It’s a start, but I suspect it is no where near enough.

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/idaho-press/ai-electioneering-bill-heads-idaho-house/277-fc979ffd-54ba-4b36-b30c-1c9d421b1ad2

AI electioneering bill heads to Idaho House

… Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, and House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel, D-Boise, sponsored HB 426, which would require AI-generated messages that impersonate a candidate to include notification that it’s fake. Candidates who are impersonated in manipulated images, audio or videos may seek relief from the courts.

How powerful is Taylor Swift? She snaps her fingers and the White House wakes up!

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24052261/taylor-swift-ai-fakes-white-house-responds-legislation

White House calls for legislation to stop Taylor Swift AI fakes

Legislation needs to be passed to protect people from fake sexual images generated by AI, the White House said this afternoon. The statement, from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, came in response to a question about the spread of fake sexualized photos of Taylor Swift on social media this week.

(Related)

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/26/fbi_amazon_rekognition/

FBI recruits Amazon Rekognition AI to hunt down 'nudity, weapons, explosives'

… In its Agency Inventory of AI Use Cases, the DOJ lists the project, code-named Tyr, as being in the "initiation" phase for the FBI, which intends to customize and use the technology "to review and identify items containing nudity, weapons, explosives, and other identifying information."

A model for Colorado to follow?

https://www.pogowasright.org/california-privacy-protection-agency-launches-new-website-with-privacy-rights-resources/

California Privacy Protection Agency Launches New Website with Privacy Rights Resources

Kathryn M. Rattigan of Robinson & Cole LLP writes:

Last week, the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) launched a new website dedicated to providing resources to California residents about their privacy rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The purpose of this new website is to serve as a central resource for residents to understand their rights and the actions that they can take related to a variety of privacy issues.

One of the website’s features includes information on a resident’s rights under the CCPA and how to submit a complaint against a business. On the flip side, it also includes resources for businesses to understand their obligations under the CCPA.

Other resources include guidance on what to do if you are a victim of a data breach, identity theft, financial privacy, children’s privacy, and civil rights violations.

Read more at The National Law Review.

Almost unbelievable. Kids everywhere average almost two hours a day watching TikTok videos?

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/25/kids-spent-60-more-time-on-tiktok-than-youtube-last-year-20-tried-openais-chatgpt/

Kids spent 60% more time on TikTok than YouTube last year, 20% tried OpenAI’s ChatGPT

No wonder YouTube launched Shorts. A new study of children’s online habits found that children ages 4 through 18 spent a global average of 112 minutes daily on TikTok’s short video app in 2023, an increase from 107 minutes the year prior. And although YouTube remains the world’s biggest streaming app among this demographic, kids spent 60% more time on TikTok last year. The data, from a new study on kids’ digital media, also examined kids’ use of novel technologies like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Perspective. (Positive roles for AI)

https://www.fastcompany.com/91015525/deepak-chopra-explains-how-to-make-ai-your-guru

Deepak Chopra explains how to make AI your guru

Deepak Chopra writes: “What excites me the most is AI’s potential for helping a person reach the level of deep wisdom that exists inside human awareness.”

(Related) Any large organization could use a concierge.

https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2024/01/pentagons-it-agency-crafting-its-very-own-ai-chatbot/393638/

The Pentagon’s IT agency is crafting its very own AI-chatbot

… The Defense Information Systems Agency is developing “Concierge AI” technology that can take data from multiple sources, plug it into a model or database, “and then have a large language model bang against that database and present the user with answers,” Steve Wallace, the agency’s chief technology officer and head of emerging technologies, said Thursday.

It complicates things, but not that much.

https://www.wcvb.com/article/dog-found-safe-after-more-than-a-week-in-the-bitter-col1/46520921

Ring changes how police can access your door camera video

Ring will stop allowing police departments to request doorbell camera footage from users, marking an end to a feature that has drawn criticism from privacy advocates.

Ring said it will sunset the "Request for Assistance" tool, which allows police departments and other public safety agencies to request and receive video captured by the doorbell cameras through Ring’s Neighbors app.

… WCVB legal analyst Greg Henning says the new policy could slow down some investigations.

"They'll need to go to those houses, knock on the doors and determine if they have Ring cameras with their own eyes," Henning said.

"They can still go knock on doors," Henning said. "But they cannot use the app to find and locate and contact immediately and directly the users that have ring cameras."

I had not considered this. Are any answers provided (eg filling out a subscription form) private information?

https://www.pogowasright.org/are-test-answers-personal-data/

Are Test Answers Personal Data?

Odia Kagan of FoxRothschild writes:

Are test questions and answers personal data that needs to be provided pursuant to an access request?

A German court recently weighed in, providing some good insight regarding both GDPR and U.S. state data privacy laws.

Some key takeaways:

• Answers given by a student in a test could be considered personal data. Test questions, however, cannot be considered personal data.

