pair the heart with the chip to extend our perceptual reach range from the whimsical to the profound. And the potential for other applications is vast. Environmental and government organizations tasked with protecting our landscapes could dispatch eyes to autonomously monitor land for illegal deforestation without putting people at risk. Remote workers could use robots to extend their hands into dangerous environments, manipulating or moving objects at hazardous nuclear sites. Scientists could peek or listen into the secret lives of the many amazing species on this planet. Or we could harness our efforts to find a way to remotely experience Paris or Tokyo or Tangier. The possibilities are endless and endlessly exciting. We just need effort, ingenuity, strategy, and the most precious resource of all.

No, not funding, although that is helpful.

We need time."

Introducing CopyrightCatcher, the first Copyright Detection API for LLMs; Patronus AI, March 6, 2024

 Patronus AI; Introducing CopyrightCatcher, thefirst Copyright Detection API for LLMs

"Managing risks from unintended copyright infringement in LLM outputs should be a central focus for companies deploying LLMs in production.

• On an adversarial copyright test designed by Patronus AI researchers, we found that state-of-the-art LLMs generate copyrighted content at an alarmingly high rate 😱
• OpenAI’s GPT-4 produced copyrighted content on 44% of the prompts.
• Mistral’s Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1 produced copyrighted content on 22% of the prompts.
• Anthropic’s Claude-2.1 produced copyrighted content on 8% of the prompts.
• Meta’s Llama-2-70b-chat produced copyrighted content on 10% of the prompts.
• Check out CopyrightCatcher, our solution to detect potential copyright violations in LLMs. Here’s the public demo, with open source model inference powered by Databricks Foundation Model APIs. 🔥

LLM training data often contains copyrighted works, and it is pretty easy to get an LLM to generate exact reproductions from these texts1. It is critical to catch these reproductions, since they pose significant legal and reputational risks for companies that build and use LLMs in production systems2. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft have all faced copyright lawsuits on LLM generations from authors3, music publishers4, and more recently, the New York Times5.

To check whether LLMs respond to your prompts with copyrighted text, you can use CopyrightCatcher. It detects when LLMs generate exact reproductions of content from text sources like books, and highlights any copyrighted text in LLM outputs. Check out our public CopyrightCatcher demo here!

Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement using popular books, and GPT-4 performed worst; CNBC, March 6, 2024

 Hayden Field, CNBC; Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement using popular books, and GPT-4 performed worst

"The company, founded by ex-Meta researchers, specializes in evaluation and testing for large language models — the technology behind generative AI products.

Alongside the release of its new tool, CopyrightCatcher, Patronus AI released results of an adversarial test meant to showcase how often four leading AI models respond to user queries using copyrighted text.

The four models it tested were OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2, Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral AI’s Mixtral.

“We pretty much found copyrighted content across the board, across all models that we evaluated, whether it’s open source or closed source,” Rebecca Qian, Patronus AI’s cofounder and CTO, who previously worked on responsible AI research at Meta, told CNBC in an interview.

Qian added, “Perhaps what was surprising is that we found that OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is arguably the most powerful model that’s being used by a lot of companies and also individual developers, produced copyrighted content on 44% of prompts that we constructed.”"

Public Symposium on AI and IP; United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Wednesday, March 27, 2024 10 AM - 3 PM PT/1 PM - 6 PM ET

 United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO); Public Symposium on AI and IP

"The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Emerging Technologies (ET) Partnership will hold a public symposium on intellectual property (IP) and AI. The event will take place virtually and in-person at Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, California, on March 27, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. PT. 

The symposium will facilitate the USPTO’s efforts to implement its obligations under the President’s Executive Order (E.O.) 14110 “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The event will include representation from the Copyright Office, build on previous AI/Emerging Technologies (ET) partnership events, and feature panel discussions by experts in the field of patent, trademark, and copyright law that focus on:

1. A comparison of copyright and patent law approaches to the type and level of human contribution needed to satisfy authorship and inventorship requirements;
2. Ongoing copyright litigation involving generative AI; and 
3. A discussion of laws and policy considerations surrounding name, image, and likeness (NIL) issues, including the intersection of NIL and generative AI.

