How news coverage, often uncritical, helps build up the AI hype; Reuters Institute, May 20, 2024

Prof. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen , Reuters Institute; How news coverage, often uncritical, helps build up the AI hype

"“I would put media reporting [about AI] at around two out of 10,” David Reid, professor of Artificial Intelligence at Liverpool Hope University, said to the BBC earlier this year. “When the media talks about AI, they think of it as a single entity. It is not. What I would like to see is more nuanced reporting.”

While some individual journalists and outlets are highly respected for their reporting on AI, overall, social science research on news media coverage of artificial intelligence provides some support for Reid’s assessment.

Some working in the technology industry may feel very put upon – a few years ago Zachary Lipton, then an assistant professor at the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, was quoted in the Guardian calling media coverage of artificial intelligence “sensationalised crap” and likening it to an “AI misinformation epidemic”. In private conversations, many computer scientists and technologists working in the private sector echo his complaints, decrying what several describe as relentlessly negative coverage obsessed with “killer robots.”"

Sure, Google’s AI overviews could be useful – if you like eating rocks; The Guardian, June 1, 2024

 John Naughton, The Guardian; Sure, Google’s AI overviews could be useful – if you like eating rocks

"To date, some of this searching suggests subhuman capabilities, or perhaps just human-level gullibility. At any rate, users have been told that glue is useful for ensuring that cheese sticks to pizza, that they could stare at the sun for for up to 30 minutes, and that geologists suggest eating one rock per day (presumably to combat iron deficiency). Memo to Google: do not train your AI on Reddit or the Onion."

The media bosses fighting back against AI — and the ones cutting deals; The Washington Post, May 27, 2024

 

Laura Wagner

 and 

Gerrit De Vynck

 The Washington Post; The media bosses fighting back against AI — and the ones cutting deals

"The fact that so many media companies are cutting deals with Open AI could “dilute” the leverage that the companies suing it have, Mateen noted. On the other hand, by paying some publishers so much money, Open AI may be undermining its own defense: If it were truly “fair use,” he said, “they’d be confident enough not to pay anything.”"

Jamie Raskin: How to Force Justices Alito and Thomas to Recuse Themselves in the Jan. 6 Cases; The New York Times, May 29, 2024

Jamie Raskin , The New York Times; Jamie Raskin: How to Force Justices Alito and Thomas to Recuse Themselves in the Jan. 6 Cases

"At his Senate confirmation hearing, Chief Justice Roberts assured America that “Judges are like umpires.”

But professional baseball would never allow an umpire to continue to officiate the World Series after learning that the pennant of one of the two teams competing was flying in the front yard of the umpire’s home. Nor would an umpire be allowed to call balls and strikes in a World Series game after the umpire’s wife tried to get the official score of a prior game in the series overthrown and canceled out to benefit the losing team. If judges are like umpires, then they should be treated like umpires, not team owners, team fans or players."

Why using dating apps for public health messaging is an ethical dilemma; The Conversation, May 28, 2024

Jaime Garcia Iglesias, Chancellor's Fellow, Deanery of Molecular, Genetic and Population Health Sciences Usher Institute Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society, The University of Edinburgh, Brian Heaphy, Professor of Sociology, Sociology, University of Manchester, Maurice Nagington, Lecturer in Nursing, University of Manchester , The Conversation; Why using dating apps for public health messaging is an ethical dilemma

"Future collaborations with apps should prioritise the benefit of users over those of the app businesses, develop transparent data policies that prevent users’ data from being shared for profit, ensure the apps’ commitment to anti-discrimination and anti-harrassment, and provide links to health and wellbeing services beyond the apps.

Dating apps have the potential to be powerful allies in public health, especially in reaching populations that have often been ignored. However, their use must be carefully managed to avoid compromising user privacy, safety and marginalisation."

Will the rise of AI spell the end of intellectual property rights?; The Globe and Mail, May 27, 2024

 SHEEMA KHAN , The Globe and Mail; Will the rise of AI spell the end of intellectual property rights?

"AI’s first challenge to IP is in the inputs...

Perhaps the question will become: Will IP be the death of AI?...

The second challenge relates to who owns the AI-generated products...

Yet IP rights are key to innovation, as they provide a limited monopoly to monetize investments in research and development. AI represents an existential threat in this regard.

