philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

How a Law That Shields Big Tech Is Now Being Used Against It

... Section 230, introduced in the internet’s early days, protects companies from liability related to posts made by users on their sites, making it nearly impossible to sue tech companies over defamatory speech or extremist content. ...

The lawsuit, filed by Ethan Zuckerman, a public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the first to use Section 230 against a tech giant in this way, his lawyers said. It is an unusual legal maneuver that could turn a law that typically protects companies like Meta on its head. And if Mr. Zuckerman succeeds, it could mean more power for consumers to control what they see online. ...

In 2021, after a developer released software to purge users’ Facebook feeds of everyone they follow, Facebook threatened to shut it down. But Section 230 says it is possible to restrict access to obscene, excessively violent and other problematic content. The language shields companies from liability if they censor disturbing content, but lawyers now say it could also be used to justify scrubbing any content users don’t want to see. ...

So Mr. Barclay, who is now 35, built a browser extension tool the same year that would automate the process, called Unfollow Everything. Roughly 12,000 people tried it, he said.

But on July 1, 2021, a law firm representing Facebook sent Mr. Barclay a cease-and-desist letter. His browser extension violated Facebook’s terms of service, including for “impairing the intended operation of Facebook,” the letter said. It also instructed Mr. Barclay to take down his browser extension or face a potential lawsuit. ...

But he and his lawyers were still looking for a legal argument on which to hang their lawsuit. Preparing for a graduate-level class called “Fixing Social Media” in 2022, Mr. Zuckerman read Section 230 and noticed the provision protecting “technical means” to block objectionable content. ...

Mr. Zuckerman is taking that argument a step further, asking the court to pre-emptively protect an effort to build software that filters content because an internet user simply does not want to see it.

“The purpose of the tool is to allow users who find the newsfeed objectionable, or who find the specific sequencing of posts within their newsfeed objectionable, to effectively turn off the feed,” Mr. Zuckerman’s lawyers said in the lawsuit. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/technology/meta-section-230-lawsuit.html

Google TV Streamer

The Google TV streamer, a Chromecast replacement, is truly an AI-first device, using Gemini to offer content summaries and screen savers. The Apple TV version, with Apple Intelligence, can’t be far behind. ...

See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91170817/google-tv-streamer-apple-intelligence-gemini-ai-chromecast-reviews-content-summary

As DNC hits Chicago, Microsoft warns of deepfake artificial-intelligence attacks

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Badanes says one of the most troubling political deepfake attacks worldwide happened in October in Slovakia just two days before the election for a seat in parliament in the central European country. AI technology was used to create a fake recording of a top political candidate bragging about rigging the election. It went viral. And the candidate lost by a slim margin.

AI also turned up in last year’s Chicago mayoral election. Candidate Paul Vallas, the former Chicago Public Schools chief, was the target of an audio deepfake posted on the social media platform X. In the clip, an artificial but realistic voice purporting to be that of Vallas endorsed rampant police violence, saying: “These days, people will accuse a cop of being bad if they kill one person that was running away. Back in my day, cops would kill, say, 17 or 18 civilians in their career, and nobody would bat an eye.” ...

She says Microsoft’s event at The Drake, 140 E. Walton Place, will be geared toward women, whom she says are disproportionately targeted by deepfakes and also online harassment. The training will focus on spotting deceptive AI content and providing tools to protect against illicit uses of the technology — including how to report a deepfake and how to check whether an image is bogus.

Badanes also will be part of a panel discussion Aug. 21 at the Erie Cafe, 536 W. Erie St., on the intersection of AI and politics, with a focus on regulations to combat deepfakes. ...

“We have a free tool,” Badanes says. “We encourage political campaigns to tag all of their official images and videos with this content-integrity marker.” ...

“There are real-world harms that are happening due to this technology,” Badanes says. “What I’m focusing on at the [DNC] is around the impact it has on elections, but we’re thinking about these harms in a much broader sense.” ...