This event is free and open to the public, but in-person attendance is limited, so register early"

Beaufort, South Carolina, schools return most books to shelves after attempt to ban 97; CBS News, March 3, 2024

Scott Pelley, CBS; Beaufort, South Carolina, schools return most books to shelves after attempt to ban 97

"Ruth-Naomi James: I'm a combat veteran, right? There's no way I went to Iraq thinking that when I moved back home, I would have to do this to make sure that the freedom that we fight for in this country is taken out of the hands of students and parents.

The final votes came this past December. Five books were judged too graphic in sex or violence. But 92 returned to the schools. Dick Geier says this lesson reaches beyond the classroom.

Dick Geier: Diversity brings tolerance. The more you understand what other people think and realize that what they say is important, but who they are, what their story, what their background is. The more you know that, the more you see the power of diversity. And then, be kind, and be understanding. And don't make judgments because you haven't lived their story. They have.

In the city that's lived a story of letters and learning, one book that was banned and restored was "The Fixer," a novel of antisemitism that won the Pulitzer prize. In its pages, the book's hero expresses this opinion, "There are no wrong books." "What's wrong is the fear of them."

The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet sue OpenAI for copyright infringement; The Guardian, February 28, 2024

 Nick Robins-Early, The Guardian ; The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

"OpenAI and Microsoft are facing a fresh round of lawsuits from news publishers over allegations that their generative artificial intelligence products violated copyright laws and illegally trained by using journalists’ work. Three progressive US outlets – the Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet – filed suits in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, demanding compensation from the tech companies.

The news outlets claim that the companies in effect plagiarized copyright-protected articles to develop and operate ChatGPT, which has become OpenAI’s most prominent generative AI tool. They allege that ChatGPT was trained not to respect copyright, ignores proper attribution and fails to notify users when the service’s answers are generated using journalists’ protected work."

How scientists are using facial-recognition AI to track humpback whales; NPR, February 29, 2024

 Lauren Sommer, NPR; How scientists are using facial-recognition AI to track humpback whales

"Photographs are key for counting whales. As they dive deep, humpbacks raise their tails out of the water, revealing markings and patterns unique to each individual. Scientists typically identify whales photo by photo, matching the tails in a painstaking process.

Cheeseman figured that technology could do that more quickly. He started Happy Whale, which uses artificial intelligence-powered image recognition to identify whales. The project pulled together about 200,000 photos of humpback whales. Many came from scientists who had built large image catalogs over the years. Others came from whale watching groups and citizen scientists, since the website is designed to share the identity of a whale and where it's been seen."

Google CEO Pichai says Gemini's AI image results "offended our users"; NPR, February 28, 2024

Bobby Allyn , NPR; Google CEO Pichai says Gemini's AI image results "offended our users"

"Gemini, which was previously named Bard, is also an AI chatbot, similar to OpenAI's hit service ChatGPT. 

The text-generating capabilities of Gemini also came under scrutiny after several outlandish responses went viral online...

In his note to employees at Google, Pichai wrote that when Gemini is re-released to the public, he hopes the service is in better shape. 

"No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry's development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes," Pichai wrote."

He Hunts Sloppy Scientists. He’s Finding Lots of Prey.; The New York Times, February 2, 2024

Matt Richtel, The New York Times ; He Hunts Sloppy Scientists. He’s Finding Lots of Prey.

"Sholto David, 32, has a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from Newcastle University in England. He is also developing an expertise in spotting errors in scientific papers. Most recently, and notably, he discovered flawed or manipulated data in studies conducted by top executives at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The institute said that it was requesting retraction of six manuscripts and had found 31 other manuscripts that required corrections.

From his home in Wales, Dr. David scours new research publications for images that are mislabeled and manipulated, and he regularly finds mistakes, or malfeasance, in some of the most prominent scientific journals. Accuracy is vital, as peer-reviewed papers often provide the evidence for drug trials or further lines of research. Dr. David said that the frequency of such errors suggests an underlying problem for science.

His interview with The New York Times has been edited and condensed...

Does this call into question the peer-review process?

I think that’s something that people need to think about. These are top scientific journals with errors that escaped peer review. Maybe the peer reviewers are looking for other things. Maybe they like to look at the methods or the conclusions more carefully than the results. But, yeah, it does make me think that people should question how effective the peer-review process has been."

