I’m sure there is no possible scenario that justifies paying the ransom…

https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/patchwork-of-us-state-regulations-becomes-more-complex-as-florida-north-carolina-ban-ransomware-payments/

Patchwork of US State Regulations Becomes More Complex as Florida, North Carolina Ban Ransomware Payments

The issue of banning ransomware payments has been contentious and hotly debated in governments throughout the world in the last few years, particularly as the problem seemed to grow out of control during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the US, the federal government has come down on the side of allowing payments but adding increasingly stringent incident reporting requirements to get law enforcement involved as fast as possible.

As with the issue of data privacy regulations, some states have decided to take their own approach. Pennsylvania was the first in January of this year, with the state Senate passing a ban that prohibits agencies or organizations that receive taxpayer funds from making ransomware payments (the bill remains before the state House awaiting a vote). North Carolina added a comprehensive ban on local and state agency ransomware payments in May, followed by a similar measure in Florida in July. New York, Texas, Arizona and New Jersey have also had bills of this nature recently come up for consideration.

Thus far the states are not attempting to compel private organizations to reject ransomware payments; the focus is on government agencies in the states that have passed such laws. However, at least one of the bills under consideration (in New York) would extend these rules to non-government entities.

Consider how easy it is to get your email address.

https://www.makeuseof.com/ways-scammers-use-email-address/

5 Ways Scammers Can Use Your Email Address Against You

Who will be the first AI ethicist?

https://thenextweb.com/news/critical-review-eus-ethics-guidelines-for-trustworthy-ai

A critical review of the EU’s ‘Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI’

Europe has some of the most progressive, human-centric artificial intelligence governance policies in the world. Compared to the heavy-handed government oversight in China or the Wild West-style anything goes approach in the US, the EU’s strategy is designed to stoke academic and corporate innovation while also protecting private citizens from harm and overreach. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.

Would the same argument apply to any AI trained on Copyrighted or Patented data?

https://petapixel.com/2022/08/19/ai-image-generators-could-be-the-next-frontier-of-photo-copyright-theft/

AI Image Generators Could Be the Next Frontier of Photo Copyright Theft

Artificial intelligence-powered (AI) image generators have exploded in popularity and apps like DALL-E, Midjourney, and more recently Stable Diffusion are exciting and tantalizing technology enthusiasts.

To train these systems, each AI tool is fed millions of images. DALL-E 2, for example, was trained on approximately 650 million image-text pairs that its creator, OpenAI, scraped from the internet.

Now, the companies behind these technologies haven’t said as much, but to train these machines it doesn’t seem likely that millions of copyrighted images weren’t used to inform the AI’s learning.

… It seems very doubtful that companies like OpenAI have only scraped public domain and creative commons images into the algorithm. More likely, the process involves image-text pairing from Google searches. That means photographers’ images have presumably been used in a way that the owners never intended or consented to.