Disinformation from a “trusted source?” Who should we counter with? Will Rogers? Daffy Duck?
The far right is using AI to sell Hitler to a new generation
Videos of the Nazi leader speaking in English are reaching millions online. Experts fear they are fueling a surge of antisemitism.
Free is good.
Generative AI and LLMs for Dummies
Maury Nichols tells me The ABA has issued a broad, far-reaching Opinion on the use of AI in the legal profession.
Perspective.
The Digitalist Papers (on AI and Democracy in America) Now Out from Stanford
… Here's a full list, with links:
Erik Brynjolfsson, Alex Pentland, Nathaniel Persily, Condoleezza Rice, and Angela Aristidou, Introduction: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America
Lawrence Lessig, Protected Democracy
Divya Siddarth, Saffron Huang, and Audrey Tang, A Vision of Democratic AI
Lily Tsai and Sandy Pentland, Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation
Sarah Friar and Laura Bisesto, The Potential for AI to Restore Local Community Connectedness, the Bedrock of a Healthy Democracy
Jennifer Pahlka, AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity
Eric Schmidt, Democracy 2.0
John Cochrane, AI, Society and Democracy: Just Relax
Nathaniel Persily, Misunderstanding AI's Democracy Problem
Eugene Volokh, Generative AI and Political Power
Mona Hamdy, Johnnie Moore, and E. Glen Weyl, Techno-Ideologies of the Twenty-First Century
Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato, Informational GPS
James Manyika, Getting AI Right: A 2050 Thought Experiment
If I can’t find an answer, I’ll just make one up.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03137-3
Bigger AI chatbots more inclined to spew nonsense — and people don't always realize
Artificial-intelligence models are improving overall but are more likely to answer every question, leading to wrong answers.
Did they ask an AI about the guidelines?
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/25/doj_ai_compliance_guidance_update/
If your AI does the crime, you'll do the time, warns DoJ
If juggling the extreme cost and hazy ROI of AI weren't enough of a headache, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) now expects enterprise compliance officers to start weighing the tech's potential for harm – or risk stiff fines if it breaks the law.
Nicole Argentieri, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for the DoJ's criminal division, discussed the changes made to the Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Program (ECCP) guidelines [PDF] in an address to the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics earlier this week.
The guidelines detail how DoJ prosecutors should approach criminal investigations and evaluate service providers' effectiveness at preventing criminal behavior. As such, the ECCP effectively functions as a guide for compliance officers looking to avoid the DoJ's ire.
It’s not AI, just raw data.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/24/24252235/police-unlock-phone-password-face-id-apple-wallet-id
Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops
You should never voluntarily hand your phone to a police officer.
It’s going to become increasingly tempting for the cops to ask and for you to comply, especially as more and more states adopt digital ID systems that allow driver’s licenses and state IDs to be added to Apple Wallet on iOS and Google Wallet on Android. Californians can now add their driver’s licenses and state IDs to their iPhones and Apple Watches in addition to Android devices, making the state one of seven — alongside Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Hawaii, and Ohio — to allow storing digital IDs through Apple’s system.
These particular digital IDs are so far pretty limited. California’s are for use at “select TSA checkpoints” and participating businesses, for instance — they aren’t meant to be used as identification in traffic stops or other police interactions, which means users are supposed to continue carrying their physical IDs. But other states — including Louisiana and Colorado — have rolled out their own digital IDs that can be used during traffic stops and other police interactions, which may have fewer privacy protections. And Apple’s vision for Apple Pay has long been explicitly to replace your entire wallet, which means that eventually, these IDs will be meant for use during police stops.
Perspective. Will this approach work elsewhere?
https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/coursera-ceo-ai-teachers-transform-education-tech/
Coursera CEO: AI won’t replace teachers—but it will transform education
A global debate on the future of education and the role of educators is unfolding as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes every aspect of our lives. As AI permeates classrooms—from universities to corporate learning programs—many are left wondering: Will AI replace teachers? The short answer is no. But the longer explanation is more nuanced—and more optimistic.
In his essay, The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence, Stanford professor and leading voice in AI ethics Erik Brynjolfsson warns against prioritizing automation over augmentation. He argues that focusing on augmentation benefits not just workers but society as a whole. The same is true for education.
Tools & Techniques.
Find the Right Open Source Research Tools – Bellingcat’s New Online Investigations Toolkit
“Have you ever struggled to find a tool that does exactly what you need? Do you know the feeling of spending hours trying to figure out how to use a tool just to realise that the key features you are interested in are not working anymore, or that the previously free product has turned into a paid one that is more expensive than you can afford? You are not alone. More than 80 percent of open source researchers that participated in two Bellingcat surveys indicated that finding the right tools can be challenging. This is where our new Online Investigations Toolkit comes in: it not only helps you discover tools in categories like satellite imagery and maps, social media, transportation or archiving, but is also designed to help researchers learn how to use each tool by providing in-depth descriptions, common use cases and information on requirements and limitations for each toolkit entry. Most of the tools included can be used for free…”
Apparently there is a market for surveillance. Why stop at targeted individuals? Target populations.