The Most Important Writing Exercise I’ve Ever Assigned; The New York Times, February 18, 202

 Rachel Kadish, The New York Times; The Most Important Writing Exercise I’ve Ever Assigned

"Unflinching empathy, which is the muscle the lesson is designed to exercise, is a prerequisite for literature strong enough to wrestle with the real world. On the page it allows us to spot signs of humanity; off the page it can teach us to start a conversation with the strangest of strangers, to thrive alongside difference. It can even affect those life or death choices we make instinctively in a crisis. This kind of empathy has nothing to do with being nice — and it’s not for the faint of heart."

MAGA’s Violent Threats Are Warping Life in America; The New York Times, February 18, 2024

 David French, The New York Times; MAGA’s Violent Threats Are Warping Life in America

"So we called the local sheriff, shared the threat, and asked if the department could send someone to check our house.

Minutes later, a young deputy called to tell me all was quiet at our home. When I asked if he would mind checking back frequently, he said he’d stay in front of our house all night. Then he asked, “Why did you get this threat?”

I hesitated before I told him. Our community is so MAGA that I had a pang of concern about his response. “I’m a columnist,” I said, “and we’ve had lots of threats ever since I wrote against Donald Trump.”

The deputy paused for a moment. “I’m a vet,” he said, “and I volunteered to serve because I believe in our Constitution. I believe in free speech.” And then he said words I’ll never forget: “You keep speaking, and I’ll stand guard.”

I didn’t know that deputy’s politics and I didn’t need to. When I heard his words, I thought, that’s it. That’s the way through. Sometimes we are called to speak. Sometimes we are called to stand guard. All the time we can at least comfort those under threat, telling them with words and deeds that they are not alone. If we do that, we can persevere. Otherwise, the fear will be too much for good people to bear."

Arrested for Leaving Flowers, Navalny Mourners Fear Worse to Come; The New York Times, February 18, 2024

Valerie Hopkins, The New York Times ; Arrested for Leaving Flowers, Navalny Mourners Fear Worse to Come

"As thousands of Russians across the country tried to give voice to their grief for Mr. Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony on Friday, Russian police officers cracked down, temporarily detaining hundreds and placing more than two dozen in jail...

“Those who are detaining people are afraid of any opinion that isn’t connected to propaganda, to the pervading ideology,” said Lena, 31, who brought a sticker to the Solovetsky Stone, a monument to victims of political repression in the Soviet Union. “Don’t give up,” read the sticker — part of a message Mr. Navalny once recorded in case of his death."

IT body proposes that AI pros get leashed and licensed to uphold ethics; The Register, February 15, 2024

Paul Kunert, The Register; IT body proposes that AI pros get leashed and licensed to uphold ethics

"Creating a register of licensed AI professionals to uphold ethical standards and securing whistleblowing channels to call out bad management are two policies that could prevent a Post Office-style scandal.

So says industry body BCS – formerly the British Computer Society – which reckons licenses based on an independent framework of ethics would promote transparency among software engineers and their bosses.

"We have a register of doctors who can be struck off," said Rashik Parmar MBE, CEO at BCS. "AI professionals already have a big role in our life chances, so why shouldn't they be licensed and registered too?"...

The importance of AI ethics was amplified by the Post Office scandal, says the BCS boss, "where computer generated evidence was used by non-IT specialists to prosecute sub postmasters with tragic results."

For anyone not aware of the outrageous wrongdoing committed by the Post Office, it bought the bug-ridden Horizon accounting system in 1999 from ICL, a company that was subsequently bought by Fujitsu. Hundreds of local Post Office branch managers were subsequently wrongfully convicted of fraud when Horizon was to blame."

The New York Times’ AI copyright lawsuit shows that forgiveness might not be better than permission; The Conversation, February 13, 2024

 Peter Vaughan, Senior Lecturer, Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University, The Conversation; ; The New York Times’ AI copyright lawsuit shows that forgiveness might not be better than permission

"The lawsuit also presents a novel argument – not advanced by other, similar cases – that’s related to something called “hallucinations”, where AI systems generate false or misleading information but present it as fact. This argument could in fact be one of the most potent in the case.

The NYT case in particular raises three interesting takes on the usual approach. First, that due to their reputation for trustworthy news and information, NYT content has enhanced value and desirability as training data for use in AI. 

Second, that due to its paywall, the reproduction of articles on request is commercially damaging. Third, that ChatGPT “hallucinations” are causing reputational damage to the New York Times through, effectively, false attribution. 

This is not just another generative AI copyright dispute. The first argument presented by the NYT is that the training data used by OpenAI is protected by copyright, and so they claim the training phase of ChatGPT infringed copyright. We have seen this type of argument run before in other disputes."

