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House Judiciary Panel Subpoenas FBI and DOJ Over Biden, Big Tech Collusion
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan slapped the heads of the FBI and Justice Department with a pair of subpoenas Thursday over their agencies’ work with Big Tech companies to limit the spread of unpopular speech.
Jordan (R-Ohio) demanded that the FBI and DOJ fork over a slew of documents, specifically communications with private companies and third parties pertaining to “content moderation and the suppression of disfavored speech online.”
“It is necessary for Congress to gauge the extent to which DOJ officials have coerced, pressured, worked with, or relied upon social media and other tech companies to censor speech,” Jordan wrote in separate letters to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Earlier this month, Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government threw its weight behind the suit brought by Louisiana and Missouri, alleging the Biden administration trampled on First Amendment rights with its content-flagging apparatus.
Markey, Blackburn Demand FTC Investigate YouTube’s Data Collection on Kids
Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) demanded Thursday that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigate social media company YouTube over potential violations of how it is tracking and targeting children on their platforms. YouTube is owned by tech giant Google.
“YouTube and Google cannot continue treating young people’s data as an unprotected commodity from which to profit with abandon. Not only must the FTC Act, but Congress must also pass legislation to protect young people’s privacy online and finally ban targeted advertising to kids and teens,” the lawmakers wrote to the FTC.
The bipartisan push for the FTC to probe the Google subsidiary followed the release of a report from the ad quality and transparency platform Adalytics on Thursday morning, and a report from The New York Times about the findings.
The Adalytics report found that YouTube set “long-lasting cookies,” or small portions of text sent to a browser based on what websites a user visits, that allowed ad targeting and tracking on browsers for viewers of YouTube videos “clearly labeled as ‘for kids.’”
COVID Vaccine Free Speech Suit to Get First Circuit Look
A Rhode Island oral surgeon is appealing the dismissal of a lawsuit alleging that state officials shut down his practice because he spoke out against COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Stephen Skoly notified the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island on Thursday that he will ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to allow him to proceed on a claim that the officials unlawfully retaliated against him for exercising his free speech rights.
Judge Mary S. McElroy orally dismissed Skoly’s First Amendment suit following oral arguments on July 20. She didn’t issue a written opinion.
Communication Using Thought Alone? Unbabel Unveils AI Project to Give Us Superhuman Capabilities
Sitting in a meeting room in a startup office in Lisbon, I silently typed the answer to a question only the person opposite would know the answer to. What kind of coffee had I asked for when I’d arrived at the office? A short moment later, without even moving or opening his mouth, the reply came back via a text message: “You had an Americano.”
This wasn’t how I’d expected to spend a Friday afternoon in the city, but here I was, sitting in the offices of enterprise language translation services startup Unbabel, opposite founder and CEO Vasco Pedro, testing what appeared to be a brain-to-computer interface. And it was pretty astounding.
Unbabel’s core mission — allowing enterprises to understand and be understood by their customers in dozens of languages — long ago led the company to think outside the proverbial “box,” to develop several projects in-house. It wanted to explore other ways to communicate. Now, as a startup with $90 million in VC funding, annual revenues of around $50 million and having survived the pandemic, Unbabel is doing well enough to explore these projects.
Unbabel’s innovation team, led by Paulo Dimas, VP of Product Innovation, looked into the way our brains evolved. Dimas and his team started to look into electroencephalogram (EEG) systems, some of which can be invasive to the body. Elon Musk’s Neuralink company is famously exploring invasive brain-computer interface devices for humans.
Terms-of-Service Land Grab: Tech Firms Seek Private Data to Train AI
Tech companies are confronting a challenge: how to balance asking users for more data in order to deliver new AI features without scaring away privacy-conscious businesses and consumers.
Why it matters: Consumers consistently tell pollsters they want transparency about when AI is used and trained. But when companies provide such detail, it’s often written in legalese and buried in fine print that is often being rewritten to give tech companies more rights.
Driving the news: Video conferencing company Zoom encountered a massive backlash over concerns the contents of video chat might be used to train AI systems. The move prompted an apologetic post from Zoom’s CEO, but the company is far from alone in seeking more consumer data in order to train AI models.
The big picture: The absence of a federal privacy law fosters an AI development environment that allows companies to grab more data without facing limits or consequences.
What Normal Americans — Not AI Companies — Want for AI
Five months ago, when I published a big piece laying out the case for slowing down AI, it wasn’t exactly mainstream to say that we should pump the brakes on this technology. Within the tech industry, it was practically taboo.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has argued that Americans would be foolish to slow down OpenAI’s progress. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than “authoritarian governments,” he told the Atlantic. Microsoft’s Brad Smith has likewise argued that we can’t afford to slow down lest China race ahead on AI.
But it turns out the American public does not agree with them. A whopping 72% of American voters want to slow down the development of AI, compared to just 8% who prefer speeding up, according to new polling from the think tank AI Policy Institute.
Western Powers Argue Over How to Control AI
In the race to rein in artificial intelligence, Western governments have hit a major bump in the road: they all want to win.
Officials from the European Union, the United States and other major economies are competing to write the definitive rules for artificial intelligence, including for the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google‘s Bard.
AI advocates say the economic opportunities offered by rolling out the technology range from quicker diagnoses of diseases to the development of autonomous vehicles. Skeptics warn AI could lead to a surge in unemployment and — in the very worst scenarios — global armageddon if automated systems gain uncontrollable power.