Texas to Adopt “Tangles” – a Warrantless Profiling and Geofencing Tool
The Texas Observer reports that the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) signed a 5-year, nearly $5.3 million contract for the Tangles surveillance tool, originally designed by former Israeli military officers to catch terrorists in the Middle East.
… Unclear is how DPS will proceed now that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Jamarr Smith ruled that geofence warrants cannot be reconciled with the Fourth Amendment. If DPS does move forward, there will be nothing to keep the state’s warrantless access to personal data from migrating from searches for terrorists and mass shooters, to providing backdoor evidence in ordinary criminal cases, to buttressing cases with political, religious, and speech implications.
(Related)
The Civil Rights Implications of the Federal Use of Facial Recognition Technology
A report by the U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS, September 2024
Access the 194-page report at https://www.usccr.gov/files/2024-09/civil-rights-implications-of-frt_0.pdf
Perspective. Not all attacks will be explosive…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/09/israels-pager-attacks.html
Israel’s Pager Attacks and Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.
Though the deadly operations were stunning, none of the elements used to carry them out were particularly new.
Optional or mandatory? How valuable is your data?
https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-tools-detect-block-ai-bots/
New Cloudflare Tools Let Sites Detect and Block AI Bots for Free
Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare is launching a suite of tools that could help shift the power dynamic between AI companies and the websites they crawl for data. Today it’s giving all of its customers—including the estimated 33 million using its free services—the ability to monitor and selectively block AI data-scraping bots.
That preventative measure comes in the form of a suite of free AI auditing tools it calls Bot Management, the first of which allows real-time bot monitoring. Customers will have access to a dashboard showing which AI crawlers are visiting their websites and scraping data, including those attempting to camouflage their behavior.
Looking for a good bad example?
Want to Search Donald Trump’s Truth Social Posts? A New Site Is Here to Help.
Washingtonian: “Do you regularly check Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform? Unless you’re a faithful Trump supporter or a journalist who covers the former president, Chris Herbert would bet that you probably don’t. That’s why Herbert—a web developer based in DC—and his team at the conservative, anti-Trump nonprofit Defending Democracy Together created Trump’s Truth, a database that tracks all of the content that Trump posts to Truth Social. Users of the site, which launched today, can search Trump’s Truth by keyword, filter the results by date, and access content that Trump has deleted from his page. Trump’s Truth was conceived back in April, when Herbert noticed a number of factors that made Truth Social difficult to monitor. For one thing, its content doesn’t feed into Google search results like tweets or Instagram posts do. Its search engine is not very advanced. Trump deletes posts fairly frequently. And, according to Herbert, the site’s most glaring deficiency is that it doesn’t offer video transcripts or image descriptions: Many of Trump’s posts contain videos and photos, but without text content attached to these uploads, there hasn’t been a way to for search engines to index them up to this point. “By transcribing it, I think I really am offering an interesting service to people who want to see what [Trump] is saying without literally having to sit through a 20-minute video—and there’s thousands of them,” Herbert says…”
It’s only going to get worse.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4960559
The Significance of Forensic and Scientific Evidence and Their Admissibility in Criminal Law
Forensic and scientific evidence have become essential components of the modern criminal justice system, enabling more accurate investigations, convictions, and exonerations. This chapter explores the significance of forensic disciplines such as DNA profiling, fingerprint analysis, ballistics, toxicology, forensic pathology, and digital forensics in solving complex criminal cases. It emphasizes the role of scientific advancements in enhancing the accuracy of evidence while also addressing the legal frameworks governing their admissibility. The chapter critically examines key admissibility standards, including the Frye and Daubert standards, and highlights global perspectives on forensic evidence in court. Additionally, it explores how flawed forensic methods and junk science have contributed to wrongful convictions and underscores the importance of reliable, scientifically sound evidence in ensuring justice. The ethical considerations involved in handling forensic evidence, including the chain of custody, privacy concerns, and the prevention of bias, are also discussed. Furthermore, the chapter reflects on the future of forensic science, with emerging fields such as genetic genealogy, artificial intelligence, and machine learning promising to further revolutionize criminal investigations. Through a comprehensive analysis, this chapter provides an in-depth understanding of how forensic science shapes modern criminal law while addressing the challenges of admissibility, reliability, and ethics in the pursuit of justice.
