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The Tricky Truth About How Generative AI Uses Your Data
When the White House revealed its list of voluntary safety and societal commitments signed by seven artificial intelligence (AI) companies, one thing was noticeably missing: anything related to the data these AI systems collect and use to train this powerful technology. Including, very likely, yours.
There are many concerns about the potential harm that sophisticated generative AI systems have unleashed on the public. What they do with our data is one of them.
We know very little about where these models get the petabytes of data they need, how that data is being used and what protections, if any, are in place when it comes to sensitive information. The companies that make these systems aren’t telling us much, and may not even know themselves.
You may be okay with all of this, or think the good that generative AI can do far outweighs whatever bad went into building it. But a lot of other people aren’t.
Jim Jordan Unleashes ‘The Facebook Files’: Social Media Giant ‘Censored Americans Because of Biden White House Pressure’
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) released internal Meta documents on Thursday that he said were evidence of the White House improperly pressuring Facebook and Instagram into censoring posts.
The congressman said in a thread posted to X that he was unveiling “Part 1” of “The Facebook Files” — which appears to be a nod to the “Twitter Files” — obtained by his panel only after he threatened to move forward with holding Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress. Jordan said that plan is being placed on hold unless the Big Tech giant stops cooperating with his investigation.
Jordan’s thread, which he said involved “smoking-gun” documents that “prove Facebook censored Americans because of Biden White House pressure,” contained some screenshots of the documents, but not the full correspondence.
“Never-before-released internal documents subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee PROVE that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House,” Jordan began.
“During the first half of 2021, social media companies like Facebook faced tremendous pressure from the Biden White House — both publicly and privately — to crack down on alleged ‘misinformation,’” Jordan said.
The ESRB Has Begun Work On ‘Facial Age Verification’ Tech for Age Checks
The video games rating board, known and referred to as the Entertainment Software Rating Board or ESRB, has proposed the implementation of a new age verification tech that would use facial age assurance to gain parental consent.
As reported by Eurogamer, the Entertainment Software Rating Board is suggesting using such a means in order that parental consent is gained in accordance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA).
The proposed tech would see the deployment of what the ESRB is calling “Privacy-Protective Facial Age Estimation” which would scan faces to verify the age of a parent.
This is due to COPPA stating that services in the U.S. must have parental consent when obtaining the personal information of anyone under the age of 13. The tech has been developed with digital ID platform, Yoti and SuperAwesome which specializes in online safety tech for children.
Anything that is going to scan faces for data and seemingly retain the information — for initial verification purposes only or not — is likely to raise alarm bells. I, for one, am not a huge fan of the idea of a tech company scanning my face to check my age.
Senate Panel Advances Bills to Childproof the Internet
Congress is closer than ever to passing a pair of bills to childproof the internet after lawmakers voted to send them to the floor Thursday.
The bills — the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and COPPA 2.0 — were approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday by a unanimous voice vote. Both pieces of legislation aim to address an ongoing mental health crisis amongst young people that some lawmakers blame social media for intensifying.
But critics of the bills have long argued that they have the potential to cause more harm than good, like forcing social media platforms to collect more user information to properly enforce Congress’ rules.
In his past two State of the Union addresses, President Joe Biden has insisted that Congress enact stronger online privacy protections for children. Taking a cue from the president in recent years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have rolled out legislation to address his concerns. Obviously, the two bills passed Thursday have come out on top.
AWS Launches New Healthcare-Focused Services, Powered by Generative AI
Amazon is expanding its range of health-focused apps and services with a platform that offers artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help clinicians transcribe and analyze their conversations with patients.
At its annual AWS Summit conference in New York, Amazon unveiled AWS HealthScribe, an API to create transcripts, extract details and create summaries from doctor-patient discussions that can be entered into an electronic health record system.
The transcripts from HealthScribe can be converted into patient notes by the platform’s machine learning models, Amazon says, which can then be analyzed for broad insights.
Amazon says that the AI capabilities in HealthScribe are powered by Bedrock, its platform that provides a way to build generative AI-powered apps via pretrained models from startups as well as Amazon itself. This might be cause for alarm, given generative AI’s tendency to exhibit biases, confidently invent facts and generally go off the rails.
Speech recognition algorithms, too, often contain biases.
One recent study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that speech recognition systems from leading tech companies were twice as likely to incorrectly transcribe audio from Black speakers as opposed to white speakers.
As a piece in Scientific American points out, in normal conversations, we might choose to “code-switch” depending on the audience. But there’s no code-switching with automated speech recognition programs — either you assimilate, or you’re not understood.
So is HealthScribe consistent? Can it be trusted, particularly when it comes to deciding whether to label a part of a discussion as “subjective” or “objective” or identifying medications? And can it handle the wide array of different accents and vernaculars that patients and providers might use?
The jury’s out on all that.
Senators Sound Alarm Over US Funding to Chinese Biotech Firm Over National Security Threats
A group of Republican senators are probing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) over its partnership with Chinese biotech firm BGI, warning that the collaboration could give China a competitive edge while putting U.S. security in danger.
The Chinese genomics giant, which has been blacklisted by both the Defense and Commerce Departments, has been working with the USDA since as early as 2018 on the Earth BioGenome Project, which aims to sequence the genomes of over 1.5 million species over a 10-year span to catalog the earth’s biodiversity.
Following the partnership’s announcement, the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service awarded $1 million to BGI. The Chinese firm and the state-funded China National GeneBank it runs occupy leadership roles in four of the project’s nine subcommittees, including chairmanship of the subcommittee of IT and Informatics.
The lawmakers said they are “gravely concerned” about BGI’s participation in this “massive effort to sequence all of life,” a partnership they said was uncovered while tracking U.S. government funding during a probe into COVID-19 origins.
