Ars Technica: “Human Rights Watch (HRW) continues to reveal how photos of real children casually posted online years ago are being used to train AI models powering image generators—even when platforms prohibit scraping and families use strict privacy settings. Last month, HRW researcher Hye Jung Han found 170 photos of Brazilian kids that were linked… Continue Reading
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Author Archives: Sabrina I. Pacifici
The End of Libraries as We Know Them? with Brewster Kahle and Kyle Courtney
The End of Libraries as We Know Them? with Brewster Kahle and Kyle Courtney Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast– Could the future of libraries as we’ve known them be completely different? Our guests this week say so. Megapublishers are suing the Internet Archive, perhaps best known for its Wayback Machine, to redefine… Continue Reading
Recent Reports of Law Schools’ AI Adoption Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
LawSites: “This recent Reuters story caught my attention: “More than half of law schools now offer classes on AI,” it said, citing a new survey conducted by the American Bar Association. Other reports in the news and on LinkedIn sounded a similar takeaway. Indeed, the survey, AI and Legal Education Survey Results 2024, recently released… Continue Reading
Cybersecurity Resources for 9-1-1 Centers
“This document describes several CISA resources available to public safety communications organizations to help enhance their cybersecurity posture and resilience. Public safety communications entities, such as Emergency Communications Centers (ECCs), Public Safety Communications Centers (PSCCs), and Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs), are a highly visible and important part of Emergency Services Sector communications, and therefore… Continue Reading
LLRX June 2024 Articles and Columns
Protecting the Vulnerable: Navigating Online Risks for Minors – Veronica Garrick PowerPoint Has Its Problems – Jerry Lawson AI in Banking and Finance, June 30, 2024 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, industry white papers, academic papers and speeches on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact… Continue Reading
The Greatest Social Media Site Is Craigslist (Yes, Craigslist)
Slate – “While the internet has morphed and changed, the controversial classifieds site has remained largely the same—hearkening back to a time when everyone online trusted each other more….The site has changed relatively little in both functionality and appearance since Newmark launched it in 1995 as a friends and family listserv for jobs and other… Continue Reading
Quora’s Chatbot Platform Poe Allows Users to Download Paywalled Articles on Demand
Wired [unpaywalled]: “WIRED was able to download stories from publishers like The New York Times and The Atlantic using Poe’s Assistant bot. One expert calls it “prima facie copyright infringement,” which Quora disputes. Poe, an AI chatbot platform owned by the question-and-answer site Quora and backed by a $75 million Andreessen Horowitz investment, is providing… Continue Reading
The telltale words that could identify generative AI text
Ars Technica: “Thus far, even AI companies have had trouble coming up with tools that can reliably detect when a piece of writing was generated using a large language model. Now, a group of researchers has established a novel method for estimating LLM usage across a large set of scientific writing by measuring which “excess… Continue Reading
Microsoft tells yet more customers their emails have been stolen
The Register: “It took a while, but Microsoft has told customers that the Russian criminals who compromised its systems earlier this year made off with even more emails than it first admitted. We’ve been aware for some time that the digital Russian break-in at the Windows maker saw Kremlin spies make off with source code,… Continue Reading
The Supreme Court Puts Trump Above the Law
The Atlantic via MSN: “Near the top of their sweeping, lawless opinion in Trump v. United States, Donald Trump’s defenders on the Supreme Court repeat one of the most basic principles of American constitutional government: “The president is not above the law.” They then proceed to obliterate it. Although the pro-Trump justices attempt to nest… Continue Reading
Making a case for Shakespeare, 400 years after his death
The Economist – The Folger library reopens, with a renewed purpose [unpaywalled]. What is the world’s largest Shakespeare collection doing in Washington, DC? Across the street from the Library of Congress, diagonally opposite to the Supreme Court, sits the Folger Shakespeare Library. At first glance, the large neoclassical block of white marble looks like another… Continue Reading
ChatGPT is bullshit
ChatGPT is bullshit. Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries. Ethics and Information Technology, June 8, 2024. Volume 26, article number 38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5. “Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are… Continue Reading