• The argument the test questions are strictly linked to the answers given by the plaintiff was also not accepted by the court, which held that the questions do not reveal anything about the level of knowledge of the plaintiff and thus do not constitute personal data.

• Access requests under Article 15 GDPR serve the purpose of making data subjects aware of the processing of their personal data and to verify the legality of processing. It is therefore irrelevant that the plaintiff needed access to the test questions for the purpose of interpreting the test result because he does not have a right to access under the GDPR for such purpose.

• Test questions may constitute trade secrets.

That ruling makes sense. Entities have a legitimate interest in protecting the security of test questions. But could there come at time when — or has it come already — when test questions might contain personal information on a student?

Is there an antidote? Should all social media be banned?

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/24/new-york-city-social-media-environmental-toxin

NYC first to designate social media as environmental toxin

New York City declared Wednesday that it's the first city to issue an advisory officially designating social media as an environmental toxin.

Driving the news: In response to the danger social media poses to the mental health of young people, the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene issued an advisory identifying unrestricted access to and use of social media as a public health hazard.

Even my AI is concerned.

https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-protection/gdpr-2-0-new-comprehensive-ai-regulations-from-the-eu/

GDPR 2.0? New Comprehensive AI Regulations From the EU

… When the EU first introduced GDPR five years ago, the world went through a seismic shift as organizations scrambled to ensure they updated their privacy notice, ensuring transparency on how they govern their data and everything in between. Since then, GDPR has accrued over $4 billion in fines.

With GDPR setting the standard of what data privacy and regulations should look like, the EU sets out to once again change the way we view regulations. Many are hailing this historical moment as a right step in the right direction, with the regulations outlining what tech companies that make AI will have to show or risk incurring fines of up to 7% of their global sales (GDPR fines are up to 4%.)

And so it begins… Will everyone recognize a bogus message?

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/fake-joe-biden-robocall-tells-new-hampshire-democrats-not-vote-tuesday-rcna134984

Fake Joe Biden robocall tells New Hampshire Democrats not to vote Tuesday

The call, an apparent imitation or digital manipulation of the president's voice, says, "Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again."

A (near) future battlefield…

https://www.bespacific.com/facial-recognition-technology-current-capabilities-future-prospects-and-governance/

Facial Recognition Technology Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance

National Academies: “Advances in Facial Recognition Technology Have Outpaced Laws, Regulations; New Report Recommends Federal Government Take Action on Privacy, Equity, and Civil Liberties Concerns. Some uses of facial recognition technology raise significant concerns that merit a swift government response, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report recommends consideration of federal legislation and an executive order, as well as attention from courts, the private sector, civil society organizations, and other organizations that work with facial recognition technology, and provides guidance for the technology’s responsible development and deployment. A powerful and increasingly used tool, facial recognition technology is useful for a large range of identity verification and identification applications, offering capabilities for checking whether someone is who they say they are and identifying a person in an image. Systems utilize trained artificial intelligence models to extract facial features and create a biometric template from an image, and compare the features in the template to the features of another image or set of images to produce a similarity score. The accuracy and speed of these systems have advanced rapidly in the last decade with the adoption of deep neural network-based machine learning, the report says. With few exceptions, the U.S. does not currently have authoritative guidance, regulations, or laws to adequately address issues related to facial recognition technology use, the report finds. It also notes that facial recognition technology can interfere with and substantially affect the values embodied in U.S. privacy, civil liberties, and human rights commitments — even if it does not necessarily violate rights and obligations included in statutes or constitutional provisions.”

I’m betting this is useful for non-lawyers too. (Thinking, I mean.)

https://www.bespacific.com/introducing-ai-prompt-worksheets-for-the-legal-profession/

Introducing AI Prompt Worksheets for the Legal Profession

Via LLRX – Introducing AI Prompt Worksheets for the Legal Profession – Jennifer (Greig) Wondracek identified that her AI results are much better when she stops and thinks them through, providing a high level of detail and a good explanation of what she want the AI system to produce. So, good law librarian that she is, she created a new form of plan for those who are learning to draft a prompt. And the result is the AI prompt worksheets she shares in this article.

Perspective.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/tech/ai-labor-market-mit-study/index.html

We may not lose our jobs to robots so quickly, MIT study finds

As anxiety about artificial intelligence tools putting workers out of jobs reaches a global fever pitch, new research suggests that the economy isn’t ready for machines to put most humans out of work.

The fresh research finds that the impact of AI on the labor market will likely have a much slower adoption than some had previously feared as the AI revolution continues to dominate headlines. This carries hopeful implications for policymakers currently looking at ways to offset the worst of the labor market impacts linked to the recent rise of AI.

In a study published Monday, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab sought to quantify the question of not just will AI automate human jobs, but when this could happen. Researchers ended up finding that a vast majority of jobs previously identified as vulnerable to AI are not economically beneficial for employers to automate at this time.

