Trump posts deepfakes of Swift, Harris and Musk in effort to shore up support; The Guardian, August 19, 2024

Nick Robins-Early, The Guardian ; Trump posts deepfakes of Swift, Harris and Musk in effort to shore up support

"Donald Trump shared several AI-generated images of Taylor Swift and her fans vowing their support for his presidential campaign on Sunday, reposting them with the caption “I accept!” on his Truth Social platform. The deepfakes are part of a slew of images made with artificial intelligence that the former president has disseminated in recent days straddling the line between parody and outright election disinformation."

Mayoral candidate vows to let VIC, an AI bot, run Wyoming’s capital city; The Washington Post, August 19, 2024

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff

 and 

Jenna Sampson

 , The Washington Post; Mayoral candidate vows to let VIC, an AI bot, run Wyoming’s capital city

"Miller made this pitch at a county library in Wyoming’s capital on a recent summer Friday, with a few friends and family filling otherwise empty rows of chairs. Before the sparse audience, he vowed to run the city of Cheyenne exclusively with an AI bot he calls “VIC” for “Virtual Integrated Citizen.”

AI experts say the pledge is a first for U.S. campaigns and marks a new front in the rapid emergence of the technology. Its implications have stoked alarm among officials and even tech companies...

The day before, Miller had scrambled to get VIC working after OpenAI,the technology company behind generative-AI tools like ChatGPT, shut down his account, citing policies against using its products for campaigning. Miller quickly made a second ChatGPT bot, allowing him to hold the meet-and-greet almost exactly as planned.

It was just the latest example of Miller’s skirting efforts against his campaign by the company that makes the AI technology and the regulatory authorities that oversee elections...

“While OpenAI may have certain policies against using its model for campaigning, other companies do not, so it makes shutting down the campaign nearly impossible.”"

New ABA Rules on AI and Ethics Shows the Technology Is 'New Wine in Old Bottles'; The Law Journal Editorial Board via Law.com, August 16, 2024

The Law Journal Editorial Board via Law.com; New ABA Rules on AI and Ethics Shows the Technology Is 'New Wine in Old Bottles'

On July 29, the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility issued Formal Opinion 512 on generative artificial intelligence tools. The opinion follows on such opinions and guidance from several state bar associations, as well as similar efforts by non-U.S. bars and regulatory bodies around the world...

Focused on GAI, the opinion addresses six core principles: competence, confidentiality, communication, meritorious claims and candor to tribunal, supervision and fees...

What is not commonly understood, perhaps, is that GAI “hallucinates,” and generates content...

Not addressed in the opinion is whether GAI is engaged in the practice of law...

At the ABA annual meeting, representatives of more than 20 “foreign” bars participated in a roundtable on GAI. In a world of cross-border practice, there was a desire for harmonization."

UC Berkeley Law School To Offer Advanced Law Degree Focused On AI; Forbes, August 16, 2024

  Michael T. Nietzel, Forbes; UC Berkeley Law School To Offer Advanced Law Degree Focused On AI

"The University of California, Berkeley School of Law has announced that it will offer what it’s calling “the first-ever law degree with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI).” The new AI-focused Master of Laws (LL.M.) program is scheduled to launch in summer 2025.

The program, which will award an AI Law and Regulation certificate for students enrolled in UC Berkeley Law’s LL.M. executive track, is designed for working professionals and can be completed over two summers or through remote study combined with one summer on campus...

According to Assistant Law Dean Adam Sterling, the curriculum will cover topics such as AI ethics, the fundamentals of AI technology, and current and future efforts to regulate AI. “This program will equip participants with in-depth knowledge of the ethical, regulatory, and policy challenges posed by AI,” Sterling added. “It will focus on building practice skills to help them advise and represent leading law firms, AI companies, governments, and non-profit organizations.”"

A.L.S. Stole His Voice. A.I. Retrieved It.; The New York Times, August 14, 2024

 Benjamin Mueller, The New York Times; A.L.S. Stole His Voice. A.I. Retrieved It.

"As scientists continued training the device to recognize his sounds, it got only better. Over a period of eight months, the study said, Mr. Harrell came to utter nearly 6,000 unique words. The device kept up, sustaining a 97.5 percent accuracy.

