#USA #News #LocalNews #Journalism: "Now, a new bill in Congress aims to help small struggling news outlets survive these financial headwinds. The Community News and Small Business Support Act, introduced by Rep. Claudia Tenney and co-sponsored by Rep. Suzan DelBene, is a bi-partisan bill (PDF) that would give tax credits to small businesses that advertise in local media and a payroll tax credit to local news outlets that employ reporters in their communities. According to the Rebuild Local News coalition, the payroll credit could provide newsrooms with as much as $85,000 over the course of five years for each full-time local journalist they employ."
https://freedom.press/news/lets-shore-up-funding-for-local-news/
#AI #Journalism #News #Media: "As it turns out, research suggests that large language models, like the one that powers ChatGPT, quickly collapse when the data they are trained on is created by other AIs instead of original material from humans. Other research found that without fresh data, an autophagous loop is created, doomed to a progressive decline in the quality of content. One researcher said “we’re about to fill the internet with blah”. Media organisations using AI to generate a huge amount of content are accelerating the problem. But maybe this is cause for a dark optimism; rampant AI generated content could seed its own destruction.
AI in the media doesn’t have to be bad news. There are other AI applications that could benefit the public. For example, it can improve accessibility by helping with tasks such as transcribing audio content, generating image descriptions, or facilitating text-to-speech delivery. These are genuinely exciting applications."
#Copyright #Emojis #IP: "Just… incredible. Now, my first reaction to this is that using the emoji and stickers and whatnot in the book seems like a very clear fair use situation. But… that requires a publisher willing to take up the fight (and an insurance company behind the publisher willing to finance that fight). And, that often doesn’t happen. Publishers are notoriously averse to supporting fair use, because they don’t want to get sued.
But, really, this just ends up highlighting (once again) the absolute ridiculousness of copyright in the modern world. No one in their right mind would think that a book about emoji is somehow harming the market for whatever emoji or stickers the professor wished to include. Yet, due to the nature of copyright, here we are. With an academic book about emoji that can’t even include the emoji being spoken about."
#AI #USA #Pentagon #SiliconValley #CyberWar: "Three factors are driving that shift: China’s rapid development of advanced weapons systems that negate US defences, the war in Ukraine which has highlighted the advantages of integrating commercial tech into a nation’s military and the startling advances in AI.
For all these reasons, the US government has become a far more motivated customer, while a downturn in deals and valuations in Silicon Valley has made the public defence sector seem like a stable and reliable option for start-ups.
The whiff of opportunity has spurred a gold rush among investors in California, who are piling billions of dollars into defence and weapons technology start-ups. Venture capital in the sector has doubled from around $16bn in 2019 to $33bn in 2022, PitchBook data shows."
https://www.ft.com/content/2ed278cc-6c3f-4569-b73c-64ad378f3ea8
#Neoliberalism #USA #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Inequality: "Among the debits: deregulation, which was supposed to spur competition, has not slowed the trend toward monopoly. Despite the Telecommunications Act, just three companies—Verizon, T-Mobile, and A.T. & T.—provide ninety-nine per cent of wireless service. Six companies dominate the media in the United States: Comcast, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, the Fox Corporation, and Sony. Book publishing in the United States is dominated by the so-called Big Five: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster. The music industry is dominated by just three corporate players: the Universal, Sony, and Warner music divisions.
The big fish, with their piles of capital, keep swallowing up the little fish. The Big Five would now be the Big Four if Penguin Random House’s deal to acquire Simon & Schuster had not been ruled a violation of antitrust law last fall. Of the twelve most valuable companies in the world, eight of which are tech businesses, all are monopolies or near-monopolies."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/24/the-rise-and-fall-of-neoliberalism
#AI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #Writing: "ChatGPT produces weaker writing when it hasn’t received instructions about audience, purpose, and context, and must “decide” for itself what they are. Its writing improves as a user gives it more information about who it’s writing for, why and in what situation. But as these elements get more specific, it becomes harder to tell ChatGPT enough for it to generate an adequately tailored response.
The chatbot can write passable essays for standardized tests because the purpose and context are so general — they need to be for humans to produce texts that can be compared and ranked in an equitable way.