Clearly, the law has not caught up. But sitting idly by is not an option, as there are too many important policy issues at play."

Debunking misinformation failed. Welcome to ‘pre-bunking’; The Washington Post, May 26, 2024

Cat Zakrzewski

, 

Joseph Menn

, 

Naomi Nix

 and 

Will Oremus

, The Washington Post; Debunking misinformation failed. Welcome to ‘pre-bunking’

"Election officials and researchers from Arizona to Taiwan are adopting a radical playbook to stop falsehoods about voting before they spread online, amid fears that traditional strategies to battle misinformation are insufficient in a perilous year for democracies around the world.

Modeled after vaccines, these campaigns — dubbed “prebunking” — expose people to weakened doses of misinformation paired with explanations and are aimed at helping the public develop “mental antibodies” to recognize and fend off hoaxes in a heated election year...

Federal agencies are encouraging state and local officials to invest in prebunking initiatives, advising officials in an April memo to “build a team of trusted voices to amplify accurate information proactively.”"

Yale Freshman Creates AI Chatbot With Answers on AI Ethics; Inside Higher Ed, May 2, 2024

Lauren Coffey , Inside Higher Ed; Yale Freshman Creates AI Chatbot With Answers on AI Ethics

"One of Gertler’s main goals with the chatbot was to break down a digital divide that has been widening with the iterations of ChatGPT, many of which charge a subscription fee. LuFlot Bot is free and available for anyone to use."

NHL hockey stars to compete in Stamford in memory of Darien's Hayden Thorsen; CT Post, August 2, 2023

Dave Stewart, CT Post ; NHL hockey stars to compete in Stamford in memory of Darien's Hayden Thorsen

[Kip Currier: I just learned about this inspiring Shoulder Check Initiative this Memorial Day from an update story reported on morning television. On this day when we thank all those who gave their lives while serving in our military branches, in furtherance of freedom, this is an important reminder for all of us to reach out to someone, check on someone, and show kindness and compassion.]

"The HT40 Foundation is named for Hayden Thorsen, using his initials and the No. 40 jersey he wore while playing ice hockey.

Thorsen, an avid hockey player, died by suicide in the spring of 2022, and his parents Rob and Sarah created the foundation to “bring people together through kindness and compassion, just as (Hayden) did throughout his life.”...

According to a press release,, the Shoulder Check Initiative “encourages reaching out, checking in, and making kindness a contact sport in the locker rooms, in the halls, on and off the ice.”"

‘That’ll cost you, ChatGPT’ — copyright needs an update for the age of AI; The Hill, May 23, 2024

 CHRISTOPHER KENNEALLY, The Hill; That’ll cost you, ChatGPT’ — copyright needs an update for the age of AI

"Beyond commercially published books, journals, and newspapers, AI databases derive from a vast online trove of publicly available social media and Wikipedia entries, as well as digitized library and museum collections, court proceedings, and government legislation and regulation.

Consumption of public and private individual data on the “open” web marks an important shift in digital evolution. No one is left out. Consequently, we have all become stakeholders.

AI is now forcing us to consider viewing copyright as a public good...

Statutory licensing schemes for copyright-protected works are already applied to cable television systems and music recordings with great success. Fees collected for AI rights-licensing of publicly available works need not be burdensome. The funds can help to underwrite essential public education in digital literacy and civil discourse online.

OpenAI, along with Meta, Apple, Google, Amazon, and others who stand to benefit, must recognize the debt owed to the American people for the data that fuels their AI solutions."

Can I Use A.I. to Grade My Students’ Papers?; The New York Times, May 24, 2024

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times; Can I Use A.I. to Grade My Students’ Papers?

"Can I Use A.I. to Grade My Students’ Papers?

I am a junior-high-school English teacher. In the past school year, there has been a significant increase in students’ cheating on writing assignments by using artificial intelligence. Our department feels that 13-year-old students will only become better writers if they practice and learn from the successes and challenges that come with that.

Recently our department tasked students with writing an argumentative essay, an assignment we supported by breaking down the process into multiple steps. The exercise took several days of class time and homework to complete. All of our students signed a contract agreeing not to use A.I. assistance, and parents promised to support the agreement by monitoring their children when they worked at home. Yet many students still used A.I.