That exceeded the accuracy of many smartphone applications that transcribe people’s intact speech. It also marked an improvement on previous studies in which implants reached accuracy rates of roughly 75 percent, leaving one of every four words liable to misinterpretation.

And whereas devices like Neuralink’s help people move cursors across a screen, Mr. Harrell’s implant allowed him to explore the infinitely larger and more complex terrain of speech.

“It went from a scientific demonstration to a system that Casey can use every day to speak with family and friends,” said Dr. David Brandman, the neurosurgeon who operated on Mr. Harrell and led the study alongside Dr. Stavisky.

That leap was enabled in part by the types of artificial intelligence that power language tools like ChatGPT. At any given moment, Mr. Harrell’s implant picks up activity in an ensemble of neurons, translating their firing pattern into vowel or consonant units of sound. Computers then agglomerate a string of such sounds into a word, and a string of words into a sentence, choosing the output they deem likeliest to correspond to what Mr. Harrell has tried to say...

Whether the same implant would prove as helpful to more severely paralyzed people is unclear. Mr. Harrell’s speech had deteriorated, but not disappeared.

And for all its utility, the technology cannot mitigate the crushing financial burden of trying to live and work with A.L.S.: Insurance will pay for Mr. Harrell’s caregiving needs only if he goes on hospice care, or stops working and becomes eligible for Medicaid, Ms. Saxon said, a situation that, she added, drives others with A.L.S. to give up trying to extend their lives.

Those very incentives also make it likelier that people with disabilities will become poor, putting access to cutting-edge implants even further out of their reach, said Melanie Fried-Oken, a professor of neurology at Oregon Health & Science University."

How AI is revolutionising how firefighters tackle blazes and saving lives; The Guardian, August 15, 2024

Selena Ross , The Guardian; How AI is revolutionising how firefighters tackle blazes and saving lives

"What’s more, all that data needs to be recrunched anew every day as the weather forecast changes.

Humans can do this. But AI seems to be able to do it better, digesting mammoth datasets to predict wildfires fairly accurately as much as a week or even 10 days before they start...

Technosylva’s work is part of a wave of new fire modelling around the world drawing on AI and grappling each project in a different way, with the same three factors: fuel, weather, ignition. Many are not yet operational, but their creators expect them to be in the next couple of years."

San Francisco Moves to Lead Fight Against Deepfake Nudes; The New York Times, August 15, 2024

 Heather Knight, The New York Times; San Francisco Moves to Lead Fight Against Deepfake Nudes

"Instead, the lawsuit seeks to shutter the sites and permanently restrain those operating them from creating deepfake pornography in the future, and assess civil penalties and attorneys’ fees. On the question of jurisdiction, the suit argues that the sites violate state and federal revenge-pornography laws, state and federal child-pornography laws, and the California Unfair Competition Law, which prohibits unlawful and unfair business practices.

San Francisco is a fitting venue, the lawyers argued, as it is ground zero for the growing artificial intelligence industry. Already, people in the city can order driverless vehicles from their phones to whisk them around town, and the industry’s leaders, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are based there.

Mr. Chiu says he thinks the industry has largely had a positive effect on society, but the issue of deepfake pornography has highlighted one of its “dark sides.”

Keeping pace with the rapidly changing industry as a government lawyer is daunting, he said. “But that doesn’t meant we shouldn’t try.”"

Sasse’s spending spree: Former UF president channeled millions to GOP allies, secretive contracts; The Independent Florida Alligator, August 12, 2024

Garrett Shanley, The Independent Florida Alligator; Sasse’s spending spree: Former UF president channeled millions to GOP allies, secretive contracts

"In his 17-month stint as UF president, Ben Sasse more than tripled his office’s spending, directing millions in university funds into secretive consulting contracts and high-paying positions for his GOP allies.

Sasse ballooned spending under the president’s office to $17.3 million in his first year in office — up from $5.6 million in former UF President Kent Fuchs’ last year, according to publicly available administrative budget data.

A majority of the spending surge was driven by lucrative contracts with big-name consulting firms and high-salaried, remote positions for Sasse’s former U.S. Senate staff and Republican officials.