But in a highly specific context like a novel or a letter, ChatGPT can’t know enough to create sufficient nuance. Writing a prompt with all relevant information would be nearly impossible, and suboptimal for a technology meant to optimize our time. For creative, expressive, or exploratory writing tasks, using ChatGPT is like supervising a bumbling assistant who needs painfully detailed, step-by-step instructions that take more effort to explain than to simply do the work yourself."
https://www.noemamag.com/what-ai-teaches-us-about-good-writing/
#USA #AI #AIRegulation #GenerativeAI: "Indeed, the US government’s record to date on AI has mostly involved vague calls for “continued United States leadership in artificial intelligence research and development” or “adoption of artificial intelligence technologies in the Federal Government,” which is fine, but not exactly concrete policy.
That said, we probably are going to see more specific action soon given the unprecedented degree of public attention and number of congressional hearings devoted to AI. AI companies themselves are actively working on self-regulation in the hope of setting the tone for regulation by others. That — plus the sheer importance of an emerging technology like AI — makes it worth digging a little deeper into what action in DC might involve.
You can break most of the ideas circulating into one of four rough categories:
Rules: New regulations and laws for individuals and companies training AI models, building or selling chips used for AI training, and/or using AI models in their business
Institutions: New government agencies or international organizations that can implement and enforce these new regulations and laws
Money: Additional funding for research, either to expand AI capabilities or to ensure safety
People: Expanded high-skilled immigration and increased education funding to build out a workforce that can build and control AI"
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23775650/ai-regulation-openai-gpt-anthropic-midjourney-stable
#EU #DSA #Meta #SocialMedia #Transparency: "We wanted to dig into these announcements and how they stack up against the spirit of these new rules and against best practices and expectations for platform accountability and responsible AI. Here we draw on our research on AI transparency, YouTube’s User Controls efficiency, and our best practice guide towards Responsible Recommending.
In our research on AI Transparency in Practice, we revealed that one of the reasons why there is little intrinsic motivation to implement a useful level of transparency in AI systems is the lack of external pressure, e.g. the lack of legal transparency requirements, or rather the perception of a lack. “Compliance with legal frameworks as well as audits'' were therefore the least cited motivations for developers and deployers of AI systems to implement transparency. This seems to be changing with the DSA and other regulatory requirements on the horizon."
#SocialMedia #Twitter #Copyright #DMCA #Anonymity: "When a Twitter user posted copyrighted photos for the purpose of criticizing a private-equity billionaire, Twitter stepped in to challenge a DMCA subpoena that aimed to strip that person of their anonymity. A new DMCA subpoena targeting three Twitter users, including one who isn't anonymous at all, is certainly controversial. The demands listed in the subpoena are nothing short of extraordinary."
https://torrentfreak.com/twitter-x-might-have-a-new-dmca-subpoena-controversy-on-its-hands-230805/
#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #Twitter: "Social media will survive. Something will come out of this moment. But a LOT of money is going to be wasted relearning the lessons from the last 20 years. When Alice and I were playing around with the concept of “context collapse,” I never realized just how relevant it would continue to be. And when I was riffing about network formation back in the days of Orkut, I never thought that we would need to relearn this over and over again. Rather than being bitter as I shake my head like an old person, I’m going to enjoy my popcorn."
https://zephoria.medium.com/dear-alt-twitter-designers-its-about-the-network-3d6f7e8714dd
#Marxism #France #Marx: "Daniel Bensaïd once remarked that the age of the “master thinker” in European Marxism, represented by figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre or Georg Lukács, had passed: “And this is rather a good thing — a sign of the democratization of intellectual life and theoretical debate.” Yet Bensaïd himself clearly stands out as one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the past generation.
Before his death in 2010, Bensaïd published an extraordinary sequence of books and essays exploring the main political and theoretical questions facing Marxism today. He did so in a French intellectual context where bitter hostility to Marxist ideas had become the norm, often expressed by veterans of 1968 who, unlike Bensaïd, had reneged on their previous commitments.
