Sam Tabahriti, Reuters; Musicians release silent album to protest UK's AI copyright changes
"More than 1,000 musicians, including Kate Bush and Cat Stevens, on Tuesday released a silent album to protest proposed changes to Britain's copyright laws, which could allow tech firms to train artificial intelligence models using their work."
Nicole Black, BridgeTower Media Newswires , Minnesota Lawyer; AI in law firms: Ethics panels clearing path forward
"With the arrival of generative artificial intelligence (AI), a roadmap to ethical adoption was needed, and quickly, given the unprecedented rate of advancement. Fortunately, bar associations nationwide rose to the occasion, issuing timely and in-depth guidance in months, not years. Since the spring of 2023, many jurisdictions released guidance or opinions on the ethics of using AI in law firms: California, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, the American Bar Association, Virginia, D.C., and New Mexico.
Most recently, North Carolina joined their ranks in November, handing down 2024 Formal Ethics Opinion 1. In the opinion, the Ethics Committee addressed six inquiries about ethical AI adoption."
Josephine Ma , South China Morning Post; Chatbots for children: China grapples with how to teach use and ethics of AI in schools
"One question educators are pondering is the boundary between using AI as a learning aid and students using AI to write."
Felice Frankel, Nature ; Will AI jeopardize science photography? There’s still time to create an ethical code of conduct
"Ethical standards
For years, I have suggested that scientists need to be trained in the ethics of visual communication, and the easy availability of AI image-creation software adds urgency to this discussion."
Ally Schweitzer, NPR; When is it time to have the courage to quit?
"If your boss asks you to do something you consider unethical, do you resign or hold the line?
Some federal workers are wrestling with that question now, as President Trump calls to reshape the mission and perceived politics of government agencies. In one recent example, multiple prosecutors resigned after Trump's Department of Justice ordered Manhattan officials to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
"I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me," wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten in his resignation letter...
But sometimes, sticking around is the more ethical choice, Rutgers philosophy professor Alex Guerrero told NPR. He spoke with Morning Edition host A MartÃnez about what to consider before leaving a job that conflicts with your values...
MartÃnez: Is there an argument that some people who choose to resign for ethical reasons ought to stay? Maybe they can do more good by staying as opposed to making a public statement by leaving.
Guerrero: Absolutely. I think especially in cases where you might not be in a particularly high-profile position, maybe nobody will really notice that you leave. But also, there might be cases where it's really important that people stay and look for ways to fight from within: to try to push back against what's being done, to gum up the works. I think in many cases, the ethical thing to do actually is to stay in the role, as hard as it might be, because if you leave, you might be replaced by somebody who is gung ho about the immoral thing and will push forward in a much worse way. But also, you might well be able to help slow down the things that are being done."
JARED KELLER, Fast Company; Trump’s firing of the U.S. government archivist is far worse than it might seem
"On Feb. 7, Trump fired Colleen Shogan from her role as Archivist of the United States, the head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and government official responsible for overseeing the preservation—both physical and digital—and promulgation of government records. Shogan’s dismissal marks the first time that a sitting president has fired the nation’s archivist since the position was established in the 1930s...
The dismissal wasn’t exactly unexpected. The New York Times reports that Trump had grown to “despise” the agency for its role in alerting the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2022 to his alleged misappropriation and mishandling of classified documents at his Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago following his first term in office—a case a federal judge dismissed in July of last year. (His ire extended to Shogan despite her not assuming the Archivist post until 2023, months after the agency alerted the DOJ.)
And Shogan won’t be the last NARA official to get the axe: The president has reportedly in recent months drawn up a “list” of staff to fire in retaliation for their role in the classified documents investigation, according to Rolling Stone. (Shogan, NARA, and the White House did not respond to Fast Company’s requests for comment.)"
Andy Behring , Daily Mail; Copyright 'sell-out' will silence British musicians, says BRIAN MAY
"No one will make music in Britain any more if Labour's AI copyright proposal succeeds, Sir Brian May warned last night as he backed the Daily Mail's campaign against it.
The Queen guitarist said he feared it may already be 'too late' because 'monstrously arrogant' Big Tech barons have already carried out an industrial-scale 'theft' of Britain's cultural genius.
He called on the Government to apply the brakes before the next chapter of Britain's rich cultural heritage – which includes Shakespeare, Chaucer, James Bond, The Beatles and Britpop – is nipped in the bud thanks to Sir Keir Starmer's copyright 'sell-out'...
