Silicon Valley bishop, two Catholic AI experts weigh in on AI evangelization; Religion News Service, May 6, 2024

leja Hertzler-McCain , Religion News Service; Silicon Valley bishop, two Catholic AI experts weigh in on AI evangelization

"San Jose, California, Bishop Oscar Cantú, who leads the Catholic faithful in Silicon Valley, said that AI doesn’t come up much with parishioners in his diocese...

Pointing to the adage coined by Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, “move fast and break things,” the bishop said, “with AI, we need to move very cautiously and slowly and try not to break things. The things we would be breaking are human lives and reputations.”...

Noreen Herzfeld, a professor of theology and computer science at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict and one of the editors of a book about AI sponsored by the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education, said that the AI character was previously “impersonating a priest, which is considered a very serious sin in Catholicism.”...

Accuracy issues, Herzfeld said, is one of many reasons it should not be used for evangelization. “As much as you beta test one of these chatbots, you will never get rid of hallucinations” — moments when the AI makes up its own answers, she said...

Larrey, who has been studying AI for nearly 30 years and is in conversation with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is optimistic that the technology will improve. He said Altman is already making progress on the hallucinations, on its challenges to users’ privacy and reducing its energy use — a recent analysis estimated that by 2027, artificial intelligence could suck up as much electricity as the population of Argentina or the Netherlands."

Pueblo artist seeking copyright protection for AI-generated work; The Gazette, August 8, 2024

O'Dell Isaac , The Gazette; Pueblo artist seeking copyright protection for AI-generated work

"“We’re done with the Copyright Office,” he said. “Now we’re going into the court system.”

Allen said he believes his case raises two essential questions: What is art? And if a piece doesn’t belong to the artist, whom does it belong to?

Tara Thomas, director of the Bemis School of Arts at Colorado College, said the answers may not be clear-cut.

“There was a similar debate at the beginning of photography,” Thomas said. "Was it the camera, or was it the person taking the photos? Is the camera the artmaker, or is it a tool?”

Allen said it took more than two decades for photography to gain acceptance as an art form.

“We’re at a similar place in AI art,” he said. 

“Right now, there is a massive stigma surrounding AI, far more so than there was with photography, so the challenge is much steeper. It is that very stigma that is contributing to the stifling of innovation. Why would anybody want to incorporate AI art into their workflow if they knew they couldn’t protect their work?”"

Dave Eggers’ Novel Was Banned From South Dakota Schools. In a New Documentary, the Community Fights Back (Exclusive); People, August 10, 204

Carly Tagen-Dye

Carly Tagen-Dye

Carly Tagen-Dye is the Books editorial assistant at PEOPLE, where she writes for both print and digital platforms.

PEOPLE EDITORIAL GUIDELINES

, People; Dave Eggers’ Novel Was Banned From South Dakota Schools. In a New Documentary, the Community Fights Back (Exclusive)

"Bestselling author Dave Eggers wasn’t expecting to learn that his 2013 dystopian novel, The Circle, was removed from high schools in Rapid City, S.D. What's more, Eggers' book, along with four others, was designated “to be destroyed” by the school board as well.

“It was new to me, although the other authors that were banned have had the books banned again and again,” Eggers tells PEOPLE.

The decision to ban The Circle, as well as The Perks of Being a Wallflowerby Stephen Chbosky, How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, Fun Homeby Alison Bechdel and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo, is the subject of the documentary To Be Destroyed, premiering on MSNBC on Aug. 11 as part of Trevor Noah's "The Turning Point" series. Directed by Arthur Bradford, the film follows Eggers during his travels to Rapid City, where he met with the teachers and students on the frontlines of the book banning fight."

Should artists be terrified of AI replacing them?; The Guardian, August 11, 2024

Rudi Zygadlo , The Guardian; Should artists be terrified of AI replacing them?

"Interviewing those at the techno-cultural vanguard, including Herndon, Dryhurst and Maclean, has given me some sense of peace. I realise that I have been hanging on to 20th-century notions of art practice and the cultural landscape, one where humans spent months and years writing, painting, recording and filming works that defined the culture of our species. They provided meaning, distraction, wellbeing. A reason to exist. Making peace may mean letting go of these historical notions, finding new meaning. While digitally generatable media is increasingly becoming the domain of AI, for example, might performance and tactile artforms, such as live concerts, theatre and sculpture, be reinvigorated?"