See the full story here: https://chicago.suntimes.com/the-watchdogs/2024/08/18/deepfake-microsoft-ai-artificial-intelligence-ginny-badanes-content-integrity-marker-slovakia-iran-trump-kamala-harris

Can AI truly replicate the screams of a man on fire? Video game performers want their work protected

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“If motion-capture actors, video-game actors in general, only make whatever money they make that day ... that can be a really slippery slope,” said Dalal, who portrayed Bode Akuna in "Star Wars Jedi: Survivor." “Instead of being like, ‘Hey, we’re going to bring you back’ ... they’re just not going to bring me back at all and not tell me at all that they’re doing this. That’s why transparency and compensation are so important to us in AI protections.”

Hollywood's video game performers announced a work stoppage — their second in a decade — after more than 18 months of negotiations over a new interactive media agreement with game industry giants broke down over artificial intelligence protections. Members of the union have said they are not anti-AI. The performers are worried, however, the technology could provide studios with a means to displace them. ...

“It reminds me a lot of sampling in the ‘80s and ’90s and 2000s where there were a lot of people getting around sampling classic songs,” he said. “This is an art. If you don’t protect rights over their likeness, or their voice or body and walk now, then you can’t really protect humans from other endeavors.”

See the full story here: https://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/can-ai-truly-replicate-the-screams-of-a-man-on-fire-video-game-performers-want-their-work-protected/T7CTKZHWARESDDDLUEEOAP7VTQ/

Researchers Have Ranked AI Models Based on Risk—and Found a Wild Range

Bo Li, an associate professor at the University of Chicago who specializes in stress testing and provoking AI models to uncover misbehavior, has become a go-to source for some consulting firms. These consultancies are often now less concerned with how smart AI models are than with how problematic—legally, ethically, and in terms of regulatory compliance—they can be.

Li and colleagues from several other universities, as well as Virtue AI, cofounded by Li, and Lapis Labs, recently developed a taxonomy of AI risks along with a benchmark that reveals how rule-breaking different large language models are. “We need some principles for AI safety, in terms of regulatory compliance and ordinary usage,” Li tells WIRED.

The researchers analyzed government AI regulations and guidelines, including those of the US, China, and the EU, and studied the usage policies of 16 major AI companies from around the world. ...

A company looking to use a LLM for customer service, for instance, might care more about a model’s propensity to produce offensive language when provoked than how capable it is of designing a nuclear device. ...

See the benchmarking site here: https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/air-bench/latest/#/leaderboard

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-models-risk-rank-studies/

MIT releases comprehensive database of AI risks

... The AI Risk Repository tackles this challenge by consolidating information from 43 existing taxonomies, including peer-reviewed articles, preprints, conference papers and reports. This meticulous curation process has resulted in a database of more than 700 unique risks. ...

The repository uses a two-dimensional classification system. First, risks are categorized based on their causes, taking into account the entity responsible (human or AI), the intent (intentional or unintentional), and the timing of the risk (pre-deployment or post-deployment). This causal taxonomy helps to understand the circumstances and mechanisms by which AI risks can arise.

Second, risks are classified into seven distinct domains, including discrimination and toxicity, privacy and security, misinformation and malicious actors and misuse. 

The AI Risk Repository is designed to be a living database. It is publicly accessible and organizations can download it for their own use. The research team plans to regularly update the database with new risks, research findings, and emerging trends. ...

Beyond its practical implications for organizations, the AI Risk Repository is also a valuable resource for AI risk researchers. The database and taxonomies provide a structured framework for synthesizing information, identifying research gaps, and guiding future investigations. ...

“We will use this repository to identify potential gaps or imbalances in how risks are being addressed by organizations,” Thompson said. “For example, to explore if there is a disproportionate focus on certain risk categories while others of equal significance are being underaddressed.” ...

See the Risk Repository here: https://airisk.mit.edu

See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/ai/mit-releases-comprehensive-database-of-ai-risks/

Popping the Bubble of Noise-Cancelling Headphones

... Still, I think we’ve reached the point of too much noise cancelling, because, when our individual audio realities become entirely avoidable, our public auditory landscapes get worse. Think of it as a version of the tragedy of the commons: If you can simply don your puffy AirPods Max and block out road construction outside or the loud stereo blaring from next door, there’s less impetus to address the underlying issues of urban noise pollution or neighborly accountability. In that sense, noise-cancelling headphones are a fundamentally antisocial technology. ...