Sir Brian said: 'My fear is that it's already too late – this theft has already been performed and is unstoppable, like so many incursions that the monstrously arrogant billionaire owners of Al and social media are making into our lives. The future is already forever changed."
Ella Creamer, The Guardian; The CIA smuggled the Guardian into the eastern bloc during the cold war
"The CIA smuggled the Guardian Weekly to eastern bloc countries during the cold war, a new book reveals. Copies of this newspaper were sent as part of a broader secret programme that got literature by authors including George Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn behind the Iron Curtain.
In the early 70s, Guardian Weekly was sent to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, said Charlie English, former head of international news at the Guardian and author of The CIA Book Club.
Under the “CIA book program”, the US intelligence agency sent approximately 10m books east over the three decades leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The programme aimed to “combat the stultification that Stalinism imposed on the eastern bloc”, where censorship was rife, and show those living there that “the west hadn’t forgotten about them”, said English...
The CIA Book Club details the significant role of the late Jerzy Giedroyc, a relative of the former Great British Bake Off television presenter Mel Giedroyc, in the CIA’s operations. He was “perhaps the most important person in the west helping the CIA ship books into Poland” and considered a “hero of the Polish independence movement”, said the author.
While the book programme is given “almost no credit” for bringing about the end of the cold war, dissidents say literature was vital to the anti-communist movement in Poland, and former CIA officers believe it played a significant role in ending the war."
Donna Ferguson , The Guardian; Literary gold … or betrayal of trust? Joan Didion journal opens ethical minefield
"The announcement that these post-psychiatry notes, discovered by Didion’s literary executors in an unlabelled folder shortly after she died in 2021, are to be published in April has raised questions around the ethics of posthumous publishing."
Opinion Perry Bacon Jr. , The Washington Post; A college president offers a class in standing up to Trump
"Many college presidents and deans are issuing mealymouthed statements, ending long-standing programs, removing content from websites and otherwise cowering in the face of the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education. Then there’s Michael S. Roth.
The president of Connecticut’s Wesleyan University wrote a piece in Slate that described some of the Trump administration’s rhetoric as authoritarian. He consistently reposts articles criticizing Trump’s decisions. He speaks and blogs firmly in defense of diversity, equity and inclusion, transgender rights and immigration.
Roth is demonstrating the kind of eloquence and resistance we desperately need from the leaders of not only colleges but also corporations, nonprofits and other organizations in the face of Trump’s onslaught against the rule of law, civil society and key American institutions."
, The New Republic; Elon Musk’s Cringey Chainsaw Act Exposes a Deep Ignorance Fueling DOGE
[Kip Currier: Read and share this New Republic article with as many people as possible. We must work to raise awareness of what the Trump/Musk alliance is perpetrating and inflicting.
Matthew 20:16: "So the last shall be first, and the first last."
As this article unpacks, even catching a glimpse of the richest man on Planet Earth perversely fetishizing a chainsaw on stage -- as he elatedly wreaks havoc on the lives of Americans and the world -- is both stomach-churning and heart-breaking. We see before us a WWE-esque caricature of a human; a performative individual who is profoundly lacking an ethical center and values like compassion, reason, and integrity.
Elon the Oligarch can buy whatever access his heart desires. He can attain whatever healthcare he or his family needs. Musk also has unfettered access to lucrative government opportunities for self-enrichment, despite having clear conflicts of interest and supporting the abrogation of government ethics rules. The unchecked damage that Team Musk is unleashing will be far-reaching for millions.
Consider just a few examples:
Musk wants us to feel guilty for government programs that we support with our tax dollars, while he games the system to advance his aim of being the world's first trillionaire.
When the time comes to vote, remember the politicians who unabashedly are supporting Elon the Tyrannical right now, and the administration giving him a free hand to take a chainsaw to programs that assist persons in need and empower other people to help their fellow humans in need.]
[Excerpt]
"At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Elon Musk appeared on stage in oversized sunglasses, a black gothic MAGA hat, a thick gold chain around his neck—and wielding a chainsaw. Ha ha. Over at Politico’s Playbook, the new team may not have heard of the New Deal, but thank goodness they do have enough sense to know that the richest man in the world and the president he works for (or is it the other way around?) might—make that will—come to rue that cringey image.
