I thought we were past this stupidity.
Misinformation expert cites non-existent sources in Minnesota deep fake case
A leading misinformation expert is being accused of citing non-existent sources to defend Minnesota’s new law banning election misinformation.
Professor Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, is “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology,” according to his Stanford biography.
At the behest of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hancock recently submitted an affidavit supporting new legislation that bans the use of so-called “deep fake” technology to influence an election. The law is being challenged in federal court by a conservative YouTuber and Republican state Rep. Mary Franson of Alexandria for violating First Amendment free speech protections.
Hancock’s expert declaration in support of the deep fake law cites numerous academic works. But several of those sources do not appear to exist, and the lawyers challenging the law say they appear to have been made up by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT.
Something else to worry about…
The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone
In September, the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) signed a two-million-dollar contract with Paragon, an Israeli firm whose spyware product Graphite focusses on breaching encrypted-messaging applications such as Telegram and Signal. Wired first reported that the technology was acquired by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—an agency within D.H.S. that will soon be involved in executing the Trump Administration’s promises of mass deportations and crackdowns on border crossings. A source at Paragon told me that the deal followed a vetting process, during which the company was able to demonstrate that it had robust tools to prevent other countries that purchase its spyware from hacking Americans—but that wouldn’t limit the U.S. government’s ability to target its own citizens. The technology is part of a booming multibillion-dollar market for intrusive phone-hacking software that is making government surveillance increasingly cheap and accessible. In recent years, a number of Western democracies have been roiled by controversies in which spyware has been used, apparently by defense and intelligence agencies, to target opposition politicians, journalists, and apolitical civilians caught up in Orwellian surveillance dragnets. Now Donald Trump and incoming members of his Administration will decide whether to curtail or expand the U.S. government’s use of this kind of technology. Privacy advocates have been in a state of high alarm about the colliding political and technological trend lines. “It’s just so evident—the impending disaster,” Emily Tucker, the executive director at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, told me. “You may believe yourself not to be in one of the vulnerable categories, but you won’t know if you’ve ended up on a list for some reason or your loved ones have. Every single person should be worried.”
(Related)
Secret Service Tracking People’s Locations without Warrant
This feels important:
The Secret Service has used a technology called Locate X which uses location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on phones. Because users agreed to an opaque terms of service page, the Secret Service believes it doesn’t need a warrant.
Could be useful.
OpenScholar: The open-source A.I. that’s outperforming GPT-4o in scientific research
Scientists are drowning in data. With millions of research papers published every year, even the most dedicated experts struggle to stay updated on the latest findings in their fields.
A new artificial intelligence system, called OpenScholar, is promising to rewrite the rules for how researchers access, evaluate, and synthesize scientific literature. Built by the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the University of Washington, OpenScholar combines cutting-edge retrieval systems with a fine-tuned language model to deliver citation-backed, comprehensive answers to complex research questions.
“Scientific progress depends on researchers’ ability to synthesize the growing body of literature,” the OpenScholar researchers wrote in their paper. But that ability is increasingly constrained by the sheer volume of information. OpenScholar, they argue, offers a path forward—one that not only helps researchers navigate the deluge of papers but also challenges the dominance of proprietary AI systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4o.
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