Tools & Techniques. (I use Feedly myself.)

https://www.bespacific.com/the-top-five-rss-readers-for-keeping-up-with-your-news-feeds/

The top five RSS readers for keeping up with your news feeds

The Verge: “When you want to check out your favorite news sites or other online information sources, you can take the time to go directly to each site, clog your email with newsletters and announcements, check the updates on your favorite social media app(s) — or you can use an RSS feed reader. RSS readers allow you to collect the articles of specific sources in one app, making it a lot easier to find the content you’re interested in without crawling through a lot of noise. RSS (which may stand for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or one of several other possibilities — nobody seems sure) has been around a while, having been first developed in 1999, although it wasn’t more widely adopted until a few years later. Since then, the idea of using feeds has risen and fallen in popularity (it didn’t help when Google, true to its habit of creating and killing apps, sunset its own popular Reader in 2013 ), but RSS has never actually gone away. Plenty of websites continue to maintain RSS feeds, and there are a wide range of RSS apps still available for those who want to use them. I’ve tried out a few, and these are the five that I thought worked best. Each of these works either via an online app or has apps for all the major formats: macOS, iOS, Windows, and Android. With one exception, they all have a free version, too.”

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/rss-anything/

RSS Anything

Transform any old website with a list of links into an RSS Feed. Enter a URL – Get feed URL.

When you can see no regular/traditional way forward, anything that offers even a minuscule chance of success is worth a try. (If it’s dumb but it works, it ain’t dumb!)

https://www.wired.com/story/parabon-nanolabs-dna-face-models-police-facial-recognition/

Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face—and Tried to Run Facial Recognition on It

In 2017, detectives at the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department working a cold case got an idea, one that might help them finally get a lead on the murder of Maria Jane Weidhofer. Officers had found Weidhofer, dead and sexually assaulted, at Berkeley, California’s Tilden Regional Park in 1990. Nearly 30 years later, the department sent genetic information collected at the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs—a company that says it can turn DNA into a face.

Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect’s DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence.

The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn’t a photograph. It was a 3D rendering that bridges the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction; a representation of how the company’s algorithm predicted a person could look given genetic attributes found in the DNA sample.

The face of the murderer, the company predicted, was male. He had fair skin, brown eyes and hair, no freckles, and bushy eyebrows. A forensic artist employed by the company photoshopped a nondescript, close-cropped haircut onto the man and gave him a mustache—an artistic addition informed by a witness description and not the DNA sample.

In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic—and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software.

If your AI decides to go bad?

https://flore.unifi.it/handle/2158/1348176

Artificial Intelligence, Criminal Liability for

The most recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have resulted in the creation of systems that may function in an unforeseen, autonomous, and unsupervised manner. Machine learning techniques enable algorithms to draw lessons from their past actions and teach themselves new behavioral patterns. This might trigger algorithmic wrongdoing without any human involvement.

When you interact with my AI without even knowing it…

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693396

Wearable AI, Bystander Notice, and the Question of Privacy Frictions

With the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and the widespread availability of Large Language Models (LLMs), wearable AI devices and design for new hardware have surged like never before. While wearable AI was traditionally marketed for health and fitness purposes, many of the emerging products are multifunctional. These features can jeopardize the privacy of bystanders in addition to the consumers. Product designers are thus facing a dilemma: ensuring third party privacy or guaranteeing convenience and a user-friendly design. This essay argues for mandating “privacy frictions” to function as both bystander notice and consent for wearable AI devices with audiovisual features. Privacy frictions are tangible measures that can put the reasonable bystander on notice. While this human-centered privacy design may impact the users’ experience, it ensures a future where privacy continues to be relevant and valued.

Perspective.

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/86900

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the Law

This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.

Can you draw a definitive conclusion in an evolving field?

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Asad-Abbas-58/publication/377396370_Ethical_Considerations_in_AI_and_Machine_Learning/links/65a4104340ce1c5902de0d4c/Ethical-Considerations-in-AI-and-Machine-Learning.pdf

Ethical Considerations in AI and Machine Learning

This research paper delves into the intricate ethical considerations permeating the dynamic landscape of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). As these technologies have woven themselves into the fabric of society, their ethical implications have become increasingly pronounced. The paper offers a comprehensive exploration of the critical ethical dimensions inherent to AI and ML, including fairness, transparency, accountability, and data privacy. It delves into the multifaceted challenges that arise, such as algorithmic bias, job displacement, and autonomous decision-making, and examines emerging technologies and regulatory frameworks designed to address these concerns. By scrutinizing AI ethics within the context of specific domains like healthcare and education and anticipating future trends and challenges, this paper underscores the ongoing imperative of ethical considerations in the ever-evolving landscape of AI and ML. It calls upon researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders to embrace interdisciplinary collaboration and adhere to the principles of transparency and accountability, in order to steer the trajectory of AI and ML towards ethical, responsible, and beneficial outcomes.