Some of Bensaïd’s work has been translated into English, notably Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique and his memoir, An Impatient Life. However, most of his writings remain inaccessible to those who cannot read French. This essay gives a brief overview of the main themes articulated by Bensaïd as he sought to renovate Marxist theory so that it could process the defeats and disappointments of the last century and supply us with an intellectual road map for the present."
https://jacobin.com/2023/07/daniel-bensaid-marxism-history-theory-time-class
#SelfDrivingCars #AutonomousVehicles #Surveillance #Privacy: "It is imperative that as more self-driving cars occupy our city streets, collecting vast quantities of data, that we have strong privacy laws that address both the personal data that the cars process and police access to that data. We also need a better understanding of how much footage police request access to and when, if ever, companies that operate autonomous vehicles will push back against overly broad requests. It is also essential that we learn whether police are given historic footage or real-time live access to peer through the cameras on the vehicles.
In the coming years, cities and regulators will have to have difficult choices when it comes to how autonomous vehicles should be able to safely operate. It is imperative that, in addition to pedestrians and driver safety, regulators consider the civil liberties implications for the tremendous amount of data and footage collected by these self-driving cars."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/impending-privacy-threat-self-driving-cars
#China #PoliceState #Dictatorship: "China is proposing to restrict internet access to minors and children. The move is intended to curb internet addiction.
Tech sector regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China said on Wednesday that people under 18 will not be allowed to access the internet via a mobile device between 10pm and 6am each day.
The regulator will introduce a graduated system where young people have different amounts of internet access depending on their age. Those under eight years old will be limited to 40 minutes per day. Those age between 16 and 18 will have a maximum of two hours access per day.
Additionally, content must be age-appropriate. And youngsters will be reminded to take breaks every 30 minutes."
https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/china-internet-access-minors-1235685825/
#AI #GenerativeAI #AGI #Politics #Democracy: "The success and widespread deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) have raised awareness of the technology’s economic, social, and political consequences. Each new step in the development and application of AI is accompanied by speculations about a supposedly imminent but largely fictional artificial general intelligence (AGI) with (super-)human capacities, as seen in the unfolding discourse about capabilities and impact of large language models (LLMs) in the wake of ChatGPT. These far-reaching expectations lead to a discussion on the societal and political impact of AI that is largely dominated by unfocused fears and enthusiasms. In contrast, this article provides a framework for a more focused and productive analysis and discussion of AI’s likely impact on one specific social field: democracy. First, it is necessary to be clear about the workings of AI. This means differentiating between what is at present a largely imaginary AGI and narrow artificial intelligence focused on solving specific tasks. This distinction allows for a critical discussion of how AI affects different aspects of democracy, including its effects on the conditions of self-rule and people’s opportunities to exercise it, equality, the institution of elections, and competition between democratic and autocratic systems of government. This article shows that the consequences of today’s AI are more specific for democracy than broad speculation about AGI capabilities implies. Focusing on these specific aspects will account for actual threats and opportunities and thus allow for better monitoring of AI’s impact on democracy in an interdisciplinary effort by computer and social scientists."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051231186353#bibr59-20563051231186353
#Google #DRM #OpenWeb: "Now, I’ve seen some conspiracy theories making the rounds about this, trying to argue that it’s not just a terrible, awful, dangerous, problematic idea, but that there are truly nefarious (think: government surveillance) reasons behind all this. And that’s… nonsense.
But it is bad. It’s very clearly opposed to the principles of an open web, the kind of thing that Google used to be at the forefront of fighting for. But, of course, as companies get older and lose that innovative edge, they look to extract more value out of users. And that leads down this path.
And, yes, there are real concerns about abuse that WEI claims to be addressing. As Cory discussed about Microsoft’s original plan 20 years ago, they’re presenting new capabilities that can be used to stop some very problematic things. But… the way that it’s being done fundamentally restructures the open internet to something that is not the same at all."
#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #SBF "The US government dropped the campaign finance charge against Sam Bankman-Fried this week, after The Bahamas informed them they had not intended to extradite him on that charge.
The “SBF is going to walk” crowd of conspiracy theorists — who broadly think that SBF’s past political donations to Democrats have bought him a ticket out of any convictions for his alleged crimes — immediately went full throttle, claiming this was only the beginning as the criminal justice system lets SBF get away with it. Never mind that Sam Bankman-Fried’s political donations were actually pretty evenly distributed across the political spectrum1 — he was just a lot louder about the donations to the Dems, and the people advancing these theories tend to be folks on the right, such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Glenn Greenwald.