Utah outlaws books by Judy Blume and Sarah J Maas in first statewide ban; The Guardian, August 7, 2024

Ella Creamer , The Guardian; Utah outlaws books by Judy Blume and Sarah J Maas in first statewide ban

"Books by Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur and Sarah J Maas are among 13 titles that the state of Utah has ordered to be removed from all public school classrooms and libraries.

This marks the first time a state has outlawed a list of books statewide, according to PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman, who oversees the organisation’s free expression programs.

The books on the list were prohibited under a new law requiring all of Utah’s public school districts to remove books if they are banned in either three districts, or two school districts and five charter schools. Utah has 41 public school districts in total.

The 13 books could be banned under House bill 29, which became effective from 1 July, because they were considered to contain “pornographic or indecent” material. The list “will likely be updated as more books begin to meet the law’s criteria”, according to PEN America.

Twelve of the 13 titles were written by women. Six books by Maas, a fantasy author, appear on the list, along with Oryx and Crake by Atwood, Milk and Honey by Kaur and Forever by Blume. Two books by Ellen Hopkins appear, as well as Elana K Arnold’s What Girls Are Made Of and Craig Thompson’s Blankets.

Implementation guidelines say that banned materials must be “legally disposed of” and “may not be sold or distributed”."

TryTank Research Institute helps create Cathy, a new AI chatbot and Episcopal Church expert; Episcopal News Service, August 7, 2024

 KATHRYN POST, Episcopal News Service; TryTank Research Institute helps create Cathy, a new AI chatbot and Episcopal Church expert

"The latest AI chatbot geared for spiritual seekers is AskCathy, co-launched in June by a research institute and ministry organization and aiming to roll out soon on Episcopal church websites. Cathy draws on the latest version of ChatGPT and is equipped to prioritize Episcopal resources.

“This is not a substitute for a priest,” said the Rev. Tay Moss, director of one of Cathy’s architects, the Innovative Ministry Center, an organization based at the Toronto United Church Council that develops digital resources for communities of faith. “She comes alongside you in your search queries and helps you discover material. But she is not the end-all be-all of authority. She can’t tell you how to believe or what to believe.”

The Rev. Lorenzo Lebrija, the executive director of TryTank Research Institute at Virginia Theological Seminary and Cathy’s other principal developer, said all the institute’s projects attempt to follow the lead of the Holy Spirit, and Cathy is no different. He told Religion News Service the idea for Cathy materialized after brainstorming how to address young people’s spiritual needs. What if a chatbot could meet people asking life’s biggest questions with care, insight and careful research?

The goal is not that they will end up at their nearby Episcopal church on Sunday. The goal is that it will spark in them this knowledge that God is always with us, that God never leaves us,” Lebrija said. “This can be a tool that gives us a glimpse and little direction that we can then follow on our own.”

To do that, though, would require a chatbot designed to avoid the kinds of hallucinations and errors that have plagued other ChatGPT integrations. In May, the Catholic evangelization site Catholic Answers “defrocked” their AI avatar, Father Justin, designating him as a layperson after he reportedly claimed to be an ordained priest capable of taking confession and performing marriages...

The Rev. Peter Levenstrong, an associate rector at an Episcopal church in San Francisco who blogs about AI and the church, told RNS he thinks Cathy could familiarize people with the Episcopal faith.

“We have a PR issue,” Levenstrong said. “Most people don’t realize there is a denomination that is deeply rooted in tradition, and yet open and affirming, and theologically inclusive, and doing its best to strive toward a future without racial injustice, without ecocide, all these huge problems that we as a church take very seriously.”

In his own context, Levenstrong has already used Cathy to brainstorm Harry Potter-themed lessons for children. (She recommended a related book written by an Episcopalian.)

Cathy’s creators know AI is a thorny topic. Their FAQ page anticipates potential critiques."

It’s practically impossible to run a big AI company ethically; Vox, August 5, 2024

Sigal Samuel, Vox; It’s practically impossible to run a big AI company ethically

"Anthropic was supposed to be the good AI company. The ethical one. The safe one.

It was supposed to be different from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. In fact, all of Anthropic’s founders once worked at OpenAI but quit in part because of differences over safety culture there, and moved to spin up their own company that would build AI more responsibly. 

Yet lately, Anthropic has been in the headlines for less noble reasons: It’s pushing back on a landmark California bill to regulate AI. It’s taking money from Google and Amazon in a way that’s drawing antitrust scrutiny. And it’s being accused of aggressively scraping data from websites without permission, harming their performance. 

What’s going on?

