Insightful?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-isnt-the-next-big-thing-heres-what-is/

AI isn't the next big thing - here's what is

Here's what you should be focusing on instead.

Hang on to this article for the next time someone starts to brag about how smart their AI is…

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/12/2024-the-year-ai-drove-everyone-crazy/

2024: The year AI drove everyone crazy

It's been a wild year in tech thanks to the intersection between humans and artificial intelligence. 2024 brought a parade of AI oddities, mishaps, and wacky moments that inspired odd behavior from both machines and man. From AI-generated rat genitals to search engines telling people to eat rocks, this year proved that AI has been having a weird impact on the world.

A non-technical attack on technology? Trying out techniques for the coming war with NATO?

https://www.ft.com/content/0c208ac1-f416-41b2-a373-ec7f90b84ca8

Finland seizes Russian shadow fleet oil tanker after cable-cutting incident

Finland suspects an oil tanker that is part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of damaging an underwater electricity cable and three communication cables, opening an investigation into the vessel for aggravated sabotage. 

The Eagle S was seized and boarded by Finnish authorities on Thursday, a day after the Estlink 2 subsea electricity cable in the Gulf of Finland was disconnected.

The tanker, which is registered in the Cook Islands and is carrying oil from Russia to Egypt according to ship tracking data, was seen passing over the cable at the time of the incident.

Finnish police said on Thursday that they believe the vessel’s anchor, which they did not find on the ship, cut the cables. 

… The Christmas Day incident appears to be the latest in a series of pipelines and cables being targeted in the Baltic Sea by foreign vessels, sparking fears of deliberate attacks on critical infrastructure between Nato countries.

Treat AI as non-technical? I wouldn’t.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-ethics-is-becoming-ais-biggest-challenge/

Why ethics is becoming AI's biggest challenge

Many organizations are either delaying or pulling the plug on generative AI due to concerns about its ethics and safety. This is prompting calls to move AI out of technology departments and involve more non-technical business stakeholders in AI design and management.

More than half (56%) of businesses are delaying major investments in generative AI until there is clarity on AI standards and regulations, according to a recent survey from the IBM Institute for Business Value. At least 72% say they are willing to forgo generative AI benefits due to ethical concerns.

Notice that they did not ask AI…

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/constitutional-constraints-on-regulating-artificial-intelligence/

Constitutional Constraints on Regulating Artificial Intelligence

On July 12, 2024, the Congressional Study Group on Foreign Relations and National Security convened virtually to discuss possible constitutional limits on and barriers to the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI). Concerns over the rapid development of AI technology has led policymakers at all levels to consider an array of possible regulatory approaches. While Congress debates a possible federal approach, several states had begun to step into the void with their own legislation. The leading example is California’s S.B. 1047, which would, among other measures, require that all AI developers of a particular scale “provide reasonable assurance” under oath that their models are unable to cause $500 million in damage to critical infrastructure within the state or lead to a mass-casualty event. But observers have questioned whether such requirements are consistent with the First Amendment and other possible constitutional constraints.

(Releted)

https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2024/12/27/artificial-intelligence-ai-texas-bill-legislature.html

Proposed state law would regulate artificial intelligence in Texas

I like a couple, others not so much.

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/five-tune-ups-your-company-needs-in-2025/

Five Tune-Ups Your Company Needs in 2025

… We combed through MIT SMR’s columns from the past year and culled five tips for leaders who want to recharge their organizations. These insights home in on how to inspire the best from employees and managers and help people embrace the challenges around artificial intelligence, disruption, and burnout — challenges that all flared hot in 2024. This isn’t a definitive list; check out the full collection of MIT SMR columns for more ideas. But we think you’ll find at least one strategy that can help you tackle your leadership challenges.

Perhaps if we add these up and take an average…

https://katu.com/news/local/oregon-attorney-general-issues-guidance-on-ai-use-by-businesses

Oregon attorney general issues guidance on AI use by businesses

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum is warning businesses, as artificial intelligence is becoming more common, that any use of AI must follow state law.

Rosenblum released guidance on how to safely implement AI into practice.

She pointed to Oregon's Unlawful Trade Practices Act, which was designed to stop misrepresentations in consumer transactions.

One example she gave, if companies use AI to create chatbots, is they can be held liable if that technology gives bad information to customers.

New Jersey is a bastion of literacy? Who’d a thunk it?

https://www.bespacific.com/new-law-in-nj-limits-the-banning-of-books-in-schools-and-public-libraries/

New law in NJ limits the banning of books in schools and public libraries

WHYY: “When Martha Hickson was the librarian at New Jersey’s North Hunterdon HighSchool, she fought against attempts to ban books that her critics labeled as inappropriate because they contained sexual content, and she became a target of book banners. “I received hate mail, shunning by colleagues, antagonism by administrators, and calls for my firing and arrest,” the recently retired librarian said. She said “a handful of parents called me by name a pedophile, pornographer and ruiner of children.” At issue were five award-winning books for young adults, all with LGBTQ themes. Hickson, who was named the 2023 Librarian of the Year by the New Jersey Library Association, said all the books were retained after the school board reviewed the matter and affirmed the titles met the district’s standards. On Monday at the Princeton Public Library, she watched as Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law A3446, known as the Freedom to Read Act. “This legislation mandates that books cannot be removed from our libraries solely based on the origin, background or views contained within the text, or because an individual finds it offensive,” he said.