The way Musk’s DOGE is going about these cuts is the equivalent, as I heard former Biden administration official Mitch Landrieu say on TV this week, of a man thinking he needs to lose 30 pounds and deciding to saw off his leg. That’s funny, and true. But this is even worse. A man sawing off his leg hurts only himself. What Musk is doing will hurt millions of people in ways that we’re only beginning to see.
Here’s one small example, which you likely haven’t read about but which I take a little personally. If you’re one of my regular readers, you know that I was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, and went to my hometown university, West Virginia University, or WVU (not UWV, thank you). A week ago, West Virginia Watch, a small nonprofit news organization in the state, moved a story noting that the university expects to lose $12 million annually in funding that supports cancer and vascular research.
Under dynamic Dean Clay Marsh, a native of the state recruited back to West Virginia from Ohio State by WVU President E. Gordon Gee (and the son of hell-raising newspaper editor Don Marsh, who once upon a time made The Charleston Gazette one of the most aggressive regional newspapers in the country), the cancer institute has made tremendous strides. The cuts, a university spokeswoman told West Virginia Watch, could cost the school the faculty it has recruited to do the research and conduct the clinical trials that could lead to the breakthroughs that would save a lot of lives in the state with the third-highest cancer mortality ratein America.
And if it’s $12 million at the smallish West Virginia University Health Sciences Center, imagine what it is at New York University, or UCLA, or Johns Hopkins, or even much larger state research hospitals in Florida or Washington. And it’s happening to every state university medical system in the nation."
Douglas Murray, New York Post; Mr. President: Putin is THE dictator and 10 Ukraine-Russia war truths we ignore at our peril
"In Trump’s rush to end the bloodshed, these are also the truths against which any deal will be judged and which will define him when the history books are written.
To ignore them or not treat them with the gravity they deserve will also have enormous consequences for decades to come:
Truth No. 5
HANNA ARHIROVA / AP, Time; Ukrainians Rally Around Zelensky as Trump and Putin Denigrate Him
"After Trump called Zelensky a “dictator”—for legally postponing an election last year—and as reports emerged of U.S. and Russian officials meeting in Saudi Arabia to discuss a possible ceasefire without input from Ukraine, even some of Zelensky’s harshest domestic critics have begun defending him.
“We may have different opinions about Zelensky, but only Ukrainian citizens have the right to judge his support,” said Yaroslav Zhelezniak, a lawmaker from the opposition party Holos. “And to publicly criticize him too, because, in the end, he is our elected leader.”
Trump’s harsh words for Zelensky have drawn criticism from Democrats and even some Republicans in the U.S. Congress, where defending Ukraine from Russia—with tens of billions of dollars in military aid—has had bipartisan support. But Vice President J.D. Vance admonished Zelensky for publicly warning Trump about falling for Russian disinformation...
A poll released Wednesday by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology put public trust in Zelensky at 57%. The survey was conducted Feb. 4 to Feb. 9 among 1,000 people living across Ukraine in regions and territories controlled by the Ukrainian government."
Mandy Taheri, Newsweek; Nearly Twice as Many Americans View Trump as 'Dictator' Than Zelensky
"Nearly twice as many Americans view President Donald Trump as a "dictator" compared to Volodymyr Zelensky, according to a new poll. Trump recently used the word to describe the Ukrainian president...
A YouGov poll of 4,071 Americans conducted on February 19 asked participants whether they believe Zelensky, Trump and Putin are dictators.
The poll found that 41 percent of participants view Trump as a dictator, just below the 45 percent who do not. Gender played a role in participants answers, as among women, 46 percent consider Trump a dictator, compared to 35 percent of men.
The divide also falls along political lines, with 80 percent of Republicans saying Trump is not a dictator, while 68 percent of Democrats believe he is.
Fourteen percent of respondents said they were unsure if they consider him a dictator or not.
When participants were asked if they considered Zelensky a dictator, as Trump did on Wednesday, 22 percent said yes, while 45 percent said no. A larger share of participants, 33 percent, were unsure.
A majority of Democrats, 63 percent, said the Ukrainian leader is not a dictator, with only 15 percent believing he is. Republicans were fairly split among the three responses, with 36 percent unsure, 31 percent saying no and 33 percent saying yes."
Ronny Reyes, New York Post; Fox News’ Mark Levin criticizes Trump for attacking Zelensky: ‘MAGA doesn’t support Putin’
"Fox News host Mark Levin, a longtime supporter of President Trump, is breaking with the commander-in-chief over his recent attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, warning Trump that “MAGA doesn’t support Putin.”