The best clue might come from a 2022 paper written by the Anthropic team back when their startup was just a year old. They warned that the incentives in the AI industry — think profit and prestige — will push companies to “deploy large generative models despite high uncertainty about the full extent of what these models are capable of.” They argued that, if we want safe AI, the industry’s underlying incentive structure needs to change.

Well, at three years old, Anthropic is now the age of a toddler, and it’s experiencing many of the same growing pains that afflicted its older sibling OpenAI."

Dr. Ruffini: Church leadership needed to shape ‘Ethical AI’; LiCAS News via Vatican News, August 2024

Joan April, Roy Lagarde & Mark Saludes - LiCAS News via Vatican News; Dr. Ruffini: Church leadership needed to shape ‘Ethical AI’

"“The digital world is not a ready-made. It is changing every day. We, we can change it. We can shape it. And we need Catholic communicators to do it, with love and with human intelligence,” said Dr. Ruffini. 

In a recorded speech delivered during the 7th National Catholic Social Communications Convention (NCSCC) in Lipa City, south of Manila, on August 5, the Prefect of the Dicastery for Communication (Vatican News' parent organization, underscored the Church’s responsibility to guide technological advancements with moral clarity and human-centered values.

“So the basic question is not about machines, but about humans, about us. There are and always will be things that a technology cannot replace, like freedom, like the miracle of encounter between people, like the surprise of the unexpected, the conversion, the outburst of ingenuity, the gratuitous love,” he said. 

Organized by the Episcopal Commission on Social Communications (ECSC) of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), the convention aims to explore advancements and risks in AI, offering insights on leveraging the technology for positive impact while addressing potential negative consequences."

A booming industry of AI age scanners, aimed at children’s faces; The Washington Post, August 7, 2024

Drew Harwell, The Washington Post ; A booming industry of AI age scanners, aimed at children’s faces

"Nineteen states, home to almost 140 million Americans, have passed or enacted laws requiring online age checks since the beginning of last year, including Virginia, Texas and Florida. For the companies, that’s created a gold mine: Employees at Incode, a San Francisco firm that runs more than 100 million verifications a year, now internally track state bills and contact local officials to, as senior director of strategy Fernanda Sottil said, “understand where … our tech fits in.”

But while the systems are promoted for safeguarding kids, they can only work by inspecting everyone — surveying faces, driver’s licenses and other sensitive data in vast quantities. Alex Stamos, the former security chief of Facebook, which uses Yoti, said “most age verification systems range from ‘somewhat privacy violating’ to ‘authoritarian nightmare.'”"

How Companies Can Take a Global Approach to AI Ethics; Harvard Business Review (HBR), August 5, 2024

Swanand Deodhar, 

Favour Borokini, and 

Ben Waber, 

Harvard Business Review (HBR) ; How Companies Can Take a Global Approach to AI Ethics

"Getting the AI ethics policy right is a high-stakes affair for an organization. Well-published instances of gender biases in hiring algorithms or job search results may diminish the company’s reputation, pit the company against regulations, and even attract hefty government fines. Sensing such threats, organizations are increasingly creating dedicated structures and processes to inculcate AI ethics proactively. Some companies have moved further along this road, creating institutional frameworks for AI ethics.

Many efforts, however, miss an important fact: ethics differ from one cultural context to the next...

Western perspectives are also implicitly being encoded into AI models. For example, some estimates show that less than 3% of all images on ImageNet represent the Indian and Chinese diaspora, which collectively account for a third of the global population. Broadly, a lack of high-quality data will likely lead to low predictive power and bias against underrepresented groups — or even make it impossible for tools to be developed for certain communities at all. LLMs can’t currently be trained for languages that aren’t heavily represented on the Internet, for instance. A recent survey of IT organizations in India revealed that the lack of high-quality data remains the most dominant impediment to ethical AI practices.

As AI gains ground and dictates business operations, an unchecked lack of variety in ethical considerations may harm companies and their customers.

To address this problem, companies need to develop a contextual global AI ethics model that prioritizes collaboration with local teams and stakeholders and devolves decision-making authority to those local teams. This is particularly necessary if their operations span several geographies."

Music labels' AI lawsuits create copyright puzzle for courts; Reuters, August 4, 2024

 Blake Brittain, Reuters; Music labels' AI lawsuits create copyright puzzle for courts

"Suno and Udio pointed to past public statements defending their technology when asked for comment for this story. They filed their initial responses in court on Thursday, denying any copyright violations and arguing that the lawsuits were attempts to stifle smaller competitors. They compared the labels' protests to past industry concerns about synthesizers, drum machines and other innovations replacing human musicians...