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/arkansas-law-criminalizing-librarians-ruled-unconstitutional/

Arkansas Law Criminalizing Librarians Ruled Unconstitutional

AP: “A federal judge on Monday struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors. U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that elements of the law are unconstitutional. “I respect the court’s ruling and will appeal,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in a statement to The Associated Press. The law would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible to children. The measure was signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in 2023, but an earlier ruling had temporarily blocked it from taking effect while it was being challenged in court. “The law deputizes librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship; when motivated by the fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest,” Brooks wrote in his ruling. A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged…”

We knew that, didn’t we?

https://www.bespacific.com/the-battle-over-copyright-in-the-age-of-chatgpt/

The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT

Boston Review: “Questions of AI authorship and ownership can be divided into two broad types. One concerns the vast troves of human-authored material fed into AI models as part of their “training” (the process by which their algorithms “learn” from data). The other concerns ownership of what AIs produce. Call these, respectively, the input and output problems. So far, attention—and lawsuits—have clustered around the input problem. The basic business model for LLMs relies on the mass appropriation of human-written text, and there simply isn’t anywhere near enough in the public domain. OpenAI hasn’t been very forthcoming about its training data, but GPT-4 was reportedly trained on around thirteen trillion “tokens,” roughly the equivalent of ten trillion words. This text is drawn in large part from online repositories known as “crawls,” which scrape the internet for troves of text from news sites, forums, and other sources. Fully aware that vast data scraping is legally untested—to say the least—developers charged ahead anyway, resigning themselves to litigating the issue in retrospect. Lawyer Peter Schoppert has called the training of LLMs without permission the industry’s “original sin”—to be added, we might say, to the technology’s mind-boggling consumption of energy and water in an overheating planet. (In September, Bloomberg reported that plans for new gas-fired power plants have exploded as energy companies are “racing to meet a surge in demand from power-hungry AI data centers.”) The scale of the prize is vast: intellectual property accounts for some 90 percent of recent U.S. economic growth. Indeed, crawls contain enormous amounts of copyrighted information; the Common Crawl alone, a standard repository maintained by a nonprofit and used to train many LLMs, contains most of b-ok.org, a huge repository of pirated ebooks that was shut down by the FBI in 2022. The work of many living human authors was on another crawl, called Books3, which Meta used to train LLaMA. Novelist Richard Flanagan said that this training made him feel “as if my soul had been strip mined and I was powerless to stop it.” A number of authors, including Junot Díaz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Sarah Silverman, sued OpenAI in 2023 for the unauthorized use of their work for training, though the suit was partially dismissed early this year. Meanwhile, the New York Times is in ongoing litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft for using its content to train chatbots that, it claims, are now its competitors. As of this writing, AI companies have largely responded to lawsuits with defensiveness and evasion, refusing in most cases even to divulge what exact corpora of text their models are trained on. Some newspapers, less sure they can beat the AI companies, have opted to join them: the Financial Times, for one, minted a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI in April, while in July Perplexity launched a revenue-sharing “publisher’s program” that now counts Time, Fortune,  Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com among its partners. At the heart of these disputes, the input problem asks: Is it fair to train the LLMs on all that copyrighted text without remunerating the humans who produced it? The answer you’re likely to give depends on how you think about LLMs…”

Worms, by the can.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/if-chatgpt-produces-ai-generated-code-for-your-app-who-does-it-really-belong-to/

If ChatGPT produces AI-generated code for your app, who does it really belong to?

In one of my earlier AI and coding articles, where I looked at how ChatGPT can rewrite and improve your existing code, one of the commenters, @pbug5612, had an interesting question:

Who owns the resultant code? What if it contains business secrets - have you shared it all with Google or MS, etc.?

It's a good question and one that doesn't have an easy answer. Over the past two weeks, I've reached out to attorneys and experts to try to get a definitive answer.

Perspective.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61147

Artificial Intelligence and Its Potential Effects on the Economy and the Federal Budget

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to computer systems that can perform tasks that have traditionally required human intelligence, such as learning and performing other activities that require cognitive ability. A general attribute of AI is its ability to identify patterns and relationships and to respond to queries that arise in complex scenarios for which the precise computational algorithm that is needed cannot be specified in advance.

Because AI has the potential to change how businesses and the federal government provide goods and services, it could affect economic growth, employment and wages, and the distribution of income in the economy. Such changes could in turn affect the federal budget. The direction of those effects—whether they increased or decreased federal revenues or spending—along with their size and timing, are uncertain. Some budgetary effects could occur relatively quickly, whereas others might take longer. In this report, the Congressional Budget Office provides an overview of the channels through which the adoption of AI could affect the U.S. economy and the federal budget.