Judge dismisses Elon Musk's suit against hate speech researchers; NPR, March 25, 2024

 Bobby Allyn, NPR; Judge dismisses Elon Musk's suit against hate speech researchers

"A federal judge has dismissed X owner Elon Musk's lawsuit against a research group that documented an uptick in hate speech on the social media site, saying the organization's reports on the platform formerly known as Twitter were protected by the First Amendment. 

Musk's suit, "is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose," wrote U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in his Monday ruling, "This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech."

Amid an advertiser boycott of X last year, Musk sued the research and advocacy organization Center for Countering Digital Hate, alleging it violated the social media site's terms of service in gathering data for its reports."

Magali Berdah: Dozens jailed in France's largest cyberbully case; BBC, March 19, 2024

 Ian Casey, BBC; Magali Berdah: Dozens jailed in France's largest cyberbully case

"Twenty-eight people have been jailed for up to 18 months for the harassment of an influencer in France's largest cyberbullying case to date.

Judges found the accused guilty of harassing Magali Berdah, spurred on by a campaign by the French rapper Booba against "thieving influencers"...

Ms Berdah has built a prominent career in France as a lifestyle and fashion expert, while also marketing other social media stars through her company Shauna Events.

Her lawyers said posts from Booba, real name Élie Yaffa, encouraged a "mob" of people online to send hateful and insulting messages to their client, something Booba denied. 

The court said that each of the defendants "made a conscious choice to join in" with the cyberbullying.

The accused, aged between 20 and 49, received jail terms ranging from four to 18 months, some of which were suspended."

Expert Insights: An estimated 1 in 4 teens has experienced cyberbullying. Parents can help.; The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 23, 2024

JONATHAN PERLE, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Expert Insights: An estimated 1 in 4 teens has experienced cyberbullying. Parents can help.

"What are the outcomes of cyberbullying?

The residual effects of cyberbullying are often considered like those of traditional bullying. Related to the victim, cyberbullying can lead to:

• General life stress.

• Avoidance of school or social situations for fear of what others may have learned about them.

• Avoidance of online pleasurable activities (e.g., gaming, social media).

• Anxiety, whether general (e.g., “what if” thoughts) or specific (e.g., about particular events or people).

• Depression that could include changes in eating, sleeping or interests, as well as increases in withdrawal, irritability, and potentially suicidal thoughts or activities.

• Substance use to cope.

• Trauma that could develop over time from recurrent exposure to bullying and make the individual fearful of their safety at home, online, in social settings and/or at school.

Combined issues can not only result in a decline in self-esteem, but also reduced academic and social performance. Finally, some have suggested that being cyberbullied has the potential to increase the chances of traditional in-person bullying.

Despite the victim being the focus, cyberbullying can also lead to issues for the bully.

Depending on what they share and the outcomes, many schools have implemented bullying policies to hold children (and families) accountable. Similarly, many states have integrated cyberbullying laws that could result in formal charges being brought against a bully. To learn more about specific laws, visit StopBullying.gov/resources/laws."

Tennessee becomes the first state to protect musicians and other artists against AI; NPR, March 22, 2024

 Rebecca Rosman, NPR; Tennessee becomes the first state to protect musicians and other artists against AI

"Tennessee made history on Thursday, becoming the first U.S. state to sign off on legislation to protect musicians from unauthorized artificial intelligence impersonation.

"Tennessee (sic) is the music capital of the world, & we're leading the nation with historic protections for TN artists & songwriters against emerging AI technology," Gov. Bill Lee announced on social media.

The Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, or ELVIS Act, is an updated version of the state's old right of publicity law. While the old law protected an artist's name, photograph or likeness, the new legislation includes AI-specific protections."

‘Social media is like driving with no speed limits’: the US surgeon general fighting for youngsters’ happiness; The Guardian, March 19, 2024

Robert Booth, The Guardian; ‘Social media is like driving with no speed limits’: the US surgeon general fighting for youngsters’ happiness

"Last year, Murthy, who was first appointed to his role by Barack Obama and again by Joe Biden, issued a formal US-wide warning that social media presented “a profound risk of harm” to the mental health and wellbeing of children and adolescents. “We do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe” for them to use, it said.

“I’m still waiting for companies to show us data that tells us that their platforms are actually safe,” he added.

He compared tech companies to 20th-century car giants producing vehicles without seatbelts and airbags until legislation mandated it.

“What’s happening in social media is the equivalent of having children in cars that have no safety features and driving on roads with no speed limits,” he said. “No traffic lights and no rules whatsoever. And we’re telling them: ‘you know what, do your best – figure out how to manage it.’ It is insane if you think about it.”"

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt – a pocket full of poison; The Guardian, Book Review, March 21, 2024

 Sophie McBain, The Guardian, Book Review; The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt – a pocket full of poison

"The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes this mental health crisis has been driven by the mass adoption of smartphones, along with the advent of social media and addictive online gaming. He calls it “the Great Rewiring of Childhood”.

Children are spending ever less time socialising in person and ever more time glued to their screens, with girls most likely to be sucked into the self-esteem crushing vortex of social media, and boys more likely to become hooked on gaming and porn. Childhood is no longer “play-based”, it’s “phone-based”. Haidt believes that parents have become overprotective in the offline world, delaying the age at which children are deemed safe to play unsupervised or run errands alone, but do too little to protect children from online dangers. We have allowed the young too much freedom to roam the internet, where they are at risk of being bullied and harassed or encountering harmful content, from graphic violence to sites that glorify suicide and self-harm...