The labels' claims echo allegations by novelists, news outlets, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits over chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude that use generative AI to create text. Those lawsuits are still pending and in their early stages.

Both sets of cases pose novel questions for the courts, including whether the law should make exceptions for AI's use of copyrighted material to create something new...

"Music copyright has always been a messy universe," said Julie Albert, an intellectual property partner at law firm Baker Botts in New York who is tracking the new cases. And even without that complication, Albert said fast-evolving AI technology is creating new uncertainty at every level of copyright law.

WHOSE FAIR USE?

The intricacies of music may matter less in the end if, as many expect, the AI cases boil down to a "fair use" defense against infringement claims - another area of U.S. copyright law filled with open questions."

Meta in Talks to Use Voices of Judi Dench, Awkwafina and Others for A.I.; The New York Times, August 2, 2024

Mike Isaac and Nicole Sperling , The New York Times; Meta in Talks to Use Voices of Judi Dench, Awkwafina and Others for A.I.

"Meta is in discussions with Awkwafina, Judi Dench and other actors and influencers for the right to incorporate their voices into a digital assistant product called MetaAI, according to three people with knowledge of the talks, as the company pushes to build more products that feature artificial intelligence.

Apart from Ms. Dench and Awkwafina, Meta is in talks with the comedian Keegan-Michael Key and other celebrities, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are private. They added that all of Hollywood’s top talent agencies were involved in negotiations with the tech giant."

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. We should be very afraid; The Observer via The Guardian, August 3, 2024

Gary Marcus, The Observer via The Guardian; OpenAI’s Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. We should be very afraid

"Unfortunately, many other AI companies seem to be on the path of hype and corner-cutting that Altman charted. Anthropic – formed from a set of OpenAI refugees who were worried that AI safety wasn’t taken seriously enough – seems increasingly to be competing directly with the mothership, with all that entails. The billion-dollar startup Perplexity seems to be another object lesson in greed, training on data it isn’t supposed to be using. Microsoft, meanwhile, went from advocating “responsible AI” to rushing out products with serious problems, pressuring Google to do the same. Money and power are corrupting AI, much as they corrupted social media.

We simply can’t trust giant, privately held AI startups to govern themselves in ethical and transparent ways. And if we can’t trust them to govern themselves, we certainly shouldn’t let them govern the world.

 

I honestly don’t think we will get to an AI that we can trust if we stay on the current path. Aside from the corrupting influence of power and money, there is a deep technical issue, too: large language models (the core technique of generative AI) invented by Google and made famous by Altman’s company, are unlikely ever to be safe. They are recalcitrant, and opaque by nature – so-called “black boxes” that we can never fully rein in. The statistical techniques that drive them can do some amazing things, like speed up computer programming and create plausible-sounding interactive characters in the style of deceased loved ones or historical figures. But such black boxes have never been reliable, and as such they are a poor basis for AI that we could trust with our lives and our infrastructure.

 

That said, I don’t think we should abandon AI. Making better AI – for medicine, and material science, and climate science, and so on – really could transform the world. Generative AI is unlikely to do the trick, but some future, yet-to-be developed form of AI might.

 

The irony is that the biggest threat to AI today may be the AI companies themselves; their bad behaviour and hyped promises are turning a lot of people off. Many are ready for government to take a stronger hand. According to a June poll by Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute, 80% of American voters prefer “regulation of AI that mandates safety measures and government oversight of AI labs instead of allowing AI companies to self-regulate"."

AI is complicating plagiarism. How should scientists respond?; Nature, July 30, 2024

Diana Kwon , Nature; AI is complicating plagiarism. How should scientists respond?

"From accusations that led Harvard University’s president to resign in January, to revelations in February of plagiarized text in peer-review reports, the academic world has been roiled by cases of plagiarism this year.

But a bigger problem looms in scholarly writing. The rapid uptake of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools — which create text in response to prompts — has raised questions about whether this constitutes plagiarism and under what circumstances it should be allowed. “There’s a whole spectrum of AI use, from completely human-written to completely AI-written — and in the middle, there’s this vast wasteland of confusion,” says Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant based in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, which are based on algorithms known as large language models (LLMs), can save time, improve clarity and reduce language barriers. Many researchers now argue that they are permissible in some circumstances and that their use should be fully disclosed.