Some of our staff members uploaded their grading rubric into an A.I.-assisted platform, and students uploaded their essays for assessment. The program admittedly has some strengths. Most notable, it gives students writing feedback and the opportunity to edit their work before final submission. The papers are graded within minutes, and the teachers are able to transfer the A.I. grade into their roll book.

I find this to be hypocritical. I spend many hours grading my students’ essays. It’s tedious work, but I feel that it’s my responsibility — if a student makes an effort to complete the task, they should have my undivided attention during the assessment process.

Here’s where I struggle: Should I embrace new technology and use A.I.-assisted grading to save time and my sanity even though I forbid my students from using it? Is it unethical for teachers to ask students not to use A.I. to assist their writing but then allow an A.I. platform to grade their work? — Name Withheld" 

Navigating the Patchwork of AI Laws, Standards, and Guidance; American Bar Association (ABA), May 9, 2024

Emily Maxim Lamm , American Bar Association (ABA); Navigating the Patchwork of AI Laws, Standards, and Guidance

"The opening weeks of 2024 have seen a record number of state legislative proposals seeking to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) across different sectors in the United States...

With this type of rapid-fire start to the 2024 legislative season, the AI legal landscape will likely continue evolving across the board. As a result, organizations today are facing a complex and dizzying web of proposed and existing AI laws, standards, and guidance.

This article aims to provide a cohesive overview of this AI patchwork and to help organizations navigate this increasingly intricate terrain. The focus here will be on the implications of the White House AI Executive Order, existing state and local laws in the United States, the European Union’s AI Act, and, finally, governance standards to help bring these diverse elements together within a framework."

A UCLA doctor is on a quest to free modern medicine from a Nazi-tainted anatomy book; Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2024

Emily Alpert Reyes, Los Angeles Times ; A UCLA doctor is on a quest to free modern medicine from a Nazi-tainted anatomy book

"So far, Amara Yad has completed two volumes focused on the anatomy of the heart and is enlisting teams at other universities for more. The plan is to draft a freely available, ethically sourced road map to the entire body that eclipses the weathered volumes of watercolors from Pernkopf and honors the Nazis’ victims.

Anatomists have told him, “‘You’re crazy. It’s impossible. How could you ever surpass it?’” Shivkumar said of the Pernkopf atlas in a speech last year before members of the Heart Rhythm Society.

But “can it be beaten? The answer is yes...

Amara Yad is also an act of “moral repair” meant to honor the victims, said Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a UCLA cardiologist and evolutionary biologist who helped support the project. The Nazi atlases “were like documents of death. The atlases that Shiv is creating are really living, interactive tools to support life.”

When Shivkumar decided to launch the project, he had been inspired by the words of USC emeritus professor of rheumatology Dr. Richard Panush, who had pushed to set the atlas aside in the library of the New Jersey medical center where he had worked, moving it to a display case that explained its history.

Panush said the old atlas should be preserved only as “a symbol of what we should not do, and how we should not behave, and the kind of people that we cannot respect.”"

US intelligence agencies’ embrace of generative AI is at once wary and urgent; Associated Press, May 23, 2024

FRANK BAJAK , Associated Press; US intelligence agencies’ embrace of generative AI is at once wary and urgent

"The CIA’s inaugural chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani, thinks that because gen AI models “hallucinate” they are best treated as a “crazy, drunk friend” — capable of great insight and creativity but also bias-prone fibbers. There are also security and privacy issues: adversaries could steal and poison them, and they may contain sensitive personal data that officers aren’t authorized to see.

That’s not stopping the experimentation, though, which is mostly happening in secret. 

An exception: Thousands of analysts across the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies now use a CIA-developed gen AI called Osiris. It runs on unclassified and publicly or commercially available data — what’s known as open-source. It writes annotated summaries and its chatbot function lets analysts go deeper with queries...

Another worry: Ensuring the privacy of “U.S. persons” whose data may be embedded in a large-language model.

“If you speak to any researcher or developer that is training a large-language model, and ask them if it is possible to basically kind of delete one individual piece of information from an LLM and make it forget that -- and have a robust empirical guarantee of that forgetting -- that is not a thing that is possible,” John Beieler, AI lead at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an interview.