The Anxious Generation is nonetheless an urgent and essential read, and it ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media. As well as calling for school phone bans, Haidt argues that governments should legally assert that tech companies have a duty of care to young people, the age of internet adulthood should be raised to 16, and companies forced to institute proper age verification – all eminently sensible and long overdue interventions."

Canada moves to protect coral reef that scientists say ‘shouldn’t exist’; The Guardian, March 15, 2024

Leyland Cecco, The Guardian; Canada moves to protect coral reef that scientists say ‘shouldn’t exist’

"For generations, members of the Kitasoo Xai’xais and Heiltsuk First Nations, two communities off the Central Coast region of British Columbia, had noticed large groups of rockfish congregating in a fjord system.

In 2021, researchers and the First Nations, in collaboration with the Canadian government, deployed a remote-controlled submersible to probe the depths of the Finlayson Channel, about 300 miles north-west of Vancouver.

On the last of nearly 20 dives, the team made a startling discovery – one that has only recently been made public...

The discovery marks the latest in a string of instances in which Indigenous knowledge has directed researchers to areas of scientific or historic importance. More than a decade ago, Inuk oral historian Louie Kamookak compared Inuit stories with explorers’ logbooks and journals to help locate Sir John Franklin’s lost ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. In 2014, divers located the wreck of the Erebus in a spot Kamookak suggested they search, and using his directions found the Terror two years later."

Google hit with $270M fine in France as authority finds news publishers’ data was used for Gemini; TechCrunch, March 20, 2024

 Natasha Lomas, Romain Dillet , TechCrunch; Google hit with $270M fine in France as authority finds news publishers’ data was used for Gemini

"In a never-ending saga between Google and France’s competition authority over copyright protections for news snippets, the Autorité de la Concurrence announced a €250 million fine against the tech giant Wednesday (around $270 million at today’s exchange rate).

According to the competition watchdog, Google disregarded some of its previous commitments with news publishers. But the decision is especially notable because it drops something else that’s bang up-to-date — by latching onto Google’s use of news publishers’ content to train its generative AI model Bard/Gemini.

The competition authority has found fault with Google for failing to notify news publishers of this GenAI use of their copyrighted content. This is in light of earlier commitments Google made which are aimed at ensuring it undertakes fair payment talks with publishers over reuse of their content."

Public Libraries Saw 92 Percent Increase In Number of Titles Targeted for Censorship Over The Previous Year; American Library Association (ALA) Press Release, March 14, 2024

American Library Association (ALA) Press Release; Public Libraries Saw 92 Percent Increase In Number of Titles Targeted for Censorship Over The Previous Year

"The number of titles targeted for censorship surged 65 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching the highest levels ever documented by the American Library Association (ALA). The new numbers released today show efforts to censor 4,240 unique book titles* in schools and libraries. This tops the previous high from 2022, when 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship. 

ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom documented 1,247 demands to censor library books, materials, and resources in 2023. Four key trends emerged from the data gathered from 2023 censorship reports: 

• Pressure groups in 2023 focused on public libraries in addition to targeting school libraries. The number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92 percent over the previous year; school libraries saw an 11 percent increase.
• Groups and individuals demanding the censorship of multiple titles, often dozens or hundreds at a time, drove this surge.  
• Titles representing the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals made up 47 percent of those targeted in censorship attempts. 
• There were attempts to censor more than 100 titles in each of these 17 states: Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

“The reports from librarians and educators in the field make it clear that the organized campaigns to ban books aren’t over, and that we must all stand together to preserve our right to choose what we read,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Each demand to ban a book is a demand to deny each person’s constitutionally protected right to choose and read books that raise important issues and lift up the voices of those who are often silenced.  By joining initiatives like Unite Against Book Bans and other organizations that support libraries and schools, we can end this attack on essential community institutions and our civil liberties."

ALA will unveil its highly anticipated list of the top 10 most challenged books in the U.S. on Monday, April 8, which is Right to Read Day of National Library Week, along with its full State of America's Libraries Report.

"Every challenge to a library book is an attack on our freedom to read. The books being targeted again focus on LGBTQ+ and people of color. Our communities and our country are stronger because of diversity. Libraries that reflect their communities' diversity promote learning and empathy that some people want to hide or eliminate,” said ALA President Emily Drabinski. “Libraries are vital institutions to each and every community in this country, and library professionals, who have dedicated their lives to protecting our right to read, are facing threats to their employment and well-being." 

In response to the surge of book challenges and efforts to restrict access to information, ALA launched Unite Against Book Bans, a national initiative to empower readers everywhere to stand together in the fight against censorship. The coalition will mark its second anniversary during National Library Week.

For more information about ALA and its intellectual freedom efforts, visit www.ala.org. For a breakdown for censorship challenges by state visit this heat map."

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

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

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

Some of this year’s honorees include...

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

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

Amy B Wang

 and 

Patrick Svitek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

• Daniela Rusarchive page
•  and Gregory Monearchive page

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

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

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

No, not funding, although that is helpful.

We need time."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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