But such tools complicate an already fraught debate around the improper use of others’ work. LLMs are trained to generate text by digesting vast amounts of previously published writing. As a result, their use could result in something akin to plagiarism — if a researcher passes off the work of a machine as their own, for instance, or if a machine generates text that is very close to a person’s work without attributing the source. The tools can also be used to disguise deliberately plagiarized text, and any use of them is hard to spot. “Defining what we actually mean by academic dishonesty or plagiarism, and where the boundaries are, is going to be very, very difficult,” says Pete Cotton, an ecologist at the University of Plymouth, UK."

Supreme Court Ethics Controversies: All The Scandals That Led Biden To Endorse Code Of Conduct; Forbes, July 29, 2024

Alison Durkee , Forbes; Supreme Court Ethics Controversies: All The Scandals That Led Biden To Endorse Code Of Conduct

"President Joe Biden endorsed the Supreme Court imposing a binding code of ethics on Monday, following a string of recent ethics issues the court has faced that have ramped up criticism of the court and sparked cries for a code of conduct from lawmakers and legal experts."

Justice Department sues TikTok, accusing the company of illegally collecting children’s data; AP, August 2, 2024

HALELUYA HADERO, AP; Justice Department sues TikTok, accusing the company of illegally collecting children’s data

"The Justice Department sued TikTok on Friday, accusing the company of violating children’s online privacy law and running afoul of a settlement it had reached with another federal agency. 

The complaint, filed together with the Federal Trade Commission in a California federal court, comes as the U.S. and the prominent social media company are embroiled in yet another legal battle that will determine if – or how – TikTok will continue to operate in the country. 

The latest lawsuit focuses on allegations that TikTok, a trend-setting platform popular among young users, and its China-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13. It also says the companies failed to honor requests from parents who wanted their children’s accounts deleted, and chose not to delete accounts even when the firms knew they belonged to kids under 13."

Paris mayor supports Olympics opening ceremony director after death threats; The Athletic, August 2, 2024

Ben Burrows and Brendan Quinn, The Athletic; Paris mayor supports Olympics opening ceremony director after death threats

"The mayor of Paris has offered her “unwavering support” to the artistic director behind the Olympics opening ceremony after he was subjected to harassment online including death threats.

Thomas Jolly has filed a complaint with authorities after the opening ceremony — which took place on Friday night — saw him targeted by “threats” and “defamation”...

A statement from Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo on Friday read: “On behalf of the City of Paris and in my own name, I would like to extend my unwavering support to Thomas Jolly in the aftermath of the threats and harassment he has been subjected to in recent days, which have led him to lodge a complaint.”

Paris’ Central Office for Combating Crimes Against Humanity and Hate Crimes (OCLCH) is now investigating Jolly’s complaint.

Jolly’s complaint related to “death threats on account of his origin, death threats on account of his sexual orientation, public insults on account of his origin, public insults on account of his sexual orientation” as well as “defamation” and “threatening and insulting messages criticizing his sexual orientation and his wrongly assumed Israeli origins.”"

Bipartisan Legal Group Urges Lawyers to Defend Against ‘Rising Authoritarianism’; The New York Times, August 1, 2024

Charlie Savage , The New York Times; Bipartisan Legal Group Urges Lawyers to Defend Against ‘Rising Authoritarianism’

"A bipartisan American Bar Association task force is calling on lawyers across the country to do more to help protect democracy ahead of the 2024 election, warning in a statement to be delivered Friday at the group’s annual meeting in Chicago that the nation faces a serious threat in “rising authoritarianism.”

The statement by a panel of prominent legal thinkers and other public figures — led by J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George Bush, and Jeh C. Johnson, a Homeland Security secretary during the Obama administration — does not mention by name former President Donald J. Trump.

But in raising alarms, the panel appeared to be clearly referencing Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert his loss of the 2020 election, which included attacks on election workers who were falsely accused by Mr. Trump and his supporters of rigging votes and culminated in the violent attack on the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021."

Jeffrey Clark Should Get 2-Year Suspension, DC Ethics Board Says; Bloomberg Law, August 1, 2024

Sam Skolnik , Bloomberg Law; Jeffrey Clark Should Get 2-Year Suspension, DC Ethics Board Says

"Trump administration Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark should receive a two-year suspension for attempting dishonesty over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, a DC Board on Professional Responsibility panel recommended Thursday.

“Disciplinary Counsel has proven by clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Clark attempted dishonesty and did so with truly extraordinary recklessness,” the panel said.