It’s one reason the intelligence community is not in “move-fast-and-break-things” mode on gen AI adoption."

An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads. That's not supposed to happen; The Register, May 18, 2024

Thomas Claburn , The Register; An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads. That's not supposed to happen

"In December, 2023, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences professor Masooda Bashir led a study titled "Patron Privacy Protections in Public Libraries" that was published in The Library Quarterly. The study found that while libraries generally have basic privacy protections, there are often gaps in staff training and in privacy disclosures made available to patrons.

It also found that some libraries rely exclusively on social media for their online presence. "That is very troubling," said Bashir in a statement. "Facebook collects a lot of data – everything that someone might be reading and looking at. That is not a good practice for public libraries.""

When Online Content Disappears; Pew Research Center, May 17, 2024

 Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy and Gonzalo Rivero, Pew Research Center; When Online Content Disappears

"38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later...

How we did this

1

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

Pew Research Center conducted the analysis to examine how often online content that once existed becomes inaccessible. One part of the study looks at a representative sample of webpages that existed over the past decade to see how many are still accessible today. For this analysis, we collected a sample of pages from the Common Crawl web repository for each year from 2013 to 2023. We then tried to access those pages to see how many still exist.

A second part of the study looks at the links on existing webpages to see how many of those links are still functional. We did this by collecting a large sample of pages from government websites, news websites and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

We identified relevant news domains using data from the audience metrics company comScore and relevant government domains (at multiple levels of government) using data from get.gov, the official administrator for the .gov domain. We collected the news and government pages via Common Crawl and the Wikipedia pages from an archive maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. For each collection, we identified the links on those pages and followed them to their destination to see what share of those links point to sites that are no longer accessible.

A third part of the study looks at how often individual posts on social media sites are deleted or otherwise removed from public view. We did this by collecting a large sample of public tweets on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) in real time using the Twitter Streaming API. We then tracked the status of those tweets for a period of three months using the Twitter Search API to monitor how many were still publicly available.

Refer to the report methodology for more details."

New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC; Ars Technica, May 20, 2024

BENJ EDWARDS, Ars Technica ; New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC

"At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research. Despite encryption and local storage, the new feature raises privacy concerns for certain Windows users."

Alito Ethics Defense Blown Up by Second Insurrectionist Flag; New York Magazine, May 22, 2024

Jonathan Chait, , New York Magazine; Alito Ethics Defense Blown Up by Second Insurrectionist Flag

"Now, the New York Times reports that Alito flew another flag associated with Trump’s insurrection, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which was carried by insurrectionists on January 6. The flag was confirmed to have flown over Alito’s beach house in July and September 2023.

Note how the old Alito defenses are totally useless in the face of this new case. It can’t be chalked up to a dispute with a neighbor, unless the same neighbor happens to own property near Alito in two different states. The wife excuse is also threadbare. (Indeed, Alito, who blamed his wife in a response to the first Times story, has no comment in response to the second one.) And the excuse that it was “a heated time in January 2021” obviously does not explain why the Alito home continued to display insurrectionist flags two and a half years later."

Are Ethics Taking a Backseat in AI Jobs?; Statista, May 22, 2024

 Anna Fleck, Statista; Are Ethics Taking a Backseat in AI Jobs?

"Data published jointly by the OECD and market analytics platform Lightcast has found that few AI employers are asking for creators and developers of AI to have ethical decision making AI skills. The two research teams looked for keywords such as “AI ethics”, “responsible AI” and “ethical AI” in job postings for AI workers across 14 OECD countries, in both English and the official languages spoken in the 14 countries studied. According to Lightcast, out of these, an average of less than two percent of AI job postings listed these skills. However, between 2019 and 2022 the share of job postings mentioning ethics-related keywords increased in the majority of surveyed countries. For example, the figure rose from 0.1 percent to 0.5 percent in the United States between the four years and from 0.1 percent to 0.4 percent in the United Kingdom.

According to Lightcast writer Layla O’Kane, federal agencies in the U.S. are, however, now being encouraged to hire Chief AI Officers to monitor the use of AI technologies following an executive order for the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use Of Artificial Intelligence. O’Kane writes: “While there are currently a very small number of postings for Chief AI Officer jobs across public and private sector, the skills they call for are encouraging: almost all contain at least one mention of ethical considerations in AI.”"