A new, rather strange headphone design recently produced by the Japanese company N.T.T. Sonority (a spinoff of a major Japanese telecommunications corporation) attempts something different. The company’s nwm ONE headphones (which cost two hundred and ninety-nine dollars per pair) look like the denuded skeleton of the familiar Bose model. ... The pointed speakers are “directional,” beaming sound straight into the user’s ears so that it barely leaks; only a person standing within inches of you can hear any noise, and even then, according to my informal tests, not more than a slight buzz. The device offers a technological solution to a problem caused in the first place by an excess of technology. The nwm ONE’s tagline is “Unmute the world,” as if it were not also possible to do so simply by taking off your headphones. ...

See the full story here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/popping-the-bubble-of-noise-cancelling-headphones

Tunable-focus lenses enhance see-through augmented reality glasses

... In AR devices, both real world and the virtual must be at the correct focus, so any lens that controls the focal length of the virtual object must do this without disturbing the view of the real world. To solve this, two lenses are required—one sits “eye side” of the waveguide (or equivalent), while the other sits “world side” of it (see Fig. 4).

The eye side or “pull” lens is responsible for focusing the virtual object (by applying +N diopters). Since this also unavoidably changes the focal length of the real world, a second lens on the world-side of the waveguide combiner must be included. This “push” lens is then driven to an equal and opposite lens power (-N diopters) to return the real world to its original focal length. The net effect of these two lenses operating in unison to equal and opposite lens powers is only to adjust the focal length of the virtual object. By combining this with eye tracking, for example, an efficient and comfortable way to adjust focus and reduce VAC can be achieved.

FlexEnable’s manufacturing processes and architectures allow for the creation of tunable-focus LC lenses on optically clear ultrathin plastic. This means that unlike glass LC cells, they are extremely thin (each cell is under 100 µm), lightweight, and can be biaxially curved to fit complex AR optics. ...

See the full story here: https://www.laserfocusworld.com/optics/article/55132443/tunable-focus-lenses-enhance-see-through-augmented-reality-glasses

A California Bill to Regulate A.I. Causes Alarm in Silicon Valley

... Some notable A.I. researchers have supported the bill, including Geoff Hinton, the former Google researcher, and Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal. The two have spent the past 18 months warning of the dangers of the technology. Other A.I. pioneers have come out against the bill, including Meta’s chief A.I. scientist, Yann LeCun, and the former Google executives and Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Fei-Fei Li. ...

The bill would require safety tests for systems that have development costs exceeding $100 million and that are trained using a certain amount of raw computing power. It would also create a new state agency that defines and monitors those tests. Dan Hendrycks, a founder of the Center for A.I. Safety, said the bill would push the largest tech companies to identify and remove harmful behavior from their most expensive technologies.

“Complex systems will have unexpected behavior. You can count on it,” Dr. Hendrycks said in an interview with The New York Times. “The bill is a call to make sure that these systems don’t have hazards or, if the hazards do exist, that the systems have the appropriate safeguards.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/technology/ai-california-bill-silicon-valley.html

Companies Prepare to Fight Quantum Hackers

... Some companies have already taken steps to replace current forms of encryption with post-quantum algorithms. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the Commerce Department, published three new algorithms for post-quantum encryption Tuesday. ...

Government officials and cybersecurity professionals warn that hackers might collect troves of data today that is currently protected by encryption, and then decrypt it years from now using quantum computers. 

“I personally feel like we should solve it as soon as possible. So in any event when quantum happens, the data is at least old. The older data is, the less useful it is, and the less harmful it is for a company,” Marty said. The idea, he said, is that if hackers are able to break today’s encryption in a few years, they will at least have access to a smaller volume of the bank’s data that wasn’t already protected by stronger post-quantum cryptography.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-prepare-to-fight-quantum-hackers-c9fba1ae?tpl=cs&mod=hp_lead_pos1