The recommendation from a board hearing committee is in stark contrast to that of DC Disciplinary Counsel Phil Fox, who on April 29 said that disbarment is “the only possible sanction” for Clark.

Clark, a former US assistant attorney general, in late 2020 tried to get his Justice Department superiors to send a letter to Georgia state officials improperly questioning the election outcome, three lawyers for the bar, led by Fox, wrote. Clark engaged in a “dishonest attempt to create national chaos on the verge of January 6,” they wrote.

Fox didn’t prove “by clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Clark was as culpable” as Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani or John Eastman, but he was culpable, the committee said in its 213-page, Aug. 1 report."

From 'E.T.' to 'Blade Runner,' how the summer of 1982 changed cinema forever; NPR, Fresh Air, July 31, 2024

Tonya Mosley , NPR, Fresh Air; From 'E.T.' to 'Blade Runner,' how the summer of 1982 changed cinema forever

"MOSLEY: Well, a couple of years later, then, there's "Tron"...

NASHAWATY: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...Which is about a computer hacker who is abducted into the digital world. What did Disney learn from "The Black Hole" that then maybe helped them with the success of "Tron?"

NASHAWATY: Yeah. I mean, I think it learned that it has to gamble in order to stay alive, and, yes, "Black Hole" had been sort of an unsuccessful gamble, or at least a push, but they knew that this is the way they had to go in order to stay relevant and to stay in business."

Many People Fear A.I. They Shouldn’t.; The New York Times, July 31, 2024

 David Brooks, The New York Times; Many People Fear A.I. They Shouldn’t.

"A.I. can impersonate human thought because it can take all the ideas that human beings have produced and synthesize them into strings of words or collages of images that make sense to us. But that doesn’t mean the A.I. “mind” is like the human mind. The A.I.“mind” lacks consciousness, understanding, biology, self-awareness, emotions, moral sentiments, agency, a unique worldview based on a lifetime of distinct and never to be repeated experiences...

Of course, bad people will use A.I. to do harm, but most people are pretty decent and will use A.I. to learn more, innovate faster and produce advances like medical breakthroughs. But A.I.’s ultimate accomplishment will be to remind us who we are by revealing what it can’t do. It will compel us to double down on all the activities that make us distinctly human: taking care of each other, being a good teammate, reading deeply, exploring daringly, growing spiritually, finding kindred spirits and having a good time."

Copyright Office tells Congress: ‘Urgent need’ to outlaw AI-powered impersonation; TechCrunch, July 31, 2024

  Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch; Copyright Office tells Congress: ‘Urgent need’ to outlaw AI-powered impersonation

"The U.S. Copyright Office has issued the first part of a report on how AI may affect its domain, and its first recommendation out of the gate is: we need a new law right away to define and combat AI-powered impersonation

“It has become clear that the distribution of unauthorized digital replicas poses a serious threat not only in the entertainment and political arenas but also for private citizens,” said the agency’s director Shira Perlmutter in a statement accompanying the report. “We believe there is an urgent need for effective nationwide protection against the harms that can be caused to reputations and livelihoods.”

The report itself, part one of several to come, focuses on this timely aspect of AI and intellectual property, which as a concept encompasses your right to control your own identity."

What do corporations need to ethically implement AI? Turns out, a philosopher; Northeastern Global News, July 26, 2024

Noah Lloyd, Northeastern Global News ; What do corporations need to ethically implement AI? Turns out, a philosopher

"As the founder of the AI Ethics Lab, Canca maintains a team of “philosophers and computer scientists, and the goal is to help industry. That means corporations as well as startups, or organizations like law enforcement or hospitals, to develop and deploy AI systems responsibly and ethically,” she says.

Canca has also worked with organizations like the World Economic Forum and Interpol.

But what does “ethical” mean when it comes to AI? That, Canca says, is exactly the point.

“A lot of the companies come to us and say, ‘Here’s a model that we are planning to use. Is this fair?’” 

But, she notes, there are “different definitions of justice, distributive justice, different definitions of fairness. They conflict with each other. It is a big theoretical question. How do we define fairness?”

"Saying that ‘We optimized this for fairness,’ means absolutely nothing until you have a working,  proper definition” — which shifts from project to project, she also notes.

Now, Canca has been named one of Mozilla’s Rise25 honorees, which recognizes individuals “leading the next wave of AI — using philanthropy, collective power, and the principles of open source to make sure the future of AI is responsible, trustworthy, inclusive and centered around human dignity,” the organization wrote in its announcement."