Machine ‘Unlearning’ Helps Generative AI ‘Forget’ Copyright-Protected and Violent Content; UT News, The University of Texas at Austin, May 21, 2024

 UT News, The University of Texas at Austin ; Machine ‘Unlearning’ Helps Generative AI ‘Forget’ Copyright-Protected and Violent Content

"When people learn things they should not know, getting them to forget that information can be tough. This is also true of rapidly growing artificial intelligence programs that are trained to think as we do, and it has become a problem as they run into challenges based on the use of copyright-protected material and privacy issues.

To respond to this challenge, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed what they believe is the first “machine unlearning” method applied to image-based generative AI. This method offers the ability to look under the hood and actively block and remove any violent images or copyrighted works without losing the rest of the information in the model.

“When you train these models on such massive data sets, you’re bound to include some data that is undesirable,” said Radu Marculescu, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the leaders on the project. “Previously, the only way to remove problematic content was to scrap everything, start anew, manually take out all that data and retrain the model. Our approach offers the opportunity to do this without having to retrain the model from scratch.”"

Ethics Panel Cautions Judge in Trump Trial Over Political Donations; The New York Times, May 17, 2024

William K. Rashbaum, Jonah E. Bromwich and Ben Protess, The New York Times ; Ethics Panel Cautions Judge in Trump Trial Over Political Donations

"A state ethics panel quietly dismissed a complaint last summer against the New York judge presiding over the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump, issuing a warning over small donations the judge had made to groups supporting Democrats, including the campaign of Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The judge, Juan M. Merchan, donated a total of $35 to the groups in 2020, including a $15 donation earmarked for the Biden campaign, and $10 to a group called “Stop Republicans.”

Political contributions of any kind are prohibited under state judicial ethics rules...

In its 2024 annual report, the commission said it was made aware of dozens of New York judges who had violated the rules against political contributions in recent years. Most were modest amounts, the report said, and many appeared to stem from the misperception that the rules only apply to state campaigns. In fact, judges are prohibited from contributing to any campaigns, including for federal office."

Alito’s inverted flag makes a mockery of the Supreme Court’s code of ethics; The Hill, May 21, 2024

 CEDRIC MERLIN POWELL, The Hill; Alito’s inverted flag makes a mockery of the Supreme Court’s code of ethics

"This violates the court’s newly minted code of conduct, which remains unenforced because the court regulates itself. Its legitimacy is buttressed by a paper tiger.

The inverted flag on Justice Alito’s flagpole violates nearly all of the court’s ethical rules. 

Its first disqualification rule says “A Justice is presumed impartial and has an obligation to sit unless disqualified.” Alito’s impartiality has been shattered. He should be disqualified because he has not avoided “impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities” per Canon 2, and he cannot “perform the duties of office fairly [and] impartially” per Canon 3 because the inverted flag signals his allegiance to a party that has pending matters before the court. 

The partisan and volatile tenor of the inverted flag “endorse[s] a … candidate for public office,” which violates Canon 5 because it trades in the discredited Trump-invented trope of a stolen election. Justice Alito has not refrained from political activity; thus, the independence of the judiciary is called into question, per Canon 1. This is particularly disconcerting because Justice Alito is the third most senior justice on the court...

Every branch of government, including state and lower federal courts, has enforceable and binding codes of conduct that ensure impartiality, fairness and legitimacy. Congress must adopt a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court. We should right the flag by turning it upward toward our democratic principles."

Stability AI, Midjourney should face artists' copyright case, judge says; Reuters, May 8, 2024

 Blake Brittain, Reuters; Stability AI, Midjourney should face artists' copyright case, judge says

"A California federal judge said he was inclined to green-light a copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and other companies accused of misusing visual artists' work to train their artificial intelligence-based image generation systems.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick said on Tuesday that the ten artists behind the lawsuit had plausibly argued that Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI copied and stored their work on company servers and could be liable for using it without permission...

Orrick also said that he was likely to dismiss some of the artists' related claims but allow their allegations that the companies violated their trademark rights and falsely implied that they endorsed the systems.

The case is Andersen v. Stability AI, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:23-cv-00201."