Speaking on the Mark Levin Show on Wednesday, Levin offered a rare criticism of the president as he backed Zelensky for maintaining order in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in 2022.
Levin’s segment appeared to be a direct response to Trump’s claims that Zelensky is a dictator that the Ukrainian leader is stopping free elections and only has a very low approval rating.
The Fox News host said both of those assertions are false."
Olivia George, The Washington Post; Trump ends federal leadership program, cutting off key talent pipeline
[Kip Currier: "So we do not lose heart." 2 Cor. 4:16.
Trump, Vance, Musk, and others in his circle want the American people to despair and believe that our government is irreparably broken. [Read/Listen to Ezra Klein's 2/7/25 New York Times interview with Kara Swisher "What Elon Musk Wants"] That we as a country, committed to the bedrock principle E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One), are irrevocably divided. That we are not indivisible, in contravention of our Pledge of Allegiance (one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all).
The damage being done every day by the Trump administration is tragic, uncharitable, and vengeful.
Yet, we must and will persevere as a nation. We must build stronger guardrails to protect against this kind of unilateral, monarchical destruction of federal employees, programs, and agencies that help people, provide deserved opportunities, strengthen our democracy and the free world, and present hope and information to those yearning for freedom and self-determination.
Take heart. We will rebuild our government when this regime has ended.]
[Excerpt]
"The Trump administration ended the Presidential Management Fellows Program in a late-night executive order Wednesday, axing a decades-old initiative that has long been celebrated as a pipeline to draw talent into civil service careers.
The two-year, full-time fellowship brings recent graduate students into agencies across the government with pay, benefits, training and mentorship. It bills itself as “the premier leadership development program” and has helped thousands of graduates get into government roles since its founding in 1977.
President Donald Trump instructed the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to “promptly terminate” the program in the executive order, which targeted “elements of the Federal bureaucracy” that he had “determined are unnecessary.” The order also eliminated or dramatically diminished a handful of other programs and federal advisory committees, including the U.S. Institute of Peace, which works to prevent and resolve violent conflict, and the U.S. African Development Foundation, which invests in African grassroots enterprises.
“This is one of the most unsettling, tragic pieces of news yet,” said Sean O’Keefe, a member of the presidential management program’s inaugural class who went on to become the NASA administrator under President George W. Bush. “This is a firing of convenience. They are looking for a headcount reduction; there is nothing qualitative about this.”
Eva Maitland and Madeline Roache, NEWSGUARD, NewsGuard's Reality Check; Russia’s War on Ukraine: Three Years, Three Hundred and Two False Claims
"As the war in Ukraine approaches the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion that launched the conflict, NewsGuard has now identified and debunked 302 false claims relating to the war, nearly all of them originating as Russian propaganda.
These 302 claims appear in NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprints proprietary database of viral false narratives that NewsGuard analysts have identified and debunked. NewsGuard analysts have identified 551 websites spreading these false claims...
MATT WHITE, Task & Purpose; Ronald Reagan narrated a short film in 1945 about the Tuskegee Airmen
"An Army film produced in 1945 on the Tuskegee airmen begins with footage of a fighter taxiing behind a narrator’s familiar voice.
“It’s morning,” says the unmistakable voice of then-Army captain Ronald Reagan, who always enjoyed his ‘morning’ metaphors. On screen, fighters take to the air. “Twenty miles from the enemy,” Reagan says.
The 10-minute Army-produced film is a kind of first draft of history on the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed World War II flyers who were in the news last month when the Air Force removed — and then partially replaced — videos on the unit from its boot camp. But the National Archives video on those airmen is worth watching, both for what it says and for what it doesn’t say. Along with some vintage footage of training, the film is narrated by future-President Ronald Reagan, back when he was an Army officer making films for what was then the War Department...
Perhaps Reagan’s most notable passage comes toward the end, when he firmly divides the world into two sides — the Axis powers versus the American way — and puts the segregation and racism behind the Tuskegee project squarely into the Axis’ camp.
“Here’s the answer to Hitler and Hirohito,” Reagan says. “Here’s the answer to the propaganda of the Japs and Nazis. Here’s the answer: Wings for this man.”
It’s almost as if the future President wanted to say that diversity is a strength."