The truth is a bit less salacious, I think. The United States has to honor its treaty obligations to other countries, and Sam Bankman-Fried still has twelve other charges left to wiggle out of. As Ken White (aka Popehat) put it in a recent episode of his Serious Troublepodcast, The Bahamas’ objection to the charge is “like saying ‘okay, you can shoot him, but you can only have eight bullets, not nine’”. Getting the charge dismissed is a win for SBF, no doubt, but he’s got a hell of a lot more battles left to fight."
https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/issue-35-pondering-my-orb
#China #USA #TradeWar #Protectionism: "The Chinese economy’s affliction with economic long COVID presents an opportunity for U.S. policymakers to change strategy. Instead of trying to contain China’s growth at great cost to their own economy, American leaders can let Xi do their work for them and position their country as a better alternative—and as a welcoming destination for Chinese economic assets of all kinds. Even knowledgeable officials tend to overlook how well this strategy served the United States in facing down systemic rivals in the twentieth century. It is often forgotten that it was far from evident during the Great Depression that the U.S. economy could outperform fascist regimes in Europe, and similar uncertainty about relative growth performance recurred throughout much of the Cold War. Despite that uncertainty, the United States emerged victorious in part because it maintained an open door for people and capital, siphoning off talent and investment and, ultimately, turning autocratic regimes’ own economic controls against them. As the CCP struggles with its self-afflicted economic long COVID, that strategy is worth reviving today."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/end-china-economic-miracle-beijing-washington
#Cybersecurity #Tesla #Hacking: "A group of researchers said they have found a way to hack the hardware underpinning Tesla’s infotainment system, allowing them to get what normally would be paid upgrades — such as heated rear seats — for free.
By doing this, the researchers essentially found a way to jailbreak the car. This may also give owners the ability to enable the self-driving and navigation system in regions where it’s normally not available, the researchers told TechCrunch, though they admitted that they haven’t tested these capabilities yet, as that would require more reverse engineering.
The researchers will present their research next week at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas."
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Productivity #Inequality #Unemployment: "I don’t think AI is at the point where it can be trusted on its own, but I think it’s a very powerful tool for doing a wide class of work that involves a lot of routine. Somebody trained ChatGPT on my data, and [I tested it] to see how well it did in answering journalist questions. I made up the questions, and I reviewed the answers. And I thought on half the questions, it did perfectly reasonably. And on three, it was totally wrong. So I think my view is: it’s not going to be unleashed without a lot of human interaction. You’re going to have to check it—not only the quality of the answer [but also] the bias and whether it’s gone down a rabbit hole and produced made-up references.
What about the possibility of AI creating jobs? Would that be enough to make up for some of the jobs that will disappear in the new AI era?
No, I don’t think so. I think it’s going to create a demand for different skills. So, for instance, AI is very much like a black box. And by that I mean even the people who create it don’t understand exactly how it’s functioning. So at least some people have speculated that managing an AI may require more linguistic humanities skills than mathematical skills. And it may create a change in the kinds of skills that are valuable in the labor market. I see it as, at least in many areas, increasing productivity enough that the demand for labor in those areas will go down. There will be jobs created, but my judgment is that there will be more jobs lost."
#Cybersecurity #Microsoft #Windows #Apple #Encryption: "In her nearly 25-year career in cybersecurity, Snyder was part of a group of people who pushed Microsoft in the early days of the mainstream internet to finally take cybersecurity seriously by embracing the notion that security needed to be part of the software development cycle — not bolted on afterward — and played a significant role in developing the first versions of the Windows operating systems that implemented that idea. She also helped convince the company that outside researchers, who were keen on pointing out flaws in Microsoft’s products, were actually allies, not enemies.
Having helped secure Windows, the operating system used by hundreds of millions of people in the world — and after a stint at another security consultancy and leading Mozilla’s security team at a time when users considered Firefox the secure alternative to Internet Explorer — Snyder moved to Microsoft’s then-biggest competitor.
In Cupertino, she managed Apple’s privacy and security teams. There, as part of a project she called “Apple Doesn’t Have Your Data,” she successfully lobbied and worked on enabling encryption by default in all Apple-made computers, iPhones and iPads, and iMessage, helping lay the foundations for the company’s reputation as a cybersecurity giant."
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/04/window-snyder-cybersecurity-trailblazer/