She worked in animal research. Now she’s blocked from commenting on it.; The Washington Post, May 6, 2024

 Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post; She worked in animal research. Now she’s blocked from commenting on it.

"For a long time, Madeline Krasno didn’t tell other animal rights advocates that she had worked in a monkey research lab as a college student. It had taken her years to understand her nightmares and fragmented memories as signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. And some activists could be vicious to former lab workers.

But four years after she graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Krasno started posting online about her experiences. Eventually, she started tagging the school in those posts and then commenting on its pages.

Many of those comments disappeared. As she would later learn, it was not a mistake or a glitch. Both the university and the National Institutes of Health were blocking her comments. Now with support from free speech and animal rights organizations, she is suing both institutions."

Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems; The Register, May 16, 2024

 Thomas Claburn, The Register; Wiley shuts 19 scholarly journals amid AI paper mill problems

"US publishing house Wiley this week discontinued 19 scientific journals overseen by its Hindawi subsidiary, the center of a long-running scholarly publishing scandal.

In December 2023 Wiley announced it would stop using the Hindawi brand, acquired in 2021, following its decision in May 2023 to shut four of its journals "to mitigate against systematic manipulation of the publishing process."

Hindawi's journals were found to be publishing papers from paper mills – organizations or groups of individuals who try to subvert the academic publishing process for financial gain. Over the past two years, a Wiley spokesperson told The Register, the publisher has retracted more than 11,300 papers from its Hindawi portfolio.

As described in a Wiley-authored white paper published last December, "Tackling publication manipulation at scale: Hindawi’s journey and lessons for academic publishing," paper mills rely on various unethical practices – such as the use of AI in manuscript fabrication and image manipulations, and gaming the peer review process...

In January, Wiley signed on to United2Act – an industry initiative to combat paper mills.

But the concern over scholarly research integrity isn't confined to Wiley publications. A study published in Nature last July suggests as many as a quarter of clinical trials are problematic or entirely fabricated."

Display at Alito’s Home Renews Questions of Supreme Court’s Impartiality; The New York Times, May 17, 2024

Jodi Kantor and Abbie VanSickle , The New York Times; Display at Alito’s Home Renews Questions of Supreme Court’s Impartiality

"News of a “Stop the Steal” symbol that flew at the home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. after the 2020 election has elicited concerns from politicians, legal scholars and others about the Supreme Court’s ethical standards — and, most urgent, whether the public will regard its rulings about Jan. 6, 2021, as fairly decided."

Reddit shares jump after OpenAI ChatGPT deal; BBC, May 17, 2024

  João da Silva, BBC; Reddit shares jump after OpenAI ChatGPT deal

"Shares in Reddit have jumped more than 10% after the firm said it had struck a partnership deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up OpenAI.

Under the agreement, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot will get access to Reddit content, while it will also bring AI-powered features to the social media platform...

Meanwhile, Google announced a partnership in February which allows the technology giant to access Reddit data to train its AI models.

Both in the European Union and US, there are questions around whether it is copyright infringement to train AI tools on such content, or whether it falls under fair use and "temporary copying" exceptions."

Making sure it’s Correkt: a group of UCSB students set out to revolutionize the ethics of AI chatbots; The Daily Nexus, University of California, Santa Barbara, May 16, 2024

Na Huang, The Daily Nexus, University of California, Santa Barbara; Making sure it’s Correkt: a group of UCSB students set out to revolutionize the ethics of AI chatbots 

"When second-year computer science major Alexzendor Misra first came to UC Santa Barbara in Fall Quarter 2022, he had no idea an ill-fated encounter with a conspiracy-believing peer would inspire the creation of an artificial intelligence search engine, Correkt. 

Merely two months into college, Misra began a project that he hopes can truly change the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. 

Now, Misra and his team, consisting of first-year statistics and data science major Andre Braga, first-year computer science major Ryan Hung, first-year statistics and data science major Chan Park, first-year computer engineering major Khilan Surapaneni and second-year computer science majors Noah Wang and Ramon Wang, are ready to showcase the outcome of their project. They are preparing themselves to present their product, Correkt, an AI search engine, to the UCSB community at the AI Community of Practice (CoP) Spring Symposium on May 20. 

Correkt is not so different from ChatGPT — in fact, what ChatGPT does, Correkt can do too. Yet, Correkt aims to solve one critical issue with ChatGPT: misinformation. 