A new documentary shows the impact of book bans in Florida public schools on the kids; NPR, November 25, 2023

Scott Simon, NPR; A new documentary shows the impact of book bans in Florida public schools on the kids

"In her directorial debut, Sheila Nevins' chronicles the impact of book bans in Florida public schools. She tells NPR's Scott Simon what inspired her to profile those most affected — the students...

GRACE LINN: My husband, Robert Nichol (ph), was killed in action in World War II, defending our democracy, constitution and freedoms. One of the freedoms that the Nazis crushed was the freedom to read the books that they banned.

NEVINS: And I thought, holy [expletive], this woman is out there doing something, and I'm doing nothing. And I know I'm only in my 80s, for heaven's sake. And here's this woman fighting for young people to be able to read the books that she read and I read and possibly you read, Scott, that in many ways change our lives and make us know about the world we live in. And I thought, I've got to grab her. I've got to get her. And I've got to get some of these kids who've lost the books or who have been deprived of the books to read them and to see how they feel about what they're missing.

SIMON: Some of the books that are mentioned in the course of the film that have been banned include "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Maus," "The Kite Runner," "The Life Of Rosa Parks," "The Handmaid's Tale." I can't come up with a better question than why?

NEVINS: Interesting, isn't it? Why would you deprive children of this information? If you want them to grow up to be like yourself, and yourself has a limited worldview - or at least the worldview that you believe is the worldview they should have - then you take out anything that you would find as questionable - Planned Parenthood, race, religious problems, difficulties. You know, you would simply want to make your child not aware of all these things that make the world a sort of wondrous, difficult, complex and often painful world that we all live in. I'm sort of quoting the kids, which is really odd. How can you deprive me - I'm 12 or 14 or 15 - of information?"

5 Presidential Libraries That Offer Culture, History and ‘Labs of Democracy’; The New York Times, February 13, 2024

 Lauren Sloss, The New York Times ; 5 Presidential Libraries That Offer Culture, History and ‘Labs of Democracy’

"As repositories of valuable historical documents and other records, U.S. presidential libraries have long been important destinations for scholars. But you don’t have to be an academic or even a history buff to appreciate these destinations, as many increasingly offer museums, special exhibitions and unique programming — ranging from interactive situation room experiences to musical performances — to the general public.

The first library was established by Franklin D. Roosevelt and opened to the public in 1941. Every administration since has created one of its own. (President Hoover, liking what he saw of F.D.R.’s project, established his own retroactively, in 1962.) Fifteen libraries are managed by the Office of Presidential Libraries, a part of the National Archives and Records Administration — the Presidential Libraries Act, passed in 1955, established the system of privately built and federally maintained institutions — and 13 are currently open to visitors. There are additional museums, historic monuments and sites dedicated to other presidents, like the James Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio, and some have archival components, like the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill.

“President Reagan called the libraries labs of democracy because they explain how decisions are made and how policies are executed,” said Colleen Shogan, the archivist of the United States. “They give us the opportunity to learn about American democracy, and how the government functions.”

With Presidents’ Day fast approaching, consider planning a visit to a presidential library. Here are five to start."

How to Think About Remedies in the Generative AI Copyright Cases; LawFare, February 15, 2024

  Pamela Samuelson, LawFare; How to Think About Remedies in the Generative AI Copyright Cases

"So far, commentators have paid virtually no attention to the remedies being sought in the generative AI copyright complaints. This piece shines a light on them."

A Columbia Surgeon’s Study Was Pulled. He Kept Publishing Flawed Data.; The New York Times, February 16, 2024

 Benjamin Mueller, The New York Times; A Columbia Surgeon’s Study Was Pulled. He Kept Publishing Flawed Data.

"Problems with the study were severe enough that its publisher, after finding that the paper violated ethics guidelines, formally withdrew it within a few months of its publication in 2021. The study was then wiped from the internet, leaving behind a barren web page that said nothing about the reasons for its removal.

As it turned out, the flawed study was part of a pattern. Since 2008, two of its authors — Dr. Sam S. Yoon, chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University’s medical center, and a more junior cancer biologist — have collaborated with a rotating cast of researchers on a combined 26 articles that a British scientific sleuth has publicly flagged for containing suspect data. A medical journal retracted one of them this month after inquiries from The New York Times."