Sasse’s consulting contracts have been kept largely under wraps, leaving the public in the dark about what the contracted firms did to earn their fees. The university also declined to clarify specific duties carried out by Sasse’s ex-Senate staff, several of whom were salaried as presidential advisers."

This Code Breaker Is Using AI to Decode the Heart’s Secret Rhythms; Wired, August 15, 2024

 Amit Katwala, Wired; This Code Breaker Is Using AI to Decode the Heart’s Secret Rhythms

"There’s an AI boom in health care, and the only thing slowing it down is a lack of data."

Surviving Putin's gulag: Vladimir Kara-Murza tells his story; The Washington Post, August 14, 2024

Today’s show was produced by Charla Freeland. It was edited by Allison Michaels and Damir Marusic and mixed by Emma Munger, The Washington Post; Surviving Putin's gulag: Vladimir Kara-Murza tells his story

"Pulitzer Prize winner Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was part of August’s massive prisoner exchange with Russia, sat down to talk with Post Opinions editor David Shipley about his time in jail, the importance of freedom of speech and what the future holds for Putin’s regime."

Russian court jails US-Russian woman for 12 years over $50 charity donation; The Guardian, August 15, 2024

Associated Press via The Guardian; Russian court jails US-Russian woman for 12 years over $50 charity donation

"A Russian court on Thursday sentenced the US-Russian dual national Ksenia Khavana to 12 years in prison on a treason conviction for allegedly raising money for the Ukrainian military.

The rights group the First Department said the charges stemmed from a $51 (£40) donation to a US charity that helps Ukraine.

Khavana, whom Russian authorities identify by her birth name of Karelina, was arrested in Ekaterinburg in February. She pleaded guilty in her closed trial last week, news reports said.

Khavana reportedly obtained US citizenship after marrying an American and moving to Los Angeles. She had returned to Russia to visit her family."

Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators; The Hollywood Reporter, August 13, 2024

 Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter; Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators

"Artists suing generative artificial intelligence art generators have cleared a major hurdle in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit over the uncompensated and unauthorized use of billions of images downloaded from the internet to train AI systems, with a federal judge allowing key claims to move forward.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick on Monday advanced all copyright infringement and trademark claims in a pivotal win for artists. He found that Stable Diffusion, Stability’s AI tool that can create hyperrealistic images in response to a prompt of just a few words, may have been “built to a significant extent on copyrighted works” and created with the intent to “facilitate” infringement. The order could entangle in the litigation any AI company that incorporated the model into its products."

Artificial Intelligence in the pulpit: a church service written entirely by AI; United Church of Christ, July 16, 2024

Renee DeLuca , United Church of Christ; Artificial Intelligence in the pulpit: a church service written entirely by AI

"Would you attend a church service if you knew that it was written entirely by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program? What would your thoughts and feelings be about this use of AI?

That’s exactly what the Rev. Dwight Lee Wolter wanted to know — and he let his church members at the Congregational Church of Patchogue on Long Island, New York, know that was what he was intending to do on Sunday, July 14. He planned a service that included a call to worship, invocation, pastoral prayer, scripture reading, sermon, hymns, prelude, postlude and benediction with the use of ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a free AI program developed by OpenAI, an Artificial Intelligence research company and released in 2022.

Taking fear and anger out of exploration

“My purpose is to take the fear and anger out of AI exploration and replace it with curiosity, flexibility and open-mindfulness,” said Wolter. “If, as widely claimed, churches need to adapt to survive, we might not recognize the church in 20 years if we could see it now; then AI will be a part of the church of the future. No matter what we presently think of it, it will be present in the future doing a lot of the thinking for us.”...

Wolter intends to follow up Sunday’s service with a reflection about how it went. On July 21, he will give a sermon about AI, with people offering input about the AI service. “We will discuss their reactions, feelings, thoughts, likes and dislikes, concerns and questions.” Wolter will follow with his synopsis sharing the benefits, criticisms, fears and concerns of AI...

Wolter believes we need to “disarm contempt prior to investigation,” when it comes to things like Artificial Intelligence. “AI is not going anywhere. It’s a tool–and with a shortage of clergy, money and volunteers, we will continue to rely on it.”"

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."