It is known that ChatGPT is prone to “hallucinations,” and according to IBM, it refers to the generation of false information due to the AI software’s misinterpretation of patterns or objects. Correkt is designed to prevent these instances of misinformation dissemination in two ways. 

Correkt is linked solely to reputable data sources — newspapers, textbooks and peer-reviewed journals. The AI model currently draws its information from an expansive data bank of over 180 million well-established, trustworthy resources — a number set to grow with time. This greatly lowers the risk of receiving inaccurate information by eliminating unreliable sources. However, it still does not give users the freedom to verify the information they access.

This is where Correkt truly sets itself apart from pre-existing AI chatbots: it includes a built-in citation function that details the precise location where every piece of information it presents to the user was retrieved. Essentially, Correkt is a hybrid between a search engine and an AI chatbot. The citation function allows users to judge for themselves the accuracy and validity of the information they receive as they would when conducting research through a search engine. The difference would be that the results will be much more streamlined with the support of AI. 

“[Correkt] has so much more value as a way to find information, like a new generation of [a] search engine,” Misra comments enthusiastically."

Supreme Court Ethics Controversies: Alito’s Upside-Down Flag Flying Draws Concern; Forbes, May 17, 2024

Alison Durkee , Forbes; Supreme Court Ethics Controversies: Alito’s Upside-Down Flag Flying Draws Concern

"Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew an upside-down American flag outside his house after the 2020 election, The New York Times reported Thursday—a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement challenging the election results—the latest in a string of recent ethics issues the court has faced that have ramped up criticism of the court and sparked cries for a binding code of ethics from lawmakers and legal experts...

Alito said in a statement to the Times about the flag flying that he “had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” claiming “it was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”"

How to Implement AI — Responsibly; Harvard Business Review (HBR), May 10, 2024

Michael Wade 

and 

Tomoko Yokoi

, Harvard Business Review (HBR) ; How to Implement AI — Responsibly

"Regrettably, our research suggests that such proactive measures are the exception rather than the rule. While AI ethics is high on the agenda for many organizations, translating AI principles into practices and behaviors is proving easier said than done. However, with stiff financial penalties at stake for noncompliance, there’s little time to waste. What should leaders do to double-down on their responsible AI initiatives?

To find answers, we engaged with organizations across a variety of industries, each at a different stage of implementing responsible AI. While data engineers and data scientists typically take on most responsibility from conception to production of AI development lifecycles, nontechnical leaders can play a key role in ensuring the integration of responsible AI. We identified four key moves — translate, integrate, calibrate and proliferate — that leaders can make to ensure that responsible AI practices are fully integrated into broader operational standards."

In Florida, a bestselling author is building a new community of literary resistance; CNN, May 2, 2024

Scottie Andrew , CNN; In Florida, a bestselling author is building a new community of literary resistance

"Groff is opening the Lynx now to plant a flag in her adopted home state, where she worries free thought is becoming increasingly endangered.

This isn’t just any bookstore, because Groff isn’t just any bookseller. She’s a three-time National Book Award finalist and one of Florida’s most acclaimed living writers. She’s published bestselling novels like “Fates and Furies,” a diptych that documents a marriage from the perspective of both spouses, and “Matrix,” historical fiction set in a 12th-century French convent...

But she and her neighbors are increasingly concerned about laws Florida’s government is passing that make it easier to ban books, restrict what can be taught about Black historyand limit the rights of LGBTQ residents.

The city needed a new stronghold against these threats, and Groff knew she was the person to make it."

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul sues company for publishing voters’ personal data; Chicago Sun-Times, May 9, 2024

 

Dave McKinney | WBEZ

, Chicago Sun-Times; Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul sues company for publishing voters’ personal data

"A publishing company whose politically-slanted newspapers have been derided as “pink slime” is being sued by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul for illegally identifying birthdates and home addresses of “hundreds of thousands” of voters.

Raoul’s legal move against Local Government Information Services accuses the company of publishing sensitive personal data that could subject voters across Illinois to identity theft.

Among those whose personal data has been identified on LGIS’ nearly three dozen online websites are current and former judges, police officers, high-ranking state officials and victims of domestic violence and human trafficking, Raoul’s filing said."