TORI NOBLE, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); AI and Copyright: Expanding Copyright Hurts Everyone—Here’s What to Do Instead
[Kip Currier: No, not everyone. Not requiring Big Tech to figure out a way to fairly license or get permission to use the copyrighted works of creators unjustly advantages these deep pocketed corporations. It also inequitably disadvantages the economic and creative interests of the human beings who labor to create copyrightable content -- authors, songwriters, visual artists, and many others.
The tell is that many of these same Big Tech companies are only too willing to file copyright infringement lawsuits against anyone whom they allege is infringing their AI content to create competing products and services.]
[Excerpt]
"Threats to Socially Valuable Research and Innovation
Requiring researchers to license fair uses of AI training data could make socially valuable research based on machine learning (ML) and even text and data mining (TDM) prohibitively complicated and expensive, if not impossible. Researchers have relied on fair use to conduct TDM research for a decade, leading to important advancements in myriad fields. However, licensing the vast quantity of works that high-quality TDM research requires is frequently cost-prohibitive and practically infeasible.
Fair use protects ML and TDM research for good reason. Without fair use, copyright would hinder important scientific advancements that benefit all of us. Empirical studies back this up: research using TDM methodologies are more common in countries that protect TDM research from copyright control; in countries that don’t, copyright restrictions stymie beneficial research. It’s easy to see why: it would be impossible to identify and negotiate with millions of different copyright owners to analyze, say, text from the internet."
EZRA LEVIN and LEAH GREENBERG , The Nation; How to Organize Our Way Out of the Trump-Musk Putsch
"For the millions of Americans now desperate to reclaim our democracy from the plutocratic vandalism of the second Trump administration, the main challenge before us is simple: We have to unify and fight back. This isn’t new and it isn’t rocket science—the one thing we know from historical fights against authoritarians is that success depends on a persistent, courageous, broad-based, and unified opposition. What that should look like and what that demands of each of us is the heart of the new movement to defeat a more disciplined and lawless Trump White House, but before we get to where we’re going, we have to start with where we are.
We run a national pro-democracy grassroots movement organization that’s been helping to marshal local volunteer groups against Trumpism for nearly a decade. Trump’s innovation in his second term is his strategic alignment with neoreactionary forces personified in Elon Musk. As one underground memo circulating in pro-democracy circles recently explained, the neoreactionary goal is “replacing the existing Constitutional system with a privatized state structure akin to a corporation, with a monarch-like figure at the top modeled after a CEO.” It’s no wonder that historians like Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson are raising the alarm about a boiling constitutional crisis...
A week after the election, we published Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink, an open-source handbook for building nationwide opposition to the coming authoritarian takeover. The first step: total opposition to Trump’s Project 2025...
We’re under no illusion that any senator or representative can summon forth the opposition on their own. It’s up to each of us to try, and learn, and improve, and build. Constituents should be organizing in their own communities as engaged neighbors, pro-democracy volunteers, and educators. Rank-and-file Democrats should be feeding off that energy and harnessing its power. And Democrats in leadership should be corralling their caucuses to produce a unified front with aggressive, creative tactics and messaging. Nobody has all the answers, and we’re all going to have to try, fail, go back to the drawing board, and try again.
These are frightening times, and frightening times call for active, courageous leadership. Musk and Trump are really seeking to annex the operations of the state to their pet vanity projects, bigotries, and conspiracy theories , but our enemy is not one or two men. Our enemy is apathy, cynicism, and fatalism; the pernicious, authoritarian-friendly belief that we are merely victims of world events rather than active participants in a global struggle for freedom and justice. Every time one of us—a family member, a community organizer, a representative, a senator—takes a step forward in this fight, a thousand pairs of eyes watch and learn. Courage is contagious.
Take that step, and steel yourself with the knowledge that you are the defender of a 250-year experiment in self-governance—a real-life pluralistic democracy, imperfect as it is, striving to be more perfect. Our predecessors deposed a brain-addled king; they crushed the violent insurrectionists of a slaveholding confederacy; they forced the robber barons to contend with workers and unions; they kicked the Nazis’ asses throughout Europe; they broke the back of the southern segregationist political bloc; they fought back against the terrorizing forces at Stonewall. We have planted ourselves in stubborn opposition to monomaniacal fascists of one form or another for a quarter of a millennium. No entitled reality-TV has-been backed by an addle-brained billionaire who cheats at video games is going to roll over us now.
We will not finish this fight, but we can each be damn sure to do our part while we’re here. Together, we are the opposition, and this is our republic—if we can keep it. This is